With sadness we must report that the socialist economist Andrew Glyn died yesterday.
Andrew Glyn was diagnosed with a severe, and inoperable, brain tumour only two months ago and the progress of the disease was rapid and fatal. As Rob Hoveman says, “He remained completely committed to the struggle for social justice through his academic work after some 38 years or so as a tutor in economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he virtually never dined at High Table! His contribution both theoretically and in terms of applied economic analysis was enormous and his premature death is a great loss to all of us on the left. ”
Rob interviewed Andrew in July 2006 for Socialist Review, you can read it here.
Andrew Glyn has been a huge figure in political economy since his 1972 book, co-authored by Bob Sutcliffe, “British Capitalism, Workers and the Profit Squeeze. He also wrote “Capitalism Since 1945” (with Philip Armstrong and John Harrison, 1991).
His latest work, “Capitalism Unleashed” [2006] was a devastating critique of neo-liberalism.
Bob Pollin’s review of “Capitalism Unleashed” in New Left Review 46, July-August 2007 summarises Glyn’s argument of how the more stable capitalism of the 1945 to 1970 era broke down.
The main factor leading to the demise of the Golden Age was the accumulating force of its own contradictions. Glyn argues that there were four main factors leading to its unravelling. The first was the achievement of low levels of unemployment throughout the OECD economies. That is, the single most important aim of the Keynesian model—to promote full employment—created problems for the model precisely because it was successful. This is because, with low unemployment rates, workers grew more self-confident and their bargaining power increased. They were able to bid up wages and squeeze business profits. When profits fell, capitalists were less willing to pour funds into new investments. When private investment falls, then economic growth itself also slows. Moreover, in the face of rising wage bills, capitalists tried to defend their profit margins by passing these costs onto consumers. This meant higher prices, and consequently, persistent inflation.
The second problem is what Glyn calls ‘international disorganization’. The Golden Age model was premised on the continued economic leadership of the United States and the commanding role of the dollar in international trade. When Western Europe and Japan began to challenge us firms in global markets—including those in the us itself—this meant that the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates based on the dollar was no longer sustainable. This in turn created growing cracks in the entire edifice of what had been tight financial regulatory regimes throughout the oecd. Persistent inflation—and varying rates of inflation among the oecd members—also undermined the workings of the Bretton Woods system.
A third factor was the rise in raw material prices, and in particular the fourfold increase in oil prices at the end of 1973. This move by the opec oil producers reflected both the high levels of demand generated by economic growth as well as a rising assertiveness of ex-colonial countries. The 1973 oil shock also greatly increased inflationary pressures throughout the oecd, further undermining Bretton Woods and all other financial regulatory policies, given that these were premised on the assumption of reasonably stable currencies.
The final factor cited by Glyn was the decline in productivity growth throughout the oecd economies. Rising productivity is what makes the overall economic pie grow, so that workers and capitalists can both bring home higher incomes, regardless of whose share of the pie is relatively larger or smaller. So a decline in productivity will inevitably increase tensions over the relative shares of wages and profits. Glyn argues that the primary factor in the productivity slowdown was the decline in investment associated with the squeeze on profitability, since new and better equipment is the first source of improvements in productivity. Hence for Glyn, the profit squeeze, the fall in private investment, and the productivity decline are closely interlinked.
Talking with Rob Hoveman, Andrew Glyn outlined what this has meant for pushing back the labour movement.
Glyn argues economic and political conditions have pushed labour into retreat over the last 25 years, citing the very low levels of industrial action over the last 15 to 20 years. “In Britain the decisive turning point I believe was the defeat of the great miners’ strike of 1984-5. I didn’t want to admit it at the time, but I think this drove the trade unions onto the back foot and enabled successive governments to push through privatisation and deregulation to a far greater extent than in other countries, like Germany, where there wasn’t that kind of significant defeat of a major section of the labour movement.
“Trade union strength has also been adversely affected by structural changes. The more strongly unionised industrial sectors have declined and the rising private service sector is far less unionised. Unionisation has grown in the public sector which has to some extent offset declines elsewhere. But that also explains, to my mind, the continuing drive to extend privatisation in the public sector. Its main economic rationale is to try and drive down wages by weakening union organisation.
