OVER at the Crooked Timber blog, Henry Farrell comments on Doug Henwood's response to Matthew Yglesias' argument for a higher, employment-boosting inflation target, which I endorsed in my last post. Mr Henwood dislikes Mr Yglesias' apparent "neoliberal" preference for monetary over fiscal remedies to high unemployment. He writes:

From an elite point of view, the primary problem with a jobs program—and with employment-boosting infrastructure projects—is that they would put a floor under employment, making workers more confident and less likely to do what the boss says, and less dependent on private employers for a paycheck. It would increase the power of labor relative to capital.

I think we're supposed to understand "elite" as roughly synonymous with "neoliberal" here. "Neoliberalism" has become something of a term of abuse on the left, though its denotation remains vague. It is something of which Mr Yglesias and I, despite our considerable ideological differences, are regularly accused. This newspaper is even denounced from time to time as a neoliberal rag. Anyway, as a sort of neoliberal (a neoclassical liberal), let me say that from my point of view the problem with jobs programmes, as compared to textbook monetary policy, is not that they increase the power of labour relative to capital. It's that they do little to sustainably increase demand for labour. And nothing reduces the power of labour relative to capital more than low demand for labour. But I digress.

Mr Farrell notes that Mr Yglesias is a better leftist than Mr Henwood gives him credit for, but thinks Mr Henwood is "on to something significant" in his complaints about Yglesian left-leaning neoliberalism.

Neo-liberals tend to favor a combination of market mechanisms and technocratic solutions to solve social problems. But these kinds of solutions tend to discount politics – and in particular political collective action, which requires strong collective actors such as trade unions. This means that vaguely-leftish versions of neo-liberalism often have weak theories of politics, and in particular of the politics of collective action. I see Doug and others as arguing that successful political change requires large scale organized collective action, and that this in turn requires the correction of major power imbalances (e.g. between labor and capital). They're also arguing that neo-liberal policies at best tend not to help correct these imbalances, and they seem to me to have a pretty good case. Even if left-leaning neo-liberals are right to claim that technocratic solutions and market mechanisms can work to relieve disparities etc, it's hard for me to see how left-leaning neo-liberalism can generate any self-sustaining politics.

The implied premise here seems to be that labour-union social democracy is an ideology that generates self-sustaining politics. But Mr Yglesias pops up in the comments to say:

[T]he self-assurance that there's some non-neoliberal miracle formula for political sustainability seems refuted by the fact that the pre-neoliberal paradigm in the United States was not, in fact, politically sustainable.

He goes on sensibly to note that the history of the decline in American unionisation, and the political heft of organised labour, does not seem to be some kind of right-wing or neoliberal plot:

US labor union density peaked in the mid-1950s so it's hard to see Reagan specifically as the cause of unions' decline. I think it's more plausible to say that the policy environment has grown more hostile to unions as a result of unions' decline.

I think he's right. None of this is to say that neoliberalism is especially self-reinforcing or stable. Mr Yglesias concedes that the unsustainability of neoliberalism "is a problem". I think this is a mistake. Mr Yglesias would do better to argue that no ideology generates a self-sustaining politics.

The global economy's path of development, the future of technology, the evolution of culture and the changes it causes in social norms of work and consumption, not to mention the lines along which political coalitions coalesce, are essentially unpredictable. If you think your political theory generates a "self-sustaining politics", you're kidding yourself.

Liberal and social-democratic political theory both are marked by a peculiar hopeful naivete about the possibility of one day arriving at some sort of ideal self-equilibrating politico-economic system. But it's never going to happen. Until the heat of all creation is spread evenly over the whole cold void, everything always will be unbalanced. Here in the hot human world, it's certain that sooner or later someone will invent or say something that will make comrades enemies and enemies friends. All we can do is our best for now. If sound technocratic, monetary policy (or neoliberalism, whatever that comes to) is the best we can do for now, it doesn't matter that it generates no long-run self-sustaining political constituency. Nothing does. So, for now, we should try to sustain it.

You're going to die, but that's no reason to stop eating.