Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
20, 2003
Workers and Globalization
A
Review of Beverly Silver's Forces of Labor
By STEVEN SHERMAN
The working class is not particularly high on
the agenda of the US left. It is quite telling that many on
the left were eager to support Ralph Nader's campaign for the
presidency despite his failure to win any notable support from
organized labor. Furthermore, those on the left opposed to Nader
rarely if ever raised this as a serious limit to his campaign.
It was as if there was a tacit agreement between both supporters
and foes of the Nader candidacy that the opinion of unions was
inconsequential to their strategy. Even in Counterpunch, much
more attention is devoted to the perfidy of capital than to the
struggles of labor. But a dialectic where only one side is described
is like a marriage (or any other activity involving two people)
in which only one is present-not really a dialectic at all.
The alienation of the left in the US
from the working class has a lengthy history. In the sixties,
it took the form of pessimism based on the prosperity of workers-excessively
middle class, they were believed to be unlikely to pose a revolutionary
challenge to the system. These days, the pessimism is more likely
to arise from the perceived weakness of the working class-on
the one hand facing competition from the vastly cheaper, and
seemingly unlimited labor reserves of China and other poor countries,
and on the other, worn down and frustrated by the legal and psychological
machinations of the likes of Walmart. Although the years since
Seattle have brought an impressive revival in thinking about
capitalism as a central obstacle to human liberation, many,
if not most of the militants in the global justice movement place
little hope in working class struggle in the traditional sense.
Beverly Silver's Forces
of Labor: Workers Movements and Globalization since 1870
provides, if not undue optimism, grounds for believing that working
class struggle will continue to play an important part in the
shaping of the social order into the twenty first century.
It unfolds a highly imaginative narrative of the last century,
one which, while touching on many familiar events, is unlikely
to leave reader's understanding of the dynamics of labor and
capital (or twentieth century history) unchanged, and encourages
one to look in fresh ways at the contemporary world.
Silver draws upon a database produced
by identifying every mention of labor unrest in the London Times
and the New York Times since the 1890s. Three chapters illuminate
the dialectic of labor and capital-that when capital organizes
a profitable strategy, it produces resistance, generating new
strategies of accumulation, and hence new forms of resistance.
Workers resistance is divided into two
strategies: 'Marxian' struggles, in which workers fight to claim
a greater share of profits and control over the work process
within a productive complex, and 'Polanyian' struggles (named
after Karl Polanyi, author of the classic The
Great Transformation) in which workers struggle against
being treated as a commodity, and having their livelihood threatened
by being subjected to pure market forces. What is impressive
here is that the text avoids the bathetic tone of much writing
on the left these days, where it is imagined that capital's strategy
of dispersing production to impoverished labor pools is both
new and virtually impossible to fight (or, in a similar narrative,
states have been hopelessly weakened by the unprecedented power
of international financial capital).
Far from being new, this is a strategy
that has been used recurrently for at least 100 years, and probably
longer. This relocation strategy (which she calls the spatial
fix) has the contradiction of relocating workers bargaining power
to the new sites of production. In any case, it is only one
of several strategies capital adopts.
To illustrate the spatial fix, the history
of struggle in the auto industry is recounted. The American
auto productive complex, originally rooted in MidWestern areas
with weak unions, seemed difficult to challenge because it displaced
skilled labor processes that craft workers controlled (the heart
of union struggles just a little earlier) with un- and semi-skilled
work controlled by the pace of the assembly line. However, this
new form of production created a new weakness-because the assembly
line linked thousands of activities into a single process defined
by the capital-intensive machinery at the  center,
stoppages at any point of the process could pose major challenges
to capital. Hence the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, generated
by a militant minority of workers but successful in consolidating
the place of unions in the American auto industry for decades,
and, indeed, helping to legitimize industrial unions and New
Deal measures in general. To tame the militants, the auto companies
agreed to both unions and higher wages for workers, even while
retaining control of the decision making process on the factory
floor.
However, as this deal squeezed their
profits, they began to look elsewhere to base production, most
notably, in the post-World War II era, Europe and Japan. In
Europe a similar factory regime took hold, but in Japan, where
the auto industry emerged immediately after a huge labor revolt,
a new form of organization was introduced, which included lifetime
employment for a core of workers (who also participated in production
decisions) and dependency on small contractors beyond the core.
