Saturday, December 31, 2005
Essays, Damn Quotes and Conclusions.
The doggedly torturous affair that was my recent bout of essay writing finally ended two days before Xmas. Its one thing that perplexes me about Equality Studies, and the students doing it. Last year the courses format for examining students was take home essays, where students had three days to write two 2,000 word pieces on their various topics, the idea was plausible, simply set two hours of your time aside and treat the thing like it were an on the spot exam in a hall, except with the privilege of having access to your notes and more. Not surprisingly, the class managed over the years to up the quality of the essays it was doing, so that what was being handed up equated in format and style the sort of academic essays people prepare over a month or more. So here we were this year with a different format, where all the essays were handed out and a three week deadline placed a head of us. Due to some mucking about with the course schedule this meant I had six to do. Usually doing essays can be a relatively enjoyable experience, being forced to research areas I traditionally wouldn't express an interest in, this was a much more tedious experience of drumming out an essay ever three days to keep up with the tedium of the deadline bearing down on me. Throw working into the mix, and fecking hell, it weren't the easiest thing to do in the world.The essay topics were varied, stretching as they did across Critical legal theory, social policy and feminist theory. Some of the stuff I got to research will no doubt be of use for articles somewhere along the way, as is the case with the one about Copyright legislation, housing and how migrant workers are treated under Irish legislation. Apart from being an interesting theoretical excursion into feminism and some Marxism, I can't really see much of a use for the discussions of the Domestic mode of production, the rant about Cultural turn in feminism or that old chestnut for undergrad social policy types the future of the welfare state.
Labels: Academic
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Monday, December 19, 2005
Outfoxed: Gagging Online Whispering.
A powerful expose of the intersection between elite interests and the ideological bias of Murdoch’ s Fox News network, Outfoxed performs the same function as Michael Moore’s work. Picking up key themes and running them to death, to expose the obscene manipulation of the American public through such slogans as ‘fair and balanced’ reportage. Diana Winthrop, a former Fox News producer describes being ‘ordered, from the top, to carry propaganda; carry Republican right-wing propaganda.’ Of guests on its leading show Special Report, between January and May last year, there was a greater than 8 to 1 imbalance in favour of Republicans. Fox News seems to epitomise where much of the global media is being pushed. Aesthetically, the network is a blizzard of information over-load, updates prowl along the bottom of the screen while newscasters mouth off in split screen boxes against glaring graphical backdrops of American patriotism. Despite an onscreen abundance of ‘news’ and ‘fact’, tuning in to Fox news prompts seeds of mental dissension, you are staring into the face of elite bias and content and its as obvious as the American flag in the background.The success of films like Outfoxed, the Corporation and those by Moore are evidence that a wide section of the population are increasingly sceptical. When elite interests and the media intersect, more of us expect propaganda. But as the recent US Elections show, substantial portions of the population are still shaped by a socialisation process that occurs throughout our lives, that equates the free market with a free media. Outfoxed leaves no one in doubt that corporate power is waging a war against journalistic freedom. Something Outfoxed ignores, but far from paranoiac fantasy is the state’s simultaneous attack on noncompliant media activists and networks.
Most dramatically, in an act Mark Thomas compared to smashing up printing presses, the FBI seized two Indymedia servers, crippling part of the network for a brief period in November. There’s some evidence that the Swiss authorities requested it to cover up the publication of photos of undercover police agent provocateurs in action in Geneva protests. The seizures have also disrupted evidence gathering for legal action against the Italian authorities after a violent police raid on a media centre during the Genoa protests of 2001. In the US Indymedia was the centre of failed legal attempts by the Diebold corporation, to prevent publication of flaws in electronic voting terminals for use in the recent US elections. Back here, the Indymedia network has been pivotal in uncovering the use of Shannon Airport as a stop over for the US Military, as well as undermining state hysteria around such events, as Mayday when it was accessed a million times and the Bush visit.
These raids aren’t a once off. The more obvious context is a background of similar state led offensives against the development of non-corporate media networks. In what’s being dubbed a ‘model for the world’ by Miami authorities, at recent protests reporters were embedded with state forces, as in Iraq. Those refusing to be embedded are often on the receiving end of repression or delegitimised. Cops shouted "she's not with us, she's not with us" at Ana Nogueira, a reporter for the grassroots TV Network, Democracy Now as she was hauled off reporting as police broke up a demo of 200 people. The City Council had forbidden gatherings of seven or more. Before the run up to the Republican National Congress police from several NY Departments raided and shut down an Indymedia benefit screening. In the summer of 2004 Indymedia founding member Lenin Cali Najera of Equador was murdered. Colleagues suspect a robbery was faked as cover for a political assassination, carried out by right wing paramilitaries. Again, in Cyprus a major national scandal broke after police admitted to investigating Petros Evdokas and Indymedia at the behest of the CIA, after he published material claiming American interference in a referendum on the island
Obviously the music industry feels the effects of peer to peer file sharing networks, and takes action against them. Sometimes this is illegal. As a recent Australian court case found, sections of the industry were hiring people to paralyse peer-to-peer networks with fake files. It should be no surprise that political and corporate elites are also feeling the impact of radical journalism online. The dynamic between the establishment media and the insurgent electronic media is interesting. After a police raid on the Indymedia Centre in Genoa in 2001, The Daily Mail wrote an article accusing a hospitalised media activist of being "in charge of computer systems used to co-ordinate attacks on the G8 summit." Like wise only a handful of mainstream press outlets covered the Indymedia server seizures despite it being condemned by a huge range of Journalistic Unions and brought up in the British Commons. In a similar manner Watergate era US media giants ignored extensive bugging and actions against the US left, only becoming concerned when they were directed against the Democrats, as one faction of power.
Organisations close to the US state were quick to recognise the potential of new media technologies in creating popular mobilisations. Within reason, anyone can put up a website, so ideologies and interest groups previously isolated from traditional media can now challenge its dominance. The RAND Corporation, a think tank linked to the US Military warned of the development of ‘all channel’ network designs that facilitate equal access to knowledge and its production. New networks facilitated by the net ‘will pitch battles for public opinion and for media access and coverage, at local through global levels.” Already the role of this new media has been dramatic. RAND noted how online medias prevented the Mexican State from turning the Zapatista Chiapas Rebellion of 1994, into a bloodbath similar to the Mexico City University occupation of ‘68, more worrying for RAND was the ripple effect the rising had in coalescing radical activism globally. The fact that ‘there is no single, central leadership, command, or headquarters—no precise heart or head that can be targeted” worries repressive state mechanisms that could previously target key figures or organisations, in tactics best characterised by the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO operation to ‘disrupt, discredit and destroy’ the new left in the sixties.
If social conflicts were to arise in Western countries, it would be increasingly difficult for any state to monopolise information in order to isolate hot spots. The targeting of San Francisco’s business district for action by anti-war activists the day bombs fell on Iraq and the mass arrests of 3,000 people undermined the images of patriotism generated by the US State. Those that wanted to get around the lack of mainstream media coverage could, mainly through online journals. South Korea’s most popular media outlet is called OhMyNews, an online portal with the motto ‘every citizen is a reporter.’ Already it’s been attributed responsibility for shifting the balance of power to liberals in a presidential election through mobilising youth.
As with the Charterist movement that developed around the 19th Century radical British Press, a mobilising media is a worry to elites, with its threat of awakening once passive parts of the population. Increasingly the modern mainstream media primarily exists to deliver adverts to a passive consumer, for political elites its there to deliver official lines to a passive population. For states and corporations, the development of a radical online journalism deliberately uprooting the elitism of traditional medias, inviting the unwashed to define their own interests and symbolically turning the world upside down is a worry. For once mobilised, its rare a population shares the same interests as its corporate and political rulers. As it stands these sites are whispering, but the potential is there for them to begin screaming.
Another more academic version of this article is availible over here
Labels: Academic, Film, Media, Politics
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Thursday, December 08, 2005
Just After Watching Sophie Scholl and In Anticipation Of My Review Here's An Old Article On Nazism.
When discussing National Socialism and the German working class; there's no room for romantic accounts of history, its not about matters of myth or dead heroes alive again in effigy. One thing is clear; a class which had consistently risen throughout Germany in the wave of revolution between 1918 and 1923 failed to produce one large scale strike similar to those that broke out in Turin in 1943 under Mussolini, no peppering of exemplary acts against state agents co-ordinated by a revolutionary underground such as those in Russia under the Tsar, that there was no large scale sabotages of armaments plants or no out breaks of rioting against Storm trooper patrols in working class communities throughout twelve years of a regime which facilitated the most brutal repression against working class people leaves us with many complex questions but only one clear answer. With a secret police producing nearly 1,000 arrests of workers per week; it is clear that with all the vehement hatred contained in National Socialism, it could identify its potentially most dangerous enemy as the German working class itself.There are four complex but interweaving strands which facilitated the solidification of the National Socialist regime between January 1933 and June 1934. The central locomotive driving the discussion of these four themes are the containment and neutralisation of the working class by National Socialism. The methods employed ranged from attempts to buy off the class through refusing to launch the aggressive attack on wages expected by business and maintaining and extending elements of the social welfare system which had become a feature of Weimar which riled capital with its fear of a 'trade union economy' to out right terroristic repression.
Haunted by the memory of 1918 and the general strike which brought the Kapp Putsch to it's knees National Socialism saw itself foaming at the mouth with impatience to smash the traditional socio-cultural structures of working class solidarity when it came to power in January 1933. The destruction of the working class's overt political structures; as they manifested themselves in both offensive forms as reformist and revolutionary political tendencies and in the defensive organs of the trade union movement proved an immediate agenda of National Socialism under Hitler as it strove to solidify power. The Reichstag fire attributed to the Dutch Communist Van Der Lubbe can be understood as a strategy of tension orchestrated by the SS, Goering was later to boast of it. A ploy similar in many ways to that used in Italy in the late seventies and again finding expression in the media hype surrounding the recent supposed anarchist letter bombings directed at Prodi. That is a pretext for creating an atmosphere of political upheaval and tension which serves to generate, justify and flame repression against those it is claimed is creating the disorder. A parallel can be seen in the myths of a massacre of 70 policemen in Lichtenberg, which fanned FreiCorp's repression in the wake of the March 4th, 1919 General Strike, resulting in 1,500- 2,000 deaths. The ushering in of the 'Emergency Decree for the Protection of the People and The State' saw the swift banning of the Communist Party and arbitrary attacks on the workers' movement by police and SA.
