New Politics, Summer 1994.

Expectations of prosperity, peace and freedom following the collapse of Communism have given way to unprecedented levels of permanent unemployment and, in many countries, deep poverty for which no one seems to have any cure; a multitude of incredibly barbaric wars in Europe, Africa and Asia which have destroyed the lives of millions and the continued threat of nuclear conflict. The New World Order has turned into a nightmare for all but a small elite. We are witnessing the catastrophic failure of really existing capitalism as a world system at the end of the 20th century.
What to do? Parties of the Left have demoralized their members by failing to defend them against the policies of their enemies or, worse, adopting them as their own; they have run out of steam, out of fire, out of ideas. It sometimes seems they have run out of a future.
But this is not the first time in history that wrenching change has thrown societies into seemingly uncontrollable turmoil. It is not the first time that the values of justice and solidarity, of equal rights for all, of cooperation and mutual responsibility, are held in contempt by those in power who dictate fashions, not the first time that the people have seemed powerless.
Let us start by trying to understand what is happening to us, then think about what needs to be done, what can be done and how to do it.
The Global Economy
A good place to start is the economy. In a recent issue, Business Week asked: “What’s Wrong?” and echoed the general perplexity: these should be “the best of times,” brought about by the end of the Cold War and the spread of “free market” economies. Instead, we have a deep recession in the advanced industrialized countries and “everywhere you look, fear is pitting those profiting from the global economy against those losing their jobs to overseas rivals.”
Indeed. And Business Week itself gives the answer: “A new, brutally competitive world economic order is emerging with the demise of the Cold War. … The fundamental force behind this new order is the integration into the global economy of the new capitalist nations and much of the developing world,” representing some 3,000 million people.
Transnational corporations (TNCs) are the driving force of this integration. There are now approximately 37,000 TNCs, with more than 170,000 subsidiaries outside their country of origin; because of non-equity arrangements like licensing and franchising (typical for the hotel and fast-food industry, among others) their true influence extends even further than these figures would indicate. According to a recent report by the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), sales generated by TNCs outside their country of origin totalled $5.5 trillion (million million) in 1992, thereby exceeding the total value of world exports ($4 trillion). TNCs now control one-third of the world’s private sector productive assets. The stock of foreign investment world-wide totals $2 trillion. The biggest group of owners are the TNCs based in the U.S. with $474 billion; those based in Britain come second with $259 billion, followed closely by the Japanese TNCs with $251 billion.
Growth in foreign investment will continue in the foreseeable future, the report predicts and goes on to say that “international production has become a central structural characteristic of the world economy,” partly as a result of the revolution in communications and transport systems which allows companies to integrate more fully with their subsidiaries abroad. Privatization is helping the trend, and TNCs have been particularly active in taking advantage of the selling off of public assets in Latin America and in Eastern and Central Europe. The strategies of TNCs are fostering world-wide economic integration, the report says. Companies are locating central functions in whichever country is most cost-effective. Such activities, the report points out, cause integration between national economies even in the absence of formal agreements, such as the European single market. Asian economies have been more closely integrated by the production strategies of Japanese companies, while U.S. companies were establishing links with Mexican companies even before the NAFTA negotiations. “The traditional division between integration at the corporate and country levels begins to break down,” the report says. “TNCs … encroach on areas over which sovereignty and responsibilities have traditionally been reserved for national governments.”
In 1990, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. companies employed 2 million people in Western Europe (up 4% from the previous year), 1.5 million in Asia (up 2%) and 1.3 million in Latin America (up 2%). Japanese companies are building more plants overseas even as unemployment increases at home. For example, Nissan’s $800 million expansion of its Mexican plant is intended to produce not only for the Mexican market but also for export to Japan, Canada and the rest of Latin America. French transnationals employ approximately two million workers outside of France.
The Global Labor Market
We all now live in a borderless global economy made possible by new communication and transport technologies. This global economy has created a global labor market where European, North American, Japanese or Australian labor is in direct competition with the labor force of countries where labor costs are kept 10 to 20 times lower, with both rising unemployment and falling wage levels in the old industrialized countries.
A British economic consultant, Douglas McWilliams, predicts that in the global labor market a combination of population growth and spreading literacy will expand the world’s labor force from 600 million, at present, to about 4,000 million in 25 years, with real hourly labor costs in Europe declining by over 1% per year over the same period.
As early as the 1970s and 1980s, a massive transfer of production started taking place to take advantage of cheaper labor costs in the poorer countries and of the newly industrializing countries, particularly the Asian “tigers.” As a result, entire industrial sectors virtually disappeared from northwestern Europe and North America: basic steel, shipbuilding, textiles, footwear, electronics. Today’s relocations of production affect not only traditional industries in search of cheap labor, but sophisticated manufacturing and service operations, as well.
Airlines like Swissair and Lufthansa have moved all their accounting to India and KLM is considering a similar move. A software programming center in Bangalore services some 30 transnational corporations, including Microsoft, Digital, Fujitsu, Bull, Olivetti, Oracle, IBM, Motorola, Texas Instruments, 3M, Hewlett-Packard and Siemens at half the price the same work would cost in the U.S. or in Western Europe.
Between April and September 1993, Indian exports in electronic services increased by over 20%, for software over 30%. The projection is that in the next three or four years such exports will triple to reach $1,500 million, of which half will be for software alone.
Infosys, an Indian software company which works for General Electric, among others, does “some of the best work in the world” according to the president of Siemens’ U.S. subsidiary. The managing director of Texas Instruments in India, quoted by Fortune magazine, says that “as designs and software get more complex, the cost advantage of India becomes greater. We have only scratched the surface of what could happen here.” Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has sold INR1, $800 million worth of electronic services worldwide in the past business year; it opened a subsidiary in Germany two years ago which services a major bank and the German subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard among others, and has established a joint venture with IBM which will further expand its business.
Since the mid-1980s, TCS has been leasing out teams of computer specialists by the week or by the month to software laboratories or computer firms in industrialized countries. This “body-shopping” is the up-market end of the new international slave trade; the down-market end is the leasing by the Chinese or the Burmese governments of entire crews for construction projects or for the merchant marine of foreign countries for monthly wages which are a fraction of international minimum standards, not all of which is paid to the worker but withheld by the government.
Siemens Information Systems Ltd. (SISL), which was established in July 1992 after three years’ preparation, now employs 250 software specialists in Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore. In 1993 and 1994, Siemens is planning to permanently lay off 5,100 employees — 3,900 in Germany alone — in its loss-making computer business in the industrialized world. Indian wages for the same jobs amount to less than $7,000 per year. There are virtually no social costs; working hours are generally 48 per week. In Jamaica, 3,500 people work at office parks connected to the U.S. by satellite dishes, processing airline reservations, tickets, calls to toll-free numbers, data entries, credit card applications, etc.
