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Global Social Emancipation: From the Past to the Future- and from Labour to Society?
Submitted by amrc on Wed, 02/27/2008 - 17:21.
General
Introduction:
AMRC, from the past to the future
Being over 30, I can remember the parents of AMRC, the US church people, Tom Fenton and Mary Heffron, who I met in their documentation centre in San Francisco, in the 1970s. AMRC in the 1980s was one of 5-10 key nodes in what we called ‘the new labour internationalism’, ‘shopfloor internationalism’, ‘international labour communications by computer’.
A major contribution was made by its bulletin, its innovative computer projects, and its books on East Asian countries, as well as on the ambiguous Western union presence in the region. My impression is that with the collapse of those projects, due to neo-liberal globalization, AMRC lost this global profile…but possibly became more Asian? With the industrialization of China, it has also become the centre of the world working class! AMRC is well-placed to coordinate the mounting discussion on relations between the rising Chinese labour movements and the rest of the world.
With the related rise of a variety of labour and social movements internationally, AMRC could also make a specific contribution to the new global emancipatory solidarity movement, for example with the launch of a website and/or monthly magazine, on global labour solidarity – thus playing today the kind of information and ideas role played in the 1980s by TIE Reports (Amsterdam) and International Labour Reports (Manchester).
It seems to me we need to think of the future of AMRC in relationship to the struggle for global social emancipation.
Source: International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions
What’s labour got to do with it?
Most unions and labour movements have forgotten their early h–torical inspiration to contribute to or lead the struggle for international solidarity and human social emancipation. The increasingly-recognized crisis of trade unionism, and the rise of the new global social movements, provides an opportunity for each of these to think about their relationship with each other (see Bibliography and Resources, below).
Labour is the archetypal historical agent and movement of global social emancipation, and the ‘anti-globalization’ movement or ‘global justice and solidarity movement’ (GJ&SM) is the archetypal new one.
Labour, in its many forms, remains a defining human activity. Proletarianization is increasing, and those working for capital – directly or indirectly – are the majority of humankind. Yet within the World Social Forum (WSF), labour, unlike women or even sexual minorities, is not problematized. Indeed, labour is often still marginalized or self-marginalized within Social Forum events worldwide.
A close articulation of labour with the GJ&SM is in the interests of both sides.
Why was labour considered the privileged force for global social emancipation?
Wage-labourers in modern capitalist industry were the new, mass, modern, propertyless, labouring class, without citizenship, with their own organizations and culture, commonly democratic and often internationalist.
Socialists, reformist or revolutionary, middle or working class, statist or anarchist, saw these as the privileged agents of social emancipation – and emancipation in terms of social ownership of property, worker control of production, and the rule of the proletariat.
Marxists provided the sophisticated theoretical underpinnings, with the human understood as homo faber, the concepts of alienation and exploitation, of class struggle as the moving force of history, of capitalism as the highest stage of exploitation, the state as the executive of the ruling class, of capitalism as spreading worldwide, of internationalism as necessary to surpass this, and of a working class-led socialist revolution as the beginning of history.
Workers and unions took international solidarity action, also on broader democratic or popular issues, since national laws did not protect them; they were not necessarily citizens, they were often immigrants or colonials. They also provided the base for major international/ist organizations, publications and an international working-class/socialist culture.
Limits of labour as the emancipatory movement of capitalism
Working-class self-organization has, as a result of technological development, capitalist expansion and aggression, been increasingly affected by: decentralization, re-structuring and long-distance re-location; by individualization and consumerism; by physically aggressive and/or ideologically seductive strategies of capital-and-state, and by union-smashing and union-incorporation.
Socialism, in its three major competing varieties (Communist, Social-Democratic, Radical-Nationalist) has often turned out to be productivist, statist, militarist, patriarchal, often racist, and thus part of the problem it was originally conceived as solving.
Marxism, inheriting both religious and enlightenment beliefs and behaviours, foisted on the industrial proletariat Promethean qualities and capacities that it has only partially and occasionally demonstrated.
Labour internationalism is etymologically – and has turned out to be historically – a relationship between nations, nationals, nationalists and nationalisms. Union internationalism has increasingly reproduced or echoed the international relations of capital and state.
The very privileging of the labour movement (however identified or defined), has often worked to isolate it from other progressive social movements and the construction of a radically democratic global civil society.
