Lecture Outline,  The Hague, May 28, 2008. By Peter Waterman

1. Introduction

a.    Rather than a general argument concerning the Marxist understanding of the labour movement, this is a consideration of what happened to the specifically Marxist (and general socialist) understanding of the role of this movement in the contemporary struggle for human emancipation

b.    It is also a consideration of the contemporary role of labour and unions within the contemporary global justice and solidarity movement - a movement in which they have so far played only a marginal role.

c.    It is necessary to keep in mind, in what follows, the difference between

•    ‘organisation’ and ‘movement’, or ‘event’ and ‘movement’, and thus between

•    the trade union organisation and the labour movement,

•    between the World Social Forum and the global justice and solidarity movement.

The significance of the differentiation might seem obvious but for many on the Left, the 19th-20th century union organization is often conflated with the labour movement (or seen as its core or anchor) and the increasingly institutionalized WSF is often conflated with the – admittedly amorphous - GJ&SM (or seen as its highest expression).

2. Why was labour ever considered the privileged bearer of global social emancipation?

a.    Wage-labourers in modern capitalist industry were, in the time of Marx and Engels, the new, growing, mass, modern, propertyless, labouring class, often without national citizenship, but increasingly with their own organizations, culture and forms of protest

b.    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 ‘dictatorship of  the proletariat’ (a reversal of the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’)

c.    Marx and Engels provided the sophisticated theoretical underpinnings, with the human being understood as homo faber (man the maker), the concepts of

•    alienation and exploitation - or alienation primarily as exploitation in the wage-labour relationship
•    of class struggle as the moving force of history,
•    of capitalism as the highest stage of class society,
•    the state as the executive of the ruling class,
•    of capitalism/imperialism as spreading worldwide,
•    of internationalism as necessary to surpass this,
•    of a working-class led socialist revolution as the beginning of history

d.    Workers and unions took international solidarity action, also on broader democratic or popular issues, since national laws did not protect them, they had no vote, they were often immigrants or colonials.

e.    They also provided the base for major international/ist organisations, publications and an international working-class/socialist culture.

f.    Their utopia, in the words of a German Communist song of the 1930s was eine sozialistisches weltrepublik  - a socialist world republic (a single world socialist state)

1.    ‘The forward march of labour halted’ (Hobsbawm 1978)

a.    Working-class organization, by unions or parties been increasingly affected by: decentralization, re-structuring and re-location; by individualization and consumerism; by physically aggressive and/or ideologically seductive strategies of capital-and-state, by union-smashing and union-incorporation.

b.    Socialism, in its three major competing/warring varieties (Communist, Social-Democratic, Populist or Radical-Nationalist) turned out to be productivist, statist, militarist, patriarchal, racist, ecologically destructive and thus part of the problem socialism was originally conceived as solving

c.    Marxism, inheriting both religious and enlightenment beliefs and behaviours, foisted on the industrial proletariat Promethean qualities, capacities and potentials that it has only occasionally and momentarily  demonstrated – primarily in early- or marginally-industrialised societies (Paris 1871, Russia 1917, China tomorrow?)

d.    Internationalism is etymologically - and often turned out to be historically – to be inter-nationalism (a relationship between nations, nationals, nationalists and nationalisms). Union internationalism in the 20th century increasingly reproduced or echoed the international relations of capital and state

e.    The very privileging of the labour movement (however identified or defined), has worked to isolate it from other social movements, either as a corporate special-interest group or as revolutionary elite leading the other popular classes or identities

f.    And the awarding to labour of this Herculean task tended to give to socialist intellectuals and politicians the Marxist-Leninist/Fabian right to define the ‘real’ interests and ‘true’ consciousness of workers who both locally and historically demonstrate quite other identities, interests and beliefs.

