globalisation | ukwatch.net

Labour History Resurgent?

JamieSW — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:14:00 +0000

‘Live Working or Die Fighting : how the working class went global’ (Vintage paperback, London, 2008)
Paul Mason

A paperback edition of Paul Mason’s ‘Live Working or Die Fighting: how the working class went global‘ is most welcome. More accessibly than anything else I know, it offers a way forward for labour historians still largely locked in an agenda established in the 1960s – when E. P. Thompson inspired a generation with his ‘The Making of the English Working Class‘ and his call for “History from Below”. When Mason’s book was first published in 2007, The Guardian plugged it narrowly as, “required reading for the Seattle brigade”. It is that, but the book also deserves serious attention from those who think they already know all that matters about labour history. By a journalist rather than by a professional historian, it is both readable and timely. The fact that the author was, and is, a BBC Newsnight economics commentator perhaps limits his ability to draw the theoretical and political conclusions his work points to. But that needn’t stop others from doing so.

When the book first appeared, Mason was interviewed by former sociology professor, Laurie Taylor, for Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme. A cacophony of recorded noise introduced the show: the sound of protesting textile workers in Bangladesh, explained Taylor – the sort of sound we can expect to hear more frequently as workers in newly industrialising areas of the world organise to fight for their rights. Could it be, Taylor asked, that Asia, Latin America and Africa in the 21st century might become like 19th century Europe, with workers developing a similar trade union movement? This question, a critical one, was prompted by the form of Mason’s book.

It has eleven main chapters, all of which begin with one of the authors early 21st century journalistic encounters with workers in different corners of the world. Each of these accounts is juxtaposed with a well-researched retelling of an episode from the history of the European or American workers movement. The situation of Chinese sweatshop workers in 2003 leads into an account of the 1819 Peterloo massacre (at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, four years after the battle of Waterloo). Then Indian textile workers in 2005 introduce the story of the 1831 Lyon silk workers revolt. The third chapter time-travels from Nigerian slum-dwellers in 2005 back to the Paris Commune; and the fourth translates the reader from the struggle of Iraqi oil workers in 2006 to episodes in the US labour-movement history of the 1870s and 1880s. Interviews with Canary Wharf immigrant cleaners, organising for trade-union recognition in 2004, head up an account of the heyday of international syndicalism; and Indian car workers Mason encountered a year later are paired with the emergent Chinese workers’ movement of the 1920s. The author then turns to Latin America, which he visited at various times between 2003 and 2006, giving an account of the Bolivian neighbourhood risings and comparing them to the events in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Finally, the experiences of the Argentine working class prompt an account of movements for workers control in Italy, France and the USA in the interwar years.

Taylor began by asking Mason which of his recent encounters he most vividly remembered. Mason replied:

“[In 2004] I was sitting in … a hotel room in China for an unauthorised meeting with some factory workers who were represented by a labour lawyer. That’s as near as you get to being represented by anybody. When they walked in … every single one of them was missing a limb … One of them, out of the six, had a prosthesis – everybody else couldnt afford one – and they told me the story of how theyd been injured by really crazy, avoidable accidents. And then [they were] immediately sacked because the practice in the sweatshop sector of the Shenzhen industrial sector … is not to take out insurance for the workers… [Yet] it struck me that these guys were part of probably the most decisive social force in the 21st century – thats the Chinese, and latterly the Indian, workforces – a billion strong and making history in many senses, economically, culturally even, but not yet politically.”

But what of more positive experiences of organisation rather than of impotence in the face of maltreatment? Mason responded:

“The developing world is awash with examples of workers organising both in the slums they live in and in the factories they work in… [But] very few of the struggles among the newly formed workforces of China, India, Latin America and Africa has reached the level yet of some of the historical symbolic acts that I write about [in ‘

Taylor’s second guest on the programme was a research fellow from Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies (an academic field less popular today than it was in the 1960s when ‘development’ – then based on the idea that the miscalled Third World would follow the ‘model’ of the already-industrialised world – was all the rage). Was there perhaps a ‘top-down’ answer, which would offset the need for the disruptive ‘bottom-up’ struggles Mason seems to be predicting? And could the independent study which the developmentalist had been involved in (a study which produced the 2006 Ethical Trading Initiative’s ‘Ethical Trading Report’) point the way? Already one could hear – knocking metaphorically at the studio door – those figures so beloved of troubleshooting liberal academics, ‘progressive’ employers (versed in the jargon of partnership) who see commercial advantage in their workers feeling content and properly represented. Sure enough these shining knights soon entered the discussion, with Mason joining in by recounting a debate he had chaired in which one such multinational employer called for trade unions to become global so that he would have a representative ‘interlocutor’ to mediate his relations with an international workforce.

The BBC discussion was a sign of new times, in which the fashion for a sociology that declared the “end of class”, and sustained the nonsense that “there is no alternative” to neo-liberal, global capitalism, is fading, or certainly losing credibility; and it is a tribute to Mason’s book that it has brought this into the open. But there is also an echo of a more radical discourse in his work. In 1892, when Frederick Engels agreed to a reissue of his ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844‘, he wrote a new preface recognising that times had hugely changed over the intervening 50 years, but defending the relevance of his book on the grounds of his approach to what was often called ‘The Social Question’. And he observed that the response of the middle classes to the threat of social upheaval had changed too; that one-time ‘abomination of abominations’, socialism, “has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses [French ‘love seats’ or mini-sofas]. This shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of ‘society’, middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we socialists of a past generation always held public opinion.”

As a symptom of something real beneath the surface of ‘public opinion’, Engels wrote, serious socialists should pay attention to these changes, but, he argued:

“What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even more than the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally …is the revival of the East End of London. The immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpor of despair, has returned to life, and it has become the home of what is called the New Unionism…”

One of Mason’s chapters deals with the ‘New Unionism’, the organisation of the unemployed in trade unions in Britain in the 1890s, which led to major class struggles and, early in the 20th century, the foundation of the Labour Party, a radical step in its day and one that was to ensure that a form of class politics – albeit a pale reflection of the reality of the class struggle – was to prevail in Britain’s parliamentary politics until the 1970s or 1980s. Mason brings out – as Engels who died in 1895 could not have done – the way in which the new phase of capitalism emerging at the end of the 19th century found its opposite in the internationalisation of the labour movement. For Mason, the London dock strike of 1889 – introduced with his account of how, in 2004, the immigrant Canary Wharf cleaners knew nothing of the Wapping printers’ strike of 1986, far less the history of Tom Mann and “the dockers’ tanner”, and how powerful they found even a smattering of that knowledge – is only part of a much wider story.

The chapter moves on to France: Victor Griffuelhes and the radical Paris shoemakers, Aristide Briand and Fernand Pelloutier’s ‘Revolution Through General Strike’ and the formation of the ‘Confédération Général des Ouvriers’. It visits the ‘Red City’ of porcelain-producing Limoges, where the violent events of 1905 were triggered by workers in an American-owned factory standing up against managers who thought they had inherited the droit de cuissage (the right to get between the legs) from feudal times. It covers the syndicalist movement in pre-World War I France, before moving to contemporaneous actions in Latin America, and on to Big Bill Haywood and the Industrial Workers of the World in the USA. Thence to Tom Mann’s career in Australia and the strike, and battles, at the Broken Hill mines in 1908-09; to the Europe-wide unrest that began in Barcelona in 1909 and lasted until the eve of World War I; and to the Wobblies (IWW) ‘Bread and Roses’ strike in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912.

