[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: Unmaking Global Capitalism: Nine Things to Know About Organizing in the Belly of the Beast

Tue Jun 24 00:26:53 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 1:35 PM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: Unmaking Global Capitalism: Nine Things to
Know About Organizing in the Belly of the Beast
To: CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES at jiscmail.ac.uk, Dan Gallin <gli at iprolink.ch>,
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org, WSFDiscuss List <
WorldSocialForum-Discuss at openspaceforum.net>, Debate is a listserve that
attempts to promote information and analyses of interest to the independent
left in South and Southern Africa <debate-list at fahamu.org>, Kim Scipes <
kimscipes at earthlink.net>, Asbjørn Wahl <Asbjorn.Wahl at velferdsstaten.no>,
Ana Dinerstein <A.C.Dinerstein at bath.ac.uk>

Peter sez:

This is about as good as it gets from a socialist with a lifetime of union
experience. So it surely provides a provocation to a serious discussion.
Which I am not about to carry out here right now. Except to throw doubt on
Sid's prioritisation of national over international solidarity. Rather than
seeing these as inter-related (not to speak of them being dialectically so).

In other ways also, Sid seems to me to have not entirely freed himself from
the iron cage of capitalism and bureaucracy within which he clearly sees
the unions (and the labour movement more generally) to be imprisoned. Which
may explain why he does not have at least a 10th Point on women (51% of
humanity) and a higher one of the working classes (especially if we include
generally unpaid carework as labour).

However, his setting out of his propositions under nine heads is an
invitation to others who might wish to add to or replace these.

Now read on...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sid Shniad <shniad at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 7:05 AM
Subject: Unmaking Global Capitalism: Nine Things to Know About Organizing
in the Belly of the Beast
To:

*http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1000.php
<http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1000.php> The   B u l l e t** •
Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 1000 <1000>*

* • June 18, 2014 Unmaking Global CapitalismNine Things to Know About
Organizing in the Belly of the Beast: *

*Confronting neoliberalism involves more than ethical counterarguments or
an easy return to a more tolerable past. It means having a distinct
alternative vision and developing the corresponding social power to
challenge not just a philosophy, but the core structures of “really
existing capitalism.”Sam Gindin*

When Karl Marx famously declared
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm> that
while the “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways;
the point is to change it,” he was asserting that it was not enough to
dream of another world nor to understand the dynamics of the present. It
was critical above all to address the question of agency in carrying out
transformative change. For Marx, that agent was the working-class. The gap
between workers’ needs and their actual lives – between desire and reality
– gave workers an interest in radical change, while their place in
production gave them the leverage to act.

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, Marx and Engels argued, was
that as capitalists brought workers together to increase profits they
opened the door to workers discovering their own potential. Capitalism
created its own gravediggers
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm>
.

What was much too insufficiently emphasized, however, was that there were
also contradictions within the working-class. These countered the
revolutionary potentials of the class and even came to undermine workers’
defensive capacities. Whatever unity workers had within a particular
workplace, they were fragmented across workplaces and, as a class, were
stratified by income. Moreover, their daily experiences ably taught them
how dependent they were on capital. Employers organized their separate
labour power, embodied science in their control over technology, and had
all the essential links to finance, suppliers, and markets. And the very
conditions of workers, their low wages and uncertain jobs, pressured them
to think in terms of immediate improvements, not longer-term change.
Unions as Sectional Organizations

Unions evolved to address workers’ concerns and, through their emphasis on
solidarity, provide an antidote to capitalism's pressure for working-class
fragmentation, dependence, and short-termism. Yet unions are, at their
core, not class organizations but sectional organizations. They represent
specific groups of workers united by their employer and specific group
demands, not the interests of the working-class as a whole. There were, of
course, moments early in their formation when this particularism spilled
over into broader class demands and the mobilization of entire communities.
But the very success of unions gave them their own institutional base and
reinforced their sectionalism.

Absent a vision that encompasses the entire working-class, and absent the
goal of developing workers’ capacity to democratize the economy and
society, unions turned into instrumental organizations. That is, they saw
their internal functioning as a pragmatic exchange between active leaders
and passive members. The leaders provided services and benefits, the
rank-and-file paid dues. Such organizations are especially vulnerable to
top-down deal-making and bureaucratization.

