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Global Labor in the Age of Empireby Eugene. W. Plawiuk (17 February 2004)
Paper presented at the Alberta Social Forum October 2003, and at a Public Meeting of the Council of Canadians, Red Deer Feb 17, 2004 Proletarian struggles constitute – in real, ontological terms – the motor of capitalist development. They constrain capital to adopt ever-higher levels of technology and thus transform the labor process. The struggles force capital continually to reform the relations of production and transform the relations of domination. We are here today not to bury Globalization but to praise it. The very nature of the World Social Forum reflects the dialectic of Globalization; it is both the creation of a global corporate state and a worldwide movement in opposition to the global agenda of that corporate state. Had this movement not been world wide, then we perhaps we could identify Globalization as the enemy. This is the contradiction of globalization; it has created a worldwide movement of opposition, it has brought together peoples from around the globe through communications and computer technology, through mass transportation, it has created a mass movement of internationalism. It is our globalized solidarity that is confronting our real problem: the privatization of everything. Globalization is the term in vogue to describe an evolution of trade agreements from a protectionist national model to one of a corporate state model of free trade. There is nothing “new” in globalization its impact is more apparent to us thanks to the technological transformation of communications in the last century. Many pundits have made much of the new technology as creating a form of permanent crisis free capitalism. In fact Wired Magazine in the 1990s predicted that the Internet combined with computer technological advances in business would lead to a 25-year boom for capitalism. And then the dot.com bubble burst so much for that theory. What I am going to talk about is the transformation that Capitalism, and its competing national capitals, have made in the past thirty years. A transformation that has created a global proletariat, a condition that has never before existed. The very transformation of developing nations into industrial beltways for global capitalism has taken fifty years to evolve. This evolution began after WWII and the boom in economic expansion in the advanced industrial countries, while developing countries in the Third World, in Russia and the East and in the Pacific Region, saw the formation of modern states arising where once were colonial outposts of the old 19th Century Empires. The reality is that the technological revolution touted as key to globalization has been the engine of capitalism for the past three hundred years. Beginning with printing and moving to steam, shipping, railways and telegraph, newspapers, and telephones, TV and fax machines and now computers and the internet, communications and technology have been the products of and machinery for advanced capitalism. The trade agreements of the past fifty years were based on a social contract and a protectionist model that recognized national sovereignty. GATTS, the Bretton Woods Agreement creating the IMF and World Bank, the creation of the UN itself, was the result of the tumultuous booms and busts of the early years of the last century, ending in the great depression and WWII. It is in the Seventies that the neo-liberal agenda gets cooked up in the think tanks of the right wing; the Cato and Fraser Institutes. The ideological class war began way back then, in the pages of right wing libertarian journals like Reason. Theorists of right wing free market anarchism like Murray Rothbard, proclaim the privatization of everything, including police, firemen, a return to child labor, and animal abuse, all is allowed in the market freed of the “nanny state”. All relations between men are to be contractual, and that is the only reason for the law to maintain my right to private property. Rothbard wrote of this in 1973 and further expanded his ideas of privatizing everything n the 1980’s. Far from being a fringe element as he was taken to be originally, his ideas and those of Von Mises and Frederick Hayek would be embraced, by today’s advocates of neo-conservative politics and economics. The political action taken by the right wing began in California with the Proposition 13, which ended state funding for schools and hospitals. The slide down the slippery slope of privatization had begun. Embraced by Reagan and Thatcher, the kooky free market ideas of the Austrian school returned once again reeking havoc in the economy. Privatization is the result of tax cuts. Proposition 13 called for a tax cut which resulted in a decline in funding to essential services, in turn this meant the right wing could say if the state cannot provide the services then the private sector can. And this is the real meaning of privatization and tax cuts, the ideology is that private business is more efficient than state capitalism. However private business needs the state to fund it, to educate its workers, to insure them from catastrophic legal costs (hence the WCB). What right wing ideology was really saying was that all aspects of our public lives must be dominated by the market. Which is effectively what has happened. All the so-called social reform issues of the seventies and eighties were driven by the right wing agenda. The Crisis in Public Education wasn’t about students not being able to learn, which they couldn’t because of lack of funding, but about smashing teachers unions. All of this was to promote making all aspects of the public sector open to being competitive, market orientated, driven by the bottom line, all the while more and more tax breaks left these services starved of funds, driving them into the waiting arms of the lowest bidder. In Alberta the Tories created the boom in the civil service. Yep the same guys in power today, crying about the cost of health care. They built all those hospitals in Lougheeds day to win rural votes, they built schools to win urban