File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/97-02-16.202, message 54


From: Mneillft-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 10:18:01 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Fwd: Monty's article for MN: comments from Les and Anne


I am forwarding Les & Anne's comments on the Strategy paper and am also
circulating to the list my comments to them.  Monty

---------------------
Forwarded message:
From:	L.Levidow-AT-open.ac.uk (L.Levidow -Les Levidow)
To:	caffentz-AT-usm.maine.edu ('George Caffentzis'),
M.DeAngelis-AT-east-london.ac.uk (Massimo De Angelis), Mneillft-AT-aol.com ('Monty
Neill'), nucszf-AT-hofstra.edu ('Silvia Federici'), patcu-AT-hotmail.com (Patrick
Cunningham)
Date: 97-02-04 04:25:17 EST


Les' comments

I generally agree with Massimo's comments (29.01.97) but want to query three 
related points at the start of section III.

i)  How does the term "new enclosure" relate to neoliberalism?  Is the 
former an adequate synonym?

The answer is more complex than a definitional matter; it is inadequate, for 
example, to define casualisation as new enclosures.  At the very least, we 
must clarify what is being defended from attack, how and why.   If job 
security is to be understood as a 'commons', for example, then we must 
analyse its exclusivist features, its communal-collective features, and 
their inherent tension, especially as manifest in trade-union forms of 
resistance.  When sections of the working class defend such past gains from 
attack, they tend to invoke special exclusivist qualities (e.g. 'skills', 
even professional credentials).  At the same time, the struggle may also 
transcend those limits and express/discover new needs, amenable to wider 
collective aspirations.

In our casualisation report for the Zurich meeting, we quoted a Liverpool 
docker:
'Not many human beings would choose freely to spend their lives in the 
tumult of meaningless, unfulfilling and alienated work.... The struggle of 
the dockers in Liverpool is not to maintain the past but to protect the 
future'.

In his book The Country and the City, Raymond Williams made a similar point: 
In resisting 18th-century enclosures, people rhetorically defended 'the 
community' and traditional rights; yet that 'community' had nearly 
disintegrated long ago and was now being reconstituted through collective 
resistance.  His insight has more general relevance today.

Therefore term "new enclosure" should be used for carefully analysing the 
diverse "commons" now under attack, as well as their retrograde (e.g. 
exclusivist) features which may be transcended in resisting that attack.

ii)  If we emphasize our resistance to "neoliberalism", will this term 
accommodate those who seek merely to ameliorate the worst excesses of 
capital?  Given that capitalist rule presently has no alternative to 
neoliberalism, will not (or can) opposition in practice lead to a strategy 
against capital as a whole?

My reply is ambivalent.  On the one hand, we should use the term 
'neoliberalism' for several reasons: it helps to globalize debate on what 
common enemy we face, and to clarify that capitalist rule has no alternative 
at present.  In this way, the term helps to shift the 'burden of evidence' 
towards those who imply or assume that the worst excesses can be reliably 
overcome through new deals.

On the other hand, there is no reason to believe that opposition to 
neoliberalism will lead to a strategy against capitalism (regardless of 
which term we emphasize).   Unfortunately, many Left activists find 
themselves trying to recreate old or new deals, trying to 'unite the 
masses/people' with slogans from those deals (e.g. 'full employment'), 
 trying to revive social democracy, etc.  In the name of building 'broad 
fronts' or 'unity', they try to impose old formulas which inspire no one. 
 The less they succeed in inspiring or mobilizing people, the more they try 
to censor or exclude the elements which are supposedly to blame for the 
failure.  Given such compulsive behaviour by the Left, it may be irrelevant 
that capitalist rule has no alternatives.

Therefore, without a creative vision, diverse resistances may find no 
substantive basis for unity, much less an opposition to capitalism as such. 
  This point links with Monty's article and Massimo's reply, regarding the 
recurrent difficulty and necessity for such a vision.   Where, then, is 'the 
new society growing in the womb of the old?'

iii)  What kind of class unity is possible/desirable for those who (can) 
have no collective deal with capital?