Through the unique circumstances of the 1950s and 1960s, workers made gains
despite these limits, and many of those gains were even passed on to the
broader population. But the militancy of workers in the late 1960s
contributed to a squeeze on corporations’ profits and to inflation, which
in turn led to an economic crisis. Unions, unable and unwilling to extend
their struggles beyond narrow economic militancy to address control over
prices, investment, and capital flows, left themselves vulnerable to the
state's aggressive counterattack. As Eric Hobsbawm observed
<http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:H3920N7vXZIJ:newleftreview.org/I/217/eric-hobsbawm-identity-politics-and-the-left>
of British unions, “when the labour movement became narrowed down to
nothing but a pressure-group or a sectional movement of industrial workers,
as in 1970s Britain, it lost both the capacity to be the potential center
of a general people's mobilization and the general hope of the future.”

The assault on the labour movement is generally associated with the
conservatism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But it is worth noting
that it was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, who initiated deregulation in the
airline and trucking industries and tapped Paul Volcker to run the Federal
Reserve. And in Britain, it was Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan who
opened the door to Thatcherism by essentially declaring that Keynesianism
was dead. It wasn't the subsequent set of policies, summarized as
neoliberalism, that created working-class weakness. Rather, those policies
exposed the already existing limits of the labour movement and increased
the confidence of elites in further exploiting the movement's long-standing
weaknesses.

What followed had an impact on working people far beyond individual living
standards. The frustrations of austerity didn't generally lead to
radicalization, but only increased pressures on working-class families to
maintain as much consumption as they could. Absent collective solutions,
they found other ways to support themselves, with profound implications for
undermining the development of the working-class as an oppositional class.
Family members extended their hours of work, students also became full-time
workers, and young couples moved in with their families to save for a
mortgage or accumulate a buffer against an uncertain future. Tax cuts were
seen as the equivalent of a wage increase even when they inevitably led to
cuts in the social wage, and rising stock markets were cheered because
stock values determine future pension levels. Looming environmental threats
were overridden by the pressures of more immediate problems. Debt
dependence increased and homes became assets for future security.

The ironic outcome of these forms of survival was that they contributed to
reproducing the very neoliberal zeitgeist of individualism that has so
damaged working-class lives. As Mimmo Porcaro has distressingly observed,
“the more class position determines people's lives, the less people think
of themselves as members of a class.” With picket lines and street protests
fading in relevance, cultures of solidarity and collective capacities to
struggle also atrophied. Neoliberal restructuring reintroduced and
aggravated the pressures of working-class life, leading American
autoworker Gregg
Shotwell to declare
<http://books.google.com/books?id=jcUtT3p1QFkC&lpg=PA142&ots=nRNKJVTGCw&dq=We%20are%20all%20temps.%20We%20are%20all%20disenfranchised.%20We%20are%20immigrants%20in%20the%20land%20where%20we%20were%20born&pg=PA142#v=onepage&q&f=false>:
“We are all temps. We are all disenfranchised. We are immigrants in the
land where we were born.” That restructuring also broke up communities
where class identities had developed across generations, dispersing workers
to distant corners of their country and to foreign lands.

Furthermore, as labour markets were liberalized to mirror “market
valuations” and social programs were eroded, inequalities increased not
just between the rich and the rest, but also within the working-class. This
aggravated internal resentments and further divided workers. Workers doing
relatively well resented paying taxes on their hard-earned income to
support those on welfare, while welfare recipients and the unemployed were
bitter about unions who ignored their plight.

Intensified competition tells a similar story. While competition may
destroy particular businesses, its net effect on capital is to concentrate
it and strengthen it as a class. But the impact on the workers is quite
different: even if some workers gain, it weakens the main weapon workers
have – their solidarity – and so weakens them as a class.
Here's What We Need to Understand

In terms of the impact of historical defeats, it's worth noting that in the
wake of the 1848 revolutions Marx's emphasis on changing the world and not
just interpreting it underwent a reversal. Marx was too optimistic about
the potential of 1848, and those disappointments led him to return to the
importance of understanding the world as a condition for changing it. This
search for a historical materialist understanding dominated the rest of his
life. In light of our own defeats, it is likewise crucial for us to learn
more deeply about the nature of the world we confront. The following
observations are meant to further such a process of reflection and
discussion.
1. Neoliberalism is just capitalism getting its groove back. It's the
postwar Golden Age that's the aberration and there's no going back.

