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Workers' Liberty
the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class Workers Liberty Australia |
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In recent months, in the cities of Seattle and Washington D.C., protestors in their tens of thousands representing a wide variety of organisations have demonstrated against globalisation and its negative effects on the great majority of the world's people and the environment. The demonstrations have focused on three undemocratic bureaucracies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the World Bank. By highlighting these institutions of the rich and powerful the demonstrations have put the issue of globalisation on the front pages and created the scene for continued protests and debate on this most important issue.
However for me, the most poignant images, concerning globalisation and the huge divide between the poor of the third world and the rich of the developed world came into my life via the six o'clock news. The first image was a young child dying of malnutrition in the famine in Ethiopia. The second image was the story that immediately followed it on the news. This story was about how a European consortium is to keep the Russian space station Mir, in orbit. The space station is to be kept in operation so that the super rich can go on a different type of holiday.
The wealthy are now so confident of their place they can thumb their noses at the starving, the poor and the sick not just at their garden parties but also from outer space! I wonder if even the "robber barons" we ever so confident? One can just imagine Lord Inbred observing the Horn of Africa on Mir and the only thought that would enter his mind would be the state of champagne bubbles in zero gravity.
Whilst it is only right that we should be upset by Lord Inbred and his ilk, the "real deal" is to work to create the atmosphere to defeat the globalisation process. To this end we can learn from the examples of Seattle and Washington. These demonstrations have helped to reawaken a dormant left in the United States and have played an enormous role in infusing the U.S. labor movement with a more radical perspective. The importance of this should not be underestimated. The union movement in the U.S. despite its problems still has close to 17 million members, not much less than the entire population of Australia.
In a recent article by the American economist Mark Weisbrodt, powerful arguments are developed about why the resistance to globalisation must be intensified. Weisbrodt argues convincingly that globalisation has been a disaster not only for workers in the least developed countries but for U.S. workers as well. Weisbrodt claims that during the last 26 years (1999-1973) U.S. workers have not shared in the gains of economic growth. This compares with the previous 26 years (1946-1973) when a typical worker's wage increased by 80 percent in real terms. This was a period when foreign trade and investment formed a much smaller part of the U.S. economy. Weisbrodt makes the telling comment that in the 1946-1973 period that it was not uncommon for a single wage family to be able to afford to purchase a home and maybe put their children through college. This is no longer possible. It is my contention that what Weisbrodt has argued concerning the fall in real wages in the United States is very similar to what has occurred in Australia. Let us think about it, for example how many readers who are paying off a home in the areas that are covered by this newspaper could do it on one income and live in a manner that they have become accustomed to?
In an exposure of how the IMF can level a country Weisbrodt uses the example of Russia. In 1992 the IMF program began. Within five years Russia had lost approximately 50 percent of its income. Those living in poverty went from 2 million to an astounding 60 percent. Male life expectancy fell from 65.5 to 57 years. These figures are more reminiscent of a country that has been ravaged by a war. It seems that there is a twisted irony in that Mother Russia was able to defeat the Nazis but has been overcome by the expensive 'suits' of the IMF.
Some left wing economists consider that for China to gain membership of the WTO it may well prove to be a disaster for its people; perhaps greater than it has ever experienced. I have read figures which say that if China gains full membership in the WTO and has its so called inefficient state run enterprises along with its "inefficient" farms closed in accordance with WTO rules some 230 million Chinese workers and peasants will be unemployed! Figures such as this are stunning. If this were to happen the social fabric of the country would collapse and the repercussions would be worldwide.
In Queensland we see the effects of globalisation in unemployed workers in the textile, manufacturing and other labour intensive industries. The plight of the Evans Deakin workers is a classic case of an elected government, in this case the Beattie "Labor" government, bowing to the wishes of the market place rather than supporting the rights of workers to have a job.
The workers at Evans Deakin are entitled to a decent redundancy payment but much, much, more than that they are entitled to a job.
We all pay power bills and the power industry should be building all of its necessary maintenance and operative equipment here and at union rates of pay. Power generation authorities should be compelled to source locally. Maybe if we all boycotted the payment of our electricity bills the message might get through that the average person has had a gut full of policies which are destroying working people's lives?
We need to ask questions and to develop a broad anti-monopoly, genuinely co-operative movement. A movement that embraces all of those who care
that this world is for everyone and not for a privileged few.
