Offlist, Jenny, I'll send you the 1990 Capital & Class article I did on prospects for a left turn within US populist traditions. The last few 'grafs are below. The later 'lameness' I worry about within the potential populist forces in the US came partly from Jackson's demobilization of the Rainbow (I wrote the article before it had been decisively killed in 1989), but the deeper causes are probably to be found in the single-issue nature of US civil society advocacy: a systematic failure/refusal to connect the dots... Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't lived in the US properly for about 20 years. Your thoughts are welcome.
The new US class struggle : Financial industry power vs. grassroots populism
CONCLUSION
How serious a threat can all this populist domestic and international activism ultimately make to the established financial order? Perhaps never again will the homogenising and devastating effects of speculative, footloose financial capital create such a unified moment of populist resistance as happened at the end of the last century in the US (Goodwyn, 1978) . But spelled out here is enough preliminary evidence to conclude that finance may be an ideal issue base for Left politics in the US in the 1990s . The challenge for Left militants will be to work with and help move the new populist activists from what can sometimes be splintered, single-issue, transient half-campaigns against their local banks into larger critiques, first of the entire financial system and second of the world capitalist economy of which financial capitalism is only the latest phase. With or without the participation of the Left, neighbourhood and trade union organisers will begin this journey just as they reach the limits of their local strategies and tactics, and they will move ever more rapidly as the reassertion of underlying tendencies related to the rise of finance in a crisis-ridden global economy offers them both unprecedented dangers and promises.
Perhaps the single most intractable challenge facing international, national and local managers of capitalism is to engineer the means by which the unsustainable rise of finance will end and by which overaccumulated financial capital will be devalued. There are three basic possibilities : (1) as has happened so far, a series of 'partial' defaults (e .g ., midwestern farms, the 'Rustbelt' and energy-producing regions, the LTV company, Texas banks and S&L's, Argentina, etc.), juggled skilfully by the bureaucrats and money mandarins of the international financial system (primarily the US Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Bank for International Settlements), and backed by easy government 'lender of last resort' liquidity for highly exposed and especially vulnerable financial institutions (only unlike as in the past, the partial default option cannot be accompanied by a continued rise in aggregate global debt); (2) a full-fledged banking and stock market collapse, as happened in the us from 1929-33, to wipe overaccumulated financial assets clean off the books; or (3) a period of roaring inflation and negative real interest rates, which would whittle down the debt mountain (debt is repayed in dollars worth less than when the debt was contracted), as happened to a very limited degree through most of the 1970s .
Whichever route is taken in the early 1990s, there will be enormous social costs. Of the progressive US-based forces that might be equipped to challenge the process of devaluation of overaccumulated financial capital, the modern versions of traditional us populism - the Rainbow Coalition (Navarro, 1988), Alinskyite neighbourhood activism (Boyte, 1980), resurgent anti-corporate trade unionism (Moody, 1988), Citizen Action Coalition, etc. (Boyte, Booth and Max, 1986) - offer the greatest hope (Boyte and Riessman, 1986) . Of course, alongside progressive economic analysis and the capacity to appropriate and transform the rhetoric of class struggle (e.g ., against the 'money trust' or 'corporate barracudas'), populist programmes have, unfortunately, been infused with racism and nationalism at different stages. That is why the rainbow and internationalist components are so critical to populist politics in this stage of US development, and why campaigns against financial capital that contain these components will continue to attract leading progressive activists in nearly every US city.
John Walton (1987 : 383) posits of recent, widespread Third World riots against austerity imposed by international financial capital, 'All of the protests succeeded, in the sense of shaking their societies into alert appreciation of the regressive policy effects and deepening urban poverty. In the longer run mass action has initiated a political transformation that continues to the present and suggests a realignment of the global political economy.' That is an ambitious claim, and if the populist struggles against banks and other financiers in the US merely achieve such luminous heights as shaking US society into an appreciation of the damaging effects of financial capitalism that would be a significant and worthwhile accomplishment. But if the excesses of financial capitalism do come to an end, however painfully for poor, working, and middleclass people across the globe, then there is more here than meets the eye.
Such a development would also imply the demise of the very motor of the global economy: the financial sector that in fact has sustained consumption and investment in the shaky productive sectors. The end of financial capitalism, may be, as in the early 1930s, the beginning of a period characterised by depression, extreme interterritorial competition, the formation of enormous geopolitical economic blocs (Fortress Europe 1992, the US-Canada-Western Hemisphere bloc, the ASEAN economies), and quite possibly war and the widespread resurgence of domestic fascist movements. The Rainbow Coalition's influential Left strategist Vicente Navarro writes (1988 : 443), 'A natural rainbow is after all the light of the sun that struggles to get through the dark clouds. And there are enormous clouds on our horizons of which the largest is the overwhelming dominance that the capitalist class of the us has over economic, political and communication agencies and institutions in this country.' But if the end of financial capitalism and the devaluation of overaccumulated international financial capital substantially reduce the overwhelming dominance of financial institutions and simultaneously throw the capitalist class into disarray in the 1990s, that may be the silver lining that the Rainbow Coalition and other populist forces need to attempt a full-fledged political economic transformation .