I became a political economist having lived my entire life through economic crisis. I reached voting age right at the time of the fall 2008 federal election that took place right as the Great Financial Crisis unfolded. Since then, Canadian and global economic crises have made regular occurrences, every few years or so, throughout my entire adult life – the 2011 European debt crisis, the 2014 oil price crash, Brexit, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and today’s overlapping polycrisis. Joblessness, wage and price mismatch, and precarity define the adult experiences of this generation. Crisis has been normalized, and the effects of this normalization are not well understood. Political economy, perhaps, as a generalist field has the best tools and ideas to comprehend these phenomena.
I also became a political economist to understand the causes of contradictions. Born at the end of history, the proclamation already seemed like a contradiction, coming from a working-class migrant background, growing up in advanced capitalist Canada. In this country, there are people who look like me, who spoke the Philippine languages I understood in the community, who make up one million members of Canada’s invisible working class today.
I can hear and see the working class in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, among the passengers whenever I take a bus across a city, when I am served at a fast-food restaurant, when I need help getting into a locked building at a late-night hour. This working-class experience goes beyond Canada’s major metropoles and can be found in the periphery; rural and remote communities and towns far outside the centre. The contradiction of why these working-class people who I shared kinship with worked the reception desk night shift of hotels in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, staffed hospitals in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and risked their health in meatpacking factories in High River, Alberta, was a question that lent to further inquiry.
However, political economy was not the starting point for understanding crises and contradictions because it was not exactly a concept that was taught in Canadian public schools in suburban Mississauga, but history. History, I understood, was the field to rerum cognoscere causas, as the London School of Economics motto goes. My read of history, however, turned into a read of the aggregate data points that influence the formation of political economy; the present state of society’s institutions, informed by history.
My study of political economy, because of comparative frameworks that form the basis of most university courses, focused on the institutional arrangements between states and markets in the context of different societies – the formations of those arrangements based on historical circumstances and trajectories. Not knowing much about the University of Toronto’s collegiate system, I signed up for Innis College without realizing who Harold Innis was (in grade 12, I was interested in the free movie showings at their film school). Reading up on this legend of Canadian political economy, I immediately clicked on an understanding of the development of Canada as a political economy through the Staple Thesis; the contradictory displacement and misplacement of peoples, and the gaps between rich and poor.
With the comparative focus on political economy, and the Hegelian dialectic analysis drilled into students in university courses on Western history, I found typologies and frameworks to be useful tools. ‘Varieties of Capitalism,’ ‘Welfare Worlds,’ and ‘social capital’ were concepts that would help to inform constructed and empirical analysis leading to conclude that optimal political economy arrangements are geared towards “universalism,” “market coordination,” and “high trust” societies – Frankfurt School sociological complements to an analysis of political economy. These conclusions are aligned with typically Marxist, socialist traditions, but this arrival did not come from academic study alone (I do not think I was a great student), but from working-class life experience. To be the idiomatic “fish-out-of-water” in many of these academic settings and discussions informs a perspective that is not often engaged with.
The “battle for the working class” exists between the left and the far right and the “hyperpoliticization” of the working class, with no result coming from the political activation (see recent, popularly discussed essay by Anton Jäger), is what makes this such a competition. The energized disaffection and feeling that something must change or break with the status quo can certainly be won over for a political movement, but the far-right, backed by moneyed international networks, is winning. The left’s once strong social institutions, that it previously built working-class power on, have eroded under decades of neoliberalism. They still stand but they are weakened. In Canada, those institutional hold outs include public health care, public education, and the workplace, which are all under constant attack. They must be fortified (and the left still has some authority in these arenas) to fight back the entente between the far right and capital to win the battle for the working class.
I would also argue that, as a political economist with this background, the obscurity heaped on top of the fault line of class is a site of contention that is serious, but vastly misunderstood. From liberal notions of “middle class” that previously extended into traditional understandings of “working class,” liberalism and its frameworks have attempted to save capital by hiding its power and obscuring class identity through hyper-individualization. Contradictions of class abound when one does not seek to understand dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, disability, culture, language, etc. It is critical to have clarity when the diverse oppressive forces of capital rule over the diverse working class.
Neoliberalism thrashes out at the world in its late-stage malignance, but I am not keen on a “reset” of sorts; back to the end of history or to the decades under pre-neoliberal Keynesian capitalism. As I mentioned, the entire adult lives of my generation before this former reset point have seen economic crisis, joblessness, precarity, high prices, and struggle without outcome. The pre-neoliberal decade also saw the Boomer generation struggle for peace and civil rights at the apogee of welfare capitalism. Instead, I would prefer to see a new vision for the world that considers alternative institutional arrangements that include marginalized peoples, are better suited to defend societies against environmental collapse, and builds robust systems of redistribution never seen before under capitalism, with today’s technological progress. Why settle for a world that already existed, with its own flaws and weaknesses that led to this reset point, when there can be visions for a better world rooted in equality, justice, and freedom from need?
