Organizing Insurgency

Workers' Movements in the Global South

Immanuel Ness

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745343617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Interessenvertretung

'A breath of fresh air' - Norman Finklestein

Workers in the Global South are doomed through economic imperialism to carry the burden of the entire world. While these workers appear isolated from the Global North, they are in fact deeply integrated into global commodity chains and essential to the maintenance of global capitalism.

Looking at contemporary case studies in India, the Philippines and South Africa, this book affirms the significance of political and economic representation to the struggles of workers against deepening levels of poverty and inequality that oppress the majority of people on the planet.

Immanuel Ness shows that workers are eager to mobilise to improve their conditions, and can achieve lasting gains if they have sustenance and support from political organisations. From the Dickensian industrial zones of Delhi to theagrarian oligarchy on the island of Mindanao, a common element remains – when workers organise they move closer to the realisation of socialism, solidarity and equality.

PART I

THEORIES AND CONCEPTS OF LABOUR IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

1
The Labour Atlas: The Southern Working Class Holding Up the World

In Greek mythology, Atlas, the leader of the Titans, is doomed to carry the whole weight of the heavens on his shoulders after his people’s defeat in their struggle against Zeus. The symbolism of Atlas holding up the world is apt in signifying the present global order where the labouring classes of the Third World hold up the entire world: both the 90 per cent of the world’s population living in poor countries and the workforce of the First World, which continues to profit from the toiling working classes in Southern countries. Like Titan, global South workers are condemned to the fate of work; they are also forced to exist under the most unbearable conditions of extreme suffering.

GLOBAL NEOLIBERALISM AND INCREASING MISERY OF THE SOUTHERN WORKING CLASS

As global neoliberalist capitalism has expanded in the 50 years from 1970 to 2020, the absolute power of capital has grown vis-à-vis labour. Working-class organizations and trade unions have been unable to curb the absolute growth in corporate power in a local, state, regional, and global context. In turn, working-class organizations have eroded dramatically and have become marginal in most countries of the world. The consequence of the decline in working-class organization is far more deleterious for workers in poor countries of the South than it is for those in the wealthy metropolitan and settler states. At the height of capitalist development in Western Europe and North America, workers developed labour organizations to advance their material interests. Yet today, with a severe shortage of working-class organization, global South workers lack the power to build defensive organizations to challenge a far more rapacious form of multinational capital. Thus, the disparity of wealth, wages, and income between North and South is expanding at a faster pace than any time in the last 50 years.

This book asserts that the deterioration of conditions of workers in the global South is directly related to the decline in working-class organizations, many of which expanded during the period of decolonization from the 1940s to the 1970s. Labour unions which emerged and gained power in this era have been under relentless attack by the logic of capitalist profitability under neoliberalism and the modern state. Working-class organizations are eschewed by capital and the state as a constraint on profits and development. Thus, under neoliberalism, states which freely permit working-class organizations are bypassed in the commodity supply chains for products primarily for consumers in the rich countries. As labour unions’ state social programmes complicate the production of low-cost consumer goods, states striving for integration into the global capitalist system view working-class organizations as anathema to development. Moreover, since foreign direct investments are also likely to go to countries with the weakest social safety nets, even products sold for national consumption must abjure the formation of strong labour unions. Thus, even in states with robust labour and social protection, social programmes advocated by the UN’s International Labour Organization, and beyond, are fiercely resisted by local capitalists and state regulatory bodies as capital mobility permits the freedom to invest and withdraw capital. States challenging the global neoliberal regime risk losing capital investments that are essential for economic expansion and growth. Yet, concomitantly, these very policies cause mass global poverty and economic inequality.

Thus, throughout the global South, trade unions which came of age from the 1940s to 1970s as strong and vigorous guardians of an incipient working class have now been eroded or rendered impotent in defending the broader working-class rights. Prior to the implementation of neoliberal reforms, strong unions sought to defend the rank and file and organize the most deprived workers. Today, unions are unable to even defend their own members, let alone organize the hundreds of millions of workers who have entered the labour force in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The dominant pattern on a global level is the withdrawal of trade unions from the sphere of work in all but a few sectors. Yet the fading of strong and responsive trade unions has not diminished the aspirations of workers for strong labour and effective representation. Today, in the absence of strong trade unions, the dominant trend among scholars of labour movements is to demonstrate that the working class is engaged in new forms of organization. These scholars posit that workers reject the old form of labour organization, which was deficient in democratic participation and as a rule engaged in labour–management cooperation, which weakened the power of workers. The claim that trade unions had devolved into ossified organizations benefiting only labour leaders, thwarting the foundation of trade unions in the post-war era that was directly related to mass waves of labour protests and demands for representation. Thus, labour scholarship asserts that because established trade unions ineluctably ensconce themselves into serving the interests of capital or compromising with it, workers have formed independent, autonomous trade unions to advance their class interests.

Consequently, optimistic observers point to class struggle emerging under new agency: the autonomous force of workers’ self-activity, the development of workers’ assemblies external to existing trade unions, and other organizations expressing the unique identity of workers. In addition, labour scholars identify a workers’ movement which is far more radical, as it is unconstrained by the bureaucratic and organizational constraints of established trade unions. They point to the explosion of workers’ movements on a world scale, including for-hire transportation and delivery, garment manufacturing, high-technology production workers, dockworkers, and beyond, encompassing every sector of national economies. At times, these worker mobilizations congeal into unconstrained rank-and-file organizations, and other times, they may fade away, only to return in different forms.