As an ideology, neoliberalism fits the no-alternative moment so well
because its drive to universalize market dependence tends to depoliticize
social life and its outcomes. “The market made us do it” becomes a national
excuse and the capitalism-with-a-human-face of the postwar era is replaced
by a capitalism with no face at all. Adolph Reed has said that
neoliberalism is “only capitalism that has effectively freed itself from
working-class opposition.” The great value of Reed's succinct
characterization is that it takes us beyond discourse, ideology, and even
sets of policies to appreciating neoliberalism in terms of a radical shift
in the balance of social forces.

Neoliberalism's origins can then be understood not as a sudden turn to
meanness by capitalist elites, but as the response of these elites to a
crisis they could not ignore. The capitalist answer to the crisis of the
1970s, when the exhaustion of the postwar boom combined with the militancy
of workers to squeeze profits, was more capitalism. Capitalist states, led
by the U.S., moved decisively to what Greg Albo has termed “a new form of
social rule,” a “class project” of drastically restructuring social
relations and social institutions to the end of supporting capital
accumulation and reviving profits.

It is tempting to contrast neoliberalism with the postwar welfare state and
look for a return to the past. But this nostalgia reflects a profound
lowering of expectations. Whatever was positive about the welfare state
(and much was indeed very significant), it also had a questionable record
on the role of women, class inequality, hidden poverty, and colonialism. In
any case, attempts to go back to the postwar welfare state would provoke
the same contradictions that spawned the eventual attack on its
achievements. And of course, going back in time would mean a very radical
unraveling of the dramatic shifts that have since taken place in
globalization, finance, and the role of states. This is all very clear to
capitalist elites. Though capital was previously interested in a temporary
compromise with labour, this is now the furthest thing from its mind, and
there is no social base for a new “social contract.”

Further, a closer look at the welfare state reveals crucial continuities
between that period and neoliberalism. It was during the postwar Golden Age
that the building blocks of neoliberalism first emerged: the commitment to
freer trade, the explosion of multinational corporations (MNCs), the rapid
advance of finance to support MNCs but also alongside the growth of
working-class mortgages and pensions. And it was during this period that
productivism (prioritizing production in exchange for increased private
consumption) marginalized more radical views of democratic control over
production and concerns with social equality. That defeat, and the
narrowing of perspectives and capacities it entailed, left the labour
movement especially vulnerable to future neoliberal attacks.

The point is that confronting neoliberalism involves more than ethical
counterarguments or an easy return to a more tolerable past. It means
having a distinct alternative vision and developing the corresponding
social power to challenge not just a philosophy, but the core structures of
“really existing capitalism.”
2. Don't single out finance. “Productive” capitalism is every bit a part of
the problem as the “speculative,” rentier kind.

Among activists, only “financialization” trumps neoliberalism as a term of
abuse. As free-floating abstract capital, finance is popularly seen as
speculative, parasitic, and at odds with “real” production. Much of this is
true enough, but it's worth asking why, if finance is so especially
counterproductive and has done so much damage – especially during the
latest crisis – have other capitalists not joined attacks on finance? Why
has there been no split within capital?

The answer is only partially that many of those other capitalists have also
been financialized. More important is the fact that even where this is not
the case, capitalists outside of finance have come to understand that
finance is an essential part of their own success. Finance has not only
provided business and the consumers they need with low interest rates; it
also stands at the center of neoliberal restructuring. Finance reallocates
capital to where it is most profitable, enforces the closure of plants the
market deems inefficient, facilitates mergers, and through venture capital
supports the development of new high-tech companies.

Especially important, though derivatives have added to the systematic risk
of capitalism as a whole, the markets they are part of have served as
mechanisms for companies to cope with the international uncertainties of
exchange rates, interest rates, and global political developments. Without
the capacity for such hedging – just as without cheap transportation – the
scale of current globalization would not be possible. Finally, financial
markets have played a crucial imperial function. Finance brings global
savings to the U.S. and thereby further enables the U.S. state's role in
overseeing global capitalism.

The point is obviously not to defend finance, but rather to emphasize that
it is not something separate from capitalism. The irrationalities of
finance are the irrationalities of capitalism. That capitalism has made
such an ultimately antisocial institution so essential to its functioning
is part of what makes capitalism such an objectionable social system.

The contradiction that finance embodies is not its dysfunctionality within
capitalism, but rather that along with the essential services it provides
to capitalism comes extreme volatility. While there is a general concern to
reduce that volatility, it is muted by a concern on the part of state and
corporate elites to not go so far that any regulation might undercut what
finance brings to capitalism.
3. Globalization isn't Pandora's Box. And it doesn't mean it's now “too
late” to use politics to get our hands around capital's neck.