The Japanese strategy bought a lengthy period of labor peace;
however, in Europe by the late sixties disruptions of the assembly
line similar to what took place in the US were occurring. In
Europe, the workers won greater control over the factory floor,
as well as wage increases, but this was a pyrrhic victory. Much
more rapidly than in the US case, capital migrated to new sites-South
Africa, Brazil and South Korea. Here again, the same forms of
struggle emerged, now integrated into broader societal struggles
for democracy. Again, capital has moved elsewhere, to China
and Northern Mexico. Additionally, production, now heavily automated,
has revived in the US.
This process of struggle followed by
relocation is not simply one of recurrence; it accelerated as
time went on, since unlike the American auto industry, later
versions did not possess a monopoly status in the world market,
and hence did not have windfall profits to buy workers off with.
In addition, production was not only moved from country to country;
it was transformed by the Japanese model of subcontracting and
increasing automation. This process is called the 'organizational/technological
fix', a general principle that one of the ways capital responds
to labor revolts is to transform the production process in ways
designed to weaken the stronger workers. The new complexes,
described as 'post-fordist', or 'Just-in-Time' are often seen
as particularly impervious to struggle, since they scatter production
and force workers into teams mobilized for management goals.
However, Silver identifies two weakness-first, unlike the Japanese
complex, they do not involve a core of workers whose loyalty
has been purchased through lifetime employment, and, secondly,
the complex requirements of JIT that products appear in particular
places at particular times actually increases vulnerability to
interference with the delivery process. Thus, new waves of militancy
are likely in China and Northern Mexico.
In the next part, Silver compares the
auto industry experience with that of the textile industry, usually
regarded as the quintessential industry of the nineteenth century.
This is not done simply to compare the two industries, however;
the comparison also highlights the fact that as profits decline
in a leading sector (for the nineteenth century, textiles) investment
is shifted to a new industry (in this case, auto). This is referred
to as the 'product fix.'
In some ways, the textile industry followed
a similar dynamic as the auto industry. After worker's struggles
in the original center (the United Kingdom) resulted in their
ability to strike a better deal with capital, the industry began
to migrate to other countries where wages were lower. In turn,
all of these countries eventually become the sites of labor unrest.
However, there were important differences. First, textile production
was not as centralized; each mill was not as important to production.
This made it more difficult for strikers to create difficulties
for capital. Their workplace bargaining power was not as great
as it was in the auto industry. Secondly, it migrated to a wider
variety of countries, compounding this challenge. As a result,
textile workers depended more on alliances with other sectors
of the working class and movements, a strategy Silver identifies
as associational power. Particularly notable is the tendency
of the struggles of textile workers to converge with nationalist
struggles in the colonial world. The middle class nationalist
leaders required a mass base, while the textile workers needed
allies. Thus textile workers are often found playing a strategic
role in these struggles. However, for the most part they were
not able to achieve as good deals as autoworkers were.
In line with the principle of the product
fix, Silver attempts to highlight what industries might become
the leading enterprise(s) of the twenty-first century. Unable
to settle on one, she considers the semiconductor industry, producer
services, the education industry, personal services, and, in
an interesting section, speculates on the potential strengths
of each. While office work (producer services) has been directed
overseas and over the internet, perhaps hacking and viruses will
prove a potent tool. Although teachers are dispersed in many
work places, they mostly have one employer (the state) which
increases their bargaining power, and play a crucial role in
the social division of labor, since if they don't work, it's
difficult for parents with kids to go to work.
By contrast, fast food workers (personal
services) seem structurally weaker-even if an entire fast food
chain were to go on strike, the general population would not
go hungry, disruption would be minimal. The most concrete discussion
of an actual workers struggle in this section involves the Justice
for Janitors campaign. It is striking that one of the most militant
union campaigns in recent American history was carried out by
a work force heavily composed of non-citizen immigrants. Because
'world city' headquarters of capital-particularly those heavily
capitalized with new communications technology wired into the
buildings-cannot simply be moved overseas, those who do the work
cleaning and maintaining these areas (producer services) have
a certain amount of bargaining power. However, to be effective,
the Janitors campaign had to develop associational strength through
alliances with other unions, church groups, community groups,
etc.