2.    The dual challenge to labour of globalisation and the GJ&SM

a.    Globalisation/informatisation/networking has represented the most radical subversion, marginalisation and disorientation of the labour movement – of workers, of unionism, of socialism, of Marxism, of internationalism - in 200 years

b.    The initial international union response to globalisation ranges from ‘concession-bargaining’, to attempts to revive at global level a junior partnership with capital and/or state – and occasional bitter resistance

c.    The initial international union response to the GJ&SM was defensive/aggressive/dismissive, shifting to recognition, pragmatic or occasional alliance, talk of partnership (though customarily without abandoning or aspiring to a junior partnership with capital and state)

d.    Unions are nonetheless increasingly active on labour rights, against privatization, on women’s and child labour, on ‘atypical labour’ (i.e. increasingly typical labour), HIV-AIDS, environmental issues, and on community issues more generally.

e.    Customarily, however, such outreach has not implied any reconceptualisation of the labour movement as an equal amongst others, nor a radical transformation of the union organization into what has been called ‘the virtual union of the future’ (Hyman 1999)

f.    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 national, regional and international networks, sometimes explicitly within the GJ&SM:

•    Rural labour (e.g. Via Campesina)
•    Sex workers  (e.g. the Network of Sex Work Projects)
•    Immigrant labour (e.g. the new Transnational Migrant Network)
•    Women, street, homeworkers (e.g. StreetNet International)
•    Child workers  (e.g. Global March against Child Labour)
•    Housewives, domestic and careworkers (e.g. IRENE)
•    The ‘precariat’ (e.g. Euro Mayday http://www.euromayday.org/)

g.    Increasing numbers of labour research and resource centres, increasing numbers of socialist writers (Marxists, Autonomists, Feminists, Ecologists), are re-thinking labour, unions, labour internationalism, the labour movement, in relation to the latest phase of capitalism (Gorz 1989, Hardt and Negri 2004, Tronti 2009, Hyman 1999, Ledwith 2006).

h.    The increasing spread and deepening of capitalist relations has created a growing multiplicity of experiences of alienation, of the collective subjects of such, and of protests way beyond the wage-labour relation, with social movements around, for example:

•    Environment
•    Indigenous peoples
•    Women (see, Women’s Global Charter for Humanity)
•    Sexuality
•    Culture
•    Cyberspace
•    Militarism and War
•    Ethnicity
•    Commodification
•    Debt
•    Housing
•    Imperialism/empire/capitalist globalisation
•    (have I forgotten anything important?)

3.    The ambiguities of the partnership between the international union organisations and the GJ&SM

a.    There is an apparent opposition between what is considered

•    the ‘old reformist, bureaucratic, institutionalized, representative-democratic international unions’  on the one hand and

•    the ‘new, emancipatory, networked, participatory-democratic GJ&SM’’ on the other.

b.    However, this can not be reduced to a Manichean opposition between vice and virtue. Such differences and tensions run, unevenly, through both.

c.    The tension is more evident in the union-WSF relationship – i.e. between the two more-or-less definable entities

d.    The relationship is, in part, one of mutual instrumentalisation – each one using the other for its own pre-defined purposes.

    Thus the new International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) uses the WSF to launch and get civil society endorsement for its ‘Decent Work’ campaign (actually an interstate project of the International Labour Organisation).

    The WSF can feel it has the endorsement of the ITUC’s 170 million members (who do not, however, know how or even that the ITUC represents them)

e.    Moreover, we are talking of a relationship – asymmetrical on many axes - between a 19th-20th century set of representative-democratic institutions and a 21st century event, a space of dialogue; between a set of organizations with a long dependency on capital and state, and one still seeking new forms of autonomy from such.

f.    Yet the question remains open of whether the unions will reinforce an old social-partnership tendency that also exists within the WSF, or will re-invent themselves as part of the emancipatory tendency within and around the WSF.