Globalization is the third leg of the powerful triad that includes
neoliberalism and financialization. It is crucial to understand that
globalization begins at home. Unless the conditions for free trade and the
free flow of finance are established within each state, there can be no
globalization. From this perspective, the rise of neoliberalism was very
much about establishing the domestic conditions for allowing global
accumulation to flourish. At the same time, the focus on neoliberalism
channeled the risk of divisions among capitalist states into a common
attack on the working classes within each state. What therefore
distinguished the neoliberal solution to the crisis of the 1970s from the
Great Depression of the 1930s was that the internationalization of
capitalism was interrupted in the earlier period, while in the later one it
was accelerated. This was true again in the latest crisis, with the
continuation of neoliberalism closely linked to the continuation of free
trade and the quick shelving of any temptation to impose serious controls
on capital flows.

Like neoliberalism, globalization is not inevitable, but is a conscious
“class project.” Though capitalism is characterized by powerful tendencies
to, as the Communist Manifesto put it
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm>,
“nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere,”
the notion of a seamless global capitalism, far from being inevitable,
actually seemed impossible through the first half of the twentieth century.
Global capitalism was divided into rival spheres of influence and
capitalist internationalism was stymied by two world wars and the
protectionism of the Great Depression. The eventual revival of
globalization was not a spontaneous development but dependent on the role
of states, and above all the role of the U.S. state.
4. Despite what we’re told, individual nation states play a bigger role in
the expansion of global capital than ever before.

States are often viewed as the victims of globalization, their autonomy
limited by international pressures. Or a contradiction is posed between the
global terrain of economic activity and the national terrain of the state,
with multinational corporations seen as having “escaped” the state. But as
Leo Panitch has emphasized
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/07/jacobin-book-club-the-making-of-global-capitalism/>,
rather than being the victims of globalization, states are more generally
its authors. States have mobilized the public to accept global rules and
established the institutional frameworks that make globalization possible.

As part of the making of global capitalism, states have been
“internationalized”: they have come to take responsibility, within their
own jurisdiction, for supporting the accumulation of all capitalists,
foreign as well as domestic. And so far from becoming less dependent on the
state, corporations have come to depend on many states.

The underlying confusion here lies in understanding states and markets as
opposites when they are in fact mutually embedded partners. Markets cannot
exist without states, not only to institute physical infrastructures but
enforce property rights, establish a framework for contracts, manage class
relations, and address the contradictions and crises that markets
inexorably bring. The liberalization of financial markets in the U.S., for
example, led to a dramatic increase in regulatory capacities to facilitate
that liberalization and its added complexities. Corporations, focused on
their own competitiveness and profits, can miss the forest for the trees,
and so depend on states to address, mediate, and even shape larger
capitalist interests. And capitalist states, of course, depend on markets
to provide the jobs and tax revenues that allow them to reproduce and
legitimate themselves.

This confusion about the relationship between states and markets also
brings the misperception that neoliberal globalization leads to “weak”
states. But what has occurred is that neoliberal globalization has
restructured rather than weakened states. It is, for example, clearly
absurd to speak of the U.S. state as weak given its aggressive military,
its omnipresent intrusion into private lives, and the Federal Reserve's
role in underwriting the financial system.

The U.S. state also has a ubiquitous role in shaping labour markets,
affecting the investment climate, encouraging the research capacity of
American industry, opening up trade opportunities, and so on. If there has
been a loss of autonomy, it has not been that of states, but of popular
input as states have increasingly distanced legislative bodies from key
administrative decisions, the most prominent examples being monetary policy
and trade negotiations.
5. The American Empire isn't fading. In fact, elites around the world
continue to look to the United States to lead the way for the global ruling
class.

The American empire is a unique kind of empire. Coming out of World War I,
the U.S. was already the world's dominant economic power and its largest
financial creditor. Yet like other states, it concerned itself primarily
with its own interests and did not take on the responsibility for trying to
keep global capitalism on track. That changed through the experiences of
the Depression and World War II. The American state came to see that an
unstable international environment, vulnerable to nationalisms that
restricted economic spaces, threatened American capitalism not only abroad
but at home as well.

The success of American capitalism was consequently seen as dependent on
the successful spread of capitalism internationally. Especially important
beyond the question of interests, the American state and American capital
had, by war's end, developed the administrative and economic capacities to
support the making, deepening, and, during times of international crisis,
the reproduction of global capitalism.