“Aspects of globalisation have also affected trade union militancy. Capital is more mobile and internationalised making workers more insecure. At present investment from the industrialised countries in new factories and so on in the low wage economies of the South is only about 4 percent of their investment in their home bases in the North. As yet this is a trickle. But the image of the new owners dismantling machinery at Longbridge and shipping it off to China is very striking. And the threat from globalisation does not just come from relocation of investment. Purchasing parts by subcontracting to Southern producers has the same effect. Either way, the jobs of workers in the North are threatened.
The recently announced closure of the profitable Fry’s factory in Keynsham by Cadbury’s, and the relocation of the work to a new plant in Poland fits into this pattern that Glyn describes.
When Longbridge closed, a government minister was ill-advised to suggest that the car workers could seek jobs at Tesco. Hardly a comforting response. It is not too far-fetched to imagine a long period of investment stagnation in the industrialised countries, with “emerging markets” being so much more profitable. This could bring intense pressure on jobs and working conditions in Britain and elsewhere. Even sectors where relocation was not possible, like retailing or education, would be flooded with job seekers. The bargaining chips would be in the hands of capital to a degree not seen since the industrial revolution. Fluctuations in labour’s share being confined to the range of 65-75% could disappear too, with Marx’s rising rate of exploitation re-emerging, a century and a half after he first predicted it.
Another defining feature of the current economy is financial deregulation. As Bob Pullin explains:
Glyn does see some positive effects from the expansion of financial markets. In particular, he argues that the expansion of households’ access to affordable credit enabled families to purchase homes, cars and vacations that would have been out of reach if they had had to rely on their incomes alone, or the more stringent credit terms that characterized the Golden Age. Glyn argues that this greater expansion of household borrowing, in turn, was a primary engine of economic expansion in the 1980s and 1990s. But his assessment was published before the current severe imbalances in the US mortgage lending markets had become fully evident. By July 2007, US financial markets were teetering on the brink of a major crisis brought on by the collapse of mortgage lending to riskier households—the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage market. Business Week magazine was reporting that ‘one twitchy move’ by Wall Street bankers, hedge fund managers and bond raters in the current situation ‘could lead to mutually assured destruction’. Thus, the positive effects of the expansion of household lending that Glyn emphasized have now led to a classic boom-and-bust credit cycle.
The liberalization of global financial markets—that is, the abandonment of the controls on financial flows that had been a cornerstone of the Golden Age—engendered a massive increase in financial market trading, both in the established financial centres like New York, Tokyo and London, and in ‘emerging markets’ such as Mexico City, Bangkok or Johannesburg. The result was what Glyn calls ‘one of the most notorious aspects of the expansion of finance’. … The main point here is that uncontrolled financial speculation created the conditions for financial crises, such as the 1997–98 collapse of Asian markets, which produced huge income and job losses for tens of millions of people who had little understanding that their livelihoods were vulnerable to the whims of global financial high-rollers. Glyn cites a study by the World Bank itself which estimated that the Asian crisis increased the number of people living in poverty in the region by 22 million.
Andrew Glyn poses the political consequences very well in his interview with Rob Hoveman:
‘In the old days, unskilled workers could get relatively well-paid jobs in manufacturing. Now the only jobs are poorly paid in the service sector, many of them servicing the rich who have seen their own incomes rise enormously. This will bring to the fore again the issues of inequality and redistribution . Will we face a dystopia in which very large numbers of less qualified and poorly paid people exist to service the consumption needs of the rich? Or can we gain mass support for much higher taxes on the best off sections to redistribute income and develop welfare services to mitigate rising inequality and slow growth in living standards?’
Any strategy for advance towards socialism can no longer rely upon victory on the picket lines, and generalisation of class struggle. We need to win political and ideological hegemony for the vision of a society that meets human need, rather than servicing the insatiable hunger of capital and empire. It is interesting that Glyn argues that the era of unleashed capitalism doesn’t make the welfare state unaffordable, but it requires winning a political argument for the required levels of taxation.
