Enclosure and integration

To outline my view of what globalisation is today, I must first explain what capital is for the tradition of Marxism I come from. I am an autonomist Marxist. Capital has always been global, from the very beginning. Capital has always subordinated labour, and human beings, everywhere in the world. Its nature is self-expansion. That means boundless imposition of abstract labour. That is what profit is - the continuous accumulation of capital through subsuming exploited labour on an increasing scale. The way it does that is always through struggle, at a micro level or a macro level. That is why I don't like the term capitalism, which, by the way, Marx never used. 'Capitalism' means essentially a social system, and doesn't give any idea of something other than itself. It is a word to denote a claustrophobic condition of living from which there is no escape.

In fact there are always struggles, acts of resistance at the micro level or an organised level, and capital has to deploy a particular strategy, or set of strategies, in the given historical conditions, to pursue its goal of the boundless imposition of work. In the last 200 years the capitalist mode of production has gone through many historical forms. There have been many sets of strategies, applied either to crush struggles or to bypass them or to co-opt them. The struggles occur in different forms in the history of the capitalist mode of production, with different organisations, with different cultures, with different needs expressed by the people who come together and fight.

The character of the strategies implemented by capital at any particular moment depends on what kind of class composition is there as a basis on which the working class is fighting back. What we call globalisation today is a particular kind of capitalist strategies. Some of them could be contradictory. But, broadly speaking, they form a more or less coherent whole.

These strategies, I believe, come from capital's reaction to the breakdown of the Keynesian era of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Keynesian strategies responded to struggles based on a particular composition of the mass worker - big Fordist factories with workers who got organised in industrial unions. They broke down because of a new wave of struggles, of a new kind, which brought in not only a new generation of factory workers but also spread to other territories of our society. The Keynesian strategies started to collapse, and a new set of strategies started to form. This is what people call neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is essentially a combination of capitalist strategies at the global level. Both the state and big transnational corporations are active agents in implementing those strategies. The state is an active agent of the process of globalisation.

One main component of neo-liberal strategies is what we can call enclosures. I use the word enclosures in a general sense, not simply in the sense that Marx used it to refer to the enclosure of common land in Britain. Enclosure essentially means the separation of people from commons - from direct access to social wealth. One form of those commons - with all the contradictions which I would not dispute - was entitlements in the welfare state. Some of those commons have been enclosed, through privatisations, etc. The commons gave people rights to access social wealth without going through the market and therefore without going through selling their labour-power.

Another main component of neo-liberal strategies is integration. Once you increase the space for the market - once you commodify increasingly spheres of life - then you can integrate them within the accumulation process, the M-C-M' process. The integration is done through the expansion of the market, and there are three forms; through the financial markets and the management of debt; through trade liberalisation; and through the globalisation of production.

I agree that globalisation today is not capitalism turned financial. Of course not. But we also have to recognise that the financial markets are not just a question of a casino economy. The financial markets and the increased mobility of capital have an effect as a disciplinary device against any possible concessions to people struggling to expand the realm of entitlements. Any national government can claim it is powerless because any concessions will be punished by these huge masses of mobile capital.

Trade has always been important for capital. But in the old imperial policy of capital, there was a specialisation of the North, or the imperial powers, in manufacturing, and of the South in raw materials for each colony's imperial power. The imperial powers were struggling for resources, and that was the struggle for colonies. The same sort of division of labour was reflected in the neo-colonial period after the Second World War and the various struggles for national liberation. What is happening now, with the increase of manufacturing production, and the clustering of production processes in world-wide commodity chains rather than just on a national level, is that trade becomes a disciplinary device. Mechanisms of competitiveness are used to keep in check wage rates, efficiency, etc. The threat of shifting production from one country to another - not just actual shifts, but also the threat - serves as a disciplinary device.