The final substantive chapter identifies
one more strategy of capital, in addition to the spatial, technological/organizational,
and product fixes already identified. This is the financial
fix, in which capital withdraws money from production, and invests
it in financial channels. This strategy likely sounds familiar
to those aware of dynamics of the last twenty five years, but
it has been a recurrent element in the history of capitalism,
dating all the way back to the late medieval Italian city-states
Venice and Genoa (as described by Silver's sometime co-author
Giovanni Arrighi in his The
Long Twentieth Century). Silver's narrative of the financial
fix is framed by one which developed in the late nineteenth century,
as well as by the present-day strategy.
As a result of this earlier financial
fix, workers engaged in Polanyian struggles to resist being treated
as disposable commodities. The rising tide of these struggles
provided the context for two world wars, and here there is an
effort to illuminate the relationship between workers struggles
and war. Silver considers three contradictory theories-that
war is used to distract workers, that war suppresses struggle
by encouraging national unity, and that wars create the context
for intensified struggles and revolutions-and resolves them by
arguing that each theory identifies a different phase in the
cycle. Before each world war, states engaged in efforts to distract
the population through mobilizing for war-classically, through
colonial expansion (although this strategy also sounds strangely
contemporary). This expansion itself helped lead toward full-blown
world wars, which temporarily enhanced national unity -for example,
the famous abandonment of international socialism by the parties
of the second international--particularly because states were
willing to enter into deals with workers to insure labor both
for producing military goods and as cannon fodder. Finally,
the denoument of the wars led to periods of intensified strike
activity and revolution.
Eventually the crisis generated by the
financial fix of the late nineteenth century and the world wars
was resolved through the deal produced by American hegemony,
which promised mass consumption and rising living standards for
all. Workers in the wealthier, 'core' countries, were insured
relatively high wages, and some security guarantees through welfare
states. In the post-colonial world, much smaller groups of workers
were promised the same, although these promises were more difficult
to carry out. In any case, this deal did not bring lasting stability,
as capital slowly began to sacrifice legitimacy (the deals with
workers) for profitability by initiating spatial and technological/organizational
fixes. These in turn led to explosions of militancy in the new
centers of accumulation (Poland, Brazil, South Africa, South
Korea, etc), which in turn led to the financial fix that has
emerged over the last twenty five years. Finally, this financial
fix has produced a new bout of Polanyian struggles, epitomized
by food riots over IMF austerity programs designed to recomodify
labor, land, and the state sector.
In the conclusion, Silver attempts to
assess the present situation in light of the past. Although
there is confidence that labor struggles will constitute a recurrent
feature of capitalism, she is not unduly optimistic. The grounds
for a new internationalism are undercut by the tremendous gap
in incomes between workers in the wealthier and poorer countries.
None of the new leading industries seem to deliver as much bargaining
power to workers as did the auto industry.
Most notably, it is suggested that the
automation of warfare by wealthy states-so that war can be waged
against much weaker countries with minimal casualties among the
wealthier states' armies-may further weaken workers, since it
reduces the need for the state to bargain for their support in
times of war.
The above oversimplifies a complex narrative
worth reading closely. But it gives some sense of the themes.
As noted above, it forces a reexamination of many of the prevailing
notions dominant among left thinking about the world economy.
Notions that nations are in a 'race to the bottom' are weakened
by the way the account of the spatial fix highlights both the
relocation of capital and the relocation of worker's bargaining
power. Similarly, the crisis of poorer states inability to meet
any demands these days looks different when located in both the
cycle of the financial fixes, and their ongoing difficulties
from colonialism to hard-pressed developmental states to neo-liberal
states.
Still, there are ways this narrative
can be enriched and broadened. First, there is a third form
of workers' struggle, alongside the Polanyian struggles for livelihood
and Marxian struggles based on enhanced bargaining power. In
this third form, which we would call 'Luxemburgian', after Rosa
Luxemburg's theory of the mass strike, workers take control of
a set of industries and replace capitalists as the organizers
of the social division of labor. This happened in the Soviets
of Petersburg in 1917, among the anarchists of Barcelona in 1936,
in the cordones industriales of Chile in 1972, and, to a varying
degrees in many other places (not least of which, Seattle 1919).