It is worth concluding with Rob Hoveman’s assessment of Glyn’s recent book: “Capitalism Unleashed contains a wealth of argument, analysis and facts about the world economy over the last 30 years and is very accessible to the general reader. You may not agree with everything Glyn says but socialists will benefit greatly by reading and engaging with it.”
stuart on said:
“Any strategy for advance towards socialism can no longer rely upon victory on the picket lines, and generalisation of class struggle. We need to win political and ideological hegemony for the vision of a society that meets human need, rather than servicing the insatiable hunger of capital and empire. It is interesting that Glyn argues that the era of unleashed capitalism doesn’t make the welfare state unaffordable, but it requires winning a political argument for the required levels of taxation.”
But low taxes (on the rich and corporations) is part of the ‘class struggle’. How can this be reversed or how can you ‘win arguments’ without a ‘generalisation in class struggle’?
A petition to Alistair Darling?
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Andy on said:
I mean that we cannot rely upon a generalisation of the class struggle resulting from victories on the picket lines, and traditional trade union consciousness.
A broadly progressive shift in the direction of society will include traditional forms of struggle, but cannot be limited to them.
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stuart on said:
“A broadly progressive shift in the direction of society will include traditional forms of struggle, but cannot be limited to them.”
Do you mean single issue campaigns with no connections to struggles in the workplace hold the key to success? You seem to say a shift ‘will include’ traditional forms (strikes?) but we cannot rely. This is a little confusing.
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Raphie on said:
Intersting argument for the crisis of capitalism in the mid-seventies to early eighties – higher wages and higher raw matererials. Kinda who the capitalists blamed as well. Counter to Mandel’s updating of classic Marx – declining rate of profit because of increase of organic composition of capital and end of a long wave of capitalist expansion (Krondief’s waves). Whoever is right I don’t know but like Ernie’s as it firmly lays the blame at the capitalist system.
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Andy on said:
Raphie, I was never much taken with mandel as an economist. Kondratiev waves seem to have more in the nature of religius mystacism than economic analysis to me.
But following your argument, isn’t wage push and the pressure of organised labour also part of the capitalist system? Indeed if you had no wage push, wouldn’t that feed into under-consumptionist causes of recession?
And if there had been lower wage push, that would have accelerated investment into the means of prodiction and a rising value composition of fixed capital, thus accelerating any tendency for the rate of profit to fall? So here you have a genuinely marxist contradiction, that the direct wage push that led to declining profitability was a countervailing tendency against the tendency of the organic composition of capital to increase.
Anyway, the political importance is that the industrial militancy based on the long boom couldn’t be sustained on the basis of the prevailing politics within the labour movement.
This was the thesis of the old IS, that the shop stewards movement could be a transitional form of organisation that could play a revolutionary role if they could be won to defend their self activity and shopfloor organisation as a point of principle against capital – which required an uncompromising dedication to class struggle politics and a generalised rank and file organistaion. Tragically Cliff won the IS to more traditional Trotskyist models of organisation and politics, symbolic with the launch of the SWP in January 1978, and the faction fight against Palmer. Higgins, Protz and others debilitated the task of building the R&F movement at the most critical point.
Paradoxically, the recognistion that wage militancy could not be sustained on the basis of the old politics was also the starting point of Marxism Today. They added the insight that continued and non-reflecting dedication to the of forms of labour movement organisation were a from of conservatism that prevented trade union militancy being transcended into the broader political and ideological movement required to challenge the hegemony of capital.
socialism won’t be won on the picket line.
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Raphie on said:
Hi Andy I was n’t saying I agreed with Mandel. I really don’t know who’s more right. I have not studied it in enough depth. It’s just that the capitalists blame the workers for recession by asking for wage rises and making their companies unprofitable. In fact they will counter the growing organic composition of capital by increasing the rate of exlpoitation that is keeping the real cost labour down. They have tried to maintain consumption by increasing credit rather than wages which is what they did in the mid-seventies onwards. But that is overcourse inflationary as they are finding out now together with the repackaging of debt around the financial sytem which is bringing the global economy to the edge of recession. What I like was that Mandel’s theory pointed to capitalism’s crisis as being something intrinsic to the capitalist system and did not lay the blame at the door of the greedy workers. As for long waves theory, I don’t know about the economy but it works well for financial markets. But you can fit the wave to any set of historical data. And of course capitalism goes in cycles so it’s a bit of circular argument. If it had predictive power then it would be really usefull but it’s a case of retrofitting and massaging data so think it’s not really insightfull.