votes and they build seniors homes to win their votes. To dismantle this state the government wants to privatize everything. What this really means as New Zealand and Australia show is that once workers and their unions are smashed then you give them individual contracts, everyone becomes a contract worker. The insidious ideology of the sixties which laid the base for this attack was that of Daniel Bell whom declared the end of ideology, the age of the middle class, the end of class war, we were all equal as consumers now. This matched the right wing economics of Frederick Hayek and the Austrian school, which denies labor, produces all value and focuses instead on prices, costs, and profits. All of this now is our future. Working multiple jobs, teleworking and working from home, we all become contract workers, responsible for our own health care insurance, our own retirement plans, all of the benefits usually paid for by the employer and state now paid for by us. This is the privatization agenda, to free business and the state from their social responsibility in order to amass large amounts of capital. We have been in a crisis of capitalism for thirty years, and that crisis is why we have the privatization agenda worldwide. Imperialism, Globalization, call it what you will but it is the idea once again the return of the bad old days. The State was a creation of capitalism, its function was to protect business. Its return to its roots is not something to be cheered. It simply means that we will have wars to enforce the privatization of competing states. The attack on Serbia and Iraq were attacks on the last vestiges of social states, state capitalism. The current hysteria against Cuba is the same. Russia is a shining example today of the success of the Austrian School of Economics. It’s a basket case. While under state capitalism people had to line up for rations, today the markets are overflowing with goods, there are no line ups, because no one has any money to buy anything. The changes in global trade agreements in the past decade has been the creation of a corporate state model of agreement, not between sovereign nations but the creation of corporate trading blocks, with corporations meeting on the level of governments. Agreements are not binding, except in extra parliamentary bodies of an international tribunal. National laws are subject to corporate contract governance. Free Trade is not about trade it’s about the World Bank and the IMF funding states to privatize their essential services. What does this mean for the mass movements of workers and unemployed. Well out of the bad old days of the robber barons came the unions, defeat after defeat in the 19th century still did not stop workers from organizing to over throw capitalism. And with the mass mobilizations against the war we have seen, can give us hope that resistance is not futile. The modernization of the world was an economic and political movement that included a mass workers opposition, a movement towards socialism that countered imperialism and rapacious capitalism. Keynesianism, the creation of the World Bank, the IMF, and even the social contract of labor peace in Europe, were the result of capitalism responding to and adapting to the revolutionary movements of workers after these earlier attempts at world revolution. Capitalism is more than just industrialization, it recreates the entire world in its image, it is a form of social relation, whereby all production, all values, all social services, are made into objects of consumption, they are commodified. Art loses its patrons, its last link to feudalism and becomes the object of mass consumption. Workers lose their relationship to their work and to the products of their work only to become consumers. Social safety nets are created by the state to eliminate the harshest realities of capitalism’s dog eat dog world, poverty and homelessness are ameliorated by the welfare state. Universities lose their medieval other worldliness and become research arms for the military and corporations. Public Education is embraced as a way of reducing unemployment and reinforcing a unitary vision that the world is the way it is and will always be this way. Capitalism is in the process of becoming more than competing capitals, national institutions or even individual corporations, it is and has become the world in which we live. From Johannesburg, to Edmonton, from Moscow to Seoul, from Wellington to Porto Valegro, the world is now a unified capitalist system. The reality is that capitalism is what we are fighting, not some misshapen creature called globalization. The reality is that globalization is what is happening in opposition to the capitalist transformation of the world. Globalization is the linkages being made between the peoples of diverse nations, of workers and intellectuals through the use of the Internet, fax machines, international travel, books and publications, telephones, radio, and TV. The transformation we are experiencing is the privatization, the commodification of all that surrounds us. The fact is that we did not create the state, capitalism did, it destroyed and transformed the feudal institutions into a modern state that could meet its needs. In the process it used this state to transform agriculture, the economy of the Old World, into an industrial economy. Through the enclosure acts it used the state to force the peasants and village artisans to become industrial workers to feed its “dark satanic mills” of steam driven production. These workers, the new proletariat of modern capitalism, fought to resist this change, first by trying to destroy the machines, then by creating unions which were outlawed, then by demanding control of their workplaces as they once had in their home based industry, and finally by demanding a say in the political affairs of the capitalist state. This in short is a thumbnail sketch of the development of modern capitalism. As capital evolved it evolved its own negation, a revolutionary workers movement, a movement for socialism, an ideal that looked not backwards to some golden age of the past, but forward to a bright