If it was the onset of this great movement in Britain that made talk of ‘socialism’ fashionable amongst the late-19th century middle classes (a ‘socialism’ that would act as a means of social control rather than ‘bottom-up’ universal liberation), in the Britain of the 1990s it was recognition that rampant neo-liberalism was endangering social stability that gave rise to another middle-class fad, this time echoed vociferously in key sections of the tabloid press. ‘New Labour’ thinking created the conversational buzz that contextualised a politics designed to rescue red-in-tooth-and-claw Thatcherism from its own implosion. ‘Public opinion’ found its latest fad to keep the dinner parties alive and consumerist luxury on the go. The term ‘Socialism’, emptied of its theoretical content by decades of bureaucratic welfarism, was now discounted; but the oxymoronic idea of a socially responsible capitalism (in which ‘ethical business’ has a central prominence) took its place.

But the link between Mason’s book and Engel’s preface goes beyond mere comparison. Theoretically speaking, Mason is no Engels, nor would he claim to be. But, in the socially explosive 1840s, when writing about the condition of the working class from his base in Manchester, Engels personally got to know the conditions at work and at home of the class he was writing about. Mason – taking advantage of his international journalistic remit – has visited, spoken to, and in a limited way perhaps, got to know workers all over the world in their homes and workplaces. By pursuing this method, he points the way to the sort of deeper empirical work that is needed as the basis for theorising the agency that can make “another world possible”. This may be of little interest to those concerned only with the excitement of simply asserting (often, to be sure, in courageous and creative ways) that ‘possibility’, far less to others locked into the rhetoric and forms of organisation of the 1960s and 1970s that centred on that long-tried and universally unproductive concept of “building the (revolutionary) party”. But Mason’s work – and once again perhaps that of Engels – will be read more carefully by everyone who understands that there is empirical groundwork to be done to establish the nature of the (global) working class as it is now.

It was Engels who played a key part in assisting Marx to show how the working class is the creation and victim of capital, but is also capital’s structural antagonist – an antagonist that can only assert and defend its own humanity by struggling against and ultimately overthrowing its oppressor. Further, they showed, for the first time in the history of class struggle, the interests of the oppressed class coincided with the needs of humanity as a whole to transcend the exploitation of class by class and create the conditions for the co-operative commonwealth (or ‘communism’ as properly understood). But simply to state that today is to reduce theory to dogma, a barrier to real human progress rather than an enabler of it. What does it mean in practice in the early 21st century, after all the defeats, false starts and disillusionments of the decades since this theorisation of agency was first understood in the 1840s? ‘Live Working or Die Fighting‘ is the work of an individual (one constrained by the codes of the BBC, by whom he presumably wants to remain employed), Mason could hardly be expected to answer that question alone. To do so, must be both a collective task, and a political task, not one merely confined to journalistic description and commentary. ‘Live Working or Die Fighting‘ gives an inkling of at least one aspect of what has to be done.

Mason’s particular declared objective is to address the loss of historical knowledge that is taking place because of the sense (the illusion) that, in the very exceptional period from the 1940s to the 1980s, the Western labour movement had accomplished the goals it was fighting for in the 19th and early 20th centuries: the Canary Wharf workers need to know about Wapping and about the ‘New Unionism’, but they dont. Now that the storms are gathering over globalised capitalism – and it becomes clearer than ever that, if there really is “no alternative”, then there is no human future in view at all – it is surely for those who recognise that we have entered a quite new period to find ways to accomplish in a 21st century way the task Engels set out on in the 1840s, and Mason hints at over a century and a half later.

To recognise the reality of the period – what the Marxist political theorist István Mészáros has defined as the structural, the truly historic, crisis not just of 19th and 20th century industrial capitalism, but of the much longer-lasting capital system itself – is to see that the forms of political organisation apparently appropriate to the 20th century, modelled on an often limited understanding of the 1917 Russian Revolution, are now entirely inappropriate. The protests of the ‘Seattle brigade’ show that the will to fight remains, but perhaps not the theoretical perspectives to take the fight beyond protest. ‘Live Working or Die Fighting’ is not a programmatic statement for new forms of socialist organisation that can meet the needs of the emerging global working-class movement he writes about, but it is certainly relevant to those who want to participate in creating them.
Mason himself contextualises his book, explains how he came to want to write it, in an instructive and moving way; his conclusion is highly personal and the book’s inspirational logic is thereby clarified. His father was a truck driver at a Lancashire electrical engineering factory by day, who played in a dance band by night. He was a trade unionist conscious that some of the separately-organised machine workers made twice the wages he did, and probably voted Tory. By the time he fathered Paul in 1960, he had bought their home – the first in his family to do so – but it had an outside toilet. Paul lived with his parents in this working-class community until he was 18, meeting no one who was not a trade unionist. He was used to Labour winning every election in the area. He lived through many industrial actions, including two miners’ strikes, the second of which brought down a Tory government, but never saw a political demonstration or the waving of a red flag. The demands he was aware of were for decent working conditions, pensions, health care and sports facilities. Recounted memories of the Depression of the 1930s told him more about the meaning of history than any textbook or film, and formed the background to the demand articulated in various ways in the community for “socialism through evolution”.

This labour movement as it existed from 1945 to 1989, Mason argues, was very different from the one his book describes that stretched from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War II. The unions, allied with the employers and the nation states in the 1940s war against fascism, were rewarded, more or less effectively, with welfarism and an implicit social contract in which they played a key role. The industrial democracy that had been built as an instrument of class struggle, with national variations, in the interwar years, for the most part continued only as a “parallel lifestyle, separate from but not opposed to that of the upper classes”, and even this eventually withered away, except perhaps in a few areas such as “the Welsh valleys … the Tuscan hill towns [and] the Buenos Aires docks”.

By the time Mason’s father died in 1986, the threat of mass unemployment had returned and governments were responding to shop-floor militancy by abandoning consensus, freeing capital to seek cheap labour transnationally, and – in the symbolic case of the air traffic controllers in Reagans America – chaining trade unionists hand and foot. In Britain the last battle for “progress and evolution” was fought by the miners and lost in 1985. By the 1990s, neo-liberal policies were being pursued in the post-Stalinist states and even by governments that continued to call themselves Communist in China and Vietnam.

In this self-conscious (but modestly presented) ‘life-story’ so much is encapsulated; it is a small-scale, very personal (but also typical) account of the sea-change in social opportunities and political attitudes that reflect, in an ‘advanced’ country, the underlying shifts in the tectonic plates of the capital system that have been at work since (say) the early 1970s. Such stories matter, particularly if they can be told in a way that – as Mason succeeds in doing – relates them to the much wider history of labour from which they have come. And even more do they matter if they can sharpen our minds in developing the theory necessary for us to understand the reality of the point in history that humanity has arrived at, in order to develop the thinking and forms of organisation that will enable the emergent ‘global’ working class to take ‘global’ society (in Mészáros’s words) “beyond capital”.

Mason himself ends on a rather different and more romantic note. In his chapter on the Paris Commune he writes a good deal about Louise Michel, the poor poet-schoolmistress from bohemian Montmartre who, a prosecuting lawyer claimed, “from her lectern in her spare moments … professed doctrines of free thought, and made her young pupils sing poems she had written, among which was a song entitled ‘The Avengers’.” He returns to her in conclusion, recounting a vision he imagined when covering the violently attacked protests at the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland. Against riot police got up like robocops were ranged, amongst many others, Latin American musicians, and dancers clad as fairies – symbolising the human rhythms to which the future must move and the touch of utopian magic that movement needs.