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Raphie on said:
On the industrial militancy wasn’t the problem not the IS/SWP’s eocnomistic orientation to industrial workers and the idea that they can be spontanously revolutionary (or was the second bit later)? And thinking it was some kind of pre-revoltionary period? How do you raise class-consiousness? Is it by building a party/movement which keeps a database of past struggles and recruits the most advanced workers who help to raise the concsiousness of workers in future struggles? This can be industrial and or ploitical. I don’t know any ideas?
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Rudebwoy on said:
The obit fails to mention Andrew Glyn’s association with the Militant Tendency.
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Rudebwoy on said:
http://www.socialismtoday.org/105/capitalism.html
Review of Capitalism unleashead from Socialism Today
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ortho-Trot on said:
Don’t be surprised, Rudy. In the links on this page, there are none affiliated to the CWI. Quite a blatant ommission. Also, with all the attention paid to the two “Respect” meetings, there was little mention of the Socialism event. The discussion about GLA, GG, Respect(s) and left re-groupment didn’t include a reference to the Socialist Party. I know that I now run the risk of sounding like one of those whiny SWPers on this blog that everybody hates, but I just figured I’d turn up the temperature a bit.
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Michaelx on said:
Glyn was a long standing member of Militant in the 1970s and 1980s.
Unlike many radical academics of the time he was actively involved in the difficult work of recruiting and developing new members, selling papers, raising fighting fund and building his local branch in Oxford.
He remained friendly to Militant and the Socialist Party in later years, speaking at the SP’s school in 2006 and acknowledging the influence of one of the SP’s leading members in the opening pages of ‘Capitalism Unleashed’.
I didn’t agree with everything he wrote: his account of the post-war ‘profit squeeze’ has, I think, been correctly criticised and rejected by John Weeks, Robert Brenner and others.
He edited the Oxford Review of Economic Policy – a very unusual academic economics journal in that much of it was accessible and useful to those untrained in advanced mathematical economics.
Re: comments 8 and 10 on lack of reference to the CWI/SP.
Given that many of the most significant socialist initiatives and break-throughs of the past 20 years have their origins in the work and ideas of Militant/SP members (e.g. the anti-poll tax movement, the Socialist Alliance, the Scottish Socialist Party and the victory of the left inside the PCS union) it is unfortunate that many avowedly non-sectarian journals and websites choose to imply that the SWP and Respect are the only forces on the radical left worth discussing.
But, having said this, there are more important things to worry about….
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Raphie on said:
#11 I think you make many good points. But the anti-poll tax campaign in Scotland, contrary to popular myrh, was at first led by local activists. The Militant/SML stood outside it initailly but took the correct decision to join it unlike the SWP who continued to take a sectarian stance to the point of handing out leaflets to marchers telling them where they were going wrong! The Militant/SML at first behaved in a bureacratic controlling fashion not used to being involved in a broad campaign where there are differing views. There norms of operating improved and then learnt many lessons helping them to launch the SSA and the SSP. However, I have still seen some evidence of the old their habits in the pre-split SSP.
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Matthew on said:
On the lack of focus on the SP and its ancestors: well, bring them on, bring their perspectives into the discussion. The review of Glyn’s book from Socialism Today is very good/useful. The only trouble comes when the SP is posed as the already existing and irreproachable answer to all political questions: heard that already!
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Tom D on said:
On a more personal note, friends of Andrew may like to search out and join the facebook group “Memories of Andrew Glyn”. There is a plan to compile a book for his family from contributions – and I’m sure that all who knew him will agree that there will be no end of good memories to be recorded.
This is worth remembering in itself, especially in the bitter and heavily personalised climate of left politics today. Andrew was a brilliant thinker, always politically committed, but above all, an absolutely lovely and generous bloke.
