Boom, Bust and Crisis: Labour Corporate Power and Politics in Canada ed. by John Peters (review)

Boom, Bust and Crisis – an edited volume with eight chapters, along with an introduction by the author – is a wide-ranging and passionate description of the neoliberal restructuring of the Canadian economy, emphasizing “the increasing power and wealth imbalance favouring business and top earners, the declining power of Canada’s labour movement and the worsening of jobs and incomes for the majority of Canadian workers.” (8) The book is extremely interesting and useful. Its strengths lie in pulling together clear descriptions of the effects of neoliberal restructuring, capitalist globalization, and current state and private economic strategies and policies on the real lives of working people and their institutions; its critical approach to the challenge facing unions in this era; case studies which dispel some of the prevailing mystification and mythology about supposed economic success stories; and its outrage against the economic and political inequality that has resulted from Canada’s resource, real estate, and financial boom.

The book’s weakness lies in its lack of consistent systemic analysis of the drivers of the neoliberal restructuring of the Canadian economy. Too often it lapses into a kind of populist nostalgia for a postwar era that was supposedly better, fairer, or more equal – where business had less power and markets were “neutral” – and calls for a return to policies that favour the “broad middle class.” This essentially social democratic approach muddles the analysis of political parties and governments, and makes it very difficult to pose alternative strategies for addressing inequality and the larger economic and political structures underpinning it. The book offers very few of these, and those it poses tend towards superficiality and naiveté.

John Peters’ overview “Free Markets and the Decline of Unions and Good Jobs” challenges the claims of governments and business interests that the new economy has brought prosperity, arguing that the reality for working people includes low wages, precarious work, stagnation, and inequality. At the same time, he identifies a panoply of neoliberal policies driving the new economy. His description of the effects of the natural resource, housing, and real estate booms and the relationship between financial deregulation and corporate behaviour is extremely useful and clear. A particular strength of this essay is the way it deals with the defeat of the labour movement. He criticizes unions for failing to collectively resist or go on the offensive. His call for political mobilization of all of the segments of the working class in solidaristic projects around political programs that challenge the neoliberal policy agenda is critically important.

But there are also political weaknesses here. There is no structural explanation of where the neoliberal agenda came from and what drives it. It’s almost as if, suddenly, the wealthy were able to sway the electorate and thus gain control over the state, with the help of new forms of lobbying and self-organization. The implication is that before the neoliberal era, the capitalist class never really wielded power. He writes, “Driving all these changes is one fundamental political fact – since the late 1990s, the power structure of Canadian society has fundamentally shifted to favour the affluent elite.” (17)

But the capitalist class always wielded dominant political and economic power in Canada. The crisis of the 1970s arose from a series of structural crises that could only be addressed by either dramatic reforms limiting private ownership and accumulation strategies, or a move towards liberalizing markets and attacking the structural gains of the working class. The defeat of the working class and the transformations associated with neoliberalism came about through choices made and power wielded by capital, given the political and organizational weakness of the working class. Neoliberalism has been institutionalized across the capitalist world and can’t simply be reformed away without any necessary transformation of the economic (and political) structures underpinning it. The failure to clearly articulate this affects and weakens many elements of the book.

Dianna Gibson’s and Regan Boychuk’s essay, “The Spoils of...