Globalization, Knowledge and Labour

Mario Novelli, Anibel Ferus-Comelo, Mario Novelli, Anibel Ferus-Comelo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135202941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book begins from the central premise that progressive social change requires collective struggle underpinned by a clear strategy, and that processes of neoliberal globalisation have altered the cartography upon which social struggle takes place. Drawing on insights from the knowledge production processes of labour movements around the world, this research seeks to highlight the central importance of knowledge production and processes of learning within social movements.

Providing both a comprehensive theoretical and empirical introduction to the relationship between globalisation, knowledge and social movement strategy, the authors contend that the production and dissemination of alternative knowledge is central to a resurgence of working-class power. By presenting a wide range of case-studies, the book highlights the centrality of knowledge production and circulation processes to the potential expansion and revitalization of the role of civil society in the promotion of social democracy. The chapter contributors include activist-scholars, whose work represents a broad perspective on 'labour' including the unemployed, the self-employed at the margins of the labour market, the unorganized, and those who work in the informal economy.

Delivering work which is at once theoretically rich and yet empirically informed, this work will be of interest to students and scholars from a range of disciplines including International Relations, Development Studies, Critical Labour and Social Movement Studies, and Education. It will also be of relevance to activists and practitioners engaged in strategy development and education in various social movements.

1
Globalization, neoliberalism and labour

Mario Novelli and Anibel Ferus-Comelo

This chapter explores the literature on globalization, neoliberalism and its impacts on labour and labour movements. The chapter begins with a critical exploration of globalization, drawing particularly on the theorist Boaventura de Sousa’sdefinition of ‘globalizations’. This is followed by a brief history of the rise of neoliberal globalization, globalizations contemporary hegemonic form and a mapping out of the major transformations that have taken place. Finally, we explore the implications of neoliberal globalization for workers’ movements, pinpointing particular structural transformations that require new and innovative responses from organized labour.

What is globalization?

Globalization has in many ways become the catchphrase of our era and is used by academics, politicians and journalists to explain phenomena across a whole range of social and political domains. This is reflected in shifts in its usage in the social sciences, as researchers grapple with the reality that something fundamental has changed in the contemporary world, and that those changes are affecting broad areas of our social, political and material world. New phrases that reflect this shift, such as ‘globality’, ‘globalism’ and ‘glocalization’, have appeared over the last 20 years. Although there remains a tendency to use ‘globalization’ as a synonym for such things as ‘liberalism’, ‘universalism’ and ‘westernization’, which, while perhaps reflecting some aspects of globalization, does not do justice to its complexity and indeed can be highly misleading (Scholte 2000).

Despite the different range of ‘time-frames’¹ that authors use to chart the rise of globalization, the word itself has emerged over the last 30 years as part of the attempt to make sense of the changes that have taken place in the world with the collapse of the Soviet Union; the global recession of the late 1960s and early 1970s; the end of the Cold War; rapid improvements in information technologies; the collapse of Keynesian economics; and the ascendancy of neoliberalism, which has facilitated the emergence of a truly global economy (Shaw 2000). While some authors initially saw globalization as the inevitable spread of free market economics (Ohmae 1995; Gray 1998; Reich 1991), others rejected this ‘juggernaut thesis’ suggesting that little had changed and that the interconnectedness between nations was greater at the turn of the last century (Hirst and Thompson 1996), and that the period merely represented a heightening of imperialism (Callinicos 2003; Petras 2003). However, as the years have passed, globalization has increasingly been recognized as neither inevitable nor just a simple extension of past tendencies. Instead, it is understood as a set of highly complex and contested processes rather than one single phenomenon producing indeterminate and unexpected outcomes (see Shaw 2000; Gills 2000; Gill 2003; Waterman 2001; Mittelman 2000; Othman and Kessler 2000; Hay 2002; Santos 2002).

In understanding globalization as a set of complex processes, the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos has been instructive. Central to Santos’s concept of globalization is that we are in a period of profound transformation (Santos 1999). Here globalization is defined as being more than the rise over the last 30 years of transnational processes of the production of goods and services and an increase in the power of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and International Financial Institutions (IFIs) as international actors. Instead, Santos offers a definition that incorporates the social, political and cultural dimensions of globalization as well as the economic, arguing that what we term ‘globalization’ is actually ‘a set of social relations’ and should always be treated in the plural (Santos 1999: 188–93). This complex set of social relations involves power and conflict, winners and losers. Historically, definitions are normally written by the winners, and thus provide a distorted view of events, hence globalization is often depicted as the synonym for the victorious spread of neoliberal economics while obscuring less successful alternative globalizations.

Santos (1999: 216) sees globalization as ‘the process by which a given local condition or entity succeeds in extending its reach over the globe and, by doing so, develops the capacity to designate a rival social condition or entity as local’. This definition has several important implications. Firstly, what we generally call globalization is inevitably the successful globalization of a given localism. The process of globalizing a given localism ensures that competing localisms are confined to their particular geographic area, or even removed. The example of the spread of English is illustrative here. This local language (English) globalizes, and in doing so prevents the spread of other potential globalizing localisms, such as French, while re-localizing or distorting local languages. Here we can think of the way English words have penetrated many local languages and how many localized languages are being systematically eliminated (c.f. Phillipson 1992; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000).² A further example is the way Coca Cola and McDonalds and other fast food products have broken down local cultural eating habits (Schlosser 2002) as these MNCs have extended production and distribution across the world. When we examine a process of globalization, we need to simultaneously explore processes of re-localization as their inevitable counterpart: neoliberalism spreads as Keynesianism shrinks. The global and the local are not, therefore, binary opposites but two sides of the same globalizations coin (Gibson-Graham 2002).