“Unlike earlier empires, it [the American empire] generally operated
through sovereign states rather than direct colonies, and primarily through
markets rather than direct rule – even if its military might was never far
away.”

 What is special about the American empire is the extent to which it is a
specifically capitalist empire, an informal empire. The British empire set
some precedents in this regard, but the American empire took it to new
levels. Unlike earlier empires, it generally operated through sovereign
states rather than direct colonies, and primarily through markets rather
than direct rule – even if its military might was never far away. This
provided the American state with some anti-imperialist credibility after
the end of World War II, when it supported the replacement of colonies with
sovereign states. And though U.S. support for the dispersion of capitalism
implied new competitors, its mode of operation through sovereign states and
markets led to many of the competitors being integrated into the larger
project of global capitalism.

This new kind of empire led to a fading of inter-imperial rivalry. Whatever
tensions might occasionally erupt among capitalist states, they do not
revolve around a direct challenge to American leadership. The shared
assumption is that the reproduction of America's “indispensable” role is in
the collective interests of all states. The structural integration of other
states was evidenced as some of them actively sought inclusion in the
American-led order – what Geir Lundestad labelled “empire by invitation.”
In other cases, like Germany and China, there was certainly criticism of
the United States. But this was centered not on challenging the imperial
status of the American state, but holding on the American state accountable
to its imperial responsibilities.

Of course this dependence on other states and the vagaries of markets
inevitably threw up crises. The American state could not always prevent
them (to be the leading capitalist state is not to be omnipotent) and as
this limit came to be accepted, “failure prevention” gave way to the more
practical project of “failure containment.” The reoccurrence of such
crises, especially the recent financial crisis that first exploded inside
the United States, has supported more general suggestions of American
decline. By some metrics, it is certainly true that the country is not as
quantitatively dominant as it was, for example, after World War II. But
this is too economistic a measure. What is more significant is that in
terms of the commanding heights of the global economy, the material base
for the American empire persists. And in terms of the crucial importance of
managing crises, the world has looked primarily to the American state to
save the financial system and prevent protectionism from resurfacing.
6. Fearmongering about environmental or economic collapse isn't going to
magically turn people into socialists. We have to build large, democratic
organizations that can eventually reckon directly with state power.

If we take the formidable power and resiliency of capitalism seriously,
then politics must revolve around developing a social force capable of
matching what we confront. There is a danger, however, that in the attempt
to overcome passivity and fatalism, the difficulty of replacing capitalism
will be understated, with corresponding negative effects on our politics.
Three such tendencies are worth noting: crisis-mongering as a mechanism for
overcoming popular passivity; ignoring the question of taking state power;
and styles of mobilization that reject building the institutional
capacities that might realize change.

Continuously declaring that a decisive crisis is around the corner may
generate attention, but as an organizing tactic it is counterproductive. An
economic crisis may scare people and bring out their most conservative
instincts. It may lower expectations and make people long for the
pre-crisis period (no matter how much they had previously criticized it),
desperately hoping to just fix, not transform or even significantly modify
capitalism. We cannot depend on crises to do our political work for us. If
we think that capitalism is a system that blocks human progress then the
challenge is to convince people that capitalism is the problem *even when
it is working at its best*.

A related tendency is that of environmental catastrophism. To be sure, the
climate crisis must be decisively confronted. But declarations that the end
of the planet is only decades away if capitalism isn't radically changed
now may just reinforce a sense that we are doomed and can't really do
anything about it. Or, given the lack of options, it might even encourage
people to jump aboard illusory market-based “solutions” that are presented
as more immediate, more practical, and less risky.

It would seem much more useful, in terms of building the capacity to
address the environmental crisis, to frame the issue of the environment as
linked to a broader struggle that includes the redistribution of income and
wealth to more equitably share the costs of environmental restraint; a
cultural shift in the balance between individual consumption of goods and
collective services; the development of public spaces and desperately
needed infrastructural renewal (including mass transit); and the conversion
of potentially productive facilities rejected by the market to the
production of socially useful and environmentally necessary products and
services. Such a framing would also tie the environmental crisis to the
obvious need to place democratic planning on the agenda and go so far as to
start talking about making private banks into public utilities so that we
have access to the financial resources to carry out the above initiatives.