What Mason claims he saw in his mind’s eye was “the young Louise Michel dancing to a samba band in a field outside the Gleneagles summit: her face … painted and … wearing pink fairy wings.” “She still”, he concludes, “has a lot to learn.” But the real value of his book is that it tells all of us with ears to hear and minds open to new thinking: “So have we all!” If ‘labour history’, so optimistically embraced by a generation of E. P. Thompson-inspired postgraduate students in the 1960s as a way to fight the class struggle from the archives, is to be rescued from the strangling embrace of the academy and the uncertain insights of postmodernism, it could do worse than to start with this book. And political activists too might take it as a set of signposts, not to all they need to know, but to one important area of essential knowledge.

The death of the ‘dream’ of global free-market capitalism

Alex Doherty — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:24:53 +0000

New Labour and the Tories are muttering that the left musn’t be allowed to exploit the current economic crisis in order to make a comeback. They have nothing to worry about: the systematic, publicly funded government intervention we’ve seen the world over that has been necessary to rescue global capitalism from collapse demolishes once and for all the myth that private control of capital has anything to do with the ‘free market’. What capital really fears isn’t state intervention per se, but economic democracy: nationalisation without economic democracy suits capital just fine. A worthwhile, pro-working class left would be demanding that in return for being rescued at public expense, the public should be given an increased say in the running of the economy. The middle-class left isn’t doing this, and has no interest in doing this, and so will remain an irrelevance.

Earthquakes on a fault zone

Back in March, the chief economics correspondent of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, wrote: “Remember Friday March 14 2008: it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died. For three decades we have moved towards market-driven financial systems. By its decision to rescue Bear Sterns, the Federal Reserve, the institution responsible for monetary policy in the US, chief protagonist of free-market capitalism, declared this era over. It showed in deeds its agreement with the remark by Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, that ‘I no longer believe in the market’s self-healing power’. Deregulation has reached its limits”.

The events of the last two weeks, which have the seen the disappearance of two of the four remaining major independent Wall Street investment banks, with the two left voluntarily giving up investment bank status and scurrying toward the Federal Reserve for protection ; the biggest bank failure in US history, and large scale state intervention the world over to prevent the total collapse of the global financial system (the bailout of AIG following the de-facto nationalisation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; the injection of billions upon billions of pounds of taxpayers funds into the money markets by the world’s major central banks to prevent those markets from grinding to a halt, because “nobody trusted any credit other than the government’s” ; the temporary banning of short-selling on both sides of the Atlantic; the state co-ordinated takeovers of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America and of HBOS by Lloyds, which was waved through by the British state on public interest grounds in order to “ensure the stability of the UK financial system”, and now the nationalisations of Bradford & Bingley here and Fortis on the continent) represent the final nail in that dream’s coffin. This has all culminated in the extraordinary bail-out plan, devised by the most right-wing administration in US history in collaboration with Wall Street, to spend $700bn of taxpayers money on the systematic nationalisation of risk in the US financial system, a plan described by the Financial Times as “the most extensive peacetime expansion of the role of government in the financial system since the Great Depression”.

Indeed, there is only one possible criticism that can be made of Wolf’s coroners report: rather than a ‘dream’, the concept of ‘free-market capitalism’ is perhaps better thought of as a hallucination, or an oxymoron. There is no such thing as a large-scale industrial free-market economy, and there never has been, something the economist William Lazonick refers to, quite correctly, as ‘the myth of the market economy’. It has been rhetorically useful for the right, from Hayek onwards, to equate the private control of capital with free markets, and free markets with individual liberty, but in reality capitalist development has always depended upon state assistance and the abrogation of free-market principles¹, as current events are amply demonstrating. The neo-liberal experiment with deregulation of the financial sector of the economy that we have seen over the last thirty years has been taken as far as possible, and will now be reined back in: as Wolf has put it, “In deregulated financial systems crises are inevitable, like earthquakes on a fault zone. Only timing is uncertain”

But what does this mean for the rest of us? Will the crisis of finance capital cross over to the real economy and result in recession, large scale unemployment and a drop in living standards for the mass of the population? Are we going to see some repeat of the depression that followed the great crash of 1929, the last time Anglo-Saxon capitalism suffered a comparable financial shock? It should be pointed out that even during the so-called ‘boom’ of recent years, the benefits were largely confined to the upper income brackets. The real story of the last 30 years of neo-liberalism is not rising prosperity for all, but rather the utter destruction of the wealth and savings of the bottom half of the population. Outside of property, 50 per cent of the population now own just 1 per cent of the wealth whereas in 1976 it was 12 per cent. Back in July, Ernst and Young reported that average household disposable income after tax and bills had fallen by 15% since 2003 ; a report by the Campaign to End Child Poverty in late August declared that “Poverty is now one of the greatest dangers faced by our children. If poverty were an infection then we would be in the midst of a full-scale epidemic with all the attendant public health measures, including vaccination” ; meanwhile, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee has written several times since June that in the five years between 2001/2 and 2006/7 those on median incomes of around £23,700 had seen their incomes grow by less than 1% a year, while between 2004/5 and 2006/7 those in the bottom third of the income distribution saw their incomes fall . For much of the population the downturn has long since begun (or never ended), but this has apparently not been considered as newsworthy as the travails suffered by the masters of the universe currently sucking on the taxpayers teat on Wall Street, Canary Wharf and the Square Mile.

But from even this inauspicious starting point, a downturn in the real economy is already in evidence. The last monthly unemployment figures showed a rise of over 80,000 to 1.7m, with both the Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress predicting the figure will hit 2m before the end of the year, and incomes growth excluding bonuses has fallen to zero (link and link). Manufacturing is experiencing its “worst operating conditions” in 17 years (link and link), economic growth has ground to a halt and the European Commission is predicting a recession , and yet inflation continues to rise toward 5% (significantly higher over the past year in the case of fuel and food: those who were so quick to pass on the rise in oil prices to the consumer have being a good deal less willing to pass on the subsequent falls). The turn toward neo-liberalism was supposed to eliminate such ‘stagflation’ but, now faced with it, the Bank of England has thus far refused to cut interest rates because containing inflation is more important than containing unemployment (inflation is bad for business, unemployment is not). Somewhat surprisingly, consumer spending appears to be holding up, at least according to governmental statistics (although these figures have been greeted with some skepticism by retailers, link and link). This, surely, cannot last: as we have seen, bubbles always burst and economic gravity cannot be defied forever. The Bank of England’s chief economist Spencer Dale has warned of an ‘adverse feedback loop’, or negative multiplier effect, wherein the downturn in property and banking will impact on banks’ ability to create credit and to lend, resulting in lower spending and ‘bringing painful adjustments for many households and businesses’. Likewise the Bank’s deputy governor, Sir John Gieve, has warned that “damage to bank balance sheets would lead to tighter credit conditions, lower asset prices, lower consumption and investment and to a severe feedback loop into more losses for banks and so on down a spiral”.

Financialisation

Herein lies the rub: the boom, and subsequent bust, was driven not by growth in the productive sector of the economy, but by speculation in property and finance which was largely fuelled by the easy availability of cheap credit, which of course is not and will not be so easily available from now on: as the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has said, the economy will have to adjust to “a more realistic pricing of credit”. With a contraction in the supply of credit, what else is there to sustain current levels of effective demand and fuel economic growth? At the time of writing, the British FTSE 100 index had dropped 23% over the previous year . The most optimistic predictions are that, after a short, sharp period of painful readjustment, there will be a return to business as usual. But what else is there to replace financial and property speculation as engines of growth? There is no significant manufacturing or industrial sector left to fall back on: on the continent and in Scandinavia, the industrial working class has been accommodated to a certain extent, whereas here and in the US it had to be smashed, with the result that finance has come to dominate the economy, something New Labour has been perfectly content to live with. The unusually high level of ‘financialisation’ in the UK economy (which has the additional attraction to capital of tending to concentrate wealth at the top, as outlined above, whereas manufacturing disperses it more widely) means that, contrary to Brown’s protestations, we are more vulnerable to any major financial downturn than comparable economies. Brown, the great Alan Greenspan devotee, bears personal responsibility for allowing what he has the nerve to call the ‘age of irresponsibility’ to happen on his watch, by enthusiastically embracing the deregulated, pro-capital model that has brought us to this pass.

