Editor's Note: Sam Webb chairs the Communist Party and this interview is based on his newest essay, 'No Easy Road to the Future, But We'll Get There.'
PA: In your report to the National Committee of the CPUSA last month, you describe some aspects of the current economic crisis as the “new normal.” Could you talk a little about what is new and what is old in the current economic crisis?
SAM WEBB: What is new about the present economic crisis actually has several different sides to it. First is, what brought it about. And in this regard the financial sector and financialization played a major role in bringing the country to economic ruin. There have been other financial difficulties and problems over the past 20 or 30 years. If you made a list of them, people would be surprised at the length of the list. But those problems didn’t bring the country to near collapse. In the present case, the financial sector and financialization did bring about almost total economic devastation.
The crisis was triggered by the housing sector, and the bubble in the housing sector is in no small part explained by the new financial instruments and mechanisms that allowed investment bankers and mortgage companies to make enormous profits. It was triggered there, but once it was triggered, because of the interconnectedness of the financial sector, it led to a near meltdown of the financial structure, and not surprisingly this had profound consequences on what some call “the real economy.” That I think is one new aspect of it.
The other new aspect is how this particular cyclical structural downturn unfolded. First of all, it is deeper than previous crises, going well beyond the the crisis of the mid-70s and the Mexican financial crisis of 1982, for example. Another new aspect of it is that we could well be locked into a situation of very slow growth going forward. I know there are a lot of differences among economists about that, but that could well be the situation. I don’t know if we are going to replicate what happened in Japan when they had nearly a decade of lost growth and stagnation – each country is different and has its own features, but it could well be that we are entering a period of very slow growth, and I think everybody agrees that employment and job creation, even if there is some growth in the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and other economic indicators, are going to lag far behind, so that high unemployment will probably be a long-term structural feature of the economy. I think that these are the new things that are happening.
As in any capitalist economic crisis, I think the current crisis is connected to some of the underlying contradictions in the economy between over-production and the relative buying capacity of consumers, but this one does have some new features, and it is important to see these new features, because I think they determine the scope of the crisis and the prospects for recovery.
PA: In your essay you talk about two basic solutions, one that is an immediate and one that is longer-term. The first is the fight for jobs, for green jobs and union jobs, manufacturing jobs, etc., and then in the longer term there is the political struggle for what you call a new model of governance. Could you talk a little about those two things?
SW: Regarding the immediate necessity of creating jobs, in the past month or two that idea has been embraced by many people’s organizations beginning with the labor movement, and I just read about the statement issued by a number of different organizations, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and others. That is something I think is doable now – building a broad movement around the issue of jobs and the immediate creation of them. Communists and people on the left need to become up to their necks in this movement. There are millions of unemployed people around the country who need jobs, who are just surviving day to day, and they will become part of this movement too, I think, if the channels are created for them to participate. So that is the immediate task. I think the fact that there is such broad unity among the people’s organizations in pressing the issue of jobs is of great, great consequence.
At our recent meeting of the CPUSA’s national leadership, we discussed how to stimulate activity around the issue of jobs and how to become involved in that struggle. I now think it is clear that there is a way to do this, that there is a very concrete way to do this – there’s a handle there and people need to grab on to it. Addressing the longer-term situation, real economic progress is going to require a number of political and economic reforms that are not on the immediate agenda now. When I speak about a new model of economic governance, I take inspiration from the New Deal period, where a new model of governance did arise in the course of those struggles, one that opened up entitlement benefits and social programs for people. It empowered the labor movement through the Wagner Act and set up a number of different agencies to curb the excesses of corporate power, and it also established Social Security and things like unemployment insurance. I think we need a new model now, and although I think we can still take inspiration from the New Deal, this new model of governance needs to be structured according to today’s conditions. I could cite many different examples, but the one that comes to mind is the movement of capital from one country to another. There are two aspects to this. There are short-term movements, which are very destabilizing for countries all over the world, and therefore I think there needs to be a curb on such movements of capital. They have to be taxed, and concrete steps have to be taken to stop the instantaneous movement of trillions of dollars from one country to another – because of the destabilizing impact. That is something that the New Deal didn’t have to address so much. Also, the longer-term movement of capital has a devastating impact on countries across the world including ours. We have seen it in industry after industry, with outsourcing and the setting up of global production networks. So this new model will have to be conditioned by today’s circumstances. I think we can draw lessons and take inspiration from the New Deal, but it has to be a 21st century model, and again I think the reforms must be both political and economic.
PA: One of the other things you argue is that the health care struggle really exemplifies the political balance of forces and the kind of situation we are in politically in our country today. Could you expand on that?
SW: In regard to health care reform, I think everybody has to be mindful that we haven’t reached the endpoint yet. There is a tendency to think that with every twist and turn the endpoint has been reached in terms of what we can win legislatively, and that is a terrible mistake. It’s still an open struggle. Nothing has been finally decided, and I think that all the different forces that are fighting for comprehensive and universal health care have to operate on that basis.