The second key point concerns power differentials involved in processes of globalization. Time–space compression, which is often presented as a key aspect of globalization, contains key power differentials within it. Time–space compression refers to the annihilation of space through time, whereby technological advances and new organizational practices reduce spatial and temporal distances and allow for a radical change in the parameters under which capitalism operates (Harvey 1989). One striking example of this has been the phenomenon of call centres located in countries such as India where labour costs are far cheaper than in the core, developed nations. The distance between Western consumers and Indian service providers are made less relevant by virtue of advanced information technology. Distance and time, which would have previously prevented this activity, have thus been removed as an obstacle (compressed) through technological advances thus allowing for the outsourcing of labour, which would previously have taken place within the confines of the nation-state, hence changing the parameters of the possible and economically feasible.

Santos (1999) calls for an exploration of the relations of power within ‘time– space compression’, arguing that it is not a neutral process, and while some population groups are in control of these processes, others are less so. Financial elites are better able to take charge of ‘time–space compression’ and turn it to their advantage, while refugees and migrant workers, though moving, are much less in control of that movement. Another example of this differential power relation that is implicit in ‘globalizations’ is that key contributors to processes of globalization may be confined to certain locales. Santos (ibid.) offers two examples from Latin America to illustrate this: the drug growers of Colombia and Bolivia (who contribute to the globalization of a drug culture, but are bounded in local circumstances), and the urban poor in Brazil (who are trapped in poverty but see their musical culture exported globally). Examining the basis of unequal social relations characterized by asymmetries in power is thus crucial to an understanding of the uneven nature of globalization processes.

These unequal global power relations often mean that core, developed countries specialize in ‘globalized localisms’, while ‘localized globalisms’ are generally imposed on the peripheral ‘less developed nations’. This definition of globalization assists in understanding how the local/global relationship is mutually constituted and riven with differences in power. It also begins the process of pinpointing ‘power’ and its unequal distribution within the contemporary world. What is less clear, however, in Santos’s exposition, are the differential power relations within and between ‘globalized localisms’ such as neoliberalism, human rights, democracy, fast food consumption and so on. Are they equally important? Do some ‘globalized localisms’ dominate, and should we be more concerned about certain forms of globalization than others? Furthermore, while Santos provides a clear conceptual framework for understanding differential power relations between North and South for accounting for the preponderance of globalized localisms coming from the developed North, he is less attentive to explaining unequal power relations within and among nation-states and between social classes. For us, however, what is vital is the necessity of treating globalization in the plural (globalizations) and recognizing that there are many forms of globalization. This allows us then to articulate why the badly named ‘anti-globalization’ movement is actually an ‘alter’ globalization movement, and that the struggle is not against the ‘global’,but against particular forms of globalization – neoliberalism being the current dominant form – and for alternative modes of globalization, particularly the globalization of solidarity, social struggle, social justice and popular resistance, in all its varied forms.

Globalizations, thus, for us can serve as a ‘meta’ concept for a whole range of transnational processes that are taking place, which collectively reflect the sense that we are in a period of global transition, the outcomes of which will be ‘determined by “struggle” and “contest”’’. This conceptualization perhaps explains the re-emergence of interest in Polanyi’s classic work The Great Transformation (1957), which described an earlier period of profound change – the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, Munck (2002) talks of the ‘Globalization Revolution’ in precisely those terms. Polanyi described the miraculous development of the tools of production that were, however, accompanied by a profound and catastrophic dislocation of ordinary people’s lives. His focus was on the relationship between market and society as he explored the destructive nature of the notion of a ‘self-regulated market’ and talked of this as a ‘market dystopia’ that would destroy both man and nature if it were not countered by the self-defence mechanisms of society (Polanyi 1957: 3). This process of societal defence to the destructive nature of the market was known as the ‘double-movement’, whereby the market was tamed and placed firmly under the control of societal institutions. One key mechanism for the taming of this ‘market dystopia’ was working class struggle and the organized labour movement, and it is our hope that the labour movement can once again reemerge as both a source of collective power and a real provider of development alternatives, a point we will turn to in the next chapter. Prior to that, we now wish to focus in more detail, on neoliberalism, as the hegemonic form of globalization of our era, which has had profound implications for labour organizing and the wellbeing of the working class.

Understanding neoliberal globalization

Neoliberalism is the contemporary variant of that same neoclassical economic theory which so troubled Polanyi. The theory argues that societies function best when the market is left alone to determine distribution, production and consumption patterns. Derived from the neoclassical economic thought of Adam Smith and developed by Hayek and Milton Friedman, neoliberalism in its contemporary form emerged onto the international scene in the late 1970s, with the election of Margaret Thatcher and later Ronald Reagan. In Latin America, it appeared several years earlier and far more brutally in the wake of the military coup in Chile carried out by General Pinochet and backed by the United States. At its heart, neoliberalism represents a commitment to the primacy of markets and a belief that competition, both among business and in the provision of public services, best fosters growth and is the most efficient basis for social distribution.

Drawing on Harvey’s (Harvey 2005b, 2005a, 2006) understanding of neoliberalism as a strategic class proje...