The lesser developed fringe countries of Europe are also targets for relocation. Ireland has a telecommunication-based service sector servicing U.S. computer programming for insurance companies such as Metropolitan Life, which employs 150 workers in County Cork to examine medical claims from all over the world. Operating costs in Ireland are 30-35% cheaper than in the U.S., the Irish Development Authority provides generous tax and other incentives and “there appears to be a strong work ethic intensified by a serious shortage of jobs in Ireland.”
The former Communist states are playing the same role as Third World countries with a high-tech capability: Business Week quotes the case of Polish programmers in Gdansk working for a U.S. communications equipment maker at “a fraction of the pay for a comparable U.S. worker” and Siemens reports that it is receiving offers for Russian computer specialists at $5 per day.
To understand these figures in their context it must be kept in mind that the Russian official minimum wage today stands at $7 per month, which represents 20% of the income needed for “physiological survival,” according to a recent report of the International Labor Office (ILO). In the Ukraine, the minimum wage is even lower than in Russia; in Bulgaria, it represents about 60% of the subsistence level, in Albania 24%, in Romania less than 50%, in Estonia 61%, in Hungary 64% and in Poland 70%.
The minimum wage has also fallen drastically in relation to average wages, which have themselves been falling rapidly. In 1993, wages in Russia grew by 12%, but after falls of 45%, 38% and 60% in the preceding three years. Hungary had the lowest drop, with wages stable in 1990, falling 6% in 1991 and 3% in each of the succeeding two years. Percy Barnevik, of ABB, quoted in Fortune, foresees “a massive move from the Western world. We [ABB] already have 25,000 employees in former Communist countries. They will do the job that was done in Western Europe before.” More jobs will also shift to Asia: ABB, which employed only 100 workers in Thailand in 1980, has 2,000 there now and plans on 7,000 at the end of the century. Barnevik forecasts a drastic and permanent drop in employment: “Western European and American employment will just shrink and shrink in an orderly way. Like farming at the turn of the century.”
Transfers of production are not the full story. Less well-known is the internationalization of services believed to be inherently domestic: several countries in Europe have household garbage collected by a U.S.-based transnational, the streets of London suburbs are being cleaned by a French transnational and a Danish transnational is a leading building cleaning and maintenance company in Europe and in North America. In general, this subcontracting of public services to private transnationals has involved job losses. The important point, however, is not only that production is being massively transferred, but that it is being transferred not only in manufacturing but also in services, including high-tech services, and that the resulting job losses in industrialized countries do not imply any great gains in employment in the countries where companies relocate and expand. The migration of jobs is not at all a straightforward one-for-one proposition, with one job gained in the new country for every job lost in an industrialized country.
Paul Samuelson, lecturing in Italy in 1992, observed: “As billions of people who live in East Asia and Latin America qualify for good, modern jobs, the half-billion Europeans and North Americans who used to tower over the rest of the world will find their upward progress in living standards encountering tough resistance.” The impression conveyed here of a quid-pro-quo is misleading. The operative word is “qualify”: Many are called but few are chosen.
The Whole World Is Losing Jobs
The global economy is a great leveller — but it levels downwards. As jobs are draining away from the industrialized world — over two million jobs in the last five years — Western levels of employment are not being exported to the new host countries, along with the jobs. Fortune writes that “when work does move to less developed lands, it’s by no means automatic that the shift will bring Western levels of employment and prosperity to new host countries.” In other words, there is no positive counterpart in the Third World, or in the former Communist countries, to compensate on a global level for the job losses in industrialized countries through relocation of production. The main reason is that “new technology and the continuing drive for higher productivity push companies to build in undeveloped countries plants and offices that require only a fraction of the manpower that used to be needed in factories back home.” A consultant quoted by Fortune notes: “Some of the most Japanese-looking American plants are going up in Brazil.” New factories abroad, even in low-wage countries, tend to be far more labor-efficient than their counterparts in the company’s home country.
Secondly, new factories built abroad by American, European or Japanese companies tend to subcontract (or “outsource”) far more than their predecessors did in their home countries 10 or 15 years ago and, although sub-contracted jobs are jobs, they are cheap, unprotected jobs that contribute to the world-wide deterioration of wages and conditions. The modern company is no longer structured like the classical pyramid, with management at the top, middle management and administration below and production workers at the bottom; rather, we are dealing with a flexible cluster of activities organized in a moveable pattern around a small core. That core is itself a small pyramid, although great care is often taken to disguise the underlying authoritarian relationships. It consists of headquarters management and staff and perhaps a highly specialized and skilled core labor force; all labor intensive operations are subcontracted, domestically or internationally. The corporation thus stands at the center of an interdependent network of firms of subcontractors, who in turn have their subcontractors, etc., with wages and conditions getting worse as one moves from the center to the periphery of the network.
Production and sales organizers command production facilities in different locations and countries and subcontract all or a large part of their needs. They decide what to produce, where, how, and by whom, and from where to supply which market. They sell a combination of elements, such as brand loyalty, superior organization, design and marketing, their hold over the distribution network, access to a protected market, and quality control.
Thus, the Italian clothing firm, Benetton, owns only a small part of its production and sales facilities. The shoe-producer Nike “thinks of itself not as a manufacturer but as a research, development and marketing corporation.” In fact, a number of large companies now sell their name only, and leave actual manufacturing to others. Such firms include General Motors, General Electric, Kodak, Caterpillar, Bull, Olivetti and Siemens, for significant parts of their production. This, incidentally, also illustrates the absurdity of campaigns seeking to save domestic jobs by urging consumers to “buy American” or “buy European,” since only a part, often a small part, of the product originates from domestic production.
Subcontracting applies to any kind of work, not just to manufacturing. We have already seen the case of companies subcontracting their accounting and other operations to low-wage countries. Fortune quotes the case of “typing mills” in the Philippines that will type text and numbers in a computer for 50 cents per 10,000 characters, and even they are competing with outfits in China that will do the same work for 20 cents. It therefore becomes clear that the new transnational economic order does not bring those benefits to the so-called developing countries, which are most commonly mentioned by its apologists, most notably Milton Friedman, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose “structural adjustment programs” have been the building blocks of the New World Order.
“Structural adjustment” is the name given to a set of so-called free-market policies imposed on countries by the World Bank and the IMF as a condition for receiving financial assistance. They typically include: currency devaluation, trade liberalization, cuts in social spending, privatization of public enterprises, holding down wages, business deregulation, restrictions on credit and higher interest rates. Structural adjustment programs are designed to attract foreign investments by eliminating trade and investment regulations, boost foreign-exchange earnings by promoting exports, and reduce government deficits through cuts in spending. These measures are supposed to put countries on a path to sustainable growth.
