Saturday 15 September 2012

What dominates the world?

Easy. Capitalism.

But the paradox is that the system of economics and politics created by capitalism has lost its forward momentum. At its peak: a few countries; a few banks; controlled most of the world. Those power relationships, at their imperialist height, have broken up. Vast new lands, territories, countries, and billions of people, have been able to break out of the crushing the backwardness imposed by someone else's empire. New markets have spun away from the traditional metropolitan centres in the west and torn millions from backward and backbreaking labour on the land. Those millions have subsequently been funneled into new forms of servitude in the city slums for sure. But with that transition potentially came a new sort of hope - and power.

Previous blogs (see September 3 and 8) asked why the left that stands for the overthrow of capitalism has not therefore become stronger? The fact is, it barely exists in the mainstream of our society.

Let's start with basics. Let's start with who will lead the overturn of capitalism and why. Not in abstract. Not in theory. In reality. Who are the actual people that, in the bitterness and struggle of their actual existence, will act, will need to act, to put an end to the way we live now?

A massive economic redistribution across the globe is currently underway. Nothing to do with better shares of wealth between different classes. No. Redistribution of wealth between classes is in a worse condition than it ever was. The economic redistribution going on is virtually entirely within the subordinate classes. There is both an horizontal and a vertical aspect to this redistribution; both a geographical movement and also an internal economic shift between different layers inside the working class. Marxists used to write and say about the British Empire in the 1900s that it 'exported' its domestic social violence and repression to its empire. Just as some eastern and southern countries have broken out of some of the historical restraints through which imperialism forced their under-development in the past, so certain third world conditions are now being 'exported' back to western countries and producing a mass movement of millions of labour within the global working class.

Part time workers, agency workers, short-contract workers; those in service, in care support; new slave labour in the sex 'industry', in domestic drudgery, that need to flit between criminal employers or who get chained to them, are the underbelly of the new western economy. Overwhelmingly, these workers are immigrants. They often exist outside any legal framework. Estimates vary but these forms of labour constitute between 10 and 30% of many western countries' economic activity. In 2000, the euphemistically named 'informal economy', averaged 41% in developing countries, 38% in transition countries and 18% in OECD countries. (Friedrich Schneider, July 2002). Capitalism - red in tooth and claw. And the drive for more and more 'labour flexibility' by the dominant classes against indigenous workforces is, in essence, designed to push bigger and bigger sections of the western working class into what people used to call 'third world' conditions. And it is small businesses that are at the centre of all of the political and economic establishment's 'drive for growth'. Why? Because they are the engine room of labour 'flexibility.'


In Britain an RSA and Community Links report (September 13) found that twenty per cent of small business owners had traded 'informally' (read illegally) when they started their company. Of these: nearly half (48 percent) of all respondents cited red tape as one of the biggest individual factors in preventing entrepreneurs from being able to register their business. Thirty-four per cent identified high business and personal taxes as a major barrier to getting legal. The report argues that 'learning from countries overseas' authorities charged with tackling undeclared work 'should take a radically different approach and that more should be done to support people to register their businesses.' The report (and there are two more to come) does not mention labour conditions - but that is what employers mean by 'red tape.'

Also in Britain there are now 4.7 million workers providing 'personal services', nearly half a million in 'sport and recreation', nearly a million in call centres, 1.2 million in bars and restaurants, over 4 million are self employed and nearly half a million in 'human relations'. (There were 20,000 in 1952.) This segment of the workforce amounts to nearly 12 million workers (out of 32 million).  7 million workers in Britain now work for small businesses. And, as a recent report comments, despite a massive increase in the population and in the number of workers as a proportion of the overall population since the 1950s, (77% of the population are in work today as compared with 60% in the 1950s) the share of wealth of all workers has gone down by 5%, particularly since the 1980s. The share of wages in the UK's GDP is now 53% compared to 58%, 50 years ago -
"with profit earners (sic) rather than wage earners taking a bigger share of the national income." And the level of inequality between different groups of workers has also dramatically increased in the last 30 years. ('Britain at Work ..."John Phillpott, Chief Economic Advisor, CIPD, February 2012.)

Meanwhile, and not by coincidence, trade union membership has dropped to 6.5 million (out of 32 million workers) to 20% of the workforce.

This pattern of employment, and of under-employment (19% of households are 'workless' in Britain., see above report) looks, on the surface, much like the patterns of work that used to be found in traditionally under-developed economies. A small manufacturing base, a huge 'service' sector, no employment or under employment, a large informal/illegal sector, a highly mobile workforce, deeply unequal conditions and wages within the working class, even the large, low grade white collar sectors are typical of some of the traditional economies of south east Asia like India and Sri-Lanka. This structure and shape of the UK's economy does not yet share the same content of the similar structure and shape to be found in colonial and semi-colonial countries. Living standards are still far higher in the west - albeit in relative decline. Considerable parts of a welfare state and pension system remain to be toppled. Nevertheless, a massive redistribution of wealth within the global working class is going on, coupled with a similar process between different sectors of workers within countries.

What does this tell us?

The main task of those still within organised labour is to find the routes into a recomposition of the working class as a whole under its new, often desperate conditions and to foment basic organisation. New basic economic organisation may, or may not look like traditional trade unions. Casual workers on the docks and in the building trade found unofficial ways to organise for the best part of the 20th century. Huge white collar political unions organise hundreds of thousands of white collar workers in Sri Lanka. In the past the Chartists organised Hand Loom Weavers in their village cottages and families digging out coal as well as early cotton mill workers from the new towns around 6 political reforms.

Tentative steps have been made by forward thinking unions, for example the RMT's campaign to organise the agency cleaners and Unite's union for the unemployed. But great opportunities have been missed. The last TUC could have turned round the idea of unity of all, in action, for a minimum wage of £10 an hour and the right of all above 16, whatever their employment status, to join a union of their choice, with statutory rights, at a minimum fee.

Much bolder measures are required. And this is the key leadership that the left in the west in general and the UK in particular, must offer. There will need to be a radical re-foundation of what already is. Current TU organisation will not itself do. And there has to be a drive towards new types of organisation suited to a new working class. More than anything else, new ideas for social change will spring out of the battle to build basic organisation of a whole class, based on the concrete conditions of its concrete existence.

Next, we turn to what actual upsurges, real revolts and regime overthrows, are telling us about the content of revolution and the potential for transformation of society today.










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