4.    Conclusion: The necessity of an intensive dialectic and dialogue

a.    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

b.    Even for self-defence unions need to recover and re-invent themselves as a radically-democratic social movement, with a distinct moral and cultural message, and a post-capitalist utopia.

c.    The WSF needs to be moved from its 80% university-educated community towards an 80% popular one

d.    The general GJ&SM needs to move from occasionally seeing ‘Teamsters and Turtles Together’ to a continuing and dynamic relationship between such parties.

e.    There is a need for a new global labour movement that addresses and involves the 80% of un-unionised and/or non-unionisable labour that is open, flexible, networked and capable of effective action against contemporary forms of capital, state, militarism, ecological destruction, consumerism, imperialism, patriarchalism, racism.

Peter Waterman
p.waterman@inter.nl.net

References, Bibliography and Other Resources

General

Appeal of Bamako (Labour Chapter). 2006. ‘The Bamako Appeal’, (see Sen and Kumar 2007).

Fletcher Jr, Bill and Fernando Gapasin. 2008. Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fonow, M. M. and S. Franzway. 2004. ‘Union Feminism and Transnational Labor Advocacy Networks’ Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Hilton San Francisco & Renaissance Parc 55 Hotel, San Francisco, CA, Online

Galdon, Gemma. 2006. ‘Low-Cost Generation?’, Eurotopia/Red Pepper, June 2006.

Gorz, Andre. 1989. ‘Critique of Economic Reason: Summary for Trade Unionists and Other Left Activists’.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. 2004.

Hearse, Phil. 200?. ‘Has working class consciousness collapsed? The “’crisis of the working class subject”’, International Viewpoint: News and Analysis from the Fourth International.

Hyman, Richard. 1999. ‘Imagined Solidarities: Can Trade Unions Resist Globalisation?’,

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1978. ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’, Marxism Today, September. And: http://www.amielandmelburn. org.uk /collections/mt/pdf/78_09_hobsbawm.pdf

Labour’s Platform for the Americas. 2005.

Ledwith, Sue. 2006. ‘The Future As Female? Gender, Diversity and Global Labour Solidarity’, in Phelan, C. (ed) The Future of Organised Labour. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Porcaro, ‘Labour and Life’, Transform! pdf

Sen, Jai and Madhuresh Kumar (with Patrick Bond and Peter Waterman) (eds). 2007. A Political Programme for the World Social Forum: Democracy, Substance and Debate in the Bamako Appeal and the Global Justice Movement. New Delhi: Cacim, Durban: Centre for Civil Society. 501 pp.

Therborn, Goran. 2007. ‘After Dialectics: Radical Social Theory in a Post-Communist World’, New Left Review, No. 43, pp. 63-114.

Tronti, Mario. 2009. “‘The Anti-G20 Protests Lacked Politics’, Mario Tronti interviewed by Tonini Bucci”, Autonomedia.

Women’s Global Charter for Humanity. 2004.

Worker Solidarity and Unions. Marxist Internet Archive.

Personal (and online)

Waterman, Peter. 1998/2001. Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms. London : Mansell/Cassell. 302 pp.

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.

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. Pdf.

Waterman, Peter. 2006. ‘Toward a Global Labour Charter for the 21st Century’ and here

Waterman, Peter. 2007. ‘Reviving Labour as a Sword of Justice: Labour at the World Social Forum, Nairobi, January 20-25, 2007’.

Waterman, Peter. 2008.  ‘International Labour Studies in the UK’, in Work Organisation Labour and Globalisation, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 180-200.

Waterman, Peter. 2009. ‘Labour at the 2009 Belem World Social Forum: Between an Ambiguous Past and an Uncertain Future’,  Pdf.

URLs

Assembly on Labour and Globalisation (Nairobi WSF 2007).
Decent Work, Decent Life.
E-Library for Social Transformation.
Euro Mayday
Labour and Globalisation (WSF Project)
Global Labor Strategies.
Global March Against Child Labour.
Global Working Class Project.
Industrial Restucturing Network Europe (IRENE).
Euromarches.
StreetNet International.
Transnational Migrant Network.
Waterman Papers on Choike

Labour, Peter Waterman