By Martin Thomas "This brutal victory parade of capital through the world, its way prepared by every means of violence, robbery, and infamy, has its light side. It creates the preconditions for its own final destruction. It put into place the capitalist system of world domination, the indispensable precondition for the socialist world revolution. This alone constitutes the cultural, progressive side of its reputed 'great work of civilisation'... The capitalist victory parade and all its works bear the stamp of progress in the historical sense only because they create the material preconditions for the abolition of capitalist domination and class society in general. And in this sense imperialism ultimately works for us... Proletarian policy knows no retreat; it can only struggle forward. It must always go beyond the existing and the newly created..." Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet. Capitalist globalisation emerges from long-term trends. It is not, or
at least not primarily, a sudden about-turn in economic life with a preci
se watershed somewhere between 1979 and 1992. Technology has made it a lo
t less expensive to transport commodities from country to country. More o
f trade is in manufactured commodities, and less, proportionately, in bul
k materials. The greater average value-per-kilogram makes longer-distance
trade more economical. The communications necessary for global networks
of production and marketing are very much cheaper and easier. In more and
more industries, a nationally-limited network of production is now unvia
bly small-scale. Without those long-term technical developments - and some political and social developments, too - the financial globalisation of the last two decades, the giddy whirl of short-term international trading in currencies, shares and bonds, would not have acquired such momentum and importance. Financial globalisation has played a big role in shaping the depressive slant of capitalist development since the early 1980s - the relentless
bias of capitalist state policy towards low inflation, relatively high interest rates, and short-term profits. It took off very rapidly indeed in the early 1980s, with the abolition of exchange controls. But financial globalisation is not the fundamental driving force of the broader "globalist" processes, the increasing organisation of production, trade, and communications in international networks. The European Monetary Union has seriously suppressed the whirl of the
international financial markets in Europe, yet cross-border trade and investment there continue to expand. The 1980s, the period of the first dramatic expansion of the international financial markets, were also a time of relatively slack international flows of direct investment. So financial globalisation is a particular aspect of broader processes. It is not their driving force. Dealing with capitalist globalisation is not just a matter of beating down cliques of finance-traders.When Sweden dramatically abandoned full employment and embraced welfare cuts in late 1990, the Financial Times commented: "the international money markets have become the arbiters of Sweden's future, not the Social Democratic ideologues" (27 October 1990). But in general it is not true that capitalist globalisation means states losing power to markets, or to private corporations. Countries are integrated into the global markets by deliberate decisions of their states. Those decisions are taken in the perceived interests of the capitalist classes which sustain those states (or,
at least, of the weightiest and most powerful sections of those capitalist classes). They are not forced on them by other states or by particular
private corporations. States queue up to join the International Monetary
Fund and the World Trade Organisation. They do that because they are stronger - more able to define a sharp-edged concept of the general interest
of profit-making and to enforce it - not because they are weaker. Technical: improved transport and communications, increasing industrial complexity. Social and political: for the first time, almost every country in the world is now capitalist, with wage-labour as the basis of decisive sectors of production, some industrial infrastructure, and a functioning bourgeois state. Result: globalisation. (In my view, the Stalinist states were a form of state-capitalism even in their heyday. But - contrary to the conclusion of most theorists of Stalinism-as-state-capitalism in the 1940s - they represented not the highest form of capitalism, not a forward extrapolation of the trends of advanced capitalism, but an aberrant form of capitalism tied to crude initial industrialization. Hence their states were, though capitalist, not quite bourgeois in the sense of bourgeois rule-of-law. (See my article, "Globalisation and its discontents" Workers' Liberty 50-51, October 1998.) The "import-substitution-industrialisation" strategy, pursued with some success by some Latin American states in the mid 20th century, has reached the end of its historical rope. It depended on taxing landed oligarchies or primary-product-export oligarchies to raise resources to build manufacturing industries (replacing imported manufactures) under cover of import controls. Today, manufactured commodities dominate world trade, and