While they may well serve the purpose of attracting foreign investment, we have seen that such investment cannot serve the stated purpose, which is the gradual and general raising of living standards through progressive and sustainable development of undeveloped economies. Massive transnational investment may bring prosperity and full employment to small city states like Singapore or Hong Kong, but even in these cases legitimate questions arise on environmental, social and cultural grounds. It certainly does no such thing for the large countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America which are predominantly agricultural, and where progressive and sustainable development requires a solution to the land question and a serious attack on rural poverty before anything else. What relocations of production and services and investments by transnational corporations do is to create high-tech islands in a sea of poverty, and free trade zones which are in fact free-fire zones for transnational capital, as far as social conditions and labor rights are concerned.
The Race to the Bottom
There is a geographical version of the trickle-down theory according to which “the way that poor countries have a chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is precisely by exploiting competitive advantages like cheap labor that look unfair to their rich competitors.” It does not work like that in the real world: in the first place, because, as we have seen above, what is being transferred from rich to poor countries is production, not jobs or incomes. In the second place, while the trickle-down effect may have a chance in societies where democratic mechanisms, such as strong and active trade unions, ensure a redistribution of wealth, in low-wage countries the power elites see to it that labor costs stay low and they split the loot with the foreign investors. The people of these countries never even get to reach their bootstraps: only the power elite gets more powerful and richer. This is where repression plays an economic role. Gangster states like Haiti and Burma may be extreme examples but the principle functions just as well in “democraturas” like Mexico, Egypt, Malaysia or Thailand, where more or less free trade unions are allowed to exist as long as they stay weak and where the outer trappings of democracy serve to conceal the iron fist.
In the race downhill to the lowest common international denominator, in which countries underbid each other and workers are forced to underbid each other, the usual argument is that a given economic sector must remain “competitive” to survive. But open-ended “competitiveness” is a no-win proposition: there is no finish line in the race to the bottom. As Jesse Jackson has said, you cannot compete with slave labor. “Competitiveness” does not in any way solve the employment problem, either from the point of view of quality or of quantity, nor is it intended to. On the contrary, globally the underbidding based on “competitiveness” leads to stagnation. As Jeremy Brecher wrote in “Global Village or Global Pillage?” (The Nation, 12/6/93): “As each work force, community or country seeks to become more competitive by reducing its wages and its social and environmental overheads, the result is a general downward spiral in incomes and social and material infrastructures. Lower wages and reduced public spending means less buying power, leading to stagnation, recession and unemployment. This dynamic is aggravated by the accumulation of debt; national economies in poor countries and even in the United States become geared to debt repayment at the expense of consumption, investment and development. The downward fall is reflected in the slowing of global GNP growth from almost 5% per year in the period 1948-1973 to only half that in the period 1974-1989 and to a mere crawl since then.”
To understand the political and social implications of “competitiveness” and of the massive relocation of production to low labor cost countries — both undeveloped or former Communist — it is important not to lose sight of the economic role of repression.
The Economic Role of Repression
In a celebrated and infamous ad in a trade paper of the U.S. garment industry, the wages of a garment worker in El Salvador were advertised as follows: “Rosa Martinez produces apparel for U.S. markets on her sewing machine in El Salvador. You can hire her for 57 cents an hour.” In later versions of the same advertisement, Rosa’s wage had dropped to 33 cents an hour. There is a reason for this wage level: the country has had a civil war for decades, with over 40,000 deaths. As in Guatemala, it was a war of the ruling class, backed by U.S. interests, against their own people, where the labor movement was destroyed several times over, through physical extermination, terror and intimidation, together with the parties likely to defend the people’s interest against those of the elite. It was a war for the purpose of depriving the people of the means of defending themselves.
The newly developing industrial parks in Indonesia, 12 miles across the Strait of Malacca from Singapore, employ workers from Java and Sumatra at a third the cost of comparable labor in Singapore. They live under a military dictatorship that has had to murder over half a million people in 1965, by the lowest count, two million by the highest, to seize power and to crush the labor movement.
China, the largest and cheapest labor market opening up to transnational capital in the world today, is the product of a terrorist police state which has exterminated an estimated 150 million of its own citizens by starvation and repression. Vietnam, another totalitarian police state with state-run trade unions, is the latest candidate for Asian “tiger.”
Russia has a working class that is only now emerging from seven decades in which the state killed 40 million people, again, at a low count, to wipe out every vestige of a civil society with its autonomous institutions. And the other former Communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe, with 40 years of Communist rule behind them, are economically, socially and psychologically destroyed societies, where the social fabric has all but disintegrated and even such basic notions as the public interest, or the common good, have been discredited by their association with official rhetoric under the Stalinist regimes. These are societies that have been engulfed by the ideologies of free enterprise, sometimes espoused by the very same people who would maintain the political structures of the old police states, more often by adventurers and opportunists, fusing into a new capitalist ruling class, just as ruthless but far more corrupt than that of the beginnings of the industrial age, united in their hatred of workers and of any form of an independent labor movement, in their distrust of democracy and in their subservience to transnational capital.
Brazil, another favorite country for transnational investment, is a society overwhelmed by its own poverty because of decades of military dictatorship, where the army and the police made sure that unions remained docile and opponents were either jailed or murdered.
Economic blackmail continues: when electronic workers in Malaysia tried to organize a national union two years ago, Texas Instruments and others threatened to pull out of the country if the government allowed it and unions are now accused of “acting against the national interest,” an accusation that is not to be taken lightly in a country with an authoritarian and egotistic Prime Minister armed with an arsenal of repressive internal security legislation. Enterprise-level unions are the only legal form of organization in Chile, Guatemala and Thailand. In Colombia, formally a parliamentary democracy, the national center, CUT, reported last year that nearly 800 trade union leaders and activists had been murdered since the foundation of the organization in 1987.
“Trade unionists in the Americas have continued to be subjected to a far-reaching twin offensive against their most basic rights,” the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) observed in its 1993 “Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights.” “The first element of the attack is the tragically familiar use of violent extra-legal repression which has persisted, and even intensified, in countries which have undergone the political transition from military dictatorship to formal democracy. … The second element of the attack on trade union rights is constituted by the wave of restrictive legislation which has been introduced across the continent.” It does not take specialized knowledge in economics, elaborate theories of Asian exceptionalism or speculation on the economic effect of world religions to understand why capitalism in its most rapacious and destructive forms is sweeping the planet, virtually unopposed: what we are dealing with here are the effects of decades of repression, armed violence and fear.