Problems of the trade union form
The collective self-articulation of labour has a history related to that of the stages of capitalist development and scale of operation: It began with the craft guild and the local scale. Next came the skilled workers’ union and the national scale. Next came the general or industrial workers’ union and the international scale.
Today we need a form and scale of national and international worker self-articulation appropriate to a globalized, networked, computerized capitalism.
The challenge to labour of globalization and the GJ&SM
Capitalist globalization/informatization/networking represents the most destructive attack on the labour movement – on workers, unionism, socialism, Marxism – in 200 years of history.
The initial union response has varied from concession, to attempts to revive at national, regional or global level a junior partnership with capital and/or state, to occasional bitter resistance.
The initial international union response to the GJ&SM has been defensive/aggressive/dismissive, shifting to recognition, pragmatic or occasional alliance, and talk of partnership – though customarily without abandoning its junior partnership with capital and state.
The international unions are nonetheless active on labour rights, against privatization, and increasingly active on women’s and child labour, on ‘atypical labour’ (i.e., increasingly typical labour), on HIV-AIDS, and on environmental issues.
Whilst the institutionalized international union response has been largely defensive, new kinds of labour have been discovering and asserting themselves, with or without the unions, customarily in local, national international networks, sometimes explicitly within the GJ&SM:
i. Rural labour (Via Campesina)
ii. Sex workers (Network of Sex Work Projects)
iii. Immigrant labour/unemployed (France and USA 2006)
iv. Women, street, homeworkers (Streetnet International)
v. Child workers (Global March against Child Labour)
vi. Housewives, domestic and careworkers (IRENE, etc.)
Increasing numbers of labour research and resource centres, and socialist intellectuals (e.g., Marxists, Autonomists, Feminists, Ecologists), are re-thinking labour, unions, labour internationalism, the labour movement, in relation to informatization, globalization, sub-contracting, off-shoring, and restructuring, etc.
The increasing spread and depth of capitalist relations creates a growing multiplicity of experiences of alienation, of collective subjects of such, and of protests way beyond the wage-labour relation, with social movements around, for example:
i. Environment
ii. Indigenous peoples
iii. Women (Women’s Global Charter for Humanity)
iv. Culture
v. Cyberspace
vi. Militarism and War
vii. Ethnicity
viii. Commodification
ix. Debt
The ambiguities of the partnership between international labour and the GJ&SM
It is easy to pose an opposition or tension between what are called the old/reformist/bureaucratic/institutionalized/ representative-democratic international unions on the one hand and the new/emancipatory/networked/direct-democratic GJ&SM on the other.
However, this can not be reduced to a Manichean opposition between vice and virtue. Such differences and tensions run, unevenly, through both union organizations and social-movement networks.
The tension may be more evident in the union-WSF relationship – i.e. between more-or-less definable entities. The relationship is, in part, one of mutual instrumentalization – each one using the other for its own pre-defined purposes.
Thus the new International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) explicitly uses the WSF to launch and get endorsement for its ‘Decent Work’ campaign (actually an International Labour Organization, or interstate, project). The WSF can claim or imagine it has the support of the ITUC’s 170 million members (who do not know how or where the ITUC represents them).
Moreover, we are talking of a relationship between a hierarchical policy-making institution (or set of such) and an event, a space of dialogue, between a definite ‘it’ and an amorphous and changing ‘us’ (or ‘them’).
Yet while each inevitably impacts on the parties and individuals involved, the question remaining open of whether the unions will reinforce the old syndrome/tendency within the WSF, or will re-invent themselves as part of the new emancipatory syndrome/tendency within the WSF.
The necessity of an intensive dialectic and dialogue
There is benefit for both parties/tendencies in a close articulation between the international unions on the one side, the WSF and GJ&SM on the other.
Even for self-defence unions need to recover and re-invent themselves – locally, nationally, regionally, globally – as ‘a sword of justice’. In this light I have proposed a Global Labour Charter Project for the 21st century (Waterman 2006), inspired by the Women’s Global Charter for Humanity (2004).
The WSF needs to be moved from its 80% university-educated community towards an 80% popular one (attempted at the US Social Forum, 2007) and the general GJ&SM needs to move from the rhetoric of ‘teamsters and turtles together at last’ to a meaningful relationship between these.
There is a need for a new global labour movement that addresses and involves the 80% of un-unionized and non-unionizable labour, that is open, flexible, networked and capable of effective action against contemporary forms of capital, state, militarism, ecological destruction, consumerism, patriarchalism, and racism.