Thanks to prompt and large-sale government intervention funded out of the public purse, we are unlikely to see a repeat of the Great Depression when capitalism went to the brink of annihilation. The lessons that were hard learnt in the 1930s have not been forgotten: regardless of the idiotic blatherings of free-market ‘libertarians’, the wiser heads at the top from John Maynard Keynes and Franklin D. Roosevelt up to Hank Paulson today have always understood that capitalism cannot survive without state support and systematic regulation and intervention -what the historian Michael Hogan calls ‘corporative neo-capitalism’- to ensure the socialisation of costs and risks whilst still guaranteeing the privatisation of profits and control (which is why the bail-out plan will be forced through, over-riding formal democracy if need be). But with nothing obvious on the horizon to make up for the credit shortfall, it is entirely possible that rather than booming again after readjustment, the economy will flatline in the longer term and we will have to get used to lower rates of accumulation, resulting in even less wealth trickling down the economy than now, with the increased distributional struggle that will come with it. Similarly, the downturn will see a decrease in the government’s tax take, resulting in either tax rises (which will fall disproportionately on those on low to median incomes) or cuts in public services, particularly if further large amounts of taxpayers money are required to bail-out the financial sector.

So rather than 1929, perhaps a more useful comparison to make would be the last time we saw economic turbulence on this scale, during the 1970s. Just as the Great Depression ushered in the era of Keynesianism and the Bretton Woods system, so the 1970s ended it and ushered in the era of neo-liberalism. There are a number of similarities between the ‘70s and now: stagflation, a spike in oil prices, imperial overreach on the part of the US threatening the credibility of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. With the impending economic turbulence, we could well be entering a period of similar political turbulence. A leaked memo has revealed that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith fears the downturn may produce “upward pressure on acquisitive crime”, an increase in support for “far right extremism and racism” and widen “the pool of those susceptible to radicalisation” (link). Meanwhile, Tory leader David Cameron has said that “We must not let the left use this as an excuse to wreck an important part of the British and world economy”.

State control or economic democracy

If there actually were a left of any significance, as there was in the 1930s and the 1970s, then Cameron may have reason to be fearful. However, Cameron seems wilfully ignorant of the scale of the victory his side won last time round. The shift toward financialisation and speculation and away from industry and production not only concentrates wealth at the top, it also leaves no place or role for an organised working class: workers become atomized and have no option other than to become selfish in outlook and take care of number one. In this context, organising a working class challenge to capital becomes all the more difficult. So Cameron can rest easy: his side has successfully vanquished the left and quieted the working class, at least for now. While there will be increased regulation of the economy, it will carry none of the unpleasant baggage of the past, because this time it will be solely on capital’s terms. In 1929 a weakened capitalist class had to contend with a strong working class that had a knife to capital’s throat. Compromise had to be reached if capitalism was to survive, but there is no such imperative now. As soon as the post-war settlement between capital and labour had been reached, capital (again, from Hayek onwards) looked to break it. The economic crises of the 1970s provided that opportunity, and since then capital has been systematically rolling back the gains won by the working class as part of that settlement. The current crisis offers capital the chance to reorganise, regroup and come up with a new regulatory framework, but this time without working class interference, something Keynes (who was perfectly honest about his loathing of the working class) would regard as an ideal. Cameron’s side has nothing to fear from nationalisation without economic democracy.

Old Labour sees the crisis, and New Labour’s seemingly terminal decline, as a chance to re-assert itself, to ‘take back’ the Labour party. This is a dead-end for a number of reasons. Leave aside the fact that the party is near bankrupt; that membership has halved since 1997; that “Many CLP’s [constituency Labour parties] are now husks – hollowed out shells. There may still be lots of members, but active membership has completely collapsed” ; that even liberal cheerleaders like the Guardian’s Jackie Ashley fear “the party’s destruction as a major force in British politics”, or that Old Labour couldn’t even get a candidate on the ballot paper in last years leadership contest: the New Labour initiative has ended worthwhile democracy within the party, so there is no way of ‘taking back’ the party even if the will existed. And New Labour is fully aware of the danger and has no intention of allowing the party to being taken to the left, as Ruth Kelly made clear after her resignation from the Cabinet.

But more than that, for all the talk of ‘reclaiming’ the Labour party, when has it ever truly been a labour party, led by and for the working class? As Robert Dahl has pointed out, there are two potentially contradictory schools of left wing economic thought: state control of the economy and workers’ control of the economy, and by the time Labour came to power in 1945 under Attlee (a public school educated social worker) it had come out decisively in favour of the middle class Fabian tradition of state control and against workers’ control². Beatrice Webb, who along with her husband Sidney co-founded the Fabian Society and was one of the leading lights of the early Labour party, wrote on the second day of the 1926 General Strike that it would be “the death gasp of that pernicious doctrine of ‘workers’ control’ of public affairs”, which she considered “a proletarian distemper which had to run its course – and like other distempers, it is well to have it over and done with at the cost of a lengthy convalescence”. Of the strikers she wrote that “There will be, not only an excuse but a justification of victimisation on a considerable scale” and praised scabs as “patriotic blacklegs!” [the exclamation mark is Webb’s][3]. Fabianism is neither pro-working class, nor is it a winner in economic or political terms: it is a busted flush. And for what it’s worth, there is nothing particularly new about New Labour: as far back as 1959 the (CIA-backed) right wing of the party wanted to dump Clause IV and change the party’s name⁴, a victory it ultimately took another 35 years for the right to win under Blair and Brown.

Starting from these kind of positions, it’s small wonder the middle class left has managed to completely alienate the working class. As things stand, the only likely beneficiaries of any upsurge in radicalisation will be the far-right, not the left (as evinced by recent events in Austria and Italy). A worthwhile, pro-working class, democratically inclined left would currently be demanding that in return for being rescued with public money, finance would have to be made subject to popular, democratic control. The left is not doing this, nor has any interest in, or awareness of the possibility of, doing so. The left had its chance to sever capital’s jugular vein in the twentieth century. It didn’t take it. Until the left takes a resolutely democratic, pro-working class approach, it won’t get the chance again. Neither will it deserve to.

Notes:

[1] See previous IWCA Cutting Edge documents ‘Friedman and Pinochet: an appreciation’, currently available at http://www.ukwatch.net/article/a_planned_economy; and part 4 of ‘Kicking away the ladder at home and abroad: immigration, globalisation and neo-liberalism’, http://www.iwca.info/?p=10129.

[2] Robert A. Dahl, ‘Workers’ control of industry and the British Labor Party’, American Political Science Review, vol. 41(5), October 1947. See also Dahl’s A Preface to Economic Democracy, Polity Press, 1985.

[3] The Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. 4: 1924-1943 (1985), Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (eds.) (London: Virago), p76, 77.

[4] Richard Fletcher (1978), ‘How CIA money took the teeth out of British socialism’ in Philip Agee and Louis Wolf (eds.), Dirty Work: the CIA in Western Europe (London: Zed Press), also available at http://www.wcml.org.uk/internat/wattw.htm. See also Hugh Wilford (2003), The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War (London: Frank Cass).