Before the globalization of the world economy, when national and regional economies were still protected by trade barriers, when political borders still meant something in economic terms and when international communications were slower and more costly, a slaughter of tens of thousands in El Salvador or of hundreds of thousands in Indonesia may have been regarded as a horrendous crime by some, perhaps even by many, in the far-away industrial democracies, but it did not affect their societies. Today, 30 years later, with the world economy as one, and Indonesian workers working as if side by side with European or American workers, the stench of death lingering from a massacre there 30 years ago, means unemployment, sweatshops and poverty in Europe and the U.S. today.
Rosa Martinez earning 33 cents per hour in El Salvador, perhaps less at the time of writing, because those who fought for higher wages were killed, over and over again, is working next to American garment workers. Even 10 years ago American academics like S. Sassen-Koobin in an essay in Women, Men and the International Division of Labor (State University of New York, 1983) noted: “There is growing awareness in the industry that wages in New York City are increasingly competitive with those in the garment industry in southeast Asia … the availability of immigrant labor in New York City makes location of factories here increasingly profitable.” Here the hand of the dead indeed reaches out to seize the living.
The American and international labor leaders who were boasting in 1964 of having contributed to the overthrow of the Goulart government in Brazil by getting their tame Brazilian unions to cooperate with the military in the putsch — another famous victory in the war against “Communism” — knew at the time that they were participating in a criminal act. What they did not realize is that they were also contributing to undermining the job security of their constituency, the American workers, 30 years later.
None of the people who now live in poor countries chose to be poor: they were forced into poverty by repression. Their only chance of breaking this vicious circle of poverty and terror is by securing democratic institutions which open up the space for unions to breathe and struggle and to get some power for workers and for ordinary people. In this fight, their best, and often their only, ally has been organized labor in the industrialized countries. But of course in these countries, its traditional heartland, the labor movement is also under attack. This is what the cry for deregulation, for flexibility in the labor market, is all about. A director of Courtaulds PLC, the British chemical company, says that industry needs “major cuts in costs and living standards … the realization that we must work harder for less money is not there yet.” In order to achieve this, the power of unions in North America and Western Europe must be broken.
Global Union Busting
In response to impending union mergers in the public sector in Britain, Rupert Murdoch’s Times, as early as March 1992, railed against “great combinations of labor” and spelled out the conservative definition of the “successful unions of tomorrow”: “They will be essentially staff associations, based in the individual workplace. They will be unideological except in understanding that their members’ prosperity is linked to that of their employers. They will uphold individual contracts and workers’ legal rights. … Worker organizations have a role in updating management.” That is where the New Right wants labor to be: in divided and powerless enterprise-based “staff associations” permitted only to handle individual grievances and to promote the employer’s prosperity.
It is difficult to imagine that such a program can be imposed across the board in the industrial democracies without abolishing democracy. But democracy can no longer be taken for granted, even in its traditional bastions. What is new in the attack on trade unionism in the industrialized countries is that it is also a break with the policies of social consensus, sometimes also called neo-corporatism, that characterized the social relations of the leading industrial democracies in the post-war period. Capitalist business in the industrialized countries is now breaking free of the moral constraints imposed on it by the defeat of fascism at the end of World War II. The passage of time and the right-wing control of most media in Europe, North America and Japan is gradually freeing business from the opprobrium of having financed and supported fascism in Europe and extremist nationalism in Japan. It is also blurring the memory that trade unionists and socialists led the democratic resistance and paid the highest price to secure the future of global democracy while the leading elite of the business world, with very few exceptions, were enthusiastic supporters of the fascist war machine, collaborated in the extermination of the Jews and other ethnic and political victims of fascism and made a fortune out of the blood of millions. Whatever else Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy and in other European countries, military dictatorship in Japan, might have been, they were the most ambitious and temporarily successful union-busting exercise in modern history. The current attack on the trade union movement is an attempted counter-revolution against the democratic revolution carried out by the Resistance movement in Europe, against the New Deal in the United States, with all its cultural, philosophical and political dimensions and against post-war democratization in Japan.
The counter-revolutionary character of the rise of the New Right accounts for some of its most bizarre aspects: the undertone of revenge, the mix of arrogance and scurrility, of provocation and nervousness. This was apparent in the tone of the last Republican administration in the U.S. and in the pronouncements of leading Thatcherites, but also in the former Communist countries where reactionary and fascist groups have made a strong come-back. Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic says that one of his country’s big problems is the political “infiltration” from Western European trade unions and social-democrats; Istvan Czurka, the leader of the right-wing split from the MDF, the Hungarian government party says that crime and cultural decline in Hungary have “genetic origins” and that the country is a victim of a world-wide Jewish-liberal conspiracy. In Romania, former prominent Stalinist propagandists and Securitate agents are now leading extremist nationalist parties and publishing fascist newspapers. Milosevic in Serbia and Tudjman in Croatia are holding on to power through the same poisonous mix of Stalinism and fascism and it was on this same platform, of course, that Zhirinovsky, the KGB’s candidate in the last Russian elections, successfully conducted his campaign.
The threat to democracy is now universal, and touches all regions and politico-economic zones. That is one of the reasons why the issue of democratic rights has such fundamental importance. The ability of workers everywhere to organize world wide, North and South, East and West, to establish effective international links and to support each other, depends on it. That mutual support is one basic building block of what we mean by global solidarity. That has to be our answer to transnational capital operating in a global labor market.
It is in the common fight for human and democratic rights, that the labor movement in all parts of the world, in the traditional industrialized countries of the “North,” the underdeveloped countries of the “South” and the former Communist countries, has the strongest imaginable common interest. Those who are trying to tell Asian workers, for example, that the struggle for human rights is a protectionist ploy of Western trade unions to save Western jobs are cynical liars. As Asian workers, and others, well know, one cannot trade dignity for prosperity and anyone who tries will lose both.
ICFTU general secretary Enzo Friso has pointed out that if it were true that the exercise of democratic rights was a hindrance to economic development the most repressive countries should also be the richest, whereas the opposite is true: “The folly and corruption that has disfigured the whole history of development is the direct consequence of the way that unrepresentative rulers have ignored or repressed their citizens.”
At stake are not just labor rights. But their affirmation is an integral part of, and a precondition, for a development consistent with the interests of society in general from an ecological, social or cultural point of view.
The Human Rights Imperative
In a remarkable 1992 report entitled “Indivisible Human Rights — The Relationship of Political and Civil Rights to Survival, Subsistence and Poverty,” the New York-based Human Rights Watch demonstrates that “subsistence, indeed survival, often depends on the existence of political and civil rights, especially those related to democratic accountability.” Contrary to the claims of certain governments, particularly in Asia, that social and economic rights (basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter) must first be met before the luxury of political freedoms can be granted, the report demonstrates the link between democratic rights on the one hand, and freedom from famine, environmental destruction and enforced poverty on the other. These democratic rights include freedom of expression, association and assembly, free and competitive elections, and freedom of movement and residence. The key issue is democratic accountability, that is, the ability of the people to discuss and review the policies of the executive authority and establish checks on that authority if its policies are not deemed by the people to be in the public interest.