Later in the year the regime in a typical attempt to assimilate elements of working class culture declared May 1st a holiday and oversaw huge labour demonstrations, the official organ of the German TUC, Gewerhschaftszeitung, published an article for its May Day edition naively assuming that they 'certainly need not strike our colours in order to recognise that the victory of National Socialism, though won in struggle against (the Social Democrats)...is our victory as well.' In his dairy Goebbels wrote: 'Tomorrow we will occupy the trade union buildings. There will be little resistance'. He was right, the oldest workers' movement in the world was smashed and on June 22nd the Social Democrats too found themselves removed from the political equation. Deprived of its traditional armoury of resistance and opposition in the structures the working class had fostered; militants were forced to operate in an illegality which bore no resemblance to that expected for the regime was to go all out and attempt whole scale restructurings of the working class environment and a taming of the power of national socialist labour organisations.With this elimination of organised political opposition came a restructuring of industrial relations along National Socialist lines which while not eliminating struggle at the coal face of the class struggle, sought to inoculate ideas of the Gemeinschaft (National Community) into the class which created a façade which theoretically at least neutralised ideas of class conflict in industry. Organising industry along lines outlined in the Arbeitsordnungsgesetz (AOG) enacted on January 20th 1934. The AOG defined the workplace as
Betreibsgemeinschaft, the smallest element in the wider national community, with a feudal relationship between boss and worker promoting a non material bond of loyalty midst capitalist modes of production. Schwenger, one of the architects of Nazi industrial policy described its aims 'to pacify the workforce, eliminate disputes, remove the objective grounds for social tension...to foster national ideas and to reject class conflict.' (1) The AOG plays a key role in highlighting the regimes attitude to the working class and its attempts to solidify power. Through the act the regime attempted a fundamental restructuring of attitudes to work. Hitler described how there as no need to socialise industry when one could socialise people, Robert Ley the head of the Nazi Labour Movement expanded in describing how 'we must all share in the workplace where we are employed. Share in every stone, every machine, everything. Yes, my friend; of you work there, it belongs to you! In law it may be the property of another, but that means nothing.' (2) The removal of traditional working class modes of representation saw an inability to channel opposition, the ground previously occupied by the trade union movement became occupied by the national socialist Deutsch Arbeitsfont (DAF) with a system of elected Councils of Trust which were theoretically to play an advisory role in the new industrial landscape. A process of breaking down relationships between the class was initiated through greater individualisation through Taylorism and with the advent of competitions like National Vocational Competition which sought to introduce the national socialist organising priniciple of competition among workers as a means to break up traditional notions of solidarity which had provided the backbone of the union movement. Mason uses an example of a mural from the 1934 Berlin Exhibition 'German People- German Labour which attempted to illustrate the AOG, featuring labourers and crafts men working in harmony building a small housing estate undisturbed by class tension or the noise of modern industry.
The AOG offered 'Strength Through Joy' holidays and leisure pursuits organised by firms and the state. However along with these leisure outlets it also offered the Arbeitserziehungslager, concentration camps attached to larger plants which when viewed alongside the Strength Through Joy iniatives can read as something of a signifier for the regimes attitudes to the working class; terror mixed with a willingness to give in to demands and seek a buying off of the working class. The fear of hunger unrests of 1918 saw the regime attempt to maximise supplies by using up foreign exchange which had been set aside for rearmament in the pre-war period, and as Mason suggests added an internal dynamic to the aggressive expansionism of '38-39; using plunder from Poland to satiate demand at home. The encouragement of geographic and industrial mobility has also been seen as partially contributing to the break up of 'red' neighbourhoods which held the potential for providing support for organised movements of workers opposition and resistance. Having eliminated political expression by the class, the Regime went one step further and attempted to reconstitute the class itself, eliminating the dangerous class contradiction of the old working class by socially dispersing it and wiping it out theoretically as a class.
The success of the elimination of a left opposition and resistance to the regime, then opened up the way to an elimination of a potential left opposition within the National Socialist movement itself as represented by the destruction of the Rohm/Strasser tendency of the Sturm Abteilung (SA) and their rhetoric of a 'second revolution' in the so called Knight of the Long Knives. The SA was socially constituted by the petit bourgeoisie and declassed elements from the years of unemployment; it provided the backbone of the National Socialist Movement and had proved an essential component in the outright attacks by the regime between March and June 1934. Historians like Reich and Rohm locate the violence of nazism as rooted in the authoritarian socialisation of middle class childhoods while this may certainly be true, the existence of the SA as a descendent of the FreiCrops which crushed strikes throughout the upheavals of the early Weimar gives testament to its function within the broader spectrum of National Socialism. The anarchist Daniel Guerin gives an eyewitness account of a Nazi Stormtrooper rally in Leipzig in 1933, quoting the ranting demagogue describing how 'we have now but one enemy to vanquish; the bourgeoise. To bad for it if it doesn't want to give in, if it doesn't want to understand.' (3) The Rohm/Strasser tendency of the SA represented an economic left wing of national socialism which took serious the movements promises to end the burden of interest, rent slavery and to nationalise industry. Rhetoric it may have been, but as Nazi Gauleiter Krebs reported that 'any attack on capitalism and plutocracy found the strongest echo among the local functionaries with their middle class origin.’ (4)
Speer mentions something similar in his memoirs, the sole owner of a car in his section 'the other members only expected to have a one after the 'revolution' they dreamed of took place. By way of preparation they were finding out where in the rich suburb the right cars were available for X Day. (5) The SA had provoked tensions along class lines within the movement in the past. In august 1930, Eastern SA units revolted, under the leadership of Walther Stennes. Reasons included payment and problems with the gauleiters and the growing influence of the rival SS. A group in Berlin even attacked Joseph Goebbels offices and beat up the SS men who stood guard. In February 193, Stennes wrote in a letter to Röhm "it is much more important to undertake measures to relieve the economic position of the SA. In Berlin there are regiments containing 67% unemployed. In Breslau a company could not turn out for inspection ... in frost and snow - because it completely lacked footwear". In a speech on 17 June, Franz Non Papen, a centre party renegade and Hitler's Vice Chancellor echoed the sentiment of much of the upper bourgeoisie and capital towards the wave of violence and extra-legal rule by force carried out by an organisation which while existing officially outside the state structure now seemed to share its monopoly of violecnce describing how 'no nation can live in a state of permanent revolution from below...terroristic methods in the field of law.' (6) And it was that Hitler had his 'comrades' in the leadership of the SA liquidated in the Night of the Long Knives. This liquidation of the anti-capitalist elements within National Socialism can be read as a parallel to Mussolini's Concord with the Vatican, that is the Rohm Putsch represented a compact and reapprocahment with capital, the SA's purpose having been served in the wiping out of the labour movement.
While the regime occupied the territories previously occupied by the organs of the working class within industry, and deprived it of political space; another important element which must be discussed and is often underestimated when one speaks of a neutralisation of the working class in the Third Reich is the regimes clear identification of the need to occupy the ground previously held by working class movements within their social and cultural milieus. This was one aspect which both communist and socialist groups did not consider in their preparations for illegality; where they previously could fallback on organic structures of support within communities, now they couldn't. Peukart describes how 'the attempt to nationalise society led to the atomisation of the power structure.' (7) Germany under Hitler saw the intrusion of the state into the various cultural and social milieus of the working class. One of the more interesting campaigns of resistance launched by the KPD (German Communist Party) prior to Januray 1933 was the so-called Kneipe-kampagne, that is the struggle for territorial control of taverns which were been used by the SA to gain a foot hold in working class areas.
This physical occupation of a nodal point of working class life by National Socialism broadens with the regimes solidification of power into the introduction of national socialist based organisations (Strength through Joy etc) to usurp the traditional roles of working class voluntary organisations and associations which organised leisure activities and facilitated mutual aid in working class communities. Part of an overall process of creating a dependence at once on the regime and of neutralising ability or tendencies towards the formation of independent cultural and social outlets; which could theoretically have provided the basis of a workers' resistance to Nazism. This was the recognition that the environments that facilitated working class traditions of struggle and solidarity were as much of a threat to the regime as the more overt and official organs of the class's representation that grew out of them. The increasing individualisation in the factories was compounded by an alienation of the community. As one diary entry states 'And the world? The best thing is to shut your eyes to it and to stop hearing and seeing all the dreadful fuse and bother.' (8) As one report by the underground SPD stated 'the essence of fascist control of the masses is compulsory organisation on the one hand and atomisation on the other.'
Yet, a photo of a National Socialist May Day Celebration in Penzberg in Upper Bavaria, Nazi ranks gathered at the back and miners up front, a mass of straight arm salutes and a scattering of clenched fists attesting to two strands which seem to define working class experience under National Socialism; mobilisation and refusal. (9) Horkheimer, the former director of the Frankfurt Institute, used to say "If you don't want to talk about capitalism, then don't talk about Nazism." As the dynamics of capitalism continued to reproduce itself in industry, so too did the dynamics of working class existence breed and necessitate non-traditional modes of resistance to the regime. As Robert Ley, head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront stated 'the only people who still have a private life in Germany are those who are asleep'; so it is not odd for us to characterise even the simple refusal to cook an Eintopf as opposition; as it was a rescinding of an expected form of consent in the private sphere which became an area in which the class was increasingly forced into retreat from its submission in the public sphere. The KPD's strategy of agitation for mass revolutionary action defined in its slogan of 'after Hitler, us' combined with its attempt to impose a form of centralised organisation developed for struggle under a wholly different context led to devastating setbacks for the resistance.
However new generations of anti-fascists emerged with no memory of the struggles before 1933, some of these such as the Edelweiss Pirates and Meuten groups of anti-authoritarian youths who rejected the culture of the Hitler Youth would become politicised by the occupation of the working class milieu and declare 'eternal war on the Hitler Youth', organising attacks on National Socialist Patrols and engaging in armed attacks on the Gestapo. In industry, a labour shortage of one million people created new opportunities for working class resistance in the forms of go-slows and mass absenteeism. The nature of resistance may have changed, but the battle field remained the same.
National Socialism then essentially solidified its grip on power through the destruction of the political space of the working class in its defensive and offensive organs, by a restructuring of industrial relations along National Socialist lines and attempts to buy off the class through maintenance of wages and increases in living standards. The regime also saw a need for a rapprochement with capital and the middle classes which necessitated the elimination of anti-Bourgeoisie sentiment within National Socialism Itself. Finally the regime sought to occupy the cultural and social space of the working class depriving it of the ability to self organise and hence any nodal points for the growth of resistance through a proliferation of its own organisations.
1 Quoted in Mason, Timothy. Ed. Jane Caplan. Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class; Essays By Tim Mason. (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
2 Quoted in Mason, Timothy. Ed. Jane Caplan. Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class; Essays By Tim Mason. (Cambridge University Press, 1996) P80
3 Guerin, Daniel. The Brown Plague. Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany. (Duke University Press, 1994) P120-122.