Mistaken Identity

tim — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:44:53 +0000

It is one of the biggest complaints about globalisation: that as market forces sweep across the world, so does Western culture. In the end, many fret, whether you are in New York, Rome, Beijing or Mumbai you will buy the same pair of jeans in the same shopping mall, drink the same overpriced latte in the same coffee shop, and watch the same dreary Hollywood blockbuster. Local culture will be no more.

Ironically, though, the greatest Western cultural export is not Disney or Starbucks or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of local culture. A notion that originated in late-eighteenth century Europe, in the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment, has today the whole world in its grip. Every island in the Pacific, every tribe in the Amazon, has its own culture that it wants to defend against the depredation of Western cultural imperialism. You do not even have to be human to possess a culture. Primatologists tell us that different groups of chimpanzees each has its own culture. No doubt some chimp will soon complain that its traditions are disappearing under the steamroller of human cultural imperialism.

We’re All Multiculturalists Now observed the American academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer. And indeed we are. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics – these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies.

At the heart of most multicultural philosophies is the belief that an individual’s cultural background frames their identity and helps define who they are. If we want to treat individuals with dignity and respect we must also treat with dignity and respect the groups that furnish them with their sense of personal being. We cannot, in other words, treat individuals equally unless groups are also treated equally. And since, in the words of the American theorist Iris Young, ‘groups cannot be socially equal unless their specific, experience, culture and social contributions are publicly affirmed and recognised’, so society must protect and nurture cultures, ensure their flourishing and indeed their survival.

One expression of such equal treatment is the growing tendency in some Western nations for religious law – such as the Jewish halakha and the Islamic sharia – to take precedence over national secular law in civil, and occasionally criminal, cases. Another expression can be found in Australia, where the courts increasingly accept that Aborigines should have the right to be treated according to their own customs rather than be judged by ‘whitefella law’. According to Colin McDonald, a Darwin barrister and expert in customary law, ‘Human rights are essentially a creation of the last hundred years. These people have been carrying out their law for thousands of years’. Some multiculturalists go further, requiring the state to ensure the survival of cultures not just in the present but in perpetuity. The philosopher Charles Taylor suggests that the Canadian and Quebec governments should take steps to ensure the survival of the French language in Quebec ‘through indefinite future generations’.

The demand that because a cultural practice has existed for a long time, so it should be preserved, is a modern version of the naturalistic fallacy – the belief that ought derives from is. For nineteenth century social Darwinists, morality – how we ought to behave – derived from the facts of nature – how humans are. This became an argument to justify capitalist exploitation, colonial oppression, racial savagery and even genocide. Today, virtually everyone recognises the falsity of this argument. Yet, when talking of culture rather than of nature, many multiculturalists continue to insist that ‘is’ defines ‘ought’.

Part of the problem here is a constant slippage in multiculturalism talk between the idea of humans as culture-bearing creatures and the idea that humans have to bear a particular culture. Clearly no human can live outside of culture. But then no human does.

To say that no human can live outside of culture, however, is not to say they have to live inside a particular one. To view humans as culture-bearing is to view them as social beings, and hence as transformative beings. It suggests that humans have the capacity for change, for progress, and for the creation of universal moral and political forms through reason and dialogue.

To view humans as having to bear specific cultures is, on the contrary, to deny such a capacity for transformation. It implies that every human being is so shaped by a particular culture that to change or undermine that culture would be to undermine the very dignity of that individual. The biological fact of Jewish or Bangladeshi ancestry, it suggests, somehow make a human being incapable of living well except as a participant of Jewish or Bangladeshi culture. This would only make sense if Jews or Bangladeshis were biologically distinct – in other words if cultural identity was really about racial difference.

The relationship between cultural identity and racial difference becomes even clearer if we look at the argument that cultures must be protected and preserved. The political philosopher Will Kymlicka argues that since cultures are essential to peoples’ lives, so where ‘the survival of a culture is not guaranteed, and, where it is threatened with debasement or decay, we must act to protect it’. For Charles Taylor, once ‘we’re concerned with identity’, nothing ‘is more legitimate than one’s aspiration that it is never lost’.

But what does it mean for a culture to decay? Or for an identity to be lost? Kymlicka draws a distinction between the ‘existence of a culture’ and ‘its “character” at any given moment’. The character of culture can change but such changes are only acceptable if the existence of that culture is not threatened. But how can a culture exist if that existence is not embodied in its character? By ‘character’ Kymlicka seems to mean the actuality of a culture: what people do, how they live their lives, the rules and regulations and institutions that frame their existence. So, in making the distinction between character and existence, Kymlicka seems to be suggesting that Jewish, Navajo or French culture is not defined by what Jewish, Navajo or French people are actually doing. For if Jewish culture is simply that which Jewish people do or French culture is simply that which French people do, then cultures could never decay or perish – they would always exist in the activities of people.

If a culture is not defined by what its members are doing, what does define it? The only answer can be that it is defined by what its members should be doing. And what you should be doing, for cultural preservationists, is what your ancestors were doing. Culture here has become defined by biological descent. And biological descent is a polite way of saying ‘race’. As the American writer Walter Benn Michaels puts it, ‘In order for a culture to be lost… it must be separable from one’s actual behaviour, and in order for it to be separable from one’s actual behaviour it must be anchorable in race.’

The logic of the preservationist arguments is that every culture has a pristine form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that form. There are echoes here of the concept of ‘type’ that was at the heart of nineteenth century racial science. For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism, invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms. Both sides of the race debate have their own dialect of difference. The right has appropriated the language of diversity to promote its message of racial exclusion. Liberals often turn to the idiom of exclusion to articulate a pluralist idea of culture.

‘Every society, every nation is unique’, claimed Enoch Powell, the most vocal opponent of black immigration in postwar Britain. ‘It has its own past, its own story, its own memories, its own languages or ways of speaking, its own – dare I use the word – culture.’ This is why, he argued, immigrants, who belong to different cultures and different traditions, could never be fully British. In France the far right has astutely exploited the idea of cultural differences to promote its anti-Muslim message. ‘It is a tragic mistake to want to have communities representing different civilisations live together in the same country’, argued former Gaullist minister Michel Poniatowski. ‘I love North Africans’, Jean-Marie Le Pen has declared, ‘but their place is in the Mahgreb’. Through the language of diversity, racism has been transformed into just another cultural identity.

If the right has taught itself the grammar of diversity, liberals have adopted the idiom of racial identity. Will Kymlicka is anything but a xenophobe. Yet his pluralism leads him to adopt the language of exclusion. ‘It is right and proper’, Kymlicka believes, ‘that the character of a culture changes as a result of the choices of its members’. But, he goes on, ‘while it is one thing to learn from the larger world’, it is quite another ‘to be swamped by it’. What could this mean? That a culture has the right to keep out members of another culture? That a culture has the right to prevent its members from speaking another language, singing non-native songs or reading non-native books?

Kymlicka’s warning about ‘swamping’ should make us sit up and take notice. The right has long exploited fears of cultural swamping to promote the idea that Western nations should pull up the drawbridge against immigrants whose cultural difference make them unsuitable. It is an argument that Kymlicka undoubtedly abhors. Yet once it becomes a matter of political principle that cultures should not be swamped by outsiders, then it is difficult to know how one could possibly resist such anti-immigration arguments.

Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today’s multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have ‘conflicting credos but the same vision of the world’. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to ‘confine individuals to their group of origin’. Both undermine ‘any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples’. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.

Civil Society’s Choice at the G8 Summit

Ellie Keen — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:50:07 +0000

The Road of Genoa or the Road of Gleneagles?