There is even a moderate echo of it in the factory seizures
in contemporary Argentina. Everywhere in the twentieth century,
Luxemburgian struggles were crushed-either by a counterrevolution
or by a bureaucratic, revolutionary state. States and parties
had a powerful appeal, and typically there was willingness to
abandon workers power for the promise of a state that would mobilize
the resources of society for the well being of all. Nevertheless,
Luxemborgian struggles raise different issues than the Polanyian
types, which seek security (typically through the state) or Marxian
types (which seek higher wages and more control within a factory).
The Luxemburgian struggles represent the prospect of workers
shaping the social division of labor. This seems particularly
resonant in a time when the dream of simply higher living standards
through enhanced productivity-the promise made by states of the
right and left in the twentieth century-is running aground on
environmental reality.
Can workers play a role in directly shaping
what is produced, how it is produced, rather than only who gets
what? Some of the workers in one of Silver's leading sectors
of the twenty-first century-teachers-frequently becomes embroiled
in these questions during multisided struggles between students,
parents, the state, religious leaders, capitalists, etc over
what the content of schooling should be (much more so, at least,
than fast food workers involve themselves over what McDonald's
menu should be). Perhaps in the less state-friendly climate
that seems to be emerging in the twentieth century, these struggles
will play a more prominent role, particularly in the vexing problem
of defining what should be struggled for.
I am not altogether convinced that automated
warfare will resolve decisively struggles between wealthy and
poor states, or render the societies of the states waging the
warfare redundant. Judging by the situation in Iraq, to produce
a lasting victory, troops sooner or later need to be deployed
on the terrain of defeated countries, at which point they become
much more vulnerable. Already, there are signs of discontent
among military families in the US.
Additionally, the era of automated warfare
(in some ways initiated by the bombing campaigns of world war
II) has seen a counter-trend: the rising ability of actors from
poor territories to bring the war to the terrain of the wealthy
countries. One can date this back to Algerians carrying out
attacks in Paris, or Puerto Ricans attacking the US congress.
But of course, September 11 brought this to a different level.
Not unprecedented as a crime against humanity-one can identify
dozens of armies and governments that have done worse (even in
the very recent past, the Rwanda genocide, and the UN sanctions
against Iraq were vastly more destructive in terms of human lives)-September
11 was unprecedented in its scale as an attack by peripheral
actors on the terrain of a wealthy country.
Broadly speaking, it does not seem obvious
that wealthy countries can secure themselves against such attacks
(other than by costly measures to dampen down the anger directed
toward them), any more than poor countries can secure themselves
against bombardment (other than risking attack and accelerating
arms races by developing nuclear weapons programs).
In the short (and probably medium) term,
September 11 inflamed racist and nationalist tendencies in the
US. In the longer term, efforts to create a dense security environment
may require the active cooperation of the working class, and
thus concessions. But eventually these forms of 'asymetrical
warfare' seem likely to generate societal crises, if not workers
rebellions, in both the wealthy and poor countries as they drag
on and continue to be employed.
Finally, the prospects for international
solidarity are perhaps underrated. Although its dangerous to
say 'the internet changes everything', the internet has changed
a lot. The spread of the internet is itself partly driven by
financial fixes (facilitating the rapid movement of money) and
product fixes (amplifying consumer 'choice' and driving demand
for additional goods). As Silver does note, the spatial fix
of transferring office work from the core to the Carribean or
India requires that workers in those locales be brought on line.
She fails to note, however, that their online status may be
employed to produce transnational communities of struggle. The
more general process of the creation of transnational communities
of struggle has already begun to happen of course, with the heavy
middle class bias one would anticipate given who is on line at
this point. On the other hand, much as middle class nationalists
eventually had to forge alliances with working classes to achieve
their goal of national independence, so transnational networks
may have to turn to the working class to achieve goals like environmental
sustainability and human rights.
Steven Sherman
is a sociologist. Check out his Three
Hegemons blog.
He can be reached at threehegemons@aol.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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