dominate exports for a very wide range of countries. Outside the oil-exporters and maybe a few others, there are no countries offering obvious openings for a populist policy of financing aid to an up-and-coming class of manufacturing capitalists, producing replacements for goods previously imported as luxuries, and concessions to the working class, from taxes on a lucrative primary-product export industry run by an old oligarchy. To respond to capitalist globalisation by seeking to restore or reinvigorate the national states is thus to misunderstand it. It is also false, I think, to see capitalist globalisation as a process of the overwhelming of all other states by one particular state, the United States, and the big corporations based in the U.S. Since the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. has certainly become the world's only military superpower. In recent years, capitalism in the United States has done somewhat better economically than capitalism in the European Union and Japan. But that is partly thanks to capitalists based in the EU and Japan buying up chunks of capital in the U.S. The balance of the evidence is that the long-term trend of the last half-a-century for a decline in the United States' relative economic dominance continues. Capitalist globalisation is not a world conquered by the U.S., or a world of states overwhelmed by markets and corporations, or a world of production being overwhelmed by financial markets. It is not capital turned American, or capital turned stateless, or capital turned financial. It is capital writ large. The actual process is not the only way capital could
have written itself large. The particular evolution of the regimes of international finance has shaped it. So, perhaps more importantly, have the \missed opportunities of the working class in the 1970s, and the outright defeats of the 1980s. It is not a benign process. It writes large the vices of capitalism - inequality, pauperisation, uneven development. It must be combated by global solidarity - not by seeking to turn back the clock, or by appealing to illusory allies (other states against the United States, states in general against the markets, industrial capitalists against financial capitalists). Capitalists have long used migrant workers and the unemployed to beat
down employed workers. Work harder, longer, and cheaper, or the capitalist will find someone else, cheaper and more pliant, to replace you - on the streets or off the boats! Or, now, with globalisation - in another country. In labour history, one answer to the capitalists' use of the unemployed and migrants has been crony-unionism (reserving jobs for a chosen section of the working class). Another has been support for anti-immigrant legislation. Both were self-defeating in any but the short term and destructive of socialist politics in any term at all. The solid answer always was and is united organisation of the employed and unemployed, and of native workers and migrants, to demand improvements for both sections. The battles in France since 1995, where unions and unemployed organisations have combined - sometimes by staging "invasions" of the unemployed into workplaces - to demand shorter hours with a guarantee of new hirings, are a recent example of the feasibility of that socialist response. The same goes for the capitalists' use of other countries. The answer is internationalism, united organisation of workers in different countries. One of the best things about the tremendous Seattle and Washington demonstrations was that their dominant mood was not "America First," but for global solidarity and a new internationalism. Of course it will take much discussion and debate to work out exactly what this global solidarity and new internationalism mean, and how they can be organised. Organising that global solidarity is not a task of a few minutes, any more than uniting the employed and unemployed or natives and migrants ever have has been. Yet some preconditions have been laid down. More countries world-wide
have real independent trade-union movements than ever before (though some are very weak). The technical revolutions in communications are potentially of much greater import to workers' movements than to the rich, who could always afford air fares, telexes, international phone calls, and so on. Some trade union movements, especially the Korean, have started using them systematically for international solidarity. Web sites, notably Eric Lee's www.labourstart.org, provide world-wide information on workers' struggles in a way never possible before. "Internationalism" is not the whole answer to every particular struggle. If capitalists threaten to move jobs to another country - or to sack the whole workforce and replace them with recruits from the unemployed - the appropriate immediate answer may be to call their bluff, or to seize the workplace and the machinery and use them as bargaining counters. The long-term program of uniting workers, employed and unemployed, native and
migrant, and across national borders, is not dispensable, but it is not to be counterposed to immediate struggles either. Governments in countries with lower wages, restricted trade-union rights and fewer social guarantees use those as selling points to attract multinational investment. Not only Third World governments do that, but also, for example, Ireland and Britain, "selling" themselves as lower-cost production sites in Europe. How can labour be internationalist if we do not demand levelling-up of standards, and as much legislative force as can
be achieved for that up-up? Maybe rich-country labour movements demanding
international guarantees of labour standards will seem to be, or actually be, "covering for" rich-country protectionism. The antidote is to ensure that trade unions in the poorer countries are seen to take the lead in the demands for "up-up," and to link the demands with calls for a transfer of funds from the richer countries to the poorer ones to reduce the "co
mparative disadvantage" of the latter in infrastructure, education, and so on. Such a transfer actually exists - in a very corrupt, bureaucratic form
- in the European Union. In fact, over the decades of European integrati