The Group of Eight came into being in 1975 as the G7 at a time that the world was embroiled in deep economic crisis, much like today. Its main aim was to coordinate the macroeconomic policies of the rich countries at a time of stagflation as well as to forge a common strategy vis-a-vis the developing world, which had loosened its political and economic dependency on the First World during the heady days of decolonization, national liberation struggles, and the emergence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as an economic power.

The G7 were not successful in coordinating their policies, with the US under Ronald Reagan aggressively pursuing a cheap dollar policy that brought on recession in Germany and Japan. They did, however, come together in a united front against the developing countries, putting their weight behind the neoliberal structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and IMF on more than 90 developing and transition (post-socialist) economies. The structural adjustment programs rolled back the economic gains achieved by the South in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

In the 1990’s, the G7 became the main promoters of corporate-driven globalization, for which the road had been paved by the radical deregulation, radical liberalization, and radical privatization that took place in developing countries under structural adjustment. The G7 also provided strong support for the World Trade Organization (WTO) as the main agency for the process global trade and investment liberalization demanded by their corporations.

The late 1990’s, however, brought about, not the increasing prosperity for all promised by neoliberal, pro-market policies but rising absolute poverty, increasing inequality, and the consolidation of economic stagnation in the South. The collapse of the third ministerial of the WTO in Seattle in December 1999 marked the achievement of a critical mass by the forces of opposition created by the contradictions of globalization.

With the realities of globalization exposed, the summits of the G7—now G8 with the incorporation of Russia—became a lightning rod for the rising global opposition. At the G8 Summit in Genoa in June 2001, three hundred thousand people came together under the uncompromising program of “No to the G8.” The battle lines were clearly drawn, with the Italian police or carabineri contributing immensely to polarization by erupting in a riot that took the life of one activist and injured scores of others.

Elements within the G8 realized that the image of being a hegemonic directorate of globalization was not good for the future of the body. Led by the New Labor government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Britain, the G8 underwent a facelift. A new discourse was forged, the key substantive elements of which were debt forgiveness for the poorest countries, the raising of aid levels to 0.7 per cent of the GDP of the G8 countries, a massive aid package for Africa, making trade serve development, and tackling climate change. The new watchwords when it came to process were “partnership,” “consultation,” “global social integration,” and the “millennium development goals.” The battle was for the soul of global civil society. The high point of this new look was the Gleneagles Summit in 2005, which was choreographed by an alliance between the Labor Government, entertainment superstars Bob Geldof and Bono, and influential British NGO’s. Several hundred thousand people who journeyed to Scotland found themselves manipulated into becoming a chorus for the glittering Aid for Africa concerts that were staged simultaneously in different parts of the globe.

By the time 2007 came along, the glitter was gone. The idea of global civil society partnering with the G8 had soured as none of the G8 governments reached the 0.7 of GDP target, aid to Africa fell short of the $20 billion promised at Gleneagles, the “Doha Development Round” had become a big joke, and serious action on climate was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the G8 communique at the Heiligendamm or Rostock Summit emphasized techno-fixes for climate change, lectured developing countries about not restricting investment by transnational corporations, and issued a thinly veiled warning about China getting preferential access to raw materials in Africa. Under the leadership of civil society in Germany, militant denunciation and confrontation of the G8 was the preferred civil society response, with thousands of demonstrators trying to penetrate the site of the leaders’ meeting to shut it down. With the dominant cry being “G8—Get out of the way,” the Heiligendamm protests retrieved the militant tradition of Genoa that had been suppressed at Gleneagles.

So we come to the G8 Summit here in Hokkaido, Japan. We have not only in Bush, Sarkozy, Brown, and Fukuda a group of discredited leaders with very low ratings at the polls in their own countries. We have as well a G8 that is, more than ever, lacking in legitimacy as the typhoon unleashed by the project of globalization that it has promoted is wracking the globe in the form of the simultaneous crises of skyrocketing oil prices, rising food prices, global financial collapse, and worsening climate change. Against this backdrop, Japanese and Asian social movements are faced with the choice of taking either the Road of Genoa or the Road of Gleneagles—that is, to deepen the G8’s crisis of legitimacy or, as in Gleneagles, to salvage the G8 once again. The greatest gift that the Japanese movement can give to global civil society is by leading the struggle to make the Hokkaido Summit the final summit of the G8.

Walden Bello is president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition and senior analyst of Focus on the Global South.

G8 summit marked by impotence and division

Ellie Keen — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Facing what is arguably its most serious crisis since the end of the Second World War, the global capitalist economy has never been in greater need of co-ordinated policies from the world’s major national governments.

But unity and collaboration in the face of the mounting problems posed by climate change, oil and food price hikes and the ever-present threat of recession, have been conspicuously absent from the meeting of the G8 major industrial nations being held in Hokkaido, Japan, this week.

Nowhere were the divisions more apparent than in yesterday’s statement on climate change. After much behind the scenes negotiations, the G8 meeting finally agreed to a communiqué in which the major industrial powers agreed to a “vision” of “achieving at least 50 percent reduction of global emissions by 2050.” However, in order to secure agreement from US President George Bush, who has refused to name any target in the absence of commitments from India and China, the statement added a rider “recognising that this global challenge can only be met by a global response, in particular, by the contributions from all major economies.”

The statement was dismissed by scientists as lagging far behind what was needed to arrest global climate change.

“They could have made progress here by being more specific on the near-term commitments that industrialised countries were willing to make to reduce their own emissions, but they don’t have agreement on that,” Aiden Meyer, a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said.

“They could have been more specific on reductions by 2050 from what base year, but they don’t have agreement on that.”

James Hansen, a leading climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said it was “a pretence that [industrialised nations] understand the problem. In reality, they are taking actions that guarantee that we deliver to our children climate catastrophes that are out of their control.”

The G8 statement failed to make any commitment on emission reductions over the next decade, action that is regarded as vital. The chairman of the UN’s panel of climate scientists, Rajendra Pachauri, said “very vital details” were missing from the statement. “The sooner we start reducing emissions, the greater the likelihood of avoiding some of the more serious impacts and temperature increases that are going to take place a decade or so down the road,” he said.

The statement was met with immediate criticism from the G5 group of so-called developing countries—Brazil, China, India, South Africa and Mexico—that are scheduled to meet with G8 today.

“Responsibility shouldn’t fall on developing countries for what is an unavoidable responsibility of developed nations,” said Mexican president Felipe Calderon.

South Africa’s environment minister Marthinaus van Schalkwyk called the G8 statement an “empty slogan without substance.”

“While the statement may appear as a movement forward, we are concerned that it may, in effect, be a regression from what is required to make a meaningful contribution to meeting the challenges of climate change. To be meaningful and credible, a long-term goal must have a base year. It must be underpinned by ambitious mid-term targets and actions,” he said.

In any case, even if such commitments were made, they would not prove any more substantial than those made on world poverty. Three years ago, amid great fanfare at the Gleneagles meeting in Scotland, the G8 leaders agreed to increase aid to Africa by $25 billion by the year 2010. As the Hokkaido meeting was being convened it was revealed that a mere 14 percent of the target had been met.

World economy

The G8’s commitments on the world economy were no more specific than those on climate change. The organisation was set up in 1975 to develop co-ordinated action to meet the problems posed by recession and the financial turmoil resulting from the oil price shock of 1973-74. Three and a half decades on, with the world economy facing what the International Monetary Fund has designated as the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression, such action would seem to be in order.

But the G8 statement contained no concrete measures. After noting that the world economy is facing “uncertainty” as “downside risks persist” and expressing “strong concern about elevated commodity prices, especially oil and food,” the statement went on to assert that “we are determined to continuously take appropriate actions, individually and collectively to ensure stability and growth in our economies and globally.”

