Pension funds are now huge forces in Anglo-American financial markets. Could they become levers of radical socialization, if their nominal collective ownership were activated from below? Henri Jacot of the French CGT doubts it. Robin Blackburn develops his argument that they might be unexpected sources of social change.
ROBIN BLACKBURN
REPLY TO HENRI JACOT
I am grateful to Henri Jacot for his critical reflections on my proposals for pension reform. Pension funds are a form of capitalist property, albeit a rather strange one. It might seem to some socialists that such funds should simply be abolished and that there is therefore something paltry about a mere programme for their reform. I am therefore pleased that Jacot notes the radical nature of the package I recommend. It aims to create a quite new pension fund regime—one entirely distinct from that associated with pension funds as we know them today, whether in the UK, the US, Chile or the Netherlands. In these countries, and a widening circle of imitators, large tax breaks are given to pension funds and professional fund managers, subject to the narrowest commercial objectives, supplant both policy-holders and any wider notion of the public interest.
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A tribute to Alexander Cockburn—director of CounterPunch, Marxian environmentalist, long-standing editor of New Left Review. Robin Blackburn traces his path from County Cork to Soho, Havana to Manhattan, the Florida Keys to California’s Lost Coast.
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As reverberations from the stricken mortgage market reach the real economy, Robin Blackburn reveals the origins of the crunch in the shadowy realms of financialization. Precedents from the bubbles and crash of the 1920s, warnings from pioneers and venture capitalists, and proposals for how to turn the crisis to socially redistributive effect.
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