on, on the whole labour movements in Europe have proved strong enough, even despite lamentably feeble international coordination, to make the "up" of wages consequent on that integration more a up-up than a down-down. Spanish wages have risen much closer to German wages, and not by German wages being beaten down in the same way as U.S. wages. Those U.S. wages have been beaten down by U.S. capitalists, not by
Korean or Chinese workers, and mainly by class struggle the employers' of
fensive within the U.S., where wage rates for jobs which cannot be moved
to Third World countries - janitors, retail workers, etc. - have been pushed down just as much as those for those which can. World-wide, there has not been a down-down of wages. There has not been a down at all. Workers in some previously low-wage countries have won big improvements thanks to strong and courageous union organisation (South Korea being the prime example), but overall, averages of income have become more unequal between
countries, rather than more equal. It is not true that industrialisation must follow low wages. The Australian Financial Review Magazine (April 2000) reports on how over the last 25 years hundreds of thousands of textile, clothing and footwear jobs have been moved from Australia to China and other south-east Asian countries. "Chinese factories... pay workers at 69 cents an hour when the hourly rate in Australia is $11.50". But the calculation is not as simple as it seems. Most capitalists do not go where the wages are lowest. Most industry is still in relatively high-wage countries. Very little multinational industrial investment goes to the lowest-wage countries. Taiwan, Korea, Mexico and Brazil, with their relatively higher wages and stronger unions, have faster-growing industry than Africa. Availability of skilled labour and nearby markets, and networks of transport, communication, supply, services and distribution, are generally much more important for capitalists in choosing production sites than wage levels alone. Naturally, multinational capitalists would not like it if Chinese workers' wages doubled, their hours were shortened and their factories made safe, and they gained legal freedom to organise trade unions. It does not follow that the multinationals would cease to invest there. If the improvements for workers went together with a clear-out of bureaucratic corruption, a cutback in China's huge military establishment, and the establishment of a more-or-less clear and reliable rule of law, then investment might well even increase. And if it didn't? The resources currently siphoned off by China's bureaucratic and military establishment are ample to generate a continuing rapid expansion of Chinese industry. There is no way to pursue working-class struggle without annoying or disturbing capital, or risking reprisals. Improvements in one workplace - or in one country - may be met by "strikes of capital". But by fighting for improvements, workers increase their confidence, organisation and solidarity, increase their chances of making general political and social gains, and push the capitalists into technical and social investments they would not otherwise make. This argument - necessary against "give-backs" in every workplace - is surely even more true for improvements won or defended in whole countries than for those won or defended in particular workplaces. A general rise in wages in Brazil, for example, could not conceivably happen without a great strengthening of the labour movement in Brazil and huge knock-on effects (not just in Brazil). It would create conditions for a more successful international resistance to the rules of profit, even if it did trigger a "strike of capital". And it is not at all certain that capital would find it feasible or advisable to respond by a "strike". Trade-union militancy has won huge increases in wages in South Korea - it must have been one of the fastest wage-upswings in any country at any time in world history - and capital has not stopped investing there. Aid and debt relief are not sufficient for the industrialisation of poorer countries. By themselves they can well lead to nothing much but the enrichment of a government and crony-capitalist elite, and the expansion of military establishments and prestige construction projects. Wider benefits depend on the development in those poorer countries of labour and popular movements strong enough to shift government policies. At the best the benefits from aid and debt relief are by-products of a process driven fundamentally by the self-interest of capitalist states (military alliances, construction and supply contracts, straightening out international banks' balance-sheets, etc.). The details are decided at so great a distance from any democratic processes that it is foolish to imagine that lobbying and petitioning from below can change that fundamentally within a stable capitalist regime. Even the meagre by-products, however, may be very important for some of the poorest countries. Korea and Taiwan owe their dramatic economic lift-off in large part to "aid" militarily-motivated from the United States. And any socialist world policy must include massive, democratically-controlled aid from the richer countries to the poorer. The fundamental socialist answer remains not to petition the billionaires to please invest some of their wealth in this place rather than that one, or to dispense a little more in philanthropy, but to take the billions from them and put them under democratic social control. Transitional demands along those lines might include: opening the books of the multinationals; information and veto powers for international shop stewards' committees over multinationals' investment plans; action by international shop stewards' committees to demand "levelling up" of wages and conditions; aid from rich countries to poor ones under the control of workers' and community organisations in those countries, and along the lines of workers' reconstruction plans worked out by those organisations; taxing the rich in countries