You can watch a recording of our discussion on here.
I tried to summarize a few of our discussion points below, but I didn’t have time for everything:
We discussed how Kalecki and Robinson’s arguments from the 1940s really get at this core contradiction where profits would actually be higher under full employment than under laissez-faire, but capitalists don’t want that because they prioritize control over profits. It’s not just about money or corporate greed, it’s about power and control that’s interconnected with making profits, where “discipline in the factories” and “political stability” are more important than profits for business leaders.
We talked about how the fear of unemployment functions as this disciplinary mechanism for workers, and we brought up healthcare as a concrete example: employers know that if medical costs weren’t a boot on people’s necks, workers could organize in other ways, so they sacrifice profits to the healthcare industry to maintain control. It’s basically their “class instinct” telling them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view because it would undermine their authority and give workers room to breathe and potentially organize against them.
We discussed how even the social democrats like Reuther, Clark, and Humphrey in the 1960s weren’t really talking in class conflict language. It’s more like they’re treating this as a technical problem of what’s the best way to balance the needs of workers and employers rather than recognizing this is an antagonistic relationship that you can’t ultimately manage or resolve.
Reed brings up how there were these pivotal mystifications, like this presumption that some objectively reasonable standard existed for determining what’s “valid” versus “unwarranted” in labor relations, which was determined by these labor and industrial specialists because they were seen as “informed neutrals.” But really, there’s no neutral position here. It’s just that the postwar regime created this fiction of harmonious class relations where you could supposedly balance the interests of capital and labor to everyone’s satisfaction, when actually this whole framework of presenting it as a technical rather than political problem was already stacking the deck in management’s favor.
We discussed how there’s this danger of adopting our opponent’s worldview. When we’re debating things like abundance, we need to make sure we’re not reinforcing their frameworks or suggesting we should subsidize developers more so they build housing, when really the answer is that we can’t have profit driven motives for things we all need to survive.
We looked at the previously proposed points of unity and realized they’re more like a code of conduct, things like solidarity, collective action, consensus, accountability, but we never actually listed “anti-capitalist analysis” anywhere.
We’re being too neutral, maybe even “cute” about capitalism to not scare people away, but that’s worse than having fewer people who actually understand what we stand for. We need to be more explicit about our anti-capitalist worldview, not just have ways of acting but actually articulate what vision we’re trying to present, what narrative we’re putting forward.
Like Reed says at the end, there’s no substitute for an anti-capitalist left, and we need to build that alternative political force through education and organizing, making sure everything we publish hits some anti-capitalist language and doesn’t fall into the trap of reinforcing the frameworks the other side is putting forward.
Finally we also talked about how class struggle is often only visible from this broader perspective - like Reed says, it appears as “a vector produced by the engaged push and pull of more partial and specific, even mundane, interests” so people don’t really see it for what it is. \
And that’s where Kalecki and Robinson’s point comes in about how full employment is actually impossible under capitalism because capitalists need that fear of unemployment to maintain discipline. Pete also pointed out the Przeworski quote from 1986 about how “capitalists cannot represent themselves as a class under democratic conditions and do so only in a moment of folly” - instead they have to propose this universalistic, classless image of society where everyone’s interests are supposedly in harmony. We connected this to the Abundance agenda, which is exactly doing that: pretending that if you just deregulate corporate America, then we’ll all have abundance, when really it’s just pushing capitalist interests while pretending it benefits everyone.
We ended with talking about how Reed emphasizes there are no shortcuts in building the kind of movement we need. As Jane McAlevey argued, it’s going to require slow, face-to-face work that rely on establishing trust and standing with people who aren’t already on our side.
We talked about how issue based ballot campaigns can be useful for doing political education and making direct contact with workers on a wider scale, and how left oriented initiatives have been successful even in states that routinely reject Democratic candidates. But the main thing is we need to counter half a century of weaponized lies and propaganda through political education and organizing to develop an alternative worldview.
And like Reed says at the end, which is basically the summary of the article: there’s no effective substitute for an anti-capitalist left, and the most serious political work ahead is throwing everything we can into generating one.