4 Hamerquist, Don, Sakai, J, Anti Racist Action Chicago, Mark Salotte. Confronting Fascism; Discussions For A Militant Movement. Kersplebedeb, ARA Chicago, Arsenal Magazine, 2002) P109
5 Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. (Macmillian, New York, 1970) P52
6 Hohne, Heinz. The Order of the Death's Head; The Story of the SS. (Martin Secker and Warburg LTD, 1969)
7 Peukart, Detlev JK. Trans. Richard Deveson. Inside Nazi Germany; Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. (B.T. Batsford LTD, London, 1987) P144
8 Peukart, Detlev JK. Trans. Richard Deveson. Inside Nazi Germany; Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. (B.T. Batsford LTD, London, 1987) P79
9 This image can be found on page three of the illustrations in Peukart, Detlev JK. Trans. Richard Deveson. Inside Nazi Germany; Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. (B.T. Batsford LTD, London, 1987)
Labels: Academic, Film, Politics
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Monday, June 27, 2005
"Debt Is The New Colonialism".
In November 1999, the colonial power of the global north over the global south was dramatically thrown back onto the table of popular politics in the consciousness of citizens in the metropolises of the north. It's easy to take an ironic pleasure in the fact that the facade of a generation's apathy was shattered by anarchists, NGO's, environmentalists and Trade Unionists in what was ubiquitously termed the 'teamster and turtle' alliance amidst barricades in Seattle during the World Trade Organisation's talks there. Seattle after all is the city that gave us such emblematic brands of the 'new economy' such as Microsoft and Starbucks, and also provided much of the soundtrack to the apathy of Generation X in bands like Nirvana and the rest of the grunge wave. For the first time perhaps since the covert aggression of the United States against the Sandanista regime in Nicaruga a generation was awakened to radicalism through geo-political issues complementing their own frustration with the colonisation of their own lives through brand culture and the identities they were forced to live up to. After Seattle, there was what as termed the "Seattle effect" as protests engulfed major institutional meetings such as the IMF meetings in Prague, the EU Summit in Nice, the IMF again in Washington NAFTA in Quebec and in the most dramatic exposition of the limits of such sieges at the G8 Summit in Genoa. While the western media only came to grips with opposition to globalisation when western kids took it on over barricades in Seattle, there has been three decades of struggle against it in the Global south perhaps best exemplified to this generation by the Chiapas uprising or more recently the popular revolt in Argentina.
The Zapatista’s now virtually exercise a monopoly as the symbolic manifestation of struggles in the global south against globalisation. While academics dispute the terminology of globalisation and what it connotes in terms of social organization, the Zapatista’s are poetically clear: “they talk to us about globalisation and we realize that this is what they call this absurd order, where there is only one country - the country of money. Where the frontiers will disappear, not as a result of brotherhood, but through the hemorrhage that fattens the powerful who have no nation. ” Aside from the literary flourishes, one thing is clear from the globalisation process, as Susan George as pointed out the poor are developing the rich due to a neo-colonial weighting of power in global institutions. The hinge or lever upon which this power exerts itself is in the international management of debt.
Through whatever ideological window theorists look there is a common appreciation of globalisation as a triumphant form of capitalism. One that harks back to the classical liberalism of Adam Smith while at the same time pushing beyond the limits of previous forms of capitalism towards a post-modernisation of the economy through the “informatization of production” as Negri and Hardt claim, leading to the sort of 'compression of time and space" pointed out by Harvey. Alongside this succinct idea of globalisation, there is the common perception that the globalisation process arises as the latest culmination of a development discourse centred on economic growth as the chief measurement of success. The PR departments of neo-liberalism like to use the idea of the creation of ‘global village’ as an alternative to the creation of what could alternatively be termed the manufacturing of new enclosures. Classically Marx described how "the tendancy to create the world market is directly given in the concept itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome. " The process of globalisation is one of handing over areas of life previously exempt to the market through WTO lead agreements like Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights and the General Agreement On Trade and Services. Entailed in this is the sidelining of the nation state as a dominant force in the management of economies and the increased prominence of bodies transcending national boundaries be they either bodies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the WTO or indeed trans-national corporations.
Previously, when Lenin described Imperialism as the highest form of capitalism, he was speaking of the subjection of nations by the dominant militaristic states. Historically, the emergence of the Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF and the World Bank occurred in the post World War Two period of decolonisation and the emergence of the Cold War. In this sense the formations of the institutions exemplify how capitalism as a social relationship can respond to struggle against it by altering its form. Instead of direct colonial rule, we now have a rather awkward and hidden rule over the global south whereby colonial power is instituted in a rather indirect post-modern fashion. In an 1980’s Treasury Report an official admitted that the “US was instrumental in shaping the structure and mission of the World Bank along Western Market lines...for the emergence of a corporate entity with weighted voting...as a charter member and major share holder in the World Bank, the US secured the sole right to a permanent seat on the board of directors. ”
In one sense what one can see here is illumination of myth of development, it is perhaps safer to speak of old colonial masters seeking new reigns of control in the wake of independence struggles. In a similar fashion, given that voting is weighted according to the size of economies the G7 countries control 47% of the votes in the International Monetary Fund. While theoretically the WTO can claim to operate on the basis of one country one vote, decisions are contingent on the consensus of one of the dominant quads, while the notorious Green Room negotiations exclude developing countries. On the Washington connection to fascism in the global south Chomsky has described how “whatever the attitudes of the US Leadership towards freedom at home...systematic polices to the third world countries make it evident that the alleged commitment to democracy and human rights is mere rhetoric, directly contrary to actual policy. The operative principle has been and remains economic freedom, meaning freedom for US business to invest, sell and repatriate profits. ” Much as Trumann viewed the Marshall Plan in Europe as means of averting the consolidation of communism, development ideology was used to consolidate US influence in the Global South.
It is now necessary to reflect on how the debt crisis hanging over from the development era acts as the pivotal point of this new form of colonial dominance. An OECD report describes how between 1982 and 1990 flows of capital going to developing countries amounted to $927 billion, yet in the same period of time $1,345 billion flowed from the south to the north, what Susan George points out to be the astonishing equivalent of six Marshall plans . Such extraordinary figures of debt facilitate the exercise of mechanism’s of control and discipline over populations in the global south in the interests of corporations repatriating profits to the north through several methods. In the first place, much of this debt has been taken on by elites in the south which have encountered huge resistance within their own territories. Even before the colonial break ups, one of the first major debt packages from the World Bank was to the Netherlands in 1947 as they were putting down an independence rising in Indonesia with 100,000 troops, this pattern of indirectly funding the policing of the south through corrupt and murderous regimes carries past the decolonizing high point of 1960 to the organisation today. It is clear that such levels of debt then incurred by such regimes facilitate the imposition of Structural Adjustment Packages by the IMF when they reach crisis point. In the rest of this essay I will look at the use of debt as a mechanism of control in facilitating the policing of the global south in the interests of the neo-colonial ambitions of western economic interests, how debt is used as an excuse to create new enclosures and force populations to abandon traditional subsistence based economics and finally to impose neo-liberal austerity on populations of subjected countries.
The history of the World Bank is peppered with the financing of regimes which suppress brutally the populations subject to them in the interests of western economic interests. From a chronology provided by Eric Touissant, it is quite telling just how selectively the Bank has made political judgements in the extension of loans. Through out the 1960’s the Bank financed the apartheid regime in South Africa despite various rulings from the United Nations, and despite killing 500,000 people it also extended loans to the Suharto regime in Indonesia. Most telling in this litany is the Bank’s 1964 refusal to provide loans to the democratic Goulart government of Brazil and then the manner it rushed in to give loans to a military coup. There was a similar experience in Chile, where money was extended to the Pinochet regime after the murderous coup against the progressive Allendian regime’s “Chilean road to socialism” which was refused aid. As part of the climate of the Cold War the extension of finance as a means of determining what regimes are acceptable to western colonial economic interest becomes obvious from the Chilean example.
For the establishment at the time the possibility of a social democratic route to socialism was a nerve wracking thought, one which could spread to other areas of interest in the hemisphere. The moves to nationalise the American Anaconda Copper company which controlled the Chilean mine industry, caused obvious discomfort to American elites, who through the CIA engaged in political subversion on the ground and through financial institutions vied to “make the economy scream. ” The Pinochet regime emerged, with its programme of neo-liberal shock therapy courtesy of the Chicago Boy. Which opened up and made the economy safe for American economic elites through wide scale privatisation and a state downgraded to its brute repressive form - World Bank financing of the regime renewed. When the phantasm of the ’economic miracle’ collapsed amidst a global depression in 1982, the IMF stepped in to further impose austerity, ironically despite Freidmann influenced policies, when major financial institutions were at risk their debts were socialised in a bizarre newspeak socialism for the rich. In the overall context of things it is worth noting that a United Nations Development Programme describes how high arms spenders receive two and a half times more aid per capita than those who spent less on weaponry to police their subject populations on behalf of global economic elites.
Eduardo Galeano, a 1980’s version of Marcos tore away at the “model of life in the consumer society which these days is imposed as a model at the universal level. ” If the logic of the consumer society is the commodification of elements of society that could previously be considered public goods, then it is once again obvious from a chronology of World Bank activity that it favours those projects which run against the prior economics values of populations in the global south, in short it supports a western model of development along industrial capitalist lines. The 1964 Green Revolution launched on the back of a request from India for food aid is the obvious pointer for this discussion in a historical perspective, a move which led to the industrialisation of agriculture and the ridiculous shift to cash crops. As Shiva has described “export oriented agriculture has reduced food security by encouraging a shift from small scale, sustainable production to large scale, non-sustainable industrial production. It also brings changes in ownership over natural resources and means of production, from small autonomous producers/owners to large corporate and commercial interests. ” Elsewhere Cleaver has described how the project of the Green revolution was to destroy peasant society and undercut dissent towards neo-colonial domination . The displacement of 220,000 people after the Upper Krishna dam led to a drop in their incomes of 50% as they were forced into urbanised patterns of work in accordance with a capitalist mode of development. More recently the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights overseen by the WTO encapsulate the neo-colonial creation of new enclosures. Shiva once again describes the dangers of the application of market logic to agriculture in the form of bio-piracy: “two thirds of people in the south depend on free access to biodiversity for their livelihoods and needs. Seventy percent of seed in India is saved or shared farmers seed; seventy percent of healing is based on indigenous medicine using local plants. ”
It may sound flippant, but it is usually quite easy spot countries where the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Packages are at work: they are the ones where populations are most visibly mobilised in street combat with the repressive arms of their respective states. From the past few years the examples are obvious, from the popular uprising against austerity of the IMF in Argentina in December, 2001 and the battle against water privatisation in Bolivia in Cochabamba in the same year. There is quite an obvious reason for these popular revolts, the SAP’s imposed by the IMF wreck havoc on the lives of the populations subjected to them in order to pay back World Bank loans. In Argentina the ‘Washington Consensus’ benefited few apart from the country’s economic elites, unemployment had soared to over 30% in 2000 and the overnight devaluation of the Peso virtually wiped out an entire social class. The sly privatisation of water delivery mechenisms in Cochabamba only benefited the US Bechtal corporation, but has for many symbolised the slash and burn policies of the IMF which tear away at safeguards states may provide their citizens such as public welfare systems in order to open their service provision up to the market. During the Korean Crisis one US Trade Representative could confirm that “the Korea stabilisation package negotiated with the IMF..should help open and expand competition in Korea by creating a more market driven economy...if it continues on the path of reform there will be important benefits not only for Korea but also for the United States. ”
It is quite clear that debt has been used by capital as a method of discipline and control over populations of the global south: facilitating the policing of political options open to populations and ensuring the political loyalty of regimes during the Cold War. That this can be understood in an imperialist framework is easy, if one is given to an analysis of the Bretton Woods institutions as emerging in the period of decolonization in order to facilitate the continued colonial ambitions of economic elites in the west.