where industry is shutting down to finance workers' reconversion and reconstruction plans there; and so on. All these, and others, flow from a general approach of working for workers' control over social wealth, rather than petitioning the World Bank, IMF, WTO or whomever to act more charitably. To oppose globalisation flat-out is, I think, a dead-end. Obviously socialists should support and promote protests like the Seattle and Washington demonstrations against today's capitalist globalisation. I think the message we should advocate within those protests is not "stop globalisation," or "halt globalisation at all costs until labour is strong enough to impose its own global alternatives," but rather "fight capitalism within its process of globalisation by building global solidarity to work towards socialist globalisation." Globalisation may possibly go into reverse, with a new era of heightened economic barriers between nations, in the event of a catastrophic crisis of the world financial system, but that would be no boon for workers or for socialist politics. Short of that, so long as the capitalist classes and their states are strong enough to rule, they will for the foreseeable future maintain globalisation. To attempt to roll back globalisation would be as futile as attempting to impose a general ban on cost-cutting technology. It would only strengthen nationalist prejudices in the world's labour movements, and thus make us less able to deal with global capital now. In a socialist future, we would not want to roll back globalisation. "Anti-globalisation" is as much a dead-end as the stance of voting "no to Europe," or favouring withdrawal from the European Union, taken by most of the British and Irish left in the 1970s, or the opposition to a single European currency on principle by much of the European left today. What can be done, instead, is to fight against capitalism within its process of globalisation, and for working-class globalisation. Our anti-capitalist efforts may hinder the actual capitalist process of globalisation, but that is a different matter from setting out to halt or roll back globalisation as such. A workers' government in any country would need "protectionist" controls on foreign trade and money movements. In some poorer countries "import-substitution industrialisation" may not be as obsolete as it is generally. And there are circumstances, in many countries, where a very sudden and brutal abolition of "protectionism" would mean sudden ruin or even starvation for workers in a particular industry, or small farmers, with very little chance to organise for alternatives. In those circumstances, continued "protectionism," or a gradual reduction instead of a sudden abolition, will be demanded by the capitalist interests tied up with the sector too, to give them a chance to reconvert without ruin. It is not our business to come out against them by being free-trade fanatics. It is our business to explain to the workers and small farmers that tariffs and import controls are no long-term solution. Clinging to such controls cuts against the necessary alliances with the workers and small farmers of other countries. Their best answer is a workers' reconstruction or reconversion plan. Workers' reconstruction plans were proposed by revolutionary socialists in Europe after World War II, and the capitalist governments there actually carried out capitalist reconstruction plans, rather than leaving reconversion for peacetime to the free play of the markets. In the 1970s in the UK, there was a small spate of workers' reconversion plans for particular enterprises - Lucas Aerospace and Vickers. Should we seek to reform the WTO, IMF, and so on, or abolish them? On one side it can be argued that the process of capitalist globalisation is ineluctable (short of socialist revolution). It is progressive, in the sense used by Marxists to describe capitalist development as progressive, i.e. not that it is a good thing, to be applauded and supported, but that it pushes along the contradictions in society and increases the potentialities for working-class socialist transformation. It is less destructive than the only real capitalist alternative, a world of higher barriers and sharper conflicts between nations. On the other side - it can be argued that the WTO and IMF actually function as shock-troops to open up the whole world as a free-fire zone for the multinationals and the international banks, with the consequent destruction of livelihoods and state-welfare protection for many millions of workers and small farmers and the razing of environmental and safety regulations. They are not public institutions of the sort which, susceptible to more or less direct elected control, can be reformed in the various functioning national bourgeois-democratic polities. They are the peaks of a structure whose foundations are chiefly in the permanent unelected state bureaucracies of the strongest nations. They can be blocked or deflected on this or that particular issue, but no amount of lobbying can positively transform them in a major way. Both arguments are true, I think. The alternatives are false. We cannot choose between reforming or abolishing the WTO and IMF any more than we can choose between reforming or abolishing the Federal Reserve. Instead, our job is to build an alternative, socialist, framework for international economic coordination, and in the first place to build the international working-class links necessary to underpin the battle against the existing frameworks and for a new one. What we need to abolish is not just the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank, or globalisation - but capitalism. We must build up the global workers' solidarity which can win battles against global capital now and establish socialist globalisation in the future.
Not anti-global, but anti-capitalist