
Issue No 92		20 April 2001

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Review

Working Classes: Global Realities

By Neale Towart

The Socialist Register 2001 looks at class realities and the lives of workers in the new century.

Twenty original and wide ranging essays lay the ground for a much needed revival of class analysis, exploring such themes as the making of a 'cybertariat', the spread of unstable, casual and contingent employment, the changes women have wrought in thw working classes, the relationship between workers 'north' and 'south', the persistence of 'peasantries', the growing significance of migrant workers, and new strategies for change which can transcend the limits of old forms of class organization and politics. There is also a focus on issues for workers in India, Southern Africa, East Asia, Russia and Brazil.

The editors preface sets out the themes:

This thirty-seventh volume of The Socialist Register, 'Working Classes: Global Realities' follows naturally from last year's volume, Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias, which explored visions and strategies capable of transcending the pessimism prevailing on the left and rekindling the socialist imagination. Socialist renewal remains, in our minds, inextricably linked with working class emancipation. This must mean the working class in the broadest possible sense; and it must also mean transcending the limits of old forms of working class organization and politics.

Hundreds of thousands of words have been written by left thinkers over the past decade on the penetration of capital throughout the globe and the triumphs of the neoliberal project; and from Chiapas to the 'Battle of Seattle' much attention has also been devoted to the emergence of an 'international civil society' opposed to globalized capitalism -- an opposition we heartily support. But the authors of this literature have too often accepted capitalist markets as the necessary organizing principle of modern economic and political life, or been too speculative and too minimally reformist in propounding ways in which capitalist markets might be managed, through taxes on financial speculation or international labour standards, for example. Such a truncation of political horizons was, perhaps, inevitable after the ignominious collapse of communism and social democracy's embrace of 'third wayism', but seems to us profoundly misguided.

Against these intellectual and political currents it seemed to us important to devote the present volume to the state of the global proletariat at the beginning of the new millennium, since any serious reconstruction of the socialist movement must begin by confronting the realignment of class structures and the impasse of working class politics that have taken place over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Class analysis as a mode of intellectual discourse, and social class as the pivotal axis of political mobilization, have both suffered marginalization, although certainly not complete collapse, in the face of the casualization of work, trade union decline and the fracturing of socialist political formations, not to mention the impact of neoliberal and postmodernist ideas. This has undoubtedly been the case in the advanced capitalist countries, and it is hard to avoid drawing similar conclusions for other parts of the world as well.

Yet this period has also been marked by acute social inequalities 'growing directly out of capitalist production itself', as Marx put it, a point conceded even by the international agencies and states leading the drive for globalization, while the absolute number of proletarians, and indeed workers in trade unions, has never been greater. As a set of social relations, then, 'class' is as central to understanding the dynamics of contemporary capitalism as it ever has been. But class as a political relation -- in the sense of workers consciously forming a class 'insofar as they engage in a common battle against another class', i.e. as agencies advancing political and economic alternatives to neoliberalism and capitalism -- remains deep in crisis.

So it seems important and timely to try to assess as honestly as possible the state of the global proletariat. One dimension of this is certainly to refresh class analysis, developing the theoretical capacity to understand a world in which an emerging 'cybertariat' coexists with 'peasantries', not to mention an increasing number of factory workers worldwide. And if this means overcoming the weaknesses of Marxist analysis, not least in relation to office workers and farmers, it also means overcoming a tendency to take the class structure of the 'North' as a model for the 'South'. A second task, therefore, has been to try to register the varied experiences of the contemporary working classes, and to do this in a way, moreover, that not only recognizes the importance of spatial differences and determinations, but also understands that this pertains to workers' diverse 'ways of living' as well as to experiences at work. A third task we set ourselves was to look at working class organization, identity formation and politics in various zones of the world, and assess their significance. Here too, we have tried not only to note trends that are common, but also those that have specific resonance for particular groups of workers and for particular places.

Conceptually, this volume challenges at least two items of current academic and political conventional wisdom. It challenges the claim -- beloved of both conservative thinkers and Third Way politicians -- that we live in a post-class age, that the working class no longer exists, and that to think in class terms is to remain trapped in the mental furniture of the old millennium rather than the new. It also challenges the tendency of much contemporary scholarship and political discourse to treat globalization as simply a matter of the increased mobility of capital. In our view this is to make three linked mistakes. It is to think of capital in a fetishized form, to forget that capital is necessarily always a social relationship, and to ignore the way in which the growth of capital in general is possible only through the expanding extraction of value from labour power. Capital is not suddenly more globally mobile because of the revolution in information technology or the deregulation of financial markets; capital is more geographically diversified than it used to be because it now has more working classes to exploit. Those who declare that we live in an age without classes need to count the growing numbers of those sections of the world's producers who now -- directly or indirectly -- depend on the sale of their labour power for their own daily reproduction. The World Bank in 1995 put that number at 2.5 billion. The global proletariat is not vanishing but expanding at a rate that has doubled its numbers since 1975.