Similarly, the disinterest in and even hostility to acknowledging that
politics must ultimately reckon with state power prevents us from
confronting power where it is most concentrated and tends to train our
focus on protesting capitalism, not replacing it. The issue is not taking
over a capitalist state and administering it as best we can (a perspective
that justifiably raises skepticism) but of transforming state institutions
in the deepest democratic sense. That is, imagining and struggling for a
state whose main function, at national, regional and municipal levels,
would be to support and develop our collective capacities to democratize
the economy and all aspects of our lives.

The oppositional movements that have emerged most recently are not
homogeneous, but they seem to share important attitudes in their style of
politics and the relationship they see between mobilizing and organizing.
There is certainly a great deal to praise in these movements. They have
brought new generations into politics, shown that creative and audacious
actions can touch a popular nerve, dared to place class politics (even if
in crude form) on the public agenda, and raised valid criticisms about the
politics of the various iterations of the Old Left. But if these promising
seeds for a new politics are seen as being that politics, and if new social
media are treated as a solution to organizing rather than a useful
communication tool, then we are at a dead end.

As Alfredo Saad-Filho has noted, the glorification within these movements
of spontaneity and fragmentation seems uncomfortably close to mirroring
neoliberalism's own drive to freer markets, individualism, and a workforce
that has no stability or roots. What underlies such politics seems to be a
notion that radical change will evolve out of the accumulation of protests,
and so little attention is paid to developing a deeper analysis of events,
the strategies needed to respond to changing circumstances, or political
programs that can bring some coherence to the radicalizing project and do
effective outreach. Occupy's refusal to put forth a program was at first a
stroke of tactical genius because it implied that the problem was not a
specific issue but the system as a whole. But in terms of longer-term
movement building, this refusal soon became a severe liability.

This style of mobilization leaves little enthusiasm for coping with stable
organizational structures. The movement can bring people out, but it cannot
organize them into a movement that builds and sustains an expanding
collective power. Absent such structures, democracy is reduced to forms of
dialogue, not shared agreements. Strategic discussions are marginalized.
The consolidation of gains and drawing lessons from failures are at best
secondary considerations.

Horizontalism blocks decisive collective action, and permanent protest
replaces the politics of transformative change. The challenge of how to
develop and spread the collective confidence and capacities to strategize,
share knowledge widely, build alternative political institutions, and act
is marginalized.
7. There are many oppressions that shouldn't be ignored. But class
exploitation conditions them all.

The making of the working-class is inseparable from the historical
interaction of race, gender, ethnicity, and class. The working-class in the
concrete always includes multiple differences and identities. But left
politics has, unfortunately, often been destructively polarized in terms of
identity versus class.

Identity politics emerged in the 1970s, in part out of the failures of the
Left to speak to and integrate specific oppressions into class politics
(those of women and African Americans in particular). That this paralleled
the rise of neoliberalism was no coincidence in that neoliberalism was made
possible by the more general weakness of unions and the left. But while
identity politics often added to and strengthened working-class politics,
it also included a dangerous tendency to push the salience of class aside.

It was bitterly ironic that at the very moment the state mounted a
comprehensive attack on working-class power, identity politics was parsing
the working-class into ever more fragmented subgroups. Though identities
obviously matter very much, they cannot combine into a new politics because
their essence is their separateness. Something else is needed to bring them
together in a broader, more integrated, and more coherent politics,
something beyond the particularistic concerns of both identities and
unions. That “something” is class.

This might be clarified by an example taken from the work of Walter Benn
Michaels. As a factual matter, the insecurity that, say, African-Americans
confront is much higher than that of whites whether the measure is income,
wealth, education, or access to healthcare. This fact can be used to
mobilize African-Americans as a particularly oppressed group, but that
tactic also risks limiting the problem politically to the roughly 10 per
cent of the U.S. population that is African-American. Such a tactical focus
is, at best, likely to create only limited reform or lead to affirmative
action gains that benefit only the subset of the black population best
prepared to “win” in the marketplace.

The alternative is to define racially coded inequality as part of a more
general class inequality and mobilize the class as a whole around universal
single-payer healthcare, free quality education, jobs with living wages,
and liveable public pensions. Only the latter approach would seem to hold
out the potential to build political capacity for substantive reform and
such reforms would, given the nature of existing inequalities,
disproportionately support the African-American working-class.