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The Zapatista’s now virtually exercise a monopoly as the symbolic manifestation of struggles in the global south against globalisation. While academics dispute the terminology of globalisation and what it connotes in terms of social organization, the Zapatista’s are poetically clear: “they talk to us about globalisation and we realize that this is what they call this absurd order, where there is only one country - the country of money. Where the frontiers will disappear, not as a result of brotherhood, but through the hemorrhage that fattens the powerful who have no nation. ” Aside from the literary flourishes, one thing is clear from the globalisation process, as Susan George as pointed out the poor are developing the rich due to a neo-colonial weighting of power in global institutions. The hinge or lever upon which this power exerts itself is in the international management of debt.
Through whatever ideological window theorists look there is a common appreciation of globalisation as a triumphant form of capitalism. One that harks back to the classical liberalism of Adam Smith while at the same time pushing beyond the limits of previous forms of capitalism towards a post-modernisation of the economy through the “informatization of production” as Negri and Hardt claim, leading to the sort of 'compression of time and space" pointed out by Harvey. Alongside this succinct idea of globalisation, there is the common perception that the globalisation process arises as the latest culmination of a development discourse centred on economic growth as the chief measurement of success. The PR departments of neo-liberalism like to use the idea of the creation of ‘global village’ as an alternative to the creation of what could alternatively be termed the manufacturing of new enclosures. Classically Marx described how "the tendancy to create the world market is directly given in the concept itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome. " The process of globalisation is one of handing over areas of life previously exempt to the market through WTO lead agreements like Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights and the General Agreement On Trade and Services. Entailed in this is the sidelining of the nation state as a dominant force in the management of economies and the increased prominence of bodies transcending national boundaries be they either bodies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the WTO or indeed trans-national corporations.
Previously, when Lenin described Imperialism as the highest form of capitalism, he was speaking of the subjection of nations by the dominant militaristic states. Historically, the emergence of the Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF and the World Bank occurred in the post World War Two period of decolonisation and the emergence of the Cold War. In this sense the formations of the institutions exemplify how capitalism as a social relationship can respond to struggle against it by altering its form. Instead of direct colonial rule, we now have a rather awkward and hidden rule over the global south whereby colonial power is instituted in a rather indirect post-modern fashion. In an 1980’s Treasury Report an official admitted that the “US was instrumental in shaping the structure and mission of the World Bank along Western Market lines...for the emergence of a corporate entity with weighted voting...as a charter member and major share holder in the World Bank, the US secured the sole right to a permanent seat on the board of directors. ”
In one sense what one can see here is illumination of myth of development, it is perhaps safer to speak of old colonial masters seeking new reigns of control in the wake of independence struggles. In a similar fashion, given that voting is weighted according to the size of economies the G7 countries control 47% of the votes in the International Monetary Fund. While theoretically the WTO can claim to operate on the basis of one country one vote, decisions are contingent on the consensus of one of the dominant quads, while the notorious Green Room negotiations exclude developing countries. On the Washington connection to fascism in the global south Chomsky has described how “whatever the attitudes of the US Leadership towards freedom at home...systematic polices to the third world countries make it evident that the alleged commitment to democracy and human rights is mere rhetoric, directly contrary to actual policy. The operative principle has been and remains economic freedom, meaning freedom for US business to invest, sell and repatriate profits. ” Much as Trumann viewed the Marshall Plan in Europe as means of averting the consolidation of communism, development ideology was used to consolidate US influence in the Global South.
It is now necessary to reflect on how the debt crisis hanging over from the development era acts as the pivotal point of this new form of colonial dominance. An OECD report describes how between 1982 and 1990 flows of capital going to developing countries amounted to $927 billion, yet in the same period of time $1,345 billion flowed from the south to the north, what Susan George points out to be the astonishing equivalent of six Marshall plans . Such extraordinary figures of debt facilitate the exercise of mechanism’s of control and discipline over populations in the global south in the interests of corporations repatriating profits to the north through several methods. In the first place, much of this debt has been taken on by elites in the south which have encountered huge resistance within their own territories. Even before the colonial break ups, one of the first major debt packages from the World Bank was to the Netherlands in 1947 as they were putting down an independence rising in Indonesia with 100,000 troops, this pattern of indirectly funding the policing of the south through corrupt and murderous regimes carries past the decolonizing high point of 1960 to the organisation today. It is clear that such levels of debt then incurred by such regimes facilitate the imposition of Structural Adjustment Packages by the IMF when they reach crisis point. In the rest of this essay I will look at the use of debt as a mechanism of control in facilitating the policing of the global south in the interests of the neo-colonial ambitions of western economic interests, how debt is used as an excuse to create new enclosures and force populations to abandon traditional subsistence based economics and finally to impose neo-liberal austerity on populations of subjected countries.
The history of the World Bank is peppered with the financing of regimes which suppress brutally the populations subject to them in the interests of western economic interests. From a chronology provided by Eric Touissant, it is quite telling just how selectively the Bank has made political judgements in the extension of loans. Through out the 1960’s the Bank financed the apartheid regime in South Africa despite various rulings from the United Nations, and despite killing 500,000 people it also extended loans to the Suharto regime in Indonesia. Most telling in this litany is the Bank’s 1964 refusal to provide loans to the democratic Goulart government of Brazil and then the manner it rushed in to give loans to a military coup. There was a similar experience in Chile, where money was extended to the Pinochet regime after the murderous coup against the progressive Allendian regime’s “Chilean road to socialism” which was refused aid. As part of the climate of the Cold War the extension of finance as a means of determining what regimes are acceptable to western colonial economic interest becomes obvious from the Chilean example.
For the establishment at the time the possibility of a social democratic route to socialism was a nerve wracking thought, one which could spread to other areas of interest in the hemisphere. The moves to nationalise the American Anaconda Copper company which controlled the Chilean mine industry, caused obvious discomfort to American elites, who through the CIA engaged in political subversion on the ground and through financial institutions vied to “make the economy scream. ” The Pinochet regime emerged, with its programme of neo-liberal shock therapy courtesy of the Chicago Boy. Which opened up and made the economy safe for American economic elites through wide scale privatisation and a state downgraded to its brute repressive form - World Bank financing of the regime renewed. When the phantasm of the ’economic miracle’ collapsed amidst a global depression in 1982, the IMF stepped in to further impose austerity, ironically despite Freidmann influenced policies, when major financial institutions were at risk their debts were socialised in a bizarre newspeak socialism for the rich. In the overall context of things it is worth noting that a United Nations Development Programme describes how high arms spenders receive two and a half times more aid per capita than those who spent less on weaponry to police their subject populations on behalf of global economic elites.
Eduardo Galeano, a 1980’s version of Marcos tore away at the “model of life in the consumer society which these days is imposed as a model at the universal level. ” If the logic of the consumer society is the commodification of elements of society that could previously be considered public goods, then it is once again obvious from a chronology of World Bank activity that it favours those projects which run against the prior economics values of populations in the global south, in short it supports a western model of development along industrial capitalist lines. The 1964 Green Revolution launched on the back of a request from India for food aid is the obvious pointer for this discussion in a historical perspective, a move which led to the industrialisation of agriculture and the ridiculous shift to cash crops. As Shiva has described “export oriented agriculture has reduced food security by encouraging a shift from small scale, sustainable production to large scale, non-sustainable industrial production. It also brings changes in ownership over natural resources and means of production, from small autonomous producers/owners to large corporate and commercial interests. ” Elsewhere Cleaver has described how the project of the Green revolution was to destroy peasant society and undercut dissent towards neo-colonial domination . The displacement of 220,000 people after the Upper Krishna dam led to a drop in their incomes of 50% as they were forced into urbanised patterns of work in accordance with a capitalist mode of development. More recently the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights overseen by the WTO encapsulate the neo-colonial creation of new enclosures. Shiva once again describes the dangers of the application of market logic to agriculture in the form of bio-piracy: “two thirds of people in the south depend on free access to biodiversity for their livelihoods and needs. Seventy percent of seed in India is saved or shared farmers seed; seventy percent of healing is based on indigenous medicine using local plants. ”
It may sound flippant, but it is usually quite easy spot countries where the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Packages are at work: they are the ones where populations are most visibly mobilised in street combat with the repressive arms of their respective states. From the past few years the examples are obvious, from the popular uprising against austerity of the IMF in Argentina in December, 2001 and the battle against water privatisation in Bolivia in Cochabamba in the same year. There is quite an obvious reason for these popular revolts, the SAP’s imposed by the IMF wreck havoc on the lives of the populations subjected to them in order to pay back World Bank loans. In Argentina the ‘Washington Consensus’ benefited few apart from the country’s economic elites, unemployment had soared to over 30% in 2000 and the overnight devaluation of the Peso virtually wiped out an entire social class. The sly privatisation of water delivery mechenisms in Cochabamba only benefited the US Bechtal corporation, but has for many symbolised the slash and burn policies of the IMF which tear away at safeguards states may provide their citizens such as public welfare systems in order to open their service provision up to the market. During the Korean Crisis one US Trade Representative could confirm that “the Korea stabilisation package negotiated with the IMF..should help open and expand competition in Korea by creating a more market driven economy...if it continues on the path of reform there will be important benefits not only for Korea but also for the United States. ”
It is quite clear that debt has been used by capital as a method of discipline and control over populations of the global south: facilitating the policing of political options open to populations and ensuring the political loyalty of regimes during the Cold War. That this can be understood in an imperialist framework is easy, if one is given to an analysis of the Bretton Woods institutions as emerging in the period of decolonization in order to facilitate the continued colonial ambitions of economic elites in the west.