future of a classless society of abundance. The workers revolutionary movement began fighting change and then embraced it, they saw that the past offered nothing but a brutal existence of subsistence while the future was a world where all could have both plenty and freedom. This was not inherent in capitalism, it was the result of class struggle. The world was transformed not just by capitalism but by the opposition to capitalism. Democracy is not inherent in capitalism, it is the result of the transformation of the capitalist state by workers revolution. Likewise socialism is not inherent in capitalism, it is the result of the negation of capitalism by those subjected to it. That is why the globalization has created its own negation, a world wide revolutionary movement of the proletariat. A new socialist vision is being created in opposition to capitalism. It has many names and variants, mass democracy, direct democracy, etc. but like the workers movement of old, it is still a movement against capital. Why it does not call itself socialist is a result of the failed revolutions of the 20th Century that turned socialism from a mass worldwide movement for the future, into a backwater ideology of nationalism. That moment of nationalism was needed to develop the productive forces in the developing world. Nationalism acted as a form of enclosure, ending colonialism but forcing the peasants to become workers in the newly established industrial state. Production remained for export while the state became the creator of industries and social services in the developing world. That transformation was needed but limited, and now capital is reinventing the world in its own image. The WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, the Fraser and Cato Institutes, all expound the virtues of contracting out, privatization, elimination of State owned industries. The rallying cry of the right wing is “the private sector can do it better”. This applies in Alberta today as much as it does in the Sudan, or Iraq, or Seoul, or Detroit. We hear it all the time. It is the ideology of libertarian free market, free capitalism to provide all services and we will see wealth produced beyond our wildest dreams. It is the ideology that says the world is a market, not a social community, that we are no longer hewers of wood and gatherers of water, nor even producers of goods, we are consumers and shareholders. The international trade agreements that we have been opposing, are global encroachment acts. Take for instance the Uruguay round of the GATTS talks, which opened the world up for trade in agriculture. This allows global corporations like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, etc. to move into developing countries and transform their peasant/farmer village based agriculture into industrialized factory based production. In the process the land is destroyed and the environment is threatened. An example is the case when Cargill moved into Indonesia and created Palm Oil fields and refineries. The resulting use of slash and burn led to the worst mass forest fire to threaten the region, creating a cloud of smoke that traveled across Indonesia into Malaysia and north towards Japan. Meanwhile in Alberta, Cargill and other southern Alberta meat packing plants are importing workers from the developing world to work in their factories here. Cargill is unionized, yet when the workers went on strike they were dealt with as brutally here as they would be in Indonesia. Brooks in Southern Alberta is a perfect example where a non union meat packing plant, operating without concern for basic health and safety for the workers, models its operations on those it uses in the Third World, and in fact imports workers from the Third World to work there. This immigration of labor, fills capitals need and the workers need. It has made it difficult for UFCW to unionize these workers, because they speak diverse languages, and UFCW has not mobilized them according to their needs, but using an old outmoded business union model tried to get them to join as if their needs were those of Calgary Safeway’s workers. This disconnect is the problem that business unions face when dealing with immigrant workers. The fact is that Alberta has some of the worst labor legislation in the world. And while our standard of living is certainly above the living conditions in Indonesia, or Nigeria, we, like them, have a minimum wage rather than a living wage. In these newly industrialized countries a minimum wage is based on the food required to feed oneself and one’s family, here it is based on the same, the minimum required to feed oneself. A living wage would be based upon a wage needed to support ones family, as well as the required benefits, health care, education, housing, the worker needs. In the Philippines the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) is a partner in the privatization of universities in Manilla, In Edmonton NAIT contracts out not only the ownership of its new IT facilities to Hewlett Packard, but contracts out the faculty as well, and promotes the contracting out of its computer students work. Meanwhile Filipino women make up the majority of nannies in the world. In Hong Kong or Alberta Filipino nannies are brought in as indentured servants with no employment rights, no union rights, and kept as chattel slaves in their owners house, must not leave to seek employment elsewhere or be deported. Most immigrant labor finds jobs in the janitorial industry, this largely non-union industry has seen a massive boom across North America. Bee Clean, which employs 5000 workers in Alberta alone, was awarded KPMG Entrepreneur of the year award a week ago. Yet it remains unorganized. It has gained its success by contracting out and privatization of public sector custodial jobs. This building we are in, was one of the first contracted out on campus to Bee Clean. Bee Clean also contracts with the City of Edmonton for cleaning your public library, and with ETS to clean bus shelters, all jobs formerly done by unionized public sector workers. The largest growing sector of part-time workers in the