The challenge of class politics is how to bring differences together in
ways that generate full respect and equality within the class – from pay
equity and fighting workplace discrimination to reproductive rights,
socializing family burdens like childcare, and establishing equal status
for immigrants – so as to address the larger questions of full equality
within society. It is in that sense that class trumps, without
underplaying, issues of identity.
8. We need to buy ourselves some time.

The question of greater control over time is a condition for a sustainable
new political movement, and it raises a specific set of demands around
which to mobilize. Neoliberal restructuring of labour markets, and the
response of longer paid hours per family so as to maintain mortgage
payments and consumption, have dramatically increased time pressures on the
working-class. Absent time to read, think, appreciate art, meet, and act,
it is difficult to imagine building a movement that can take on social
change in a sustained way.

A successful institutionalized movement might generate excitement among
both existing and new activists and so serve to bring formerly passive time
(recuperating from frustrated lives) into politically active time. This
might help, but it doesn't resolve the problem of finding the individual
time adequate to commit to political engagement on a scale that is
essential. Any solution will have to include deep cultural changes and a
radical redistribution of income.

It is, for example, difficult to imagine a solution if continuous growth in
private consumption remains a goal. If, on the other hand, we take more of
social productivity in terms of collective services paid for out of general
taxation, time pressures could be reduced in three ways. First, services
like socialized childcare and eldercare or better public transit could save
a measure of personal time. Second, if the rising output per capita isn't
all channelled into more consumer goods, it can go to fewer hours of
necessary work – also addressing some environmental pressures. Third, this
shift to collective benefits is inherently more egalitarian because the
taxes that pay for them are generally based on income, while the benefits
tend to be based on need.

That improved equality, reinforced by raising the wages of the lowest paid,
can reduce pressures on lower-waged workers to run between two or three
time-consuming jobs and concentrate on a single one. In this regard, the
issue is not just the number of hours worked but the ability to control
when the hours are worked. A particular area of conflict is that between
the flexibility demanded by employers and the control sought by workers,
part of a more general problem of work overload that exhausts us and
affects how we use our “free” time.
9. The best way to help the rest of the world is to first get our own house
in order.

Social justice is by its nature universal – all Left actions must include
an internationalist sensibility. But if we cannot even build unity across
workplaces in the same union, if domestic unions are competing against each
other for membership dues rather than building as a class, and if private
and public workers are divided within the nation-state, then how can we
realistically be effective across the legal, administrative, and cultural
distances of international activity? How can we contribute to the transfer
of technology to the Global South if we don't control production? How can
we transfer income and wealth more equitably if we don't control our
states? Internationalism is limited by our national capacities.

Marx and Engels famously argued in the Communist Manifesto
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm>
that though the struggle was international in substance (what workers do
domestically has indirect effects on workers abroad), it was national in
form (working classes must first come to terms with their own
bourgeoisies). We can and should, of course, engage in specific acts of
solidarity around particular struggles abroad like a defining strike. We
should mobilize to block the interventions of our states abroad that
undermine experiments important to progressives everywhere. But our most
important daily contributions to the international movement must begin at
home. Struggles in one country create space for – and inspire – struggles
by workers in other countries. This includes solidarity for migrants as
fellow workers. And building the movement within each of our countries is
our most effective contribution to building an international socialist
movement.

The most profound defeat of the past three decades has been the retreat of
the socialist left and the consequent lowering of both social and political
expectations – both in what we hope for and what we believe we can
collectively achieve. The idea of socialism has been sidelined as
pie-in-the-sky. But what is really utopian is the promise that a better
life within capitalism is around the corner. The radical must increasingly
declare itself the practical. •

Sam Gindin was Research Director of the Canadian Auto Workers from
1974-2000 and is now an adjunct professor at York University in Toronto.
This article first published by Jacobin <https://www.jacobinmag.com/>.

-- 

   1. *EBook, November 2012: Recovering Internationalism
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>.  [A
   compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download
   formats] <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>*
   2.
*EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical
   Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/> *
   3. *Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the Global
   Emancipation of Labour <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>*
   4. *Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.
   <http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.> *
   5. *Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement
   Internationalisms. See Call for Papers <http://www.interfacejournal.net/>,
   (Deadline: May 1, 2014). *
   6.
*Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement (2005-Now!)
   <http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf>*
   7. *Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a
   Globalised, Informatised Capitalism
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/>(2011) Almost 1,000
   pages of Working Papers, free, from the 1980 <1980>'s-90's.*
   8. *Google Scholar Citation Index:*
    *http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ
   <http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ> *

   -

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