It contained a veiled call to the Chinese government to allow an upward movement in the exchange rate of the yuan in order to alleviate global imbalances.

“In some emerging economies with large and growing current account surpluses,” the statement declared, “it is crucial that their effective exchange rates move so that necessary adjustment will occur.” The inclusion of the word “some” marked a change from the communiqué last year, which simply referred to “emerging economies” in general.

The exchange rate issue is only a symptom of more deep-seated problems. A spokesman for Bush declared at the outset of the meeting that the president was in favour a “strong dollar”. However, that would necessitate a rise in US interest rates, a move that would almost certainly set off a new financial crisis in the US and globally. On the other hand, an increase in the value of the dollar would require a lowering of interest rates in other regions, especially in the eurozone. But rather than cutting rates the European Central Bank is maintaining a relatively tight monetary policy in order to combat global inflationary pressures.

The impotence of the G8 is not a product of the individual leaders and governments but the expression of vast changes in the world economy. As the Financial Times noted in a comment published on Monday, the G8 is not master of its own destiny but is being buffeted by “forces and policies from elsewhere.”

“While the G8 accounts for almost half the world’s economic output, developing and emerging economies produce 70 percent of economic growth. Their dynamism outweighs the G8’s size. And by dint of its 10 percent growth rates, China alone contributes as much to the world’s economic growth every year as the US.”

The slippage of the “leading industrial nations,” as the members of the G8 like to designate themselves, is illustrated by the economic decline of the United States. As a comment published last Thursday by Bloomberg News noted: “The dollar’s 41 percent drop against the euro during Bush’s term writes the economic epitaph of an administration that set out to restore American pre-eminence.”

An even more scathing comment, authored by the well-known British historian and journalist Max Hastings, was published in the Guardian on Monday.

The gathering in Hokkaido, he began, conjured up images of a political accident and emergency ward on a Saturday night.

“President Bush, leader of the greatest nation on earth, is discredited and almost time-expired. Gordon Brown leads a government most of whose own members want him to disappear into a hole. Silvio Berlusconi presides over a gangster culture that renders it impossible for Italy to present a serious face to world. Nicolas Sarkozy should enjoy the prestige of a French president secure in office until 2012, but he has grievously injured his own power base by his first-year antics. Russia’s new president Dmitry Medvedev, may well add up to nothing, in the absence of Vladmir Putin to tell him what to think.”

Hastings’ concern over the state of the world’s political leadership was prompted by the fact that the G8 was charged with addressing the “gravest issues of modern times”, including the “shocking evidence on climate change”, world poverty and the economic slowdown in the wake of soaring energy and food prices.

However, it was becoming more difficult to “mobilise an international quorum in support of any objective, however worthy and important.” This was a reflection not only of the loss of authority by the US but was also a consequence of “globalism, which makes it ever harder for any nation to forge a consensus in support of decisive action”.

Things had been much easier for capitalist societies in the Cold War era “when it was perceived as essential to follow strong US leadership”. Hastings forecast that the “global predicament” would have to get a “great deal worse” before the members of bodies such as the G8 “acknowledge that common action against shared perils must transcend the familiar, disastrously outdated pursuit of national interests.”

Hastings’ hope that global events will alert world leaders to the dangers of the unfettered pursuit of national interest—rather in the manner of an English schoolmaster knocking sense into a class of rowdy students—is completely misplaced. As the current G8 meeting demonstrates, far from bringing greater international unity and co-operation, the global economic and environmental problems will bring greater national divergence and conflict among the capitalist powers.

This is because the divisions are not the product of individual politicians or the result of lack of knowledge or understanding but are rooted in the very nation-state structure of the world capitalist order.

Empire of the Vanities

Ellie Keen — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:52:08 +0000

An outrageous story of greed, lust and structural adjustment

In the run up to the annual meet and greet by world leaders (and ensuing mass insurrection on the other side of the police lines) at the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, it’s time we took another look at the Group of Eight (the USA, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, Japan and Russia).

The G8 has been top of activists’ hit lists since the ’90s when the leaders of the world lorded it over the planet, playing the world’s population like puppets on its strings through the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, keeping the deck of international power and capital firmly stacked in favour of the rich.

The G8 is sometimes known as the G7 plus Russia – which has been the odd man out since it joined (due more to its ownership of thousands of nuclear weapons than its position on the global rich list). It is the one international forum that brings together the world’s trade and financial institutions. Simply put it’s the world’s biggest cartel.

Throughout the ‘90s, via innocuous sounding edicts such as the ‘Treaty Regarding Property Rights (TRIPS – keeping knowledge locked away amongst a handful of electronics and bio-tech firms) and ‘Structural Adjustment Policies’ (a euphemism for the looting of entire economies by modern day corporate privateers), the world was fully under the control of USA and its allies. The Soviet Union had been defeated by the power of Democracy Inc. and the US had no rivals anywhere. It was economic liberalism and US-style democracy all the way, with Slick Willy Clinton at the helm. It was the ‘End of History’, as triumphantly proclaimed by right wing thinkers.

Mission Accomplished?

But it all turned out to be a little premature. In the twilight months of the Bush administration, the G8 looks more like a global spectator than the sole player. Across the world countries that the West had gotten used to ordering around have begun to dance to their own tune. Even ‘reliable’ US allies like Saudi Arabia aren’t afraid to say ‘no’ to the US’s face (they recently they turned down a request to release more oil into the global markets despite Dubya’s personal intervention). Around the world the battle for drug patents has basically been won by the third world drugs producers (Brazil, Thailand, India) after the G8 realised that neither the western pharma companies or the WTO could stop them.

Latin America has now pretty much thrown out the IMF and their ilk, refusing to sup from the poisoned chalice of Structural Adjustment any more. During the ‘80s and ‘90s Argentina followed the dictates of the IMF & World Bank faithfully, only to be rewarded with the total collapse of their country’s economy – banks and factories closed overnight, and the Argentinian people responded with massive strikes and worker occupations of bankrupt factories (See SchNEWS 350). The elites of Argentina sensibly saw which way the wind was blowing and stepped aside to make way for the centre-left (and hardly revolutionary) government of Nestor Kirchner, who chucked out the IMF, WB, WTO and their advisors and refused to listen to the financial advisors who predicted doom and catastrophe. They were wrong, and since they stopped listening to the globalists both the Argentinean economy and average standard of living (not the same thing by the way) have gone up and up.

Since then two-thirds of Latin America has followed suit, and the hemisphere, once America’s back yard, has begun to make faltering steps towards integration – independent of the gringos – via organisations such as MERCOSUR and the (much more ambitious) Bolivaran Alernative for the Americans (ALBA).

But even this is just the tip of the iceberg. The economies of Asia, traditionally heavily dependent on the Americans, still remember the battering they took in the late 90s during the collapse of the ‘Asian bubble’. Since then they’ve made sure that there’s plenty of extra dosh in their state coffers, ensuring that no matter how bad things get they don’t have to go down the path of short term gain for long term pain of IMF loans.

The lack of customers has effectively ruined the IMF. From a budget of over $100 billion four years ago, they can now barely scrape together $10 billion, most of which now goes to just two countries: Turkey and Pakistan. The organisation which once played the role of global loanshark is now feeling itself the pinch. Once Turkey pays off the last of its outstanding loans, the IMF will basically run out of fresh sources of cash from the world’s poor.

The net result of the failure of these US created and led institutions is that the G8 has lost control of global policy, in what even people inside the establishment are calling ‘a guerilla assault on the Washington Consensus.’ There’s still plenty of countries that are suffering horrendously from the same privatise-and-be-damned ideology of neoliberalism, but the tide is noticeably turning. States from China to Bolivia are turning state coffers over to internal development and poverty reduction, and in the process creating markets outside of the control of the G8.