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"Economic Growth Can Be Social Decline By Another Name."
We are currently living in a period where the dominant ideological vision is the aggressive desire for a complete surrender to the free market. As Susan George has noted this rise of neo-liberalism which first asserted itself as an experiment in the failed economic miracle of Chile under the Pinochet regime is very surprising given that “In 1945 or 1950, if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today's standard neo-liberal toolkit, you would have been laughed off the stage or sent off to the insane asylum. ” Nonetheless, since the collapse of Keynesian economics, amidst the imposition of austerity on debtor countries after the 1982 Crash and the dismantling of the welfare state heralded by Regan and Thatcher in the west, there can be no doubt that if there is one historical project of our time it is that of creating new enclosures economically. Where aspects of life which were once under public control and exempt from market competition are now forced into private hands through the application of pressure from institutions like the World Trade Organization which blaze the legislative path for commodifaction initiatives like the Trade Related Intellectual property Rights and the General Agreement On Trades and Services. That economic growth along such lines entails huge social decline is obvious to anyone with a smattering of current affairs.
As Bourdieu notes there is the abandonment of the tradition of dissent among radical intellectuals. While the decentring discourse of post-modernity has closed the possibility it may have opened up for radical social change in its subversion of the grounds for its own critique, those still maintaining a radical critique echo the one sided mistakes of the Frankfurt School in weighing up the power of capital, but never looking to the counter power from below. Those few writers who do hold up the potential for radical transformation from below tend to be linked to social movements, and illuminate a path academics are slow to take up obsessed with a managerial vision of the world. A piece of movement propaganda from the AdBsuters’ collective jibes that “economists need to learn to subtract” if they are to maintain a role in future sociological anaylsis. A joke maybe, but the adbust points to serious need to attack the idea of economic growth and development both as an ideology and as a method wedded to capitalist modes of production at the expense of the autonomy of those who have currently developed methods of subsistence relatively free of the gargantuan interference of debt and corporations we now associate with the free market. As Reuss describes economists and neo-liberal apologists are engaged in rather obtuse peddling of miracles and amnesia. To uncover how economic growth can be equated with social decline we are required to delve into the memory hole of history and unearth some statistical contradictions, buried social realities and the experiences of those who are the victims of economic growth.
Rightwing Think Tanks globally focus on the experiences of Chile as a laboratory test for their free market ideologies. After the coup against the social democrat Allende, the economic shock therapy of the Chicago School Boys led to the worst recession in the country since the 1930’s. Due to hardcore privatization all but 27 of 507 state enterprises were handed over to the private sector. In 76 the economy began to recover, and entered into the ‘economic miracle’ growing 6.6 percent a year. Of course here is where economists need to learn to subtract, a boom following on from an earlier recession is only recovering lost ground on a net analysis, in reality Chile actually had the second worst growth rate in Latin America between 1975 and 1980 and then there was the disaster of the 1982 recession. When society is just measured as a labour cost some obvious social decline escapes the analysis of economists obsessed with their mantra of “all else being equal.” By 1989, Chile had a poverty rate of 41.2%, while shanty towns grew at an extraordinary rate. Just before the sabotaging of the Allende regime the daily diet of the poorest 40% of the population was 2,019 calories, twenty years later it was down to 1,629. These are of course just statistical pointers, there can be no statistics for the loss of dignity experienced by those who struggled for a better vision of how society could be run only to be brutalized by the Pinochet regime because they violated the economic ambitions of the United States. While Chile heralded the pattern of social decline on the back of neo-liberal growth policies, the pattern the Chilean tale tells is typical of the social decline experienced under such austerity not to mention the elimination or neutralization of traditional means of solidarity and self-protection such political parties and trade unions.
With the obvious failure of the development project in the eighties and its clear harnessing to projects for neo-colonial expansion, a wider critique of the ideology of development itself has been increasingly mooted. Most of these analysis’s are gaining increased prominence due to the increasing visibility of struggles in the global south. Magid Rahnena describes the impact of development and its desire for economic growth using AIDs as a metaphor. She describes vernacular societies, which exhibit the same sort of pre-capitalist structures of a moral economy envisaged in the west prior to primitive capital accumulation: “they have a certain organic consistency in other words their structures are a living tissue of social and cultural relations defining the activities of their members and protecting them against possible dangers…it is the tissue of human solidarities that preserves the communities immune system. ” Shiva has become the best known critic of the effects of this form of capitalist development in western circles given her affinity to Indian social movements. Her critique of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights and the manner in which development has foisted an industrial model of agriculture on populations cuts to the contradictions in the idea that economic growth equates with social progress: “The rich diversity and sustainable systems of food production have been destroyed in the name of increasing food production. However, with the destruction of diversity, rich sources of nutrition disappear. When measured in terms of nutrition per acre, and from the perspective of biodiversity, the so-called “high yields” of industrial agriculture do not imply more production of food and nutrition. ” In 2000, the World Bank commissioned an independent study “Dams and Development” into major hydro electric dam projects which exemplify the trend of development on an industrial capital model. According to ‘The Ecologist’ magazine this study: “provides stark evidence that the world’s 45,000 large dams – which block over half the world’s rivers – have been failed experiments. They have failed to produce as much electricity and water, or control as much flood damage, as their backers claim…They have made up to 80 million people homeless, and their benefits have largely gone to the urban well-off not the rural poor they displace” and how “their effects on eco-systems have been disastrous ”.
Alex Dupey is correct to state that the 'postmodernist trend seeks to replace the central concept of class in the analysis of capitalism. ' Neo-liberalism as a postmodern condition with out doubt has undermined many of the traditional organizations of the working class in the north through breaking up heavy industries in the wake of the struggles of the sixties and seventies and exporting these to the south, leaving us with a heavily non-unionized services sector. Amidst the debate on globalisation as Dash has pointed out, some significant questions arise for those who place themselves on the left, these questions revolve around the manner in which neo-liberalism has reshaped class composition, and the manner in which it has closed many of the ‘opt outs’ movements could previously adopt as a means of contesting power. As Negri asserts, post-modernism in itself has now become both the language and a condition of power. For this reason, the term precarity which has been taken up by some social movements in the global north provides a decent interpretable framework for the global class re-composition neo-liberalism has bred through it's imposition of flexiploitation. Some have defined this "as a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the development of one’s life. This definition permits us to overcome the dichotomies of public/private and production/reproduction and to recognize the interconnections between the social and the economic. ” The debate on precarity is one that is ongoing in the parts of the new social movements, and it is possible to expose how economic growth within a neo-liberal framework has equated to a large degree with social decline using this debate as a framework. The framework is most useful because unlike much analysis in development studies and on the left it does not make the mistake of viewing neo-liberal globalization as a practice whereby northern states just subject southern states, thereby regurgitating the lexicon of national liberation struggles but it provides a lexicon where we can understand neo-liberalism as the imposition of a new work discipline on the multitudes in the metropolises of both the north and south.
In any analysis of how social decline equates with economic growth is important to escape the very statistical language economists speak while recognizing the contradictions within it. EP Thompson exposes the myth of economic growth as being contingent with social advancement in his analysis of the industrial revolution, one of the first serious instances of development, describing its effects on traditional communities: “the loss of status and above all independence for the worker, his reduction to total dependence on the master’s instruments of production; the partiality of the law; the disruption of the traditional family economy; the discipline, monotony, hours and traditions of work; loss of leisure and amenities; the reduction of man to the status of an instrument. ” For economic growth to agree according to the neo-liberalistas, we need to become flexible. The results of this flexibility is illustrated best by El Alto in Bolivia: “Bolivians have become vulnerable to economic shock and displacement especially the rural poor. As a result a demographic revolution is bringing hundreds of thousands from isolated peasant communities to expansive slums like El Alto. With its structural unemployment, incredible population growth, with sprawling miles of substandard housing and incredible social misery, el Alto may represent the near future of Latin American urban life, the era of the mega slum. ”
The flexibility imposed by neo-liberalism as a key requirement for economic growth leads to social decline north and south. With a post-modernisation of the economy, due to technical mobility there is increased scope for transnational corporations to side-line traditional protections against exploitation in society. On a global level, this was represented by a confidential report which seems to confirm much of Susan George's adoption of character in the Lugano Report. The world banks' chief economist Larry Summers called for the exporting of northern polluting industries to the global south describing how: "There are no limits on the planet's capacity for absorption likely to hold us back in the foreseeable future...in my view the economic logic of disposing toxic waste in low income countries is impeccable. " At the same time the creation of new enclosures through TRIP’s and GATS places populations in a precarious position where there is no guarantee of security apart from what they can provide for themselves through work for transnationals. On a global level, this provides an insecure work force which is exemplified by the nightmares of sweat shops and examples such as Nike’s dismissal of 447 of 6,000 workers in Vietnam for engaging in activities to secure a monthly minimum wage of $47. Equally, the increased mobility of capital necessitates a mobility of labour, with social security stripped increasingly there is a labour force unsure of its rights as the case of Brazilian cleaners in Dublin a few years ago raised: “the Brazialians were told that these extremely harsh and exhausting conditions were the way things were in Ireland. They knew no better. They came from a country with no social welfare and little protection for workers. ” More recently the GAMA workers highlight the pattern, amidst the economic growth of the Celtic Tiger which if one is to accept Kieran Allen’s work has benefited few..
With such swathes of the population so clearly absent from the benefits of economic growth, perhaps the biggest indictment of the ideology is the windows towards autonomy from market led growth which parts of society have developed in order to deal with the fallacies of development. Some of the most obvious examples of these are the “shrimp satyagraha" non-violent daily direct action against bio-piracy in India which take seeds or the ‘stolen harvest’ back out of the market and into the commons. Something else which springs to minds is the system of bartering developed to cope with the entrenched failure of the free market in Argentina. With economic growth along capitalist lines benefiting such a small fraction of the global population, the biggest indictment of the social decline prevalent under neo-liberalism is the struggles of the multitudes against it.