The rulers of countries which deny their people’s basic democratic rights are in fact hindering, not promoting, their development. They are selling their people’s labor and their countries’ resources for the short-term gain of a small and often corrupt ruling class and, if justice were served, they would be tried for high treason.
Let us now look for a moment at the consequences for the so-called industrial democracies of denying democratic rights in Third World and former Communist countries. The industrial democracies are few. They are, broadly speaking, the industrialized countries of the OECD: Western Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In the post-war world, they represented the prosperous, democratic and open societies, which formed the power structure underpinning the world order that had emerged after the defeat of fascism in Europe and Asia. While they tended to keep their democracy to themselves (after all, it was the U.S., the U.K. and France which most aggressively fought popular and progressive movements, propped up conservative rulers and protected transnational investments all over the Third World) their societies nevertheless allowed the political space for democratic forces to develop which, at different times, had a significant impact at the international and world level. These include the labor movement, the environmental movement, and the women’s movement, among others. They are rooted in democratic opinion and protected by democratic institutions. They are, organizationally, financially and politically, the principal support of an emerging world wide civil society and the principal, if not the only, allies of all peoples fighting for their liberation and their own democratic rights.
Democracy and prosperity in the industrial societies were the principal gains of the victory over fascism. Both are now under threat in a stagnant global economy with a global labor market where the living standards of a vast majority of the world’s population are held at the lowest possible level by the dictatorship of the gun, the torture chamber and the killing fields.
Democracy Undefended
As we look at the world wide threat to democracy, we must keep uppermost in our minds the unreliability of leading democratic governments, so far as the defense of democracy is concerned. Recent history demonstrates clearly that the governments of the United States, whether Republican or Democrat, of the European Union and Japan are not interested in democracy. They are interested in stability. Citizens concerned with the future of democracy can make no worse mistake than to expect relief from democratic governments. If there was any desirable by-product of the Gulf War, other than upholding international law and the dubious achievement of having returned Kuwait to the sovereignty of its ruler, it would have been the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. That result was deliberately avoided, and the regime remains free to torture and murder democratic opponents in Baghdad, Kurds in the North and Shiites in the South.
The abject betrayal of democratic and pluralist Bosnia-Herzegovina is the result of a deliberate decision by Western governments not to oppose Serbian and Croatian fascism. Western policy toward Eastern and Central Europe has been to support the World Bank’s and the IMF’s “structural adjustment” policies which have undermined the economic and social foundations of democracy while delivering the former Communist countries defenseless to transnational capital. Nor is the strange listlessness of the German state, and of other European governments, in dealing with the criminal activities of well-organized fascist gangs, an encouragement to democrats at home and abroad.
Japan, the regional superpower, has signaled to the Thai military, a source of corruption in all of Southeast Asia, and to the Burmese military, which runs one of the most viciously repressive regimes existing today, that they have nothing to fear. Its reprimands to the SLORC of Burma have all the punch of Thatcher, in her day, protesting violations of human rights in South Africa. The Australian Labor government, craving acceptance in Asia, is courting the Indonesian dictatorship and making it known that the defense of human rights is no longer one of its priorities.
The inaction of democratic governments in the defense of democracy world-wide has led to a new world crisis: the sudden and enormous growth of the world refugee population. In November 1993, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that in 1992 world refugee numbers increased by 10,000 a day. Overall refugee numbers have risen from 2.5 million in 1970 to nearly 44 million today. More than 19 million have been forced abroad and a further 24 million have been driven from their homes and are “internally displaced” refugees, the victims of “ethnic cleansing” and other forms of persecution. Never before have there been so many people in search of protection and asylum. According to the report, the main causes are “violent conflict and the chaotic breakdown of civil order.” It says further that “making sure that human rights are respected where people live, so that they do not have to flee to find protection, is a matter of the greatest urgency.” You might think that this common sense conclusion would be a priority concern of democratic governments. You would be wrong. The priority concern of democratic governments is to strengthen police measures to keep the growing refugee population out of their countries.
The European Union has generated a new body, which was supposed to be secret and which is not accountable to elected officials at any level. It is called the K4 Committee and it is composed of national security officials with broad powers to coordinate the fight against international crime such as drug trafficking and money laundering, but also against illegal immigration and asylum. At the head of its list of concerns is reportedly illegal immigration: “the process of erecting still higher barriers against refugees from Bosnia and elsewhere are already well advanced.” Plans to co-ordinate policies on the forcible expulsions of unwanted immigrants and a new high-tech fingerprint system for asylum-seekers are also under way.” We now have to ask ourselves how long democratic institutions, even in the small part of the world where they are today taken for granted, can survive given massive permanent unemployment and steadily worsening living and working conditions, along with the pressure of immigration. Millions of refugees are knocking at the doors of the prosperous democracies because their countries are engulfed in war and terror, and are being kept out by the military and the police.
Even some employers are getting worried. An increasing number of top managers of European companies are concerned about social breakdown caused by the business decisions of corporations. A manager for Allied Signal Europe NV was recently quoted as asking: “Can society sustain 20% unemployment? Where will it lead? Who’s looking at this?” Schmidheiny, one of Switzerland’s corporate leaders, has become internationally active in protecting the environment. Long before anyone else, Antoine Riboud, CEO of the French food transnational BSN, advocated a social consensus based on the recognition of trade unions, and he has stated publicly that the unions he wants to deal with should be strong and independent. We may yet find allies even among some companies, those few with a more thoughtful and responsible management than the rest.
Democracy cannot survive if transnational capital succeeds in imposing its economic solutions at the world level, and succeeds in imposing the social standards of, say, China, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil or El Salvador on the workers of Western Europe and North America. The way democracy in Europe or in America can be undermined, weakened and ultimately destroyed can take many forms, but we can be sure of one consequence: unchecked world domination by transnational capital means the end of many things, in particular the end of the labor movement for a long time, perhaps for a century, as a significant force for progressive change in the world — even as a potential for building such a force.
The Irrelevance of Nation States
What are the options available to us? The traditional remedy, seeking to achieve political power in the national context and pass protective legislation, has become largely outdated and ineffective, although it should, of course, be used for as long as possible for what it is worth.
The globalization of the world economy is rapidly restricting the space where decisions on economic and social policy taken at national level make any difference. Nation states and national legislation are becoming increasingly irrelevant because domestic economies are conditioned more and more by external forces over which national economic, political and social actors have no control.