It is not the absence of proletarian numbers that is the defining feature of the age so much as the unprecedented combination of old and new proletariats in face of global capital. Throughout the history of modern capitalism, the proletarian experience has always been complex and many-layered; but never has it been as complexly structured as it is now. For within the modern global proletariat at least several new and complex forms of class construction and experience overlay each other. In the proletariats of the core capitalisms -- in labour movements with their own long history -- the current conjuncture is one of work intensification, class restructuring and growing employer and state offensives. Across each of the major economies of North America, Western Europe and Japan, differentially nuanced by national circumstance, previous levels of proletarian power are now heavily under challenge. In each the work-effort bargain at the point of production is being intensified, job insecurity is rife, older and more unionized work groups are being replaced by newer and lesser organized ones, and the social settlement established by proletarian pressure in postwar capitalism's golden age is everywhere being eroded. In large swathes of the eastern and southern zones of what once was an undifferentiated Third World, no such social settlement exists to be defended, for there it is processes of early proletarian creation that are widely evident. There the working conditions, pay and social rights of the emerging labour forces share much in common with those typical of the core capitalisms earlier in the twentieth century: long hours for low pay, extensive use of child labour, the movement of workers from country to town, the denial of union and democratic rights and heavy state repression. Add to that the entry into the world labour market of 'Second World' workers hitherto sealed off by Cold War divisions and whose experience of full-scale industrialization (in the case of the former Soviet Union) or initial industrial development (as in Vietnam and China) either was (or in the latter two cases, still is) mediated through the rhetoric and political structures of Communist regimes.

Old and new interact dramatically in the labour experience of the newly industrializing economies of the East and the South: where different groups of workers find themselves exposed, alongside one another, to a range of different but equally daunting material conditions: the rigours of advanced factory production, the demands of modern service employment, the insecurities of petty trade and the desperate poverty of marginalized employment. Old and new interact even within the labour experience of the core capitalisms, as migrant labour becomes progressively more important for the reproduction of capital in basic industries and service employment, and as the capacity of capital to relocate to ever cheaper and more exploited sources of labour ratchets down wages and conditions of even well-organized groups of workers.

The modern proletarian condition is thus more obviously a global one than at any previous time in the history of capitalism. It is also still one that fosters divisions as much as unity within the working class. The organizational questions of working class politics remain as critical as ever. Class diversity and diverse class situations have also produced new kinds of struggle and new kinds of organization. Careful reflection on the promise and limitations of these has also been one of the main aims of this volume.

July 2000 Leo Panitch, Colin Leys, Greg Albo and David Coates

Working Classes Global Realities: Socialist Register 2001 edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys with Greg Albo and David Coates.

Co-published by Merlin Press; Monthly Review Press and the Fernwood Press.

Available direct from Monthly Review Press at http://www.monthlyreview.org

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Issue 92 contents

Interview: Beyond the Accord
Simon Crean cut his teeth in the trade union movement, now he's gearing up to run the economy.

Politics: In Defence of Della�s List
The proposition that trade unions should ask members of the ALP for a commitment that they uphold Party policy should hardly be controversial.

Corporate: The Real Rorters
The unspoken sore of the WorkCover Scheme is non-compliance by employers. None more so that in the construction industry, as this CFMEU paper details.

Legal: In the Real World
Lawyer Ross Goodridge exposes the defficincies in the new medical assessment guidelines for workers compensation by looking at real case studies.

International: The Docklands and Global Labour
Ma Wei Pin and Jasper Goss recount how the struggle of a group of Indonesian hotel workers effected a lucrative Melbourne contract.

History: Sweatshops in America
Since the dawning of the Industrial Revolution, many generations of Americans have toiled in sweatshops.

Unions: Losers Never Start
At the end of her six week vigil, Grenadier delegate Michelle Booth gave her heartfelt thanks to the trade union movement.

Review: Working Classes: Global Realities
The Socialist Register 2001 looks at class realities and the lives of workers in the new century.

Satire: Democrats Change Leader
The Democrats have a new leader after belatedly discovering that Meg Lees had become the second Democrats leader in a row to defect to another party.

» Costa To Join Della�s List

» Compo Campaign Gathers Steam

» Della�s List: Dissident MPs Targeted

» Day of Mourning to be Compo Focus

» Small Steps in Negotiations � But Hard Yards Still to Come

» Important First Step for E-Mail Privacy

» Outraged Cleaners Continue AXA Axings Protests

» Grenadier Picket Ends � But Legacy Lives On

» Entitlement Dramas in Health and Printing

» Nurses Still Waiting on Olympics Bonus

» IRC Delays Hit Eight Month Barrier

» Claims of Dirty Tricks Conspiracy at Mobil

» Sydney Water Workers On Strike

» MUA Rides Anti-pollution Wave

» Governments Urged On Child Slavery

» Time To Act on Pay Discrimination

» Construction Union Supports Folk Festival

» Activists Notebook