Returning to the political, I’d like to comment on the relationship between the Militant Tendency and the anti-poll tax movement. I’ve been researching this for some time now, and have read every bit of academic research and original material I can find in the British Library, as well as having conducted some original interviews. I have to say, I have largely confirmed the conclusion of Danny Burns, in his book Poll Tax Rebellion, that while the hard work of many Militants was useful, the actions of the organisation as a whole were controlling, patronising, and often detrimental to the movement. It is pretty much only Militant published texts which fail to point this out, and instead repeat again and again the line that ‘Militant led the anti-poll tax movement’ or ‘Militant beat the poll tax’. This is false, and misleading on a very important question of recent working class history.
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Halshall on said:
#11 Michaelx
‘…and the victory of the left inside the PCS’.
Very questionable, for many years the SP had and still does have a strong presence on the some departmental TU committees and the struggle was held back by their failure to build on popular discontent.
It’s only in recent times that this has changed with the election of Mark Serwotka and others and pressure from below.
In the NUT the position is perhaps even worse with SP standing their own candidate for General Secretary and splitting the left vote (twice).
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Michaelx on said:
#Halshall
The national PCS union is controlled by Left Unity, in which the SP is the biggest and most influencial group. The elected AGS, National President, and approx eight members of the NEC are SP members.
In the absence of Left Unity, and political organisation and leadership given by SP members, the old right wing would still be in control.
But what matters most is not who controls what, but what the industrial record is.
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a very public sociologist on said:
In slight defence of Andy, if you look at the top of the blog links you’ll find an SP blogger …
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Martin on said:
As someone who was heavily involved in both the Militant and struggle against the Poll Tax, I have to say some of the comments about the role of the Militant couldn’t be further from the truth.
Militant was the leadership and the backbone of the anti poll tax movement from the initial work of setting up the anti-poll tax unions and federations through to winning the arguments for non payment and defending the non-payers. If “the actions of the organisation as a whole were controlling, patronising, and often detrimental to the movement” why were Militant supporters regularly re-elected to leading positions at every level of the anti-poll tax movement, often opposed by anarchists or groups like 3D? The initial success of the SSP was in no little part due to the reputation that Tommy and other leading members of the Militant had built up during the anti-poll tax campaign.
Finally, it should be remembered that in the early days of the anti-Poll Tax campaign there was a heated debate in the movement about the tactic of non-payment. Many groups argued against it, including the SWP – it was akin to not paying a bus fare, you would just thrown of the bus, the Labour Left who said it would rob local Labour Councils of revenue. The Militant was the only group of significance that supported the idea of non-payment. If it had not been for the Militant, mass-non-payment would never have been a reality in Scotland and never served as the inspiration that it did for the rest of Great Britain. So I think the Militant have good claim to be the organisation that led the anti-poll tax battle, and played a major role in defeating the tax.
Of course the vast majority of the Militants that played leading roles in anti-poll tax movement have parted company with the CWI.
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Mike on said:
Michaelx wrote “Given that many of the most significant socialist initiatives and break-throughs of the past 20 years have their origins in the work and ideas of Militant/SP members (e.g. the anti-poll tax movement, the Socialist Alliance, the Scottish Socialist Party and the victory of the left inside the PCS union) it is unfortunate that many avowedly non-sectarian journals and websites choose to imply that the SWP and Respect are the only forces on the radical left worth discussing.”
What a sectarian travesty of the truth. The Militant did not originate the anti-Poll tax movement it simply moved faster than its rivals in the SWP. And then it failed to launch a campaign for direct action by the unions relying instead on pallid mass refusal to pay campaigns, that is to say they allowed a collective struggle to centre on an atomised form of protest, that eventually mean to that the principle of user pays remains enshrined in the current council tax. How the fuck can the PCS selling pension rights for SFA count as a breakthrough? Had the old right wing remained in control of the union they would have acted just as the lame ass losers running it now have done. As for the Socialist Alliance and the SSP groupings what a success they have been and how strong the CWI has emerged from both…
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Martin Wicks on said:
!5. As I recollect the Militant opposed the candidature of Mark Serwotka.
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Michaelx on said:
Initially, yes – because we were uncertain if Serwotka could mobilise enough support to win. At the time the main imperative was to get rid of Reamsbottom at all costs.
In the event Serwotka won, and it was the work of Militant/SP members like John McCreadie who made sure that Reamsbottom was defeated when he attempted to cling to power by using the courts to overturn the election result.