This point was made with extraordinary clarity by Richard Gardner, appointed U.S. ambassador to Spain in November 1993, who said that having consulted the 33 American firms doing business in that country, he had to let the Spanish public know that American investors were losing interest in Spain because of high labor costs, the “rigidities of the labor market” and deficient infrastructures. This statement comes at a time when the Spanish government is preparing for a showdown with the unions over precisely these issues: control over job security and conditions of employment.
The growing irrelevance of nation states helps to explain why governments in different countries, coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum and elected on entirely different programs, end up following more or less similar policies. Walter Wriston, former chairman of Citicorp, described how “200,000 monitors in trading rooms all over the world” now conduct “a kind of global plebiscite on the monetary and fiscal policies of the governments issuing currency. … There is no way for a nation to opt out.” Wriston recalls the election of “ardent socialist” Francois Mitterrand as French president in 1981. “The market took one look at his policies and within six months the capital flight forced him to reverse course.”
Trading blocs and geographical zones of economic cooperation will no doubt multiply and become stronger, but they merely relegate the same problem to a regional level. At best, it may become easier to secure social clauses in trade agreements to enforce minimum social standards as a condition of access to a trading bloc, although the failure to secure such clauses in the recently-concluded re-negotiation of the GATT agreement offers little encouragement for this expectation.
What, then, is there to do? It is not too difficult to devise sensible Keynesian alternatives to the catastrophic course presently followed by the leading governments, the Bretton Woods institutions and the other decision- and policy-makers of the “international community.” Beyond these, there is the gigantic task of reinventing a society organized around the priority of meeting human needs at a time when a significant and increasing part of humanity is denied a material reward for productive and creative work and where the notion of work, therefore, has to be separated from the notion of income, and the notion of income from the notion of wages or salaries. The immediate difficulty we are facing, however, is that we are not in an argument about who has the better ideas. We are in an argument about power. The question is therefore one of organization. Organizing is what the labor movement used to be best at doing, but not in its present state of disorientation and confusion. In order to organize effectively, the labor movement must learn to think globally.
Global Organizing
Organizing has to start from new premises. Trade unions in the industrial democracies are on the defensive; in some countries their numbers have been decimated, their margin for negotiations has narrowed to very little. In many countries employers have gone from the acceptance of social consensus to a policy of confrontation. In the former Communist countries, both successor organizations of old unions and the alternative organizations arising from the political opposition are disarmed by hostile, authoritarian governments, demoralized members and massive unemployment. In the Third World, unions are unable to stem the pauperization of their countries and generally do not have the support of sympathetic governments as in the past. In such desperate straits, many organizations turn inward, in the mistaken belief that concentrating on domestic issues will help solve the immediate problems of their members. In the new world situation, the opposite is true: There can no longer be any effective trade union policy, even at the national level, that is not global in concept and international in organization. Not surprisingly, the small, weak and beleaguered unions in Third World countries have understood this best, since economic dependency, and therefore interdependency, has been a fact of life in their society throughout their experience. It is in the traditionally strongest union movements that provincialism and complacency are most entrenched, even at this late stage. The experience of repeated defeats is not necessarily the mother of invention.
A global approach has to involve the membership to a far greater extent than has been customary. A transnational corporation needs to be seen as a whole for those who work in it and bargain with it. Within the European Union, draft legislation instituting regional works councils is a step in this direction, but it also carries the danger of fostering the notion that a European organization is an end in itself, and of strengthening nationalist propaganda casting the workers of other regions as competitors and enemies. A trade union approach must deal with the company as a world wide structure, and must have the objective of organizing the company wherever it operates. New forms of company organization require new forms of union organization, crossing traditional jurisdictional lines and forming coalitions of unions adapted to the specific nature of the company and of the problems it poses. International collective bargaining, including coalition bargaining of international, national and local trade union structures where appropriate, must become a priority of unions dealing with TNCs.
Restructuring at the national level is a crying need in many countries to pool scarce resources and develop specialist services, non-existent at the present time, capable of comprehending company and government policies, to develop counter-strategies and to turn them into organizing drives. How can the AFL-CIO afford some 90 unions when the overall organizational density has sunk to below 16%? How can the French trade union movement afford five national centers with an organizational density below 12%? New Zealand, with a population of 3 million, had over 300 unions when the conservative government took power. They learned the hard way. Important union mergers have taken place, and are still under way, in Australia, Britain and Japan. Let them hurry. There is nothing wrong with mergers, and largeness in itself is no threat to democracy. There are numerous bureaucratic and ossified small unions: smallness is no guarantee of democracy, but in general a guarantee of impotence.
In a global perspective, union strength must not be undermined by sectarian considerations. Union strength must be preserved where it exists and the value of a union movement must be judged on the basis of its ability to defend its members’ interests regardless of past politics. It is wrong, for example, to acquiesce in the seizure by the state of union assets in the former Communist countries on the grounds that they are goods stolen from the workers when the state controlled the unions. If these assets can play a role today in strengthening the union side against the now really existing reactionary capitalist states, by all means let them remain in union hands.
The successor organizations of the former Communist unions should be supported wherever they have reformed enough to form a line of resistance against the “structural adjustment programs” which prepare the ground for neo-Stalinism and fascism. It is foolish to seek to isolate representative trade union organizations with a proven ability to defend their members, on the grounds that they are, wholly or partly, tainted by a Communist past.
Union education programs need to focus on the implications of the New World Order to enable the membership to comprehend what has been happening to them and what is likely to happen next, and to prepare them for the effort of world-wide organizing. How many unions have education programs and, of those that do, how many deal with the New World Order, which is the reality their members face every day? As a rule, there is no discussion of international issues at the membership level.
Many more resources need to be put into international union activities if the movement is to become effective globally. At present, a small number of unions, even national trade union centers, in industrialized countries have international departments and, where they exist, they are understaffed, typically with two or three people. In many countries, international relations is something the president or another official does on the side, in addition to many other duties. Budgets for international activities are, for the most, part ridiculously low, and clearly show that, in the minds of most union executives, international activities are an unimportant sideshow.
More important, the nature of international activities is misunderstood and misinterpreted. Back in the economic and social halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s many unions, especially in the industrially developed countries, had sufficient industrial and financial strength to largely take care of their own interests and had no need for international support. For many, international activity was recreational and diplomatic, at best charitable and declarative. Verbal denunciations of colonialist and (sometimes) imperialist injustice, together with financial contributions, which might appear generous but in fact often amounted to less than donations to domestic charities, seemed to cover the ground as far as international activities were concerned. With this came a patronizing attitude to international trade union organizations and a certain amount of complacency in looking at society and the world.
