I have an article in the new issue of Dissent, arguing that “As long as democratic politics operates through nation-states, any left program will require some degree of delinking from the global economy.”
My piece is part of a special section on “Capitalism Today.” There will be an accompanying event at the New School on May 22, with Jamie Galbraith, Julia Ott, Mark Levinson and me.
I’ve made similar arguments to this article’s in a number of posts on this blog:
Capital Mobility as Trojan Horse
Only the Debt Is National
How to Think about the Balance of Payments
What Is Foreign Investment For?
Lessons from the Greek Crisis
Prices and the European Crisis, Continued
One thing that’s probably not as clear as it should be in the Dissent piece, is that the case for delinking is much stronger for most other countries than for the United States. For most countries, free trade and, even more, free capital mobility, drastically reduce the choices available to national governments. (This “disciplining” of the state by foreign investment is sometimes acknowledged as its real function.) For the US, I don’t think this is true – I don’t think the threat of capital flight meaningfully constrains policy here. And in particular I don’t think it makes sense to see a more positive trade balance as necessary or even particularly desirable to boost demand, for reasons laid out here and here.