We cannot know in advance what new deals may be possible.  For example, in 
Britain some companies now offer 'job security' in return for trade-union 
commitments to productivity targets and a no-strike pledge.  (And such 
workers would be counted among the 80% in Reich's schema.)   Perhaps the 
term 'deal' would be misleading, because trade unions may lack the strength 
to enforce the employer's side of the bargain if the latter reneges.  In any 
case, this example may indicate how capitalists experiment with new deals.

Monty's article draws a sharp distinction between two types of alliances: of 
the 80% only (anti-capitalist), vs between parts of the 80% and the 20% 
(social-democratic) -- following Reich's schema.  Although that distinction 
may be meaningful, further distinctions are needed -- in particular, on the 
basis for unity.   For example, a demand for 'full employment' presupposes 
capital and so remains social-democratic.  A demand for 'job security' seeks 
unity on some people's terms, while a demand for income favours others' 
terms.   The strategic dilemma is how to accommodate diverse experiences and 
aspirations, in such a way as to overcome such divisions through common 
practical activity -- not simply by choosing the 'correct' demands.

Lastly, I think there is a problem with terminology.  Where the article says 
'united front', I think you mean 'popular front', the classic 
social-democratic term for unity with the 'progressive bourgeoisie'.     To 
that alliance, Trotskyists counterposed the 'united front' of working-class 
organizations in the 1930s.  Today, however, that terminological distinction 
has been nearly lost; 'unity' now usually serves to re-impose a 
social-democratic framework.  Therefore we must always ask: 'unity' on whose 
terms? for what future?

All the above points also bear upon the concluding section on 'Class 
Composition Analysis', though I will leave you to work out how.
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 --------------------------------------

Anne's comments on Massimo's reply to Monty:-

Re Massimo on Monty's intro:-

Massimo's is a rhetorical point. I don't see how one could disagree with
Massimo. But this doesn't detract from the validity of what Monty says.

Re: whether neo-liberalism=new enclosures: This is worth further discussion. 

First of all, what's the benefit if these terms are found to be substitutes? 
On the one hand, `neo-liberalism' as a concept is still relatively alien to 
English speakers, although use of the term is just beginning to catch on in 
radical discussion of world development issues, for example. (Perhaps it 
should be our task to introduce it into the debate about EMU). On the other 
hand, `new enclosures' is not well known either. So trying to accept `new 
enclosures' as an alternative term for `neo-liberalism' doesn't really help 
resolve the problem of how to get across the ideas of the Encuentro.

Secondly, I tend to agree with Les that `enclosures' or `new
enclosures' is only a part of what neo-liberalism is about. In fact I would 
go
further: 'enclosures' implies an attack on what was good about 
pre-capitalist
relations of production (without implying that pre-capitalism was overall
better than capitalism, a notion that we should neither imply or deny). So
`new enclosures' can hardly be used to describe attacks on Fordist
capital/labour `deals', which would be the implication of treating Fordist
labour contracts as a `common' and casualisation as an `enclosure'. `(New)
enclosures' is a useful term  but not as an alternative to neo-liberalism. 
We
need to confront the real task of detailing WHAT NEO-LIBERALISM IS. This
requires much thought, but my first thoughts are that it's a phase of
capitalism which involves:-

a) severe reduction in the Fordist-type regulatory functions of the state,
including the functions of modifying income distribution, helping to 
reproduce
labour power by extensive state services, regulating labour contracts,
pursuing full employment as a policy goal

b) sell-off of state industries  and marketisation (=privatisation or 
charging
`market' prices) in state services, including in states that were never
`developed' enough to be truly Fordist

c) increased international mobility of capital

d) increased exposure of individual national economies to foreign trade and
competition; reduced powers (under WTO/GATT/IMF/IBRD/EU international
regulatory systems) to protect `infant' or threatened industries by
tariffs/quotas, or to control exchange rates and currency conversions. For
countries with non-convertible currencies, this includes reduced powers
(enforced `liberalisations' by IBRD/IMF) to ration or plan the use of hard
currency to secure essential imports; it thus outlaws the `state control of
foreign trade' that is essential to the development of socialist planning, 
and
allows a small developing country's middle class to consume it into deeper 
and
deeper hard-currency debt; that is, it helps to turn a Mozambique into a
Brazil.