Very few unions relate international programs to the problems of their members at the point of production and when they do, it is more a fire fighting exercise, typically in response to a threatened plant closure, rather than a systematic, long-term and pro-active program of educating the membership to the world wide connections of company policies to government policies.
The memory of past abuses lingers on — unions allowing their so-called international programs to be used as fronts for the intelligence operations of governments or as pretexts for junkets by top officials who rarely reported back what they were doing abroad. In the best of cases, honest officials of goodwill regarded an international program as a kind of charity, and would help weak unions abroad in the same spirit as contributing to the Red Cross. But those who look on international trade union action as charity, miss the fundamental point of trade unionism: solidarity, in contrast with charity, is a reciprocal relationship. Charity is top-down, solidarity is based on the acceptance of mutual responsibility. Shrinking budgets of both governments and unions, and to a lesser extent rising membership awareness, have put a stop to most of the political hi-jinx and manipulations. What remains, is that most union leaderships, as well as union members, have a very superficial, if any, understanding of the world they live in.
Organizing must be done in its political context with political means, centered on the defense of human rights, the core issue around which not only workers but all other victims of the New World Order can be organized and coalitions built that have political depth and staying power. This requires the defense of human rights as a categorical imperative. To be credible, there can be no selective defense of human rights, even if consistency inconveniences some trade union centers with a tradition of submitting to authoritarian governments or deferring to the principle of “non-intervention in the internal affairs of countries.”
The International Labor Movement
Doesn’t this mean re-inventing the international socialist movement? If the Socialist International (SI) were the kind of organization its name implies, unions would not have to take charge of the political dimension of labor action quite to the same extent that is being suggested here. The Socialist International, however, is nothing of the sort. It is a forum for leaders of mostly European socialist parties to meet and exchange views which are in general friendly to labor when their parties are in opposition and hostile to labor when their parties are in government. It is the small parties that need, and demand, an international organization capable of action; their demands are unheeded.
The large parties prefer an organization that cannot interfere with their own priorities. They make sure that it stays weak at the center, and that its policies never reach beyond the minimum common denominator they can agree on. Since their main concerns are national, that common denominator remains low. As a result, the Socialist International is utterly unable to produce an independent interpretation of the present world, much less to deal with it. Just as the defense of democracy cannot be left to democratic governments, the political dimension of labor action cannot be left to the SI.
A global approach to labor organizing and labor action implies a profound reorganization of the existing international labor movement, composed in essence of the ICFTU, which is the federation of territorial organizations such as national centers, and the International Trade Secretariats (ITSs), which are 15 or so federations of unions covering specific industries or economic sectors.
The ICFTU is at a delicate stage of its development and faces a political paradox. On the one hand, it is at the apex of its history. Its competitors are much diminished: the Communist World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) has lost most of the government support it relied on, as well as most of its affiliates, and its infrastructure and political network is in disarray. The Christian World Confederation of Labor (WCL) is little more than a Catholic Action propaganda group, dependent on only one strong and representative organization, the Belgian Confederation of Christian Trade Unions. A number of former WFTU affiliates and independents, which used to maintain equidistance, have now joined the ICFTU, which numbers an all time high of some 150 affiliates, in over 100 countries with a membership of approximately 110 million.
For practical purposes, the ICFTU today is the representative labor international, the only one that matters. Yet, on the other hand, it is a directionless giant. Those who regarded its primary function as fighting the Cold War are now disoriented. The obvious alternative does not occur to them: that now is the time to pick up where the serious labor internationals of the past left off. An international organization of labor formed for the purpose of conducting labor’s struggle for its own and society’s emancipation is beyond the imagining of those who are largely ignorant of past experience, contemptuous of history and theory, and afraid of struggle.
The ICFTU Executive Board is composed of officials of national trade union centers who are preoccupied with national issues and think in national terms. They have a vested interest in believing that there are national solutions for their members’ problems and are caught in structural constraints which obstruct a global vision. This is one of the reasons why a number of national trade union centers which, through their access to public development funds, have supported international trade union activity in the past, are now starting to give direct aid to unions in former Communist or in developing countries by-passing international trade union organizations. Such bilateral assistance creates chaos, increases the danger of corruption and weakens international trade unionism at the time it most needs strengthening, but it plays well for the home audience.
ICFTU activities, which should be the cutting edge of international labor action (defense of human rights, organizational and political support to unions in former Communist countries and in the Third World, action on TNCs in cooperation with the ITSs) are underfunded and undervalued. The institution lives far too much in a bureaucratic and abstract world where form takes precedence over substance and preoccupations with turf, jurisdiction and status overshadow the original purpose of the exercise.
The ITSs have different problems. Edo Fimmen, the secretary of the International Federation of Trade Unions (the “Amsterdam International”) for a brief period after the First World War, then general secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation for most of the 1920s and 1930s, understood and tried to solve most problems 70 years ago that we are still trying to solve today. He regarded the ITSs as the most appropriate form of trade union organization to conduct international labor struggles. In a prophetic book, Labor’s Alternative — The United States of Europe or Europe Limited, he predicted that “just as the development of capitalism has always determined the organizational form of its opponents, has given rise first of all to local and subsequently to national trade unions, so capitalism will become, if not the originator, at least the furtherer of the international organization of the industrial workers.”
Fimmen was under no illusions on the capacity of the ITSs of his time to rise to their historical task: “We are still far short of this point,” he wrote. “Several years are likely to elapse before the ITSs (which are still in the very earliest stage of their activity, and most of which are as yet devoid of substantial importance) will have won, practically as well as theoretically, the leadership in industrial struggles.”
Seventy years later, after a second world war and the subsequent Cold War set the labor movement back for decades, many ITSs are still “devoid of substantial importance” in terms of their capability of successfully conducting international labor struggles. His conclusion, however, remains inescapable: “Still, however weak and imperfect in respect of organization the ITSs may be, however little international, nonetheless the development of capitalism will compel them to take up the task that is incumbent on them unless the proletariat is to lapse internationally into a condition of more hopeless dependence and enslavement than that of the working class in its national subdivisions today.”
At this stage, the ITSs need to strengthen their capability for effective intervention at any time, anywhere in the world when trade union rights are threatened, but they must also be capable of sustained action over the long term. In short they must acquire the means of exercising power in defense of the public interest in such a way that they cannot be ignored by governments or transnational corporations, however large and powerful. This cannot be achieved without a concentration of available resources, and that in turn means a series of mergers to create a smaller number of larger and more effective organizations. These are slow processes because they have to be democratic, involving collective decisions by loosely federated organizations where differing political cultures, organizational and financial structures and personalities have to be meshed. But they are inevitable if the ITSs are to carry out their historical terms of reference. It is not difficult to see that in terms of the resources needed for effective organization, servicing and action, no ITS with less than 10 million members will be viable by the end of the century and that an effective defense of workers’ interests requires not the present 15 ITSs but seven at the most, each with the critical mass enabling it to organize in depth and to successfully sustain long-term and costly struggles. The closest possible linkage is needed between the ITSs and the ICFTU, because alliances will constantly be needed between ITSs, national centers and regional organizations to tackle specific issues.