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As Bourdieu notes there is the abandonment of the tradition of dissent among radical intellectuals. While the decentring discourse of post-modernity has closed the possibility it may have opened up for radical social change in its subversion of the grounds for its own critique, those still maintaining a radical critique echo the one sided mistakes of the Frankfurt School in weighing up the power of capital, but never looking to the counter power from below. Those few writers who do hold up the potential for radical transformation from below tend to be linked to social movements, and illuminate a path academics are slow to take up obsessed with a managerial vision of the world. A piece of movement propaganda from the AdBsuters’ collective jibes that “economists need to learn to subtract” if they are to maintain a role in future sociological anaylsis. A joke maybe, but the adbust points to serious need to attack the idea of economic growth and development both as an ideology and as a method wedded to capitalist modes of production at the expense of the autonomy of those who have currently developed methods of subsistence relatively free of the gargantuan interference of debt and corporations we now associate with the free market. As Reuss describes economists and neo-liberal apologists are engaged in rather obtuse peddling of miracles and amnesia. To uncover how economic growth can be equated with social decline we are required to delve into the memory hole of history and unearth some statistical contradictions, buried social realities and the experiences of those who are the victims of economic growth.
Rightwing Think Tanks globally focus on the experiences of Chile as a laboratory test for their free market ideologies. After the coup against the social democrat Allende, the economic shock therapy of the Chicago School Boys led to the worst recession in the country since the 1930’s. Due to hardcore privatization all but 27 of 507 state enterprises were handed over to the private sector. In 76 the economy began to recover, and entered into the ‘economic miracle’ growing 6.6 percent a year. Of course here is where economists need to learn to subtract, a boom following on from an earlier recession is only recovering lost ground on a net analysis, in reality Chile actually had the second worst growth rate in Latin America between 1975 and 1980 and then there was the disaster of the 1982 recession. When society is just measured as a labour cost some obvious social decline escapes the analysis of economists obsessed with their mantra of “all else being equal.” By 1989, Chile had a poverty rate of 41.2%, while shanty towns grew at an extraordinary rate. Just before the sabotaging of the Allende regime the daily diet of the poorest 40% of the population was 2,019 calories, twenty years later it was down to 1,629. These are of course just statistical pointers, there can be no statistics for the loss of dignity experienced by those who struggled for a better vision of how society could be run only to be brutalized by the Pinochet regime because they violated the economic ambitions of the United States. While Chile heralded the pattern of social decline on the back of neo-liberal growth policies, the pattern the Chilean tale tells is typical of the social decline experienced under such austerity not to mention the elimination or neutralization of traditional means of solidarity and self-protection such political parties and trade unions.
With the obvious failure of the development project in the eighties and its clear harnessing to projects for neo-colonial expansion, a wider critique of the ideology of development itself has been increasingly mooted. Most of these analysis’s are gaining increased prominence due to the increasing visibility of struggles in the global south. Magid Rahnena describes the impact of development and its desire for economic growth using AIDs as a metaphor. She describes vernacular societies, which exhibit the same sort of pre-capitalist structures of a moral economy envisaged in the west prior to primitive capital accumulation: “they have a certain organic consistency in other words their structures are a living tissue of social and cultural relations defining the activities of their members and protecting them against possible dangers…it is the tissue of human solidarities that preserves the communities immune system. ” Shiva has become the best known critic of the effects of this form of capitalist development in western circles given her affinity to Indian social movements. Her critique of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights and the manner in which development has foisted an industrial model of agriculture on populations cuts to the contradictions in the idea that economic growth equates with social progress: “The rich diversity and sustainable systems of food production have been destroyed in the name of increasing food production. However, with the destruction of diversity, rich sources of nutrition disappear. When measured in terms of nutrition per acre, and from the perspective of biodiversity, the so-called “high yields” of industrial agriculture do not imply more production of food and nutrition. ” In 2000, the World Bank commissioned an independent study “Dams and Development” into major hydro electric dam projects which exemplify the trend of development on an industrial capital model. According to ‘The Ecologist’ magazine this study: “provides stark evidence that the world’s 45,000 large dams – which block over half the world’s rivers – have been failed experiments. They have failed to produce as much electricity and water, or control as much flood damage, as their backers claim…They have made up to 80 million people homeless, and their benefits have largely gone to the urban well-off not the rural poor they displace” and how “their effects on eco-systems have been disastrous ”.
Alex Dupey is correct to state that the 'postmodernist trend seeks to replace the central concept of class in the analysis of capitalism. ' Neo-liberalism as a postmodern condition with out doubt has undermined many of the traditional organizations of the working class in the north through breaking up heavy industries in the wake of the struggles of the sixties and seventies and exporting these to the south, leaving us with a heavily non-unionized services sector. Amidst the debate on globalisation as Dash has pointed out, some significant questions arise for those who place themselves on the left, these questions revolve around the manner in which neo-liberalism has reshaped class composition, and the manner in which it has closed many of the ‘opt outs’ movements could previously adopt as a means of contesting power. As Negri asserts, post-modernism in itself has now become both the language and a condition of power. For this reason, the term precarity which has been taken up by some social movements in the global north provides a decent interpretable framework for the global class re-composition neo-liberalism has bred through it's imposition of flexiploitation. Some have defined this "as a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the development of one’s life. This definition permits us to overcome the dichotomies of public/private and production/reproduction and to recognize the interconnections between the social and the economic. ” The debate on precarity is one that is ongoing in the parts of the new social movements, and it is possible to expose how economic growth within a neo-liberal framework has equated to a large degree with social decline using this debate as a framework. The framework is most useful because unlike much analysis in development studies and on the left it does not make the mistake of viewing neo-liberal globalization as a practice whereby northern states just subject southern states, thereby regurgitating the lexicon of national liberation struggles but it provides a lexicon where we can understand neo-liberalism as the imposition of a new work discipline on the multitudes in the metropolises of both the north and south.
In any analysis of how social decline equates with economic growth is important to escape the very statistical language economists speak while recognizing the contradictions within it. EP Thompson exposes the myth of economic growth as being contingent with social advancement in his analysis of the industrial revolution, one of the first serious instances of development, describing its effects on traditional communities: “the loss of status and above all independence for the worker, his reduction to total dependence on the master’s instruments of production; the partiality of the law; the disruption of the traditional family economy; the discipline, monotony, hours and traditions of work; loss of leisure and amenities; the reduction of man to the status of an instrument. ” For economic growth to agree according to the neo-liberalistas, we need to become flexible. The results of this flexibility is illustrated best by El Alto in Bolivia: “Bolivians have become vulnerable to economic shock and displacement especially the rural poor. As a result a demographic revolution is bringing hundreds of thousands from isolated peasant communities to expansive slums like El Alto. With its structural unemployment, incredible population growth, with sprawling miles of substandard housing and incredible social misery, el Alto may represent the near future of Latin American urban life, the era of the mega slum. ”
The flexibility imposed by neo-liberalism as a key requirement for economic growth leads to social decline north and south. With a post-modernisation of the economy, due to technical mobility there is increased scope for transnational corporations to side-line traditional protections against exploitation in society. On a global level, this was represented by a confidential report which seems to confirm much of Susan George's adoption of character in the Lugano Report. The world banks' chief economist Larry Summers called for the exporting of northern polluting industries to the global south describing how: "There are no limits on the planet's capacity for absorption likely to hold us back in the foreseeable future...in my view the economic logic of disposing toxic waste in low income countries is impeccable. " At the same time the creation of new enclosures through TRIP’s and GATS places populations in a precarious position where there is no guarantee of security apart from what they can provide for themselves through work for transnationals. On a global level, this provides an insecure work force which is exemplified by the nightmares of sweat shops and examples such as Nike’s dismissal of 447 of 6,000 workers in Vietnam for engaging in activities to secure a monthly minimum wage of $47. Equally, the increased mobility of capital necessitates a mobility of labour, with social security stripped increasingly there is a labour force unsure of its rights as the case of Brazilian cleaners in Dublin a few years ago raised: “the Brazialians were told that these extremely harsh and exhausting conditions were the way things were in Ireland. They knew no better. They came from a country with no social welfare and little protection for workers. ” More recently the GAMA workers highlight the pattern, amidst the economic growth of the Celtic Tiger which if one is to accept Kieran Allen’s work has benefited few..
With such swathes of the population so clearly absent from the benefits of economic growth, perhaps the biggest indictment of the ideology is the windows towards autonomy from market led growth which parts of society have developed in order to deal with the fallacies of development. Some of the most obvious examples of these are the “shrimp satyagraha" non-violent daily direct action against bio-piracy in India which take seeds or the ‘stolen harvest’ back out of the market and into the commons. Something else which springs to minds is the system of bartering developed to cope with the entrenched failure of the free market in Argentina. With economic growth along capitalist lines benefiting such a small fraction of the global population, the biggest indictment of the social decline prevalent under neo-liberalism is the struggles of the multitudes against it.
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From Window Breaking At Macdonald's To Organising On The Macjob.
“We are the precarious, the flexible the temporary, the mobile. We’re the people that live on a tightrope, in a precarious balance, we’re the restructured and the outsourced, those who lack a stable job, and those who are over exploited; those who pay a mortgage or a rent that strangles us. We’re forced to buy and sell our ability to love and care. We’re just like you contortionists of flexibility ”
Over the past few years sections of a diverse movement that codifies itself around large set piece spectacles of confrontation with the state at symbolic sites of neo-liberal hegemony and power has shifted the focus of its analysis and activity away from the object of neo-liberal power towards the subjects of that power and its struggles. The result has been the rising popularity of ‘precarity’ as an organisational and discursive theme among radical elements of the social movement in the past 18 months. Already there have been several precarity forums in European cities aimed at etching out a feel for the identities shaped by this shared experience of the demands of neo-liberal flexibility. There have also been successive years of Euromayday parades across Europe calling for ‘flexicurity’ which have attracted thousands. Part of this perhaps can be explained by the demographic of the movement. When a sizeably young anti-capitalist movement suddenly realises that ’summit hopping’ will not change a social relationship globally or locally, it quickly begins to eye itself up within that relationship, preferring to engage in forms of activism that are more closely related to it’s own everyday territorial identities. To be tabloid for a second, perhaps one can speak of a move away from window breaking at MacDonald's to a more traditional desire to organise on the MacJob. In this essay I will sketch the origins of this focus and some of the ideas coming from it, before going on to use the paradigm to briefly examine the position of young workers facing issues of inequality under neo-liberalism. Finally, I will conclude by offering a commentary on the value of the "precarity" debate.