A left-wing General Secretary without a supportive NEC is in a weak position. It has been the work of SP members in Left Unity that has ensured that a Left Unity majority has controlled the NEC for the past 5 years.
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Doug on said:
The SP went it’s separate way in the NUT because the SWP-dominated STA has been steadily moving rightwards over the last couple of years or so, tailing the National Exec and rubber-stamping it’s policies. Policies which were largely intended to defuse teachers militancy over boring bread and butter domestic sectional trade union matters. But because the NE supported (as did the overhwelming majority of national conferences anyway) fairly non-contentious affiliations to UAF, STWC and Palestine Solidarity, the SWP seemed to regard this as hard fought advancements of major significance.
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harry b on said:
Might the arguments about the relative merits of the SWP and Militant circa 1990 be better played out somewhere other than in the comments on an obituary of a respected comrade?
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JM on said:
Well said harryb. Let’s leave the sectarian point scoring for another thread.
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music on said:
very interesting.
i’m adding in RSS Reader
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Philip Ferguson on said:
“The main factor leading to the demise of the Golden Age was the accumulating force of its own contradictions. Glyn argues that there were four main factors leading to its unravelling.”
And yet, oddly enough, none of the four main factors identified by Glynn has anything to do with Marx’s own crisis theory. Rather they are left Keynesian and left Ricardian.
Glyn’s economic views were ideal if you believed that capitalist crisis could be solved by a left Labur government passing an Enabling Act. But they have nothing in common with Marx’s own writings on capitalist crisis.
Marx’s crisis theory is laid out in about 50 pages in vol 3 of ‘Capital’, yet people like Glyn wrote as if Marx had no theory of capitalist crisis, had never identified the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as “the single most important law of modern political economy; instead Glyn, and many others, repeated the arguments of the capitalists that high wages were squeezing profits etc etc.
In point of fact these kinds of left-distributionist theory arguments were demolished in the early years of the Conference of Socialist Economists in a number of papers in the ‘Bulletin of the CSE’.
What is amazing is that decades on we still have people who think that under-consumption, over-production, disproportionality, profit-squeeze etc etc ideas have something to do with Marx. It might be time for the people who put forward these views to actually read some Marx.
Phil
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bill j on said:
Yet if you read Glyn’s book “Capitalism Unleashed” it at least grapples with the revival of capitalism with the advent of globalisation. In that respect it is much superior to the orthodox stagnation theorists who deny that anything has fundamentally changed since the crisis years of the 1970s/80s.
So of course it is possible to be critical, why should everyone agree after all, but at least Glyn was honest enough to recognise that the world needed to be understood as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. So, good for him.
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Cigar Rollers on said:
As one got a life then obiviously get death also but the important thing is that how one can going to make un-forgettable his life by making some history,just like the Andrew Glyin.
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krupskaya on said:
@ Andy Newman
Andrew Glyn was indeed a thoughtful economist and, in marked contrast to many in the academy, was always concerned to place his knowledge atthe service of the broader labour movement.
But in terms of specific analysis, the idea that the crisis was engendered by declining profits/higher wages and higher commodities prices is a nonesense. How did workers win increaed wages when, simultenously, there has been a collapse in militancy? The answer is they didn’t.
Real wages have been falling in the advanced economies for a considerable period, and profits consequently have risen. But this is exactly as Marx foresaw, where booms create the conditions for slump precisely because they rapidly increase the stock of capital through profitability. It is the capitalists’ inability to continue expanding the volume of their profits based on this newly-expanded stock of capital which leads to a decline in the rate of profit.
Similarly, the rise in commodities’ prices is to a lare extent a mirage, reflecting the fall of the US Dollar, the currency in which they are nearly all denominated. For Euro or Swss Franc purchasers of oil or gold, their prices are barely changed. The remainder is a function of the ultra-loose liquidity provided by the central banks to inflate their way out of the crisis and, stock markets aside, is failing.
Small point, but related to the above, anyone who has ever read Late Capitalism will know that Mandel himself resurrected a long-neglected rebuttal of Krondatiev by Trotsky, as part of Mandel’s argument that the economic cycle (long or short)was conditioned by the political sphere, wars, revolutions, general strikes, etc, rejecting articles of faith like Krondatiev’s.
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