What Congress has proposed up to now doesn’t measure up completely to what we wanted. There are certainly some very very negative features to it. But I think that represents to some degree the level and scope of the movement today. I have been saying that we need an energized movement like the one during the lead up to the elections, and we don’t have that yet. That electoral movement has not fully moved onto the current political terrain of struggle we are fighting on now, and that is a big challenge. If that movement had been re-energized, I think the debate would probably be a little bit different in Congress today.
What we have now more or less reflects the balance of power that exists but, as a cautionary note, there is still a way to go before a health care reform bill is signed by the President. The movement still has a lot of room to impress its positions on Congress and move against some possible negative elements of the bill, such as new restrictions on abortion rights and the weakening of the public option, that we don’t want this piece of legislation to contain.
I would like to add that in my opinion it would be a terrible mistake to think that it might be best if the current legislation doesn’t pass, which is what some people who have been fighting for health care are saying – that it’s best if it doesn’t pass. Then we can start from scratch, they say, start over from ground zero again, and come out of the legislative process with a much more advanced piece of legislation. That to my mind is very very naive. I think that if this piece of legislation – whatever ultimately comes out of the process – is defeated, then we are going to be set back in terms of fighting for health care for years. And not only that, it is also going to affect every other aspect of the progressive agenda as we go forward. There are near-term impacts of the legislative defeat of the health care struggle, but there will also be longer-term effects on the whole agenda of the Obama administration, negative ones.
PA: Stepping back and looking at the big picture in a more abstract way, the Communist Party argues that the political and economic struggle proceeds in stages, the most basic one being that we had to fight Republican control and the ultra-right, and that we had to defeat them before we could move to an anti-monopoly stage. Where do you see us in the current situation in regard to this theory of stages?
SW: I think we are in a transitional period, and I think what has happened since election day last year has impressed on me, and I think on others, the transitional nature of this period. We said that the extreme right was on the defensive because of the election’s outcome. That’s true, but you have to be careful what you draw from that. I think that some of us in the Party leadership maybe drew the wrong conclusion, that the extreme right would not be a major factor in the ongoing political process. However, over the past year it clearly has been.
I can recall somebody saying to me that the main problem in the post election period with Obama in the White House was the Blue Dog Democrats. Well that’s a pretty silly notion, if you look at what has happened over the past several months. It has been the right wing that has been the driving force behind efforts to block the legislative measures of the Obama administration and turn public opinion against him. The Blue Dogs have tried to contain the full sweep of some of these legislative reforms, but they don’t have a constituency that they mobilize and they don’t shape public opinion. They don’t introduce the poison of racism and male supremacy and other forms of division into the public square. That clearly belongs on the shoulders of the extreme right, and I think maybe we didn’t quite fully appreciate it. Maybe we took the idea that they were on the defensive and drew the wrong conclusion from it, thinking that maybe they were going to be more of a minor element in the struggle going forward. I definitely think we are in a transitional moment. The corporate element opposing Obama has obviously played a vigorous role over the past year too, and that is going to only grow as we go forward. As the process of fighting for democratic reforms moves forward, I think that the class element in the opposition will come forward even stronger. But since we are in a transitional moment now, there are divisions that we have to take advantage of within those corporate circles. To achieve our goals, we have to build a very broad movement. Building a broad movement is a necessary feature of this stage of struggle and every subsequent stage of struggle. The movement has to broaden and deepen, and the idea that it narrows down at some point is, I think, wrongheaded.
PA: Simply put, it seems that the idea of moving in stages is useful as metaphor, but that in real life the divisions between one point and another aren’t so sharply defined.
SW: I think that stages are at best a guide to action, and certainly they don’t completely capture any particular moment or period. They just approximate some of its features.
PA: Lastly, you talked briefly at the National Committee meeting about the role communists can play in the struggle for jobs. What kind of role should communists and the Communist Party play in this transitional period?
SW: To simplify, there are two levels as I see it. First, we have to be a part of the way people are responding to the immediate impact of this crisis. I just got back from Cleveland where I was working in a neighborhood on Rick Nagin’s election campaign. The people there are just struggling to survive, and we have to help at that level. They are trying to get food to eat; some people are trying to get shelter, others are trying to keep the real estate agent or the bank away from the door, so there is that level of trying to help people in the immediate survival situations they are in. Then, on another level, we have to be a part of the broader coalition I spoke of earlier, which is led by the labor movement and many other people’s organizations. I think we have to be a part of that. We need to play a vigorous part in fighting for immediate action, but I also think we need to bring some of our views and ways of thinking into that broader movement, such as the need for more radical economic reforms to address the present crisis we are in and the new features of the economy I mentioned. I think we need to work on both those levels, and as we work we need to continue to find ways of bringing the two levels of activity together.