Both enclosure and integration are strategies imposed to make competitiveness the horizon of human interaction. There is also an element of capitalists attempting to learn from strategic mistakes. They are striving to continuously displace the class composition. The capitalists know that they cannot run away from the conflict which is inherent in capitalist production, and so what they are trying to set up is a mechanism through which to control it by facilitating capital mobility. Capitalist production is developed in sectors where workers are unorganised, there is a culture which is not a trade-union culture or can be easily subsumed in the capitalist process. It does not take long, as the case of South East Asia demonstrates, before those workers start to get organised. Capital strives to set up a mechanism, a system of global production, in which as soon as those workers, with that particular composition, working in those particular sectors, get organised and start to put pressure on capitalist valorisation, they can shift production, or part of it, to another area, where new work practices can be put in place on the basis of a different class composition. This is what economists call the flying geese paradigm. Capital also strives to impose the market as the mechanism of our social metabolism and to generalise the market principle as the natural form of social interaction. This is a sort of colonisation of our dreams, or of our possibility of imagining other forms. It is a big problem for all progressives.

What are we going to replace the market with? In the Seattle demonstration the slogan was 'No new round - WTO turn around'. The unity was on the idea of stopping the WTO and new round. The big question mark was 'WTO turn around', which means not so much where should the WTO go as where are we going. One of the big battles that we have to face is to constitute a different horizon, a different perspective, of where we are going and where do we want to go. It is not just what has traditionally been considered 'the economy' that has been subordinated to the drive to competitiveness and accumulation, but also what has traditionally been called 'society'. We know that 'economy' and 'society' are not really divided. They are part of the same thing. But there is a lot of literature around the idea that the state and the government must ensure 'social cohesion' for the sake of competitiveness. For example, a document from the International Labour Office talks about 'competitive societies', and states that a competitive society must find a 'dynamic equilibrium between wealth-creation on one side and social cohesion on the other'.

Everyone is aware that the current strategies of enclosure disrupt the social fabric. In the South, the Structural Adjustment Programs set the context in which wars are breaking out everywhere. In the North, as well, with increasing polarisation of wealth, there is a problem of social cohesion. When we talk about the current historical form of capital, we have to think not only of the factories and the offices - and then the rest of life - but in terms of a more integrated whole, in which the accumulation process depends on capital's ability to mobilise the social cooperation of labour. Social cooperation of labour here means not only the cooperation of the workers in the factories, but social cooperation of labour in general, including in the sphere of reproduction of labour-power. Competitiveness means social competitiveness. The social consensus is managed around the internalisation of the market principle - getting us to accept the market as the only way for us to relate to each other. We must be able, as radicals or progressives or revolutionaries, to disrupt that internalisation.

The problem of infrastructure is an old one - the roads, the trains, etc., which can increase the turnover and reduce the circulation time of capital, and thus increase the social rate of profit. It is a big issue in the European Union. And it is linked to the environmental problem, and environmental struggles. However confused the environmental struggles, within the global strategies which attempt to subsume society as part of the valorisation process the environmental struggles are important struggles, and part of the class struggle.

Education is crucial for capital if it wants to rely on a strategy of continuous displacement of the class composition. An educated worker in today's paradigm is a worker who is able to adapt - who is able to take one job one day and another job the next day - who is engaged in life-long learning as a continuous process, which means updating their skills to suit the market. That is essential to maintain social cohesion in a context in which there is continuous displacement of the class composition, of what kind of work is done.

When I talk about the strategies of capital, it is important to remember that the world out there is a net result of those strategies and the struggles and limits we can impose on them. The problem for us is to recognise the changes in the class composition, and to intervene in the broad spectrum of struggles and pose the question of what we are for - though without giving answers, because even within Europe the word 'socialist' has lost any meaning. Don't tell Italians that you are a socialist, because they will reckon you are a friend of Craxi. The question is what are we for, not ideologically, but concretely, starting from the needs and aspirations which are coming forward in the struggles of today, like in Seattle.

* Massimo De Angelis, author of Keynesianism, Social Conflict and Political Economy and other works was speaking at the Workers' Liberty 2000 summer school. This is an unedited transcript.