Stuggling against the tide the G8 is bringing in some of the larger non-western countries into the fold, intending to co-opt them into selling out the rest of the developing nations and making it worth their while to play ball according to US/European rules. The so-called ‘Outreach Five (not the latest boy-band) consist of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Last year, whilst the black block was busy shutting the city down, the G8 nations were kick-starting the ‘Heiligendamm Process’ aimed to get these countries on board. The problem (from the G8’s perspective), is that these countries aren’t likely to leave it at the level of discussion. They’re demanding an ever larger slice of the pie.

End of an Error?

Just about the only place where you can see the aggressive introduction of old-school neoliberal policies on weaker nations is in the countries occupied as part of the ‘War on Terror’. In Afghanistan – and especially Iraq – entire state industries were privatised with a stroke of the American Proconsul’s pen. Water, health, education, industry were all declared open for the attentions of multinational corporations. The result has been as brutal as it has been predictable. Iraq’s public services (once the best in the Middle East) were destroyed almost overnight, spiralling its population further into poverty and easing Iraq’s population into armed resistance that has all but destroyed American plans for Iraq. It is to nobody’s surprise that the oil laws being drafted by the ‘sovereign’ state of Iraq allow for the return of all the major US oil companies, 36 years after they were kicked out by Ba’athist nationalism.

The Iraq war looks more like one last desperate throw of the dice by a visibly weakening empire. Bush’s legacy may well be that the United States is now seen as a fundamentally dangerous country that smaller nations can band together against. In the process this has created organisations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – See SchNEWS 551) which now holds joint military exercises “to fight back against new threats and challenges.” They also have an energy policy, the Asian Energy Security Grid, which has the potential to effectively counter US control the Middle-East’s oil.

With this shift in global political power the West is likely to get increasingly desperate as their economies go down the pan and oil resource pressures start to bite. The likely consequences may not be pretty as the US and its allies up their military spending and repression to counter the largely phantom threat of terrorism. But it’s reassuring to SchNEWS that there are still those in the beast of the belly willing to counter it.

More info on G8 in Japan: www.jca.apc.org/alt-g8/en and http://a.sanpal.co.jp/no-g8

Migrant Myths

Ellie Keen — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

After the Second World War there was a high demand in the UK for labour and, in order to boost the economy, the government set out to fill shortages with workers from other countries. These mainly came from the ‘Old Commonwealth’ (Australia, New Zealand and Canada), and then later the ‘New Commonwealth’ (Indian subcontinent, Africa, and Jamaica).

Before the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, Commonwealth and colonial citizens were allowed to enter the UK to provide necessary labour without any restrictions. However, this Act imposed controls, which mainly targeted black people.

In the 1970s because there was a lack of economic demand for labour, the 1971 Immigration Act was passed, tightening restrictions of migration into the UK.

In recent years there has been a large increase in the number of migrant workers coming to the UK. This has been spurred on by economic globalisation and the enlargement of the European Union.

The expansion of the European Union in May 2004 gave the citizens of new central and Eastern European member states – such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia – some rights within the territories of other member states, including the right to move and reside freely within the EU, the right to establish and provide services and the right to take up employment.

In 2005, the estimated number of people arriving to live in the United Kingdom for at least a year was 565,000. This is equivalent to an average of over 1,500 a day, but includes those not coming directly to work such as students. There are no figures available about how many migrant workers have come to Merseyside.

Despite the net increase in UK migration, only a quarter of those migrating from East and Central Europe intend to stay permanently. Overall, the point should be made that the effect of migration on both the host and home economies is positive.

While many migrant workers move into highly-skilled jobs, there are also a significant number who carry out low-paid, low-skilled jobs. The pay and conditions in these jobs has become the focus of much interest, especially in the wake of the shocking deaths of twenty-three migrant workers harvesting cockles at Morecambe Bay four years ago.

It is clear that a significant proportion of migrant workers, particularly those working in low paid, low skilled occupations, are being harshly exploited. Migrant workers are over-represented in industries and types of work where the safety incident risk is highest. They are also more likely to be injured at work than indigenous workers. Language difficulties prevent access to information, and also lead to communication problems, so many safety incidents occur because people cannot read warning signs or understand warning shouts from workmates. In addition – due to a lack of interpretation and translation facilities – they are not able to receive the relevant information documents in their own language, which would enable them to know their rights better.

Kathy Clarke, North West Organiser of migrant workers for the Unite union says.

“Employers take advantage of people’s vulnerability in the work force and do not take the necessary steps to ensure that migrant workers have access to training, language support, translated policies and procedures etc.”

Accommodation is another issue for migrant workers. Some employers create dependency, for example through providing accommodation as well as jobs and taking the rent out of wages. This deters workers from complaining, as this could mean losing their job and accommodation at the same time. In many cases there is a breach of legislation. Denise McDowell of ‘Migrant Workers Northwest’ says: “We see people who have had deductions taken from their wages that are illegal or they have not been paid for work that they have done.

Migrant workers are offered jobs that are often rejected by the indigenous worker. This can leave them in low paid and vulnerable positions. It is the migrants’ legal status and employer pressure that keeps them from organising or demanding better working conditions.

Most industrial safety incidents happen at the end of the working day, when fatigue reduces attentiveness, and because migrants work very long hours they are most at risk. Although risk assessments are an important part of the safety system of the workplace, few migrant workers report knowing of these having been done for their job, and it is quite clear that risk assessments are rare.

“It is commonplace for workplace injuries sustained by migrant workers to go unreported.” Says Kathy, ‘Many employment agencies charge migrant workers for safety boots, and other protective equipment, when direct workers have it provided at the employer’s cost.’

‘Undocumented workers are the most vulnerable because the employer knows that they have no rights and that they can be exploited by paying very low wages; below the legal minimum wage, and may work in very unsafe and dangerous situations’, says Denise. They fear dismissal or removal from the country. They are also afraid of using health services, and have even less information on their rights as workers and humans.

As economic pressures change in the UK, so do the types of jobs for which migration occurs. In 2005 the industry in which most work permits were issued was health and medical services (26.1%). This was followed by computer services and management and business administration (18.1% and 11.8% respectively). Migrants are therefore clearly responding to the particular needs that the UK economy presents to them more readily than those already in the UK. This effect has been amplified by the fact that the UK has seen a period of uninterrupted economic growth from the mid-1990s up to the time of writing.

New rules have been introduced under the Gangmaster (Licensing) Act 2004 to try and curb illegal practices of gangmasters and agencies, but the Act has been roundly criticised for failing to provide adequate protection for migrant workers. Not least of the criticisms is that the legislation doesn’t cover the majority of migrant workers. The Act provides hardly any protection to those most vulnerable workers, and as it only requires simple registration to make an illegal organisation into a legal one it is only a paper exercise. Clearly much greater levels of regulation and enforcement are required to protect those migrant workers who are most exploited in the UK labour market.

Unscrupulous employers use migrant labour to undercut the conditions of native workers. ‘The employer will often try to divide the workforce, playing one group against another. It is important that they are united as workers when it comes to tackling the employer on all issues that affect their working lives be it pay, health and safety etc’, says Kathy Clarke. The condition of migrant workers is not only their problem; one way or another it is the problem of all workers in the UK.

For further information contact:

Denise McDowell, Migrant Workers Northwest, www.migrantworkersnorthwest.org
Kathy Clarke, Unite (T&G) 0800 328 0606, www.tgwu.org.uk