<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">peter waterman</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 1:35 PM<br>Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: Unmaking Global Capitalism: Nine Things to Know About Organizing in the Belly of the Beast<br>To: <a href="mailto:CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk">CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk</a>, Dan Gallin <<a href="mailto:gli@iprolink.ch">gli@iprolink.ch</a>>, <a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a>, WSFDiscuss List <<a href="mailto:WorldSocialForum-Discuss@openspaceforum.net">WorldSocialForum-Discuss@openspaceforum.net</a>>, Debate is a listserve that attempts to promote information and analyses of interest to the independent left in South and Southern Africa <<a href="mailto:debate-list@fahamu.org">debate-list@fahamu.org</a>>, Kim Scipes <<a href="mailto:kimscipes@earthlink.net">kimscipes@earthlink.net</a>>, Asbjørn Wahl <<a href="mailto:Asbjorn.Wahl@velferdsstaten.no">Asbjorn.Wahl@velferdsstaten.no</a>>, Ana Dinerstein <<a href="mailto:A.C.Dinerstein@bath.ac.uk">A.C.Dinerstein@bath.ac.uk</a>><br>
<br><br><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:small">Peter sez:<br><br></div><div style="font-size:small">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).<br>
<br></div><div style="font-size:small">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).<br>
<br></div><div style="font-size:small">However, his setting out of his propositions under nine heads is an invitation to others who might wish to add to or replace these.<br><br></div><div style="font-size:small">
Now read on...<br></div><div style="font-size:small"><br><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Sid Shniad</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:shniad@gmail.com" target="_blank">shniad@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 7:05 AM<br>Subject: Unmaking Global Capitalism: Nine Things to Know About Organizing in the Belly of the Beast<br>To: <br><br><br><div dir="ltr"><b><a href="http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1000.php" target="_blank">http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1000.php</a><br>
<br>The B u l l e t</b><b><b> • </b>Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. <a href="tel:1000" value="+661000" target="_blank">1000</a></b><b><b> • </b>June 18, 2014<br>
<br><font size="4">Unmaking Global Capitalism</font><br><br>Nine Things to Know About Organizing in the Belly of the Beast: </b><b>Confronting neoliberalism involves more than
ethical counterarguments or an easy return to a more tolerable past. It
means having a distinct alternative <span>vision</span> and developing the corresponding social <span>power</span> to challenge not just a philosophy, but the core structures of “really existing capitalism.”<br><br>Sam Gindin</b><div>
<div><div>
<p>When <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm" target="_blank">Karl Marx famously declared</a>
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.</p>
<p>The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, Marx and Engels argued, was that as capitalists brought workers together to <span>increase profits</span> they opened the door to workers discovering their own potential. Capitalism created its own <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm" target="_blank">gravediggers</a>.</p>
<p>What was much too insufficiently <span>emphasized</span>,
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.</p>
<h3><a>Unions as Sectional Organizations</a></h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p><span>Absent</span> 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.</p>
<p>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 <span>led</span> to an <span>economic crisis</span>.
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 <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:H3920N7vXZIJ:newleftreview.org/I/217/eric-hobsbawm-identity-politics-and-the-left" target="_blank">Eric Hobsbawm observed</a> of British unions, “when the labour movement became narrowed down to nothing but a pressure-group or a sectional movement of <span>industrial workers</span>,
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.”</p>
<p>The assault on the labour movement is generally associated with the conservatism of <span>Ronald Reagan</span>
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 <span>Paul Volcker</span>
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.</p>
<p>What followed had an impact on <span>working people</span>
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. <span>Tax cuts</span> were seen as the equivalent of a <span>wage increase</span>
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.</p>
<p>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-<span>class life</span>, leading American autoworker <a href="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" target="_blank">Gregg Shotwell to declare</a>:
“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.</p>
<p>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 <span>paying taxes</span>
on their hard-earned income to support those on welfare, while welfare
recipients and the unemployed were bitter about unions who ignored their
plight.</p>
<p>Intensified competition tells a similar <span>story</span>.