Today more than ever it is necessary to reform the ICFTU as a joint organization of ITSs and national centers, with a dual (territorial and industrial) structure, to facilitate joint action between a number of partners in changing coalitions, to adapt to specific problems in a rapidly shifting international environment, and to introduce an international dimension in the strategic thinking of the world labor movement beyond international labor statesmanship and diplomacy.
There is an obvious objection which is rooted in post-war international labor history. When the WFTU was formed as a united world-wide international federation including the state-controlled labor organizations of the USSR and its new satellites, as well as the social-democratic unions of Europe and the American CIO, a struggle for control immediately developed between the Soviet bloc and its Communist-led allies on the one hand and the social-democratic unions on the other, which eventually led to a split and to the formation of the ICFTU, with the WFTU remaining under Communist control. One of the contentious issues was the status of the ITSs, which the Communists wanted to incorporate into the structure of the WFTU as departments, whereas the social-democratic trade unionists, who were in control of the ITSs, insisted on their independence.
The following years amply demonstrated the superiority of the ITSs over their Communist counterparts, the Trade Union Internationals (TUIs) that the WFTU had set up within its structure after the split. The independence of the ITSs — including from the ICFTU — gave them a high degree of flexibility and mobility, together with a higher degree of professionalism and militancy than any other international labor organization. The question therefore arises whether these advantages would not now be lost if the ITSs became part of the ICFTU structure.
This is unlikely because the ITSs of today and tomorrow are very different organizations from those of the post-war period or from the ones of Fimmen’s time. Today’s ITSs, and even more so tomorrow’s, if the anticipated merger process materializes, will be substantially more influential than many national centers. In a common international structure, they would not find it difficult to play their own role as equals. It is these equal relationships that would ensure the health and stability of the organization.
Rebuilding the Movement
What other building blocs of solidarity are available? The vast edifice of the pre-1930s social-democratic labor movement in Europe lies in ruins, and these ruins are impressive still as witness to past greatness, much like the lost cities of vanished civilizations. But there is evidence of life in these ruins and many mansions are still inhabited. The labor movement in all its vastness still has immense resources at its disposal. Their effective use is a question of understanding the priorities.
In this respect, relations with the social-democratic and labor parties are best left to the trade union movement in the different countries. The current state of relations varies considerably from country to country, ranging from the traditional relations of close cooperation to open hostility. At issue is the ability of the parties purporting to represent labor’s interests to develop a credible alternative to the neo-conservative New Right rather than merely succumbing to it ideologically and politically. At the international level, the trade union movement would no doubt welcome an opportunity of cooperating with the Socialist International in a mutually supportive relationship. In practical terms, those who have tried have not succeeded, for the reasons described earlier.
But the organizations of the labor movement also include a vast array of social and cultural organizations: women’s and youth organizations, educational associations and schools, hiking and touring clubs, sports clubs, travel agencies, consumers cooperatives, banks and housing cooperatives. The sense of belonging together to a single movement, of representing an alternative society and a counter-culture, is now much weaker than even after the last war, but there is enough of it left to pick up some of the pieces.
Two instances come to mind: the workers’ aid organizations and the workers’ educational associations. Both have their own international federations. Workers’ aid organizations were originally founded for the purpose of taking care of the victims of the class war: in the 1920s and 1930s literally so. In the 1950s and 1960s when conventional wisdom in the labor movement had it that the class war was over, that most of labor’s goals had been attained and that further progress required as seamless as possible an integration in the existing social order, workers’ aid organizations became de-politicized, as well, and like everyone else concerned with welfare, on relieving the victims of natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, famine. From the 1970s and the rise of the politics of guilt, many started giving priority to development projects: bore holes for water in the desert, planting seedlings on sand-dunes.
Today, when labor is fighting with its back to the wall, questions have to be asked regarding priorities: do the contributions of workers’ aid organizations to disaster relief bring a positive benefit to the labor movement as a whole, even though they are a drop in the bucket compared to government or private charity contributions? If the objective was to earn brownie points with the bourgeoisie, has anyone ever thanked us? Have our contributions resulted in a measurable increase in influence? For that matter, what have the contributions of American unions to the various community chests, hospitals and other charitable causes done to strengthen the labor movement in the United States? And how much of a difference would the same amounts of money have made had they been spent in paying the salaries of organizers, improving the quality of labor publications, paying strike relief? Why doesn’t labor help labor? No one else will.
The same goes for workers’ education. In the complacent 1950s it was allright to assume that general adult education could be a legitimate goal for a workers’ education association. Today, the educational needs of the labor movement as a movement are immense. The whole political culture of the labor movement has to be passed on to millions of people who have been cut off from it for several generations. What is now being done in trade union study circles, summer schools, party schools and foundations merely scratches the surface. At the international level, the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations is the only organization of the labor movement that combines trade unions at various levels of activity, party institutions, think tanks and workers’ education associations. It is uniquely well placed to become the laboratory where the labor movement develops its new ideological instruments, provided that this is perceived as its principal priority.
We can no longer afford the luxury of labor movement institutions relieving symptoms rather than treating the causes of social diseases. Treating symptoms is the proper province of the state and, of course, there we have one of the major battle lines in our war with the New Right. Humanitarian donors abound when it comes to relieving the victims of social disasters but only labor is capable of dealing with the root causes of social disasters and preventing their recurrence. Global solidarity — both geographical and qualitative — is the concept that meets the present needs of the movement.
Finally, the international labor movement must take the lead in building new international coalitions with civic and social action groups, which have grown both in numbers and in strength since the 1970s. Over ten years ago, in an article in The New International Review (Vol. 3, No.1, 1980), this writer suggested that coalition building had to be an essential element in an international labor strategy: “the building of broad popular coalitions, with the trade union movement at their center, but bringing together many civic groups, issue-oriented movements and other popular groups that perceive, each in its own way, the social threat that corporate power represents and whose areas of concern overlap, in different degrees, with that of the labor movement.” Today, lower communications and travel costs have allowed the development of more cross-border action and information. More than ever, the basis exists for the emergence of a global civil society in which the labor movement can and should play a leading role.
The following article first appeared in the American socialist review New Politics, Vol. V, Nr. 1, Summer 1994. (New Politics, P.O. Box 98, Brooklyn N.Y. 11231,USA;
newpol@igc.org
www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/default.htm