Globalization and Labour in the Twenty-First Century

Verity Burgmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415528535
• eBook ISBN: 9781317227823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.Globalization has adversely affected working-class organization and mobilization, increasing inequality by redistribution upwards from labour to capital. However, workers around the world are challenging their increased exploitation by globalizing corporations. In developed countries, many unions are transforming themselves to confront employer power in ways more appropriate to contemporary circumstances; in developing countries, militant new labour movements are emerging.

Drawing upon insights in anti-determinist Marxian perspectives, Verity Burgmann shows how working-class resistance is not futile, as protagonists of globalization often claim. She identifies eight characteristics of globalization harmful to workers and describes and analyses how they have responded collectively to these problems since 1990 and especially this century. With case studies from around the world, including Greece since 2008, she pays particular attention to new types of labour movement organization and mobilization that are not simply defensive reactions but are offensive and innovative responses that compel corporations or political institutions to change. Aging and less agile manifestations of the labour movement decline while new expressions of working-class organization and mobilization arise to better battle with corporate globalization.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of labour studies, globalization, political economy, Marxism and sociology of work.

1 Working-class agency and labour movement action

DOI: 10.4324/9781315624044-2

Anti-determinist theories

Although pessimism in the face of globalization might seem justified, any study of working-class responses should allow for the possibility of meaningful resistance. The enormous power of globalized capitalism can be appropriately acknowledged without, at the same time, becoming so overawed by the productive forces of capitalism that it is impossible to contemplate effective opposition.¹ An economic determinist rendering of Marxism risks concurring with conceptions of globalization that diminish the agency of labour by overemphasis on the dynamic role of capital as it spreads itself around the globe. It echoes rather than contests the way in which globalization is presented by its neoliberal protagonists as an inexorable and inevitable process happening to the world because of the internal momentum of capital. Such interpretation is not well suited to analysing the working-class discontents of globalization and considering potential outcomes.

Within the Western Marxist tradition, the economic determinist understanding of Marxism, which Teodor Shanin refers to as ‘the massive brainwashing of interpretation initiated by the second International’, has long been contested.² From the 1920s onwards Antonio Gramsci and others have stressed agency and consciousness to underwrite a Marxist rejection of economic determinism for only allowing workers the role of fatalistic reaction to economic forces. They have done battle with those who shift emphasis away from the emancipatory potential of proletarian agency towards more pessimistic intellectual themes that accentuate the domination of capital.³

Currents within Western Marxism that critique economic determinism and its corollary, fatalism, are pertinent to the analysis of labour organizations internationally, many of which do not accept that their futures are determined absolutely by structures over which they have no sway. Those who have done battle on behalf of the anti-determinist Marxist tradition include Jean-Paul Sartre and E.P. Thompson, for example in their arguments with Louis Althusser, whose structuralist Marxism caricatured in extreme form the Marxism handed down from the Second International.⁴ Most recently, Antonio Negri’s autonomist Marxism has offered a distinctive inflection relevant for studying labour in the globalizing period. The writings of Sartre, Thompson and Negri point out a productive theoretical avenue in which to explore working-class responses to globalization.

‘Fused groups’ and ‘the making of the working class’

History to Sartre was not order but rational disorder: at the moment when it maintains order – structure – history is already on the way to undoing it. Thus, the class struggle creates structures in the heart of which it exerts itself and which, in consequence, condition it – but to the extent that class struggle is prior to structures, it also continually overcomes them_ ‘Man receives structures; and in a sense it can be said that they make him. But he receives them as he is engaged in history, engaged in such a way that he cannot fail to destroy them, to constitute anew that which in turn will condition him.’⁵ In relation to structures, ‘each generation takes another distance, and it is this distance which allows the change of structure’; what man makes is history itself, the real overcoming of these structures in totalizing praxis. Althusser, Sartre complained, wants to make the structure privileged in relation to history, his ‘Cartesian attitude’ precluding transcendence [dépassement] made by people. Sartre stresses Marx’s comment that ‘the secret of the worker is the death of the bourgeoisie’.⁶

Sartre’s progressive–regressive method is also relevant to an understanding of movements which seek to improve workers’ individual circumstances through collective action. Articulated in The Search for a Method, this method entails a search for ‘mediation’ between ‘being’ and ‘consciousness’, to understand how subjective processes are played out through individuals – how individuals are subjects. Progressive–regressive method begins with social structure and traces its input in the individual, then returns to the individual and traces his or her input on the social structure.⁷ In Sartrian terms, social movements such as unions are an important form of mediation between a participant’s ‘being’ – the result of social structure – and his or her ‘consciousness’, and participation in the social movement also enables an individual to make an input on the social structure.