This book affirms the expansion of new forms of working-class organizations today as established union representatives decline in influence and power. However, the book also asserts that workers have always been in motion and are no more likely to engage in struggle against capital than in the past. The reason why we see these multifarious actions is that the working classes lack strong organization, thus protests are not seen as contained in the framework of organizational demands.

The book also argues that with stronger organization, labour struggles would expand dramatically, as workers are prone to engage in disruptive activity under the umbrella of a class-wide organization which has the capacity to defend and advance conditions, prevent the setting of one segment of the workforce into opposition against another, and act as a class-wide force. Thus, the labour scholarship is misplaced, as it fails to integrate the significance of strong unions and parties. Thus, we must distinguish between the quotidian protests which occur openly today and real class power, reflected in organization.

WORKER MOBILIZATION, RESISTANCE, AND ORGANIZATION

As the vast majority of the world’s workers are employed in the global South, this book provides three crucial case studies that have been derived from research across major economic regions of economic production. The case studies provide tangible examples so that readers can grasp the constraints faced by workers in context. Key questions include:

• How do workers resist oppression on a regular basis? Why is this resistance not translated into unified and militant social protest movements?

• What organizational triggers contribute to the cohesion of quotidian labour struggles into mass movements?

• How do these mass movements differ from expected social mobilization against injustice and oppression?

• What are the institutions of working-class solidarity that transform protest movements into robust social organizations capable of challenging capital and the state?

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RURAL WORKING CLASS

A second major contention of this book is that rural labour retains an enduring presence into the twenty-first century. Rural labour is conceived as workers who rotate between work and non-work. In this way, in rural regions, labour has never been fully employed throughout the year. Work is guided by agricultural seasons, planting, tilling, and harvesting. The agrarian sector has never had labourers who have been working year-round. By contrast, capitalist production has compelled labour to be constantly working, and during periods of joblessness or irregular work, the livelihood of urban workers and their families comes under severe threat. The Left has come to view irregular employment as a major threat to the existence of workers, but this risk is derived from capitalism, which separates workers from agrarian zones. This book contends that agrarian regions are crucial to comprehending labour struggles today, as they have not declined, but have expanded.

In absolute terms, the rural sectors have expanded in the global South. These regions comprise 51 per cent of the population in poor countries of the South. Moreover, as the urban regions have encroached on agrarian zones in major urban metropolises, these key agglomerations have encompassed agricultural zones. The largest cities of the global South blend urban and rural. As a consequence, labour researchers have conceived of workers as irregular or precarious. Precariousness has permeated the entire planet as workers have become redundant even in the rich countries of the global North, but it primarily depicts and comprises the vast majority of the workers who reside in the global South, as the commodification of rural areas pushes rural residents into urban zones where they must work. And work is almost always temporary and lacking in job security.

The agrarian working class has been neglected in practically all the recent scholarly analysis dealing with the transformation of labour. Indeed, this is a major omission in diagnosing the contemporary status of the labour movement and its capacity to improve its material and social conditions through social change. This inattention to rural labour is principally driven by the prominence given to new technology by social scientists, and Marxists in particular. Consequently, the focus has been trained on the modern economy, high technology, etc.

The rapid pace of global urbanization fails to consider three major countercurrents which suggest that the trajectory out of rural regions is not inexorable:

• Expansion of urban conglomerations into adjacent areas in the countryside – large tracts of land once in rural regions have been designated by government authorities as coterminous with urban zones.

• Correspondingly, the typical urban zone in the global South bears a resemblance to rural areas – in many cases, newly designated urban tracts are deficient in the characteristics of urban areas, for example they do not have running and potable water, sanitation services, electricity, health services, paved roads, security and crime prevention, education, public and private enterprises, or access to nearby markets.

• Return migration to rural regions – unable to survive and live sustainable lives in urban zones, labourers often return to rural regions upon completion of their work or when industries close and unemployment rises. The ethnographic research of Jan Breman dating back to the 1990s reveals widespread poverty and absence of basic services in urban areas in South Asia, a feature that is even more prevalent in new ‘urban’ areas of Africa and Southeast Asia.¹

Scarcity of critical daily necessities of life pushes the working classes of the global South into a peripatetic existence in the interstices between urban and rural life. Consequently, the developmental jargon proffered by established political economists is inaccurate in defining the stark disparities between the conditions of abject poverty of the global South and the relative prosperity of the global North. In the global South, work which is defined as ‘informal’ was always ‘informal’ per se, in both urban and rural regions. Rural workers always laboured under harsh conditions without standards. Accordingly, the scholarly use of the terminology ‘informal’ and ‘precarious’ fails to recognize the conditions of workers in poor countries who produce commodities for local, regional, and international markets. As we shall see in Chapter 3 on India, some industries with a very low subsumption of capital produce commodities for consumption in the rich countries of the global North through the super-exploitation of highly precarious labourers who have recently moved to major urban agglomerations.

Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter 4 on the Philippines, the agricultural sector remains a strong part of the political economy of the global South. Mike Davis’s pioneering work on global urbanization, Planet of Slums, posits a sharply rising urban population as the rural regions are depopulated.² The global economic development literature endorses and reaffirms this view of an urbanizing world.³ Yet the discourse fails to acknowledge the enduring presence of a large and growing rural population. The UN projects that population growth in urban areas will outpace rural regions from 2020 to 2050. See Table 1.1 for urban–rural population change from 1950 to 2050 in more developed and less developed regions, and Table 1.2 for the distribution of rural populations on a regional basis. Both tables demonstrate that urban conglomerates will grow quickly over the next 30 years to 2050. However, rural areas, which have expanded rapidly since 1950, will not substantially decline. UN projections show that rural populati...