Several motives, when it comes to the state of the global economy, dominated the opportunistic summaries of the past and forecasts of the new calendar year. In accordance with the positions taken on the socially acceptable part of the political-economic spectrum, the tone of the presentation varied in the range from celebratory to reserved, but it was still possible to reach some sort of consensus in the assessment.
According to what could be read in the mainstream media, the economic panorama, in fact, looks quite solid. Despite the tightening of monetary policies not seen since the 2023s, the fight against inflation was largely successful and without major social upheavals - moreover, the American economy, for example, grew in XNUMX. At the same time, European national economies have successfully survived being "cut off" from Russian gas. The labor markets continued to function successfully, according to the interpretation, primarily because companies - instead of mass redundancies - gave up hiring, that is, filling vacant positions.
Although major national economies, especially in Europe, will find it difficult to bring inflation down to the desired two percent without plunging into milder recessions, the global economy seems to be in much better shape than many thought. And when Jay Powell, the president of the FED, said at a media conference in mid-December that he "thinks that no further increase in interest rates will be necessary", the forecast of the outcome of this inflationary episode in the form of the famous "soft landing", received, according to many, and your final confirmation. In short, despite the apocalyptic whining from the economically conservative camps, last year closed on a relatively optimistic note.
Is there reason for optimism?
For a change, it was possible to recognize the reasons for optimism, albeit with a certain amount of naivety, from the left perspective. Two moments in particular resonated with the left in 2023: a kind of symbolic hype around unionism in the US and the rehabilitation of industrial policies or, in other words, economic planning. The part about naivety concerns, however, the interpretation according to which the abandonment of the global free market paradigm in itself can be a substitute for serious labor organizing, but also the mixing of media interest in unionism with the assessment of real union capacities.
The six-week strike that the American Auto Workers Union organized last fall was rightly characterized as a success. Concessions were obtained from Ford, Stellantis and General Motors, primarily in the form of significant salary increases and the inauguration of a system of coefficients that will adjust salaries to the cost of living in the future. The strike was particularly successful in a symbolic sense. He was explicitly supported by Joe Biden himself, the first American president who estimated that such a political bet could pay off for him.
Earlier, during the summer, a strike by film and television workers in Hollywood also resulted in an increase in wages, as well as the implementation of a fairer royalty payment system when it comes to streaming productions and a series of safety-preventive provisions in collective agreements that should regulate the use of artificial intelligence in the industry. In total, from January to December last year, more than 400 strikes were organized in the USA. Enough for, say, even The Wall Street Journal to publish a few reports in 2023 about how unions have become cool again.
At the same time, on an annual basis, the percentage of the US workforce that is unionized is falling. In 2021, that figure was 10,3 percent. In 2022, a drop of 0,2 percent followed. A new drop is also expected when the data for 2023 is published. In general, the percentage of the US workforce that is unionized has been declining almost linearly since the 1950s. That decline, however, is not a consequence of changes in the symbolic attractiveness of unions as institutions or some kind of general social sentiment, but rather a series of legislative frameworks that made labor organizing in the US more and more difficult over time. At least the impression is that in the context of renewed insistence on industrial policies, that framework could become somewhat looser, although, of course, nothing is guaranteed.
After all, the return of industrial policies in the USA and Europe is nothing more than a reaction to four decades of blind insistence on the free-market globalization of the economy, that is, the process that - unplanned - promoted China to the operationally strongest national economy. Over the past three years, the Biden administration has spent billions and billions of dollars in federal stimulus to boost private investment in industries and try to repair the damage, while the European Union, faced with a potential exodus of capital to the US, has done the same. , although at a slightly slower pace. The number of protectionist measures that are in force today at the global level, for example, is about 35 thousand - ten years ago there were less than ten. Although there is still no clearly defined ideological system that could justify such paradigmatic changes, the world has definitely become a significantly different place in the last five or six years.
In short, it is about the reorganization of the power of capital at the transnational level, but in the opposite direction, i.e. in a way that subjects concrete industrial policies more and more to national interests. Therefore, a renewed conversation about economic planning or a favorable media representation of trade unionism cannot in themselves be a reason for celebration or relaxation on the left - without democratic control over the distribution of public money in the form of incentives and the strengthening of trans-national trade union solidarity, exploitation will only take on a more local character.
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