A post-pandemic social peace accord?
canadiandimension.com
The key consideration is how the left should orient itself in the period that is now opening up. The concessions that employers and states make aren’t driven by wishes and hopes; they hinge on the willingness of those in power to provide them. The post-war approach was based on a capacity to broker social peace, while ensuring a robust flow of profits. There is no such prospect before us at present.

There is no golden age of reciprocity ahead, writes John Clarke. The capitalist system is in crisis and a capacity to rebound and broker peace deals is lacking.

The financial crisis and the Great Recession of 2007-09 put an end to this revival. The years after this were marked, moreover, by a remarkably sluggish recovery with low levels of profitability and dismal levels of productive investment. The low interest rates and quantitative easing that were adopted to keep things afloat produced an asset bubble but didn’t restore the health of the “real economy.” Further, as Marxist economist Rick Kuhn has pointed out, “For at least a year before the pandemic, global growth was slowing; the world economy was already moving towards another recession.”

Thus, while it massively intensified the depth and scale of the economic downturn, the pandemic descended on a global economy that was already in trouble and subject to long term contradictions. In terms of the prospects for a post pandemic recovery, Michael Roberts draws attention to the viewpoint coming from the US Federal Reserve that, “the US economy [is] going to have a ‘sugar rush’ from the fiscal stimulus and from the ‘pent-up’ demand of consumers but the Fed worries that “after this burst of energy on the ‘sugar high’ of government paychecks and restaurant meals, the US economy will slip back into the low growth trajectory that applied before the pandemic slump.”