industrialized world are call center workers. There are 10,000 in Edmonton, thousands more across Canada, in the United States, Germany, France, Italy. They are largely unorganized, because they are part time workers. They also face competition from another growing industrial sector in North American capitalism, the prison industrial complex. Across North America prisoners are being used for call centre work. Because call centre workers have a high turn over, are not career-based jobs, and certainly lack any “industrial” base, unions have been reluctant to organize them, despite the poor pay and terrible working conditions these ‘workers’ face. Contracting out has become a crisis in the United States. The failure of the Bush economic agenda, the corporate collapse of the dot.com industries, the crony capitalism of Enron and other privateers who played fast and lose in the stock market, has created an economy that has seen massive job losses. Now the Wall Street Journal and the Cable Business Channels, Lou Dobbs of CNN in particular, are crying about American industries outsourcing and contracting out jobs from America. The Congress is calling for a special committee to investigate the contracting out of American jobs. This after almost twenty years of a relentless push to privatize and contract out everything. In this case the concern is focused on the high tech computer jobs being lost to India. Germany has just opened up two new faculties, in cooperation with Indian Universities, to develop a German speaking program for computer programmers, so they can outsource their computer programming needs. When Hewlett Packard is not outsourcing work to India, it is bringing in Indian University computer graduates into the US on temporary green cards to work. Again these indentured workers have no rights, are temporary workers housed in company housing, and can only remain working in America as long as they have a contract with HP. They are needless to say paid significantly less than their American counterparts. The recent march on Washington by thousands of undocumented workers, falsely called illegal immigrants, exposes the fact that America needs these workers. The California election was as much about giving these workers drivers’ licenses as it was about Movie Star politicians or the budget crisis. The reaction against these workers will grow as the employment crisis grows in the US. Once again racist reactionary politics will pit worker against worker. Because undocumented workers are workers, let us ask who employs them? Governors, Presidents, corporate bosses, anyone who needs a gardener, a nanny, or a cheap source of labor to build Las Vegas hotels. Let us look at the impact of capitalism on the union movement. Unions are a business, they look at gaining large numbers of members in order to bargain with the bosses. To bargain effectively they need a steady work force, in many cases their disconnect from their members is this servicing model, the membership see a bureaucracy of union reps and leaders, who bargain for them, who service them, who do not challenge capitalism, but maintain business as usual. I will not go into examples of specific unions, but overall, their purpose is to maintain themselves in power, not to mobilize for workers power. As a result union membership in North America is on a serious decline. Where unions have spent their energy in the past decade has not been organizing the unorganized, or the poorest workers, or even the growing part time or contracted out workers, but in raiding each other. That’s right, gangsterism has replaced revolutionary struggle. Competing unions want each other’s membership, or as the old industries collapse the unions move into non traditional areas, such as the public sector to compete with existing public sector unions for a decreasing membership base. In a real tribute to Wall Street, a number of unions have adopted the methods of big business; merger and acquisitions.1 The Brotherhood of Railway workers is talking about merging with the Teamsters. Talks are under way for Steel and other Metal workers unions to merge with Coal and Transportation unions, nationally and internationally. Unlike the One Big Union of the last century, that believed all working people, regardless of their jobs, should be in a union to overthrow capitalism, these mergers will create new capitalist enterprises that guarantee the union bosses their jobs, in a declining growth market. We need a new union strategy to deal with the changes in capitalism, we need a new union movement to combat capitalism and promote workers power, not promote our powerlessness. We need a movement that sees all of us a the proletariat, whether we work in the home, go to school and work, work part time or full time, whether we are computer programmers, teachers, or janitors. We need a social movement to challenge capitalism, we need a living wage campaign in Alberta, and we need to end indentured servitude of nannies and farm-workers. We need to fight for union rights for university professors, graduate students and cab drivers. We need to fight for wages for housework rather than tax credits for single income families. Capital needs its state. Alberta is the perfect example of this. In the past year the government has passed work for welfare, and legislated an end to all strikes by any unionized health care workers, and eliminated the right of faculty and graduate students in post secondary institutions to have unions. And we still have the lowest minimum wage in Canada, as well as the lowest taxes. But most importantly the state must regulate workers, and their right to organize. This government is the most anti-union in Canada. Capital detests unions and workers organizing whether it is here in Alberta, or in newly industrializing China. Despite the dismissal of those who say unions are a thing of the past. The business unions of today live in the past, we need a union for all of us, a union of the proletariat of the hand and brain in resistance to global capitalism. The future never looked brighter.
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