How this is shaping up within the WSF, or is shaping up in the GJ&SM in the future, needs to be attended to with all due haste and energy.
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Bibliography and Resources
General
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.
Heckscher, Charles. 2006. ‘Organisations, Movements, and Networks’, New York Law School Review, Vl. 5, No. 2, pp. 313-36.
Hyman, Richard. 2002. ‘The International Labour Movement on the Threshold of Two Centuries: Agitation, Organisation, Bureaucracy, Diplomacy’, [online article]. Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, Stockholm. http://www.arbarkiv.nu/pdf_wrd/Hyman_int.pdf.
Hyman, Richard. 2007. ‘Democracy and Solidarity’, [online article] (in New Unionism Library) http://www.newunionism.net/library/index.php
Ince, Anthony. 2007. ‘Beyond “Social Movement Unionism”? Understanding and Assessing New Wave Labour Movement Organising’, http://www.openelibrary.info/autorsview.php?id_autore=739
Networked Politics. 2007. Networked Politics: Basic Reader. Rethinking Political Organisation in an Age of Movements and Networks. Berlin, June 2007. http://networked-politics.info/index.php/Main_Page. 26 pp.
Labour’s Platform for the Americas. 2005. http://www.gpn.org/research/orit2005/
Starr, Amory. 2005. Global Revolt: A Guide to The Movement against Globalisation. London: Zed.
Wahl, Asbjorn. 2004. ‘European Labour: the Ideological Legacy of the Social Pact’, Monthly Review, Vol. 55, No. 8. http://www.monthlyreview.org /0104wahl.htm
Women’s Global Charter for Humanity. 2004. http://www.marchemondiale.org/qui_nous_sommes/charte/en
Personal
Waterman, Peter. 1998/2001. Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms. London : Mansell/Cassell. 302 pp. http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/dialogue.html
Waterman, Peter. 2004. ‘Adventures of Emancipatory Labour Strategy as the New Global Movement Challenges International Unionism’, Journal of World-Systems Research, Vol. 10, No. 1. http://jwsr.ucr.edu/index.php.
Waterman, Peter and Jill Timms. 2004. ‘Trade Union Internationalism and A Global Civil Society in the Making’, in Kaldor, Mary, Helmut Anheier and Marlies Glasius (eds), Global Civil Society 2004/5. London: Sage, pp. 178-202. http://www.choike.org/documentos/waterman_unions.pdf
Waterman, Peter. 2005. ‘Talking across Difference in an Interconnected World of Labour’, in Joe Bandy and Jackie Smith (eds), Coalitions across Borders: Transnational Protest and the Neoliberal Order. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 141-62.
Waterman, Peter. 2006. ‘Toward a Global Labour Charter for the 21st Century’. http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/4278.html;or http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?3,28,11,2492
Waterman, Peter. 2007a. ‘Reviving Labour as a Sword of Justice: Labour at the World Social Forum, Nairobi, January 20-25, 2007’. http://www.openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=334& page=1.
Waterman, Peter. 2007b. ‘International Labour Studies (UK) in the Light of Social Justice and Solidarity (Globally)’ (Draft).
Waterman, Peter. 2007c. ‘The Networked Internationalism of Labour’s Others: A Suitable Case for Research’, paper for the International Conference of Labour and Social Movement History (ITH), Linz, Austria, September 2007.
URLs
Assembly on Labour and Globalisation (Nairobi WSF 2007). http://217.72.98.112:8080/test/social-forum/le-attivita-di-transform-a-nairobi-assembly-on-201clabour-and-globalization201d
CACIM (India Institute for Critical Action: Centre In Movement). http://cacim.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=CACIMHome
Choike. ‘About the World Social Forum’, http://www.choike. org/nuevo_eng/informes/4601.html
Decent Work, Decent Life. http://www.ituc-csi.org/spip.php?rubrique69
E-Library for Social Transformation. http://www.openelibrary.info/main.php.
Global Labor Strategies. http://laborstrategies.blogs.com/
Global Working Class Project.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/politics/gwcproject/index.php
International Trade Union Confederation. www.ituc-csi.org/
New Unionism. http://www.newunionism.net/
StreetNet International. http://www.streetnet.org.za/
Union Ideas Network. http://www.uin.org.uk/