In his Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre studies the overcoming of structures by people acting collectively. Analysts of social movements could usefully utilize Sartre’s existentialist Marxism, for it offers a coherent sociology of the group. Sartre distinguishes between groups incapable of significant actions (‘alienated series’) and those capable of overcoming passivity to assert freedom (‘fused groups’).⁸ An ‘alienated series’ is a collective where scarce matter forms the interior bond between people, where they have internalized the passivity of matter, where each acts in the same way, but in a way shaped by the material object of the scarce matter. By contrast, ‘fused groups’ are those structured by interior bonds which overcome passivity, where the group has the project of overcoming scarcity and asserting freedom, and where every member has the same project. Examples of an ‘alienated series’ include the bus queue; ‘fused groups’ include those that make revolutions, such as that which stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789. Sartre thus provides a set of categories to render all collective behaviour intelligible in terms of individual praxis (the dialectical interplay between thought and action):

the basis of intelligibility, for the fused group, is that the structure of certain objectives (communised or communising through the praxis of the Others, of enemies, of competitors, etc.) is revealed through the praxis of the individual as demanding the common unity of a praxis which is everyone’s.⁹

Similarly, the determinist project is to E.P. Thompson an exercise at enmity with reason and censorious of freedom, which stems from a kind of intellectual agoraphobia, an anxiety before the uncertain and the unknown, ‘a yearning for security within the cabin of the Absolute’.¹⁰ In his famous polemic against Althusser, Thompson emphasized that classes are the subjects of history and that the working class makes itself as much as it is made.¹¹ Marx and Engels, he reminds us, ceaselessly ridiculed the pretensions of bourgeois economy to disclose ‘fixed and eternal’ laws:

when capital and its relations are seen as a structure, in a given moment of capital’s forms, then this structure has a categorical stasis … can allow for no impingement … which could modify its relations, for this would threaten the integrity of the categories themselves.

This is an extraordinary mode of thought to find in a materialist, for capital has become Idea, which unfolds itself in history.¹²

Marx distinguished between a working class as a ‘class-in-itself’, defined objectively by relationship to the means of production, and a working class as a ‘class-for-itself’, prepared to act to improve its circumstances because conscious of its interests. In Thompson’s approach, working-class formation arises out of working-class situation, because humans react to working-class experience in intelligent ways. ‘Experience arises spontaneously within social being, but it does not arise without thought; it arises because men and women (and not only philosophers) are rational, and they think about what is happening to themselves and their world.’¹³

In his study of English working-class formation during the industrial revolution, The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson famously announces: ‘The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.’¹⁴ The people at the heart of the class struggle, ‘the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan’ are rescued from the enormous condescension of posterity precisely because they are presented as its true subjects. Class, he insists, is not simply a structure; class occurs in human relationships, defined by people ‘as they live their own history’.¹⁵

Workers are not merely bearers of structures, as economic determinist Marxism might have it. For Thompson, working-class consciousness is forged through solidaristic struggle against exploitation; it is created by individuals, unions and other labour movement organizations, and mass movements – and strengthened by culture and ritual. Class-consciousness is the way in which working-class experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms. ‘Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.’¹⁶ A working class thus formed can modify its situation, so consciousness can to some extent affect being. Class formations

arise at the intersection of determination and self-activity: the working class ‘made itself as much as it was made.’ We cannot put ‘class’ here and ‘class consciousness’ there, as two separate entities, the one sequential upon the other, since both must be taken together – the experience of determination, and the ‘handling’ of this in conscious ways. Nor can we deduce class from a static ‘section’ (since it is a becoming over time) nor as a function of a mode of production, since class formations and class consciousness (while subject to determinate pressures) eventuate in an open-ended process of relationship – of struggle with other classes – over time.¹⁷

The issues posed by Sartre and Thompson are relevant to the study of labour movement opposition to globalization. Sartre’s sociology of the group provides a template for distinguishing between ‘alienated series’ of workers connected by common workplace situations but incapable of improving their circumstances and ‘fused groups’ of workers that mobilize effectively to demand a better life for themselves. Thompson’s methods by which he rescued those who made the English working class from the enormous condescension of posterity are instructive for charting the beginnings of the making of a global working class.

Class composition and the autonomy of labour

The writings of Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Mario Tronti, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Harry Cleaver, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Franco Berardi and others offer an especially salient perspective on working-class action against globalization. Autonomism reverses the relationship between capital and labour that emerges in economic determinist Marxism, explicitly refusing to emphasize the dominance of capital and its accumulative logic as the unilateral force shaping the world. Dyer-Witheford describes how autonomist theory places labour rather than capital at the beginning of the dialectic of class struggle. Labour does not react to the development of capital; rather, the dynamism of capital is forged in reaction to the power of labour.

Far from being a passive object of capitalist designs, the worker is in fact the active subject of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: the workers of the globalizing world
• 1 Working-class agency and labour movement action
• 2 Confronting post-Fordist production
• 3 Reversing decline by going online?
• 4 Subverting the shift in production
• 5 Countering capital mobility
• 6 Confounding workforce fragmentation
• 7 Opposing unemployment and precarity
• 8 Protecting the public
• 9 Raging against the rich
• Conclusion: striking back against Empire
• Index