San Precario We Invoke Thee
High theorists have defined precarity "as a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the development of one’s life. " This living on the margins arises from a restructuring of work that has taken place under neo-liberalism, especially in the technologically advanced countries of the west where there has been a shift away from traditional industries towards the tertiary sector, with much of the manufacturing industries shifted to the global south as a response to waves of struggles in the 60‘s and ‘70‘s . Much of the precarity analysis rests entirely on a theoretical groundwork broken years before in discussions on the left of the Italian Communist Party, and then during the seventies in the Italian extra-parliamentary left. Labour once regulated by Taylorism/fordism and work discipline at the point of production is now regulated by control in society, in 'which mechanisms of command become ever more "democratic" ever more immanent to the social field. ' The diffusion of the factory into society, how society itself became a factory was something raised first by autonomist marxist theorists like Tronti and Bologna, while Maria Rosa Della Costa provided a feminist bent which defined domestic work as the production of labour power. More recently, Naomi Klein has articulated the immaterial production of capital in how corporations co-opt and codify lifestyles into brands. In an interview given in Mark Achbar's "The Corporation" she emphasises the more 'imperialist ambition of the brand.' Rather than us inviting it into our lives through consumerism, it seeks to colonise parts of our lives which previously could have been considered part of the commons. Negri and Hardt in their recycling of the original autonomism describe how "in the post modernisation of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest in one another. " The post-modernisation of the economy, also brings with it a by-passing of the state by corporations, the undermining of traditional welfare rights and of course a workforce kept particularly on its toes due to the threat of a highly mobile technologically charged capitalism which can skip country at will. Overall this creates a condition of instability for those outside of power. If it is taken that there is a re-composition of the economy, then it seems obvious that there has been a recomposition of class along post-modern lines too; a thought leading movement based theorists such as Alex Foti of the Italian Chainworkers movement to define precarity more simply as "a generalised condition searching for a radical transeuropean subject. " It is to elements of this radical transeuropean subject that we now turn.
Douglas Coupland coined the achingly appropriate term ‘McJob’ for the monotonous dead end short-term employment that so much of his Generation X fell into and we now take for granted. He presented the McJob as a slacker lifestyle choice that facilitated an escape from the cage of traditional career choices allowing us to define ourselves as something other than our job descriptions that’d see us all going the Willy Loman way. As a result he certainly fell for the worst excesses of post-modernity as a method taken on by power and capital to impose a frightening new method of work discipline and organization on us.
The Irish Labour Market Review of 2004 describes how “The market services sector now employs almost 830,000, and accounts for 45% of total employment. This is almost six times the number employed in the multinational industrial sector. There is significant room for further employment growth in the services sector, given that the services sector share of the Irish economy is smaller than for any other EU-15 member state. ” Since the rise of the Celtic Tiger, there has been an increase in casualisation of work practices in areas of the service sector along American lines. Some of this can be put down to the influence of multinational corporations importing employment practices to Ireland, at the behest of the Irish State which encourages the use of the most precarious form of employment in migrant labour on work permits held by the employer.
Casualisation in one sense promotes a sense of insecurity in the individual worker. At a national level the dismantling of the welfare state, and the privatization of basic services means that there is an increased reliance on private investment to ensure access to services such as healthcare and pensions. Then of course this is compounded by the crisis in the housing sector . With an inability to plan ahead for the future and the experience of work on a subsistence level, those in casualised labour in the neo-liberal economy are at a loss when it comes to accessing such services leading some to speak of a feminization of work as a whole. Where in the past it was previously women who were insecure in work, due to the influences of the church or dependent on their husbands for financial imbursement as society ignored the productive value of domestic labour, now there is an insecurity prevalent which does not have a gender bias. In another classical sense the use of part-time worker’s and short term contracts can be considered an internalization of the reserve army of labour within corporations. With the erosion of the welfare state and dole re-structuring it is possible to speak of the creation of a “social workhouse ” where there are few benefit entitlements those that exist, are increasingly privatized.
Kieran Allen notes that through social partnership “the union leaders have accepted that a degree of ‘atypical employment’ is not only necessary but has a vague progressive quality. ” This one sided emphasis on the positive aspect of flexi-work defined the press and popular rhetoric that ushered in the new economy Europe wide in the mid-nineties. There is as well the ever present slight of hand that tries to cover up the antagonism in the employee/employer relationship by certain elements of academia who try to define the concept of working class out of existence every time new management structures and technologies are used in the economy, something Braverman tackled in his research on the degradation of work. In terms of the new economy, the Kolinko Collective offer a devastating first hand analysis of the call centre experience that leaves most academic research on the subject dead.
Meanwhile, the overall effect of social partnership has been to cause a shift in model in the union movement away from organization in the workplace towards a service model which does little to organise in ‘non-union’ companies and has an increasingly poor record in areas where they are organised. One result of this is that there is a generation of workers emerging with little if any experience of the traditional labour movement, resulting in their ill-equipment when it comes to knowing their rights leaving them prey to the employer . Dependent on their own class positioning often young workers can negotiate their way out of precarious labour, which often as not is a transitional phase during the move from part-time work during education to full time employment. However, this still leaves us with the reality of an increased use of short term contracts throughout the economy, and parts of the population who do not have have the access to the cultural capital to negotiate an escape from the ‘macjobs’ of the metropolises.
The formation of a culture of flexiploitation as some have termed it has been traced in the movement based debates around the new economy of neo-liberalism as a response to the waves of struggles of a previous generation of workers, and specifically the rebellion of the mass worker. Short term contracts and the end of a job for life is seen as a demobilizing strategy on behalf of capital which breaks up old industrial bastions of unionism and ensures to one degree that they can not be revived. In another sense, the creation of the flexi-worker is a response to the rejection of work by youth in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In Empire, Negri describes how "'Dropping out' is really a poor conception of what was going on in Haight Ashbury and across the United States in the 1960's. The two essential operations were the refusal of the disciplinary regime and the experimentation with new forms of productivity. " So the creation of the flexi-worker can be seen as an attempt to accommodate and harness the desires of young workers back into an economical function. Much of the debate around precarity creates a devision between ‘chainworkers’ and ‘brainworkers.’ “Chain workers” are those employed in heavily taylorised positions in retail, franchises and so on. “Brainworkers” are those who are forced to commodify creative talents and skills assumed over a patch work quilt of short term employment such as design, technical skills and emotion in the service of industry.
When sections of a movement begin to generalise about the nature of work in the new economy with much of the analysis arising from extrapolation on their own experiences in the economy there are advantages and disadvantages. For a start, it is healthy to see a shift away from the sort of activity that is dependent upon mobilizing for the next big event towards an attempt to formulate working strategies of organization in the workplace. In terms of Empire’s contribution, there are flaws in an approach that reeks of all the worst facets of orthodox Marxism in an overly materialistic take which will justify the mistakes of previous movements by viewing strategies as the natural outcome of a particular historical juncture. This sort of desire to re-invent the wheel can lead to a refusal to look at movements that previously organized the exact sectors which the precarity theorists focus on. For instance the Industrial Workers of the World had much success in organizing women, migrants and casual workers in the states at the start of the last century in extremely difficult circumstances.
On the positive side, the debate offers a generation of activists the opportunity to explore a political language of struggle based on their own identities rather than having to carry the baggage of an awkwardly archaic language of class struggle with them, that in the long run only isolates them from the people they seek to organise. The application of organizing skills which have developed out of the anti-globalisation period such as Reclaim The Streets, the use of subvertisements which take on directly the logic of capitalism can only be a positive addition in terms of using an organizational vocabulary and method which reflects the network model of capitalism and can speak to a generation apathetic and distrustful of mainstream politics.
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In the epilogue to More Years For the Locust, long serving political activist Jim Higgins would compare the proliferation of theoreticians recycling variations of Marxist-Leninism to wandering Bishops without a congregation during the Great Schism. Orthodox Marxism was pushed to collapse when the excesses of Stalinism became obvious as tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956. Actually existing state socialism as Bakunin described appeared as 'nothing but a barracks." With the final blow dealt during the cycle of struggles in the late sixtiesi and early seventies, orthodox Marxism as a schema for social analysis became increasingly redundant and out of tune to social movements focussed around identity politics, the environment, and a rejection of the work place.
As post-modernism became hegemonic, and the working class moved off the centre stage of theory, several of those who had moved from Marxist orthodoxies were engaged in a parallel project of revitalising Marxism, in a current called autonomism.
If the revolt of Paris 1968 lasted for a week and was enough to spark intellectual fervour, the events of the Italian Red Autumn would play out over a decade generating strenuous Marxist revisionism among intellectuals active in the extra parliamentary left like Mario Trontiii and Antonio Negri. At the centre of the new social movements their project was very much focused on understanding the shifting dynamics of social organisation, the role of technology, and those new social actors which had traditionally been viewed as being outside the working class, defined traditionally as 'lumpen' and 'petit-bourgeoisie'. Many of their conclusions echo the less pessimistic elements of post-modernist thought.iii By '77 the Italian social movements of the seventies were scuppered by a state sponsored 'strategy of tension' against the left echoing the FBI's COINTELPRO operation against the Black Panthers. The space for the primary development of autonomist theory and most importantly practice was closed.
Returning to Marx To Go Beyond Orthodoxy.
Simply put, autonomist analysis is a return to the Marx of the Grundisseiv, and explorations of alienation. Fundamentally it focuses on those aspects of working class self activity that create alternatives within capitalism, cutting across it and refusing it's discipline. A focus similar to Marx in the Civil War in France and his analysis of political structures created by the working class during the Paris Commune.
A subterranean enough theory in the halls of academia, clever editors who seized on Empire as the new bible of the anti-globalisation movement have recently made autonomism popular to a wider left inteligentsia. Its influence however pervades the anti-globalisation movement with its seeming conformity of purpose in diversity. The language of autonomist thought is self-evident in the movements lexicon, it's refusal to accept power and desire to create alternativesv. Autonomism has been codified by Harry Cleaver into a tradition of anti-authoritarian Marxists who broke with orthodoxism to focus and explain the self-organisation of working class social movements and phenomena, rather than engaging in the portrayal of an 'overly one sided dynamic of capitalist exploitationvi' with a class of professional revolutionaries injecting revolutionary consciousness into a herd as part of some teleological project.
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Over the past few years sections of a diverse movement that codifies itself around large set piece spectacles of confrontation with the state at symbolic sites of neo-liberal hegemony and power has shifted the focus of its analysis and activity away from the object of neo-liberal power towards the subjects of that power and its struggles. The result has been the rising popularity of ‘precarity’ as an organisational and discursive theme among radical elements of the social movement in the past 18 months. Already there have been several precarity forums in European cities aimed at etching out a feel for the identities shaped by this shared experience of the demands of neo-liberal flexibility. There have also been successive years of Euromayday parades across Europe calling for ‘flexicurity’ which have attracted thousands. Part of this perhaps can be explained by the demographic of the movement. When a sizeably young anti-capitalist movement suddenly realises that ’summit hopping’ will not change a social relationship globally or locally, it quickly begins to eye itself up within that relationship, preferring to engage in forms of activism that are more closely related to it’s own everyday territorial identities. To be tabloid for a second, perhaps one can speak of a move away from window breaking at MacDonald's to a more traditional desire to organise on the MacJob. In this essay I will sketch the origins of this focus and some of the ideas coming from it, before going on to use the paradigm to briefly examine the position of young workers facing issues of inequality under neo-liberalism. Finally, I will conclude by offering a commentary on the value of the "precarity" debate.