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.</p>
<h3>Here's What We Need to Understand</h3>
<p>In terms of the impact of historical defeats, it's <span>worth</span>
noting that in the wake of the <a href="tel:1848" value="+661848" target="_blank">1848</a> revolutions Marx's emphasis on
changing the world and not just interpreting it underwent a reversal.
Marx was too optimistic about the potential of <a href="tel:1848" value="+661848" target="_blank">1848</a>, 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.</p>
<h4>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.</h4>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <span>back</span>
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.”</p>
<p>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 <span>control</span>
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.</p>
<p>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 <span>vision</span> and developing the corresponding social <span>power</span> to challenge not just a philosophy, but the core structures of “really existing capitalism.”</p>
<h4>2. Don't single out finance. “Productive” capitalism is every bit a part of the problem as the “speculative,” rentier kind.</h4>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>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.</h3>
<p>Globalization is the third leg of the powerful triad that includes
neoliberalism and financialization. It is crucial to understand that
globalization begins at <span>home</span>.
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.</p>
<p>Like neoliberalism, globalization is not inevitable, but is a
conscious “class project.” Though capitalism is characterized by
powerful tendencies to, as the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm" target="_blank"></cite><cite>Communist Manifesto put it</a>,
“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.</p>
<h3>4. Despite what we’re told, individual nation states play a bigger role in the expansion of global capital than ever before.</h3>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/07/jacobin-book-club-the-making-of-global-capitalism/" target="_blank">emphasized</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <span>jobs</span> and tax revenues that allow them to reproduce and legitimate themselves.</p>
<p>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 <span>Federal Reserve</span>'s role in underwriting the financial system.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>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.</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div>
<blockquote><p><span>“</span>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.<span>”</span>
</p></blockquote>
</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>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.</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>even when it is working at its best</i>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>7. There are many oppressions that shouldn't be ignored. But class exploitation conditions them all.</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <span>family</span> 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.</p>
<h3>8. We need to buy ourselves some time.</h3>
<p>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 <span>mortgage</span> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <span>taxes</span> that pay for them are generally based on income, while the benefits tend to be based on need.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>9. The best way to help the rest of the world is to first get our own house in order.</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Marx and Engels famously argued in the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm" target="_blank"></cite><cite>Communist Manifesto</a>
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.</p>
<p>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. •</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/" target="_blank"></cite><cite>Jacobin</a>.<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br></font></span></p></div></div></div></div>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
</font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><ol><li><b><font><span></span><font size="1"><span><span>EBook, November 2012:</span> <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/" target="_blank">Recovering
Internationalism</a>. </span><span><font color="#ff0000">[A compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download formats]</font></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span></font></font></b></li>
<li><b><font size="1"><span><span>EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></font>http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/<font color="#ff0000"> </a></span></span><span><span><br>
</span></span></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><span>Interface
Journal<span> Special (co-editor), November 2012:</span> </span><span style="font-weight:normal"><a href="http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/" target="_blank">For the Global Emancipation of Labour</a></span></font></b>
</li><li><b><font size="1"><span lang="NL">Blog:</span><span lang="NL"> <a href="http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman." target="_blank">http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.</a>
</span></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1">Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement Internationalisms. <a href="http://www.interfacejournal.net/" target="_blank">See Call for Papers</a>, <font color="#ff0000">(Deadline: May 1, 2014). </font></font></b></li>
<li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><a href="http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf" target="_blank"></font></font></span></font><font color="#000000">Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"><font color="#000000"> <font color="#ff0000">(2005-Now!)<br>
</a></font></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><font color="#000000"><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/" target="_blank"><font color="red"><b>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "www.into-ebooks.com" claiming to be</b></font> Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a Globalised, Informatised Capitalism </a>(2011) <font color="#ff0000">Almost 1,000 pages of Working Papers, free, from the <a href="tel:1980" value="+661980" target="_blank">1980</a>'s-90's</font>.</font></font></font></b></li>
<li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><font color="#000000">Google Scholar Citation Index:</font></font></font></b><br><span style="display:block"> <b><font size="1"><a href="http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ" target="_blank">http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ</a> </font></b><br>
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<br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div>
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