San Precario We Invoke Thee
High theorists have defined precarity "as a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the development of one’s life. " This living on the margins arises from a restructuring of work that has taken place under neo-liberalism, especially in the technologically advanced countries of the west where there has been a shift away from traditional industries towards the tertiary sector, with much of the manufacturing industries shifted to the global south as a response to waves of struggles in the 60‘s and ‘70‘s . Much of the precarity analysis rests entirely on a theoretical groundwork broken years before in discussions on the left of the Italian Communist Party, and then during the seventies in the Italian extra-parliamentary left. Labour once regulated by Taylorism/fordism and work discipline at the point of production is now regulated by control in society, in 'which mechanisms of command become ever more "democratic" ever more immanent to the social field. ' The diffusion of the factory into society, how society itself became a factory was something raised first by autonomist marxist theorists like Tronti and Bologna, while Maria Rosa Della Costa provided a feminist bent which defined domestic work as the production of labour power. More recently, Naomi Klein has articulated the immaterial production of capital in how corporations co-opt and codify lifestyles into brands. In an interview given in Mark Achbar's "The Corporation" she emphasises the more 'imperialist ambition of the brand.' Rather than us inviting it into our lives through consumerism, it seeks to colonise parts of our lives which previously could have been considered part of the commons. Negri and Hardt in their recycling of the original autonomism describe how "in the post modernisation of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest in one another. " The post-modernisation of the economy, also brings with it a by-passing of the state by corporations, the undermining of traditional welfare rights and of course a workforce kept particularly on its toes due to the threat of a highly mobile technologically charged capitalism which can skip country at will. Overall this creates a condition of instability for those outside of power. If it is taken that there is a re-composition of the economy, then it seems obvious that there has been a recomposition of class along post-modern lines too; a thought leading movement based theorists such as Alex Foti of the Italian Chainworkers movement to define precarity more simply as "a generalised condition searching for a radical transeuropean subject. " It is to elements of this radical transeuropean subject that we now turn.
Douglas Coupland coined the achingly appropriate term ‘McJob’ for the monotonous dead end short-term employment that so much of his Generation X fell into and we now take for granted. He presented the McJob as a slacker lifestyle choice that facilitated an escape from the cage of traditional career choices allowing us to define ourselves as something other than our job descriptions that’d see us all going the Willy Loman way. As a result he certainly fell for the worst excesses of post-modernity as a method taken on by power and capital to impose a frightening new method of work discipline and organization on us.
The Irish Labour Market Review of 2004 describes how “The market services sector now employs almost 830,000, and accounts for 45% of total employment. This is almost six times the number employed in the multinational industrial sector. There is significant room for further employment growth in the services sector, given that the services sector share of the Irish economy is smaller than for any other EU-15 member state. ” Since the rise of the Celtic Tiger, there has been an increase in casualisation of work practices in areas of the service sector along American lines. Some of this can be put down to the influence of multinational corporations importing employment practices to Ireland, at the behest of the Irish State which encourages the use of the most precarious form of employment in migrant labour on work permits held by the employer.
Casualisation in one sense promotes a sense of insecurity in the individual worker. At a national level the dismantling of the welfare state, and the privatization of basic services means that there is an increased reliance on private investment to ensure access to services such as healthcare and pensions. Then of course this is compounded by the crisis in the housing sector . With an inability to plan ahead for the future and the experience of work on a subsistence level, those in casualised labour in the neo-liberal economy are at a loss when it comes to accessing such services leading some to speak of a feminization of work as a whole. Where in the past it was previously women who were insecure in work, due to the influences of the church or dependent on their husbands for financial imbursement as society ignored the productive value of domestic labour, now there is an insecurity prevalent which does not have a gender bias. In another classical sense the use of part-time worker’s and short term contracts can be considered an internalization of the reserve army of labour within corporations. With the erosion of the welfare state and dole re-structuring it is possible to speak of the creation of a “social workhouse ” where there are few benefit entitlements those that exist, are increasingly privatized.
Kieran Allen notes that through social partnership “the union leaders have accepted that a degree of ‘atypical employment’ is not only necessary but has a vague progressive quality. ” This one sided emphasis on the positive aspect of flexi-work defined the press and popular rhetoric that ushered in the new economy Europe wide in the mid-nineties. There is as well the ever present slight of hand that tries to cover up the antagonism in the employee/employer relationship by certain elements of academia who try to define the concept of working class out of existence every time new management structures and technologies are used in the economy, something Braverman tackled in his research on the degradation of work. In terms of the new economy, the Kolinko Collective offer a devastating first hand analysis of the call centre experience that leaves most academic research on the subject dead.
Meanwhile, the overall effect of social partnership has been to cause a shift in model in the union movement away from organization in the workplace towards a service model which does little to organise in ‘non-union’ companies and has an increasingly poor record in areas where they are organised. One result of this is that there is a generation of workers emerging with little if any experience of the traditional labour movement, resulting in their ill-equipment when it comes to knowing their rights leaving them prey to the employer . Dependent on their own class positioning often young workers can negotiate their way out of precarious labour, which often as not is a transitional phase during the move from part-time work during education to full time employment. However, this still leaves us with the reality of an increased use of short term contracts throughout the economy, and parts of the population who do not have have the access to the cultural capital to negotiate an escape from the ‘macjobs’ of the metropolises.
The formation of a culture of flexiploitation as some have termed it has been traced in the movement based debates around the new economy of neo-liberalism as a response to the waves of struggles of a previous generation of workers, and specifically the rebellion of the mass worker. Short term contracts and the end of a job for life is seen as a demobilizing strategy on behalf of capital which breaks up old industrial bastions of unionism and ensures to one degree that they can not be revived. In another sense, the creation of the flexi-worker is a response to the rejection of work by youth in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In Empire, Negri describes how "'Dropping out' is really a poor conception of what was going on in Haight Ashbury and across the United States in the 1960's. The two essential operations were the refusal of the disciplinary regime and the experimentation with new forms of productivity. " So the creation of the flexi-worker can be seen as an attempt to accommodate and harness the desires of young workers back into an economical function. Much of the debate around precarity creates a devision between ‘chainworkers’ and ‘brainworkers.’ “Chain workers” are those employed in heavily taylorised positions in retail, franchises and so on. “Brainworkers” are those who are forced to commodify creative talents and skills assumed over a patch work quilt of short term employment such as design, technical skills and emotion in the service of industry.
When sections of a movement begin to generalise about the nature of work in the new economy with much of the analysis arising from extrapolation on their own experiences in the economy there are advantages and disadvantages. For a start, it is healthy to see a shift away from the sort of activity that is dependent upon mobilizing for the next big event towards an attempt to formulate working strategies of organization in the workplace. In terms of Empire’s contribution, there are flaws in an approach that reeks of all the worst facets of orthodox Marxism in an overly materialistic take which will justify the mistakes of previous movements by viewing strategies as the natural outcome of a particular historical juncture. This sort of desire to re-invent the wheel can lead to a refusal to look at movements that previously organized the exact sectors which the precarity theorists focus on. For instance the Industrial Workers of the World had much success in organizing women, migrants and casual workers in the states at the start of the last century in extremely difficult circumstances.
On the positive side, the debate offers a generation of activists the opportunity to explore a political language of struggle based on their own identities rather than having to carry the baggage of an awkwardly archaic language of class struggle with them, that in the long run only isolates them from the people they seek to organise. The application of organizing skills which have developed out of the anti-globalisation period such as Reclaim The Streets, the use of subvertisements which take on directly the logic of capitalism can only be a positive addition in terms of using an organizational vocabulary and method which reflects the network model of capitalism and can speak to a generation apathetic and distrustful of mainstream politics.
Labels: Academic, Class, Politics
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Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Returning to Marx To Go Beyond Orthodoxy.
In the epilogue to More Years For the Locust, long serving political activist Jim Higgins would compare the proliferation of theoreticians recycling variations of Marxist-Leninism to wandering Bishops without a congregation during the Great Schism. Orthodox Marxism was pushed to collapse when the excesses of Stalinism became obvious as tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956. Actually existing state socialism as Bakunin described appeared as 'nothing but a barracks." With the final blow dealt during the cycle of struggles in the late sixtiesi and early seventies, orthodox Marxism as a schema for social analysis became increasingly redundant and out of tune to social movements focussed around identity politics, the environment, and a rejection of the work place.As post-modernism became hegemonic, and the working class moved off the centre stage of theory, several of those who had moved from Marxist orthodoxies were engaged in a parallel project of revitalising Marxism, in a current called autonomism.
If the revolt of Paris 1968 lasted for a week and was enough to spark intellectual fervour, the events of the Italian Red Autumn would play out over a decade generating strenuous Marxist revisionism among intellectuals active in the extra parliamentary left like Mario Trontiii and Antonio Negri. At the centre of the new social movements their project was very much focused on understanding the shifting dynamics of social organisation, the role of technology, and those new social actors which had traditionally been viewed as being outside the working class, defined traditionally as 'lumpen' and 'petit-bourgeoisie'. Many of their conclusions echo the less pessimistic elements of post-modernist thought.iii By '77 the Italian social movements of the seventies were scuppered by a state sponsored 'strategy of tension' against the left echoing the FBI's COINTELPRO operation against the Black Panthers. The space for the primary development of autonomist theory and most importantly practice was closed.
Returning to Marx To Go Beyond Orthodoxy.
Simply put, autonomist analysis is a return to the Marx of the Grundisseiv, and explorations of alienation. Fundamentally it focuses on those aspects of working class self activity that create alternatives within capitalism, cutting across it and refusing it's discipline. A focus similar to Marx in the Civil War in France and his analysis of political structures created by the working class during the Paris Commune.
A subterranean enough theory in the halls of academia, clever editors who seized on Empire as the new bible of the anti-globalisation movement have recently made autonomism popular to a wider left inteligentsia. Its influence however pervades the anti-globalisation movement with its seeming conformity of purpose in diversity. The language of autonomist thought is self-evident in the movements lexicon, it's refusal to accept power and desire to create alternativesv. Autonomism has been codified by Harry Cleaver into a tradition of anti-authoritarian Marxists who broke with orthodoxism to focus and explain the self-organisation of working class social movements and phenomena, rather than engaging in the portrayal of an 'overly one sided dynamic of capitalist exploitationvi' with a class of professional revolutionaries injecting revolutionary consciousness into a herd as part of some teleological project.
this article continues over here
Labels: Academic, Marx, Politics, Social Movements
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