The political consequences of this strategy/phase - increased attacks on
trade unions, organised workers and peasants, more repressive policing etc. 
are well documented. Spelling it all out like this may help to make people 
more
conscious of the parallels between the EU with its EMU project and 
Maastricht
`convergence criteria' and the countries which  have suffered longer from
`structural adjustment policy'. I'm not quite sure what the implications of
neo-liberalism are for the working class in the USA, and perhaps this is
important. Is neo-liberal capitalism to be viewed as an imperialist 
`project'
>from which a `labour aristocracy' composed of at least a part of the US (or,
likewise, Japanese/German/French/Belgian) working class may derive some
benefit? or at least security from economic attack ?  Or is the working 
class
everywhere just as liable to lose ?  Currently the high wages/high welfare 
deal in France and Germany is threatened by the macro-economic policies 
which those governments find `necessary' in order to move towards monetary 
union.  But EMU might actually lead to a shift of investment towards member 
countries at the expense of non-member countries, thus limiting redundancies 
and deterioration of workers' conditions in those countries which can meet 
the convergence criteria relatively easily, whilst leading to worse 
deterioration in
non-member countries than if EMU was not set up at all.

Which brings me to Massimo's other 60k dollar question:  'Can a planetary
strategy against neo-liberalism lead to a strategy against capital as a 
whole?' My first reaction was on a superficial level: it is better to have 
reformist
allies than none, at least up to the point  (in struggle or argument) where
their paths necessarily diverge from the paths of those with a more radical
vision.  But the last paragraph takes me further; if neo-liberalism is an
`imperialist' project from which a (perhaps only small) labour aristocracy 
in
some countries are safe or may even benefit, the question of how to address
neo-liberalism in those countries is affected.

Massimo says that a return to Keynesianism is impossible, but to my mind he
doesn't produce a convincing argument for this.  Certainly there is a 
current
argument around the UK Left: if the Maastricht treaty could be
replaced by some `people's Europe' vision which facilitated a Keynesian,
rather than a monetarist, macro-economic regime across the EU, there would 
be no obstacle to Keynesianism in one country.  If Keynesianism in one 
country  (or 2 or 3 or 15) is not possible, then why should 
socialism/anarchism/workers'
autonomy or whatever be possible either?  Perhaps all one can say is that 
the
possibility/impossibility of a new `deal' (or a new mode of production)
depends on the breadth/narrowness of the attack against the old order.

Returning to `enclosures' versus `neo-liberalism'; destruction of the
`commons' very strongly raises the question of destruction of the 
environment.
Capitalism, whether neo-liberal or Fordist, certainly does that.  A 
keynesian
revival, with its preoccupation with full employment, would be very
threatening to the environment - and thus more importantly to HUMANS who are 
suffering from destruction of the ozone layer, noise, asthma and various 
kinds of poisoning and would suffer more from global warming.  The `vision' 
for  western Europe and the US/ Canada/NZ/Aussie is likely to focus on less 
work, more leisure, more satisfaction of REAL needs and less waste of 
labour/resources to serve advertiser-generated ones. But the `vision' for 
poorer countries must of
necessity involve a large element of legitimate consumerism. Not all workers
in the `North' will agree with each other with regard to the balance between
consumerism and sustainability. Those in the `South' or `East' might argue
that most of the pollution-carrying capacity of the globe should be reserved 
to
enable their standard of living to catch up. These issues are sure to come 
up
in the Encuentro series of meetings. The point to be made is that under
capitalism, it's not WORKERS, ANYWHERE, who choose how natural resources are 
to be used. We have to seize both the cake and the knife to cut it with 
before it's worth spending long on the question of how to cut it up.

PS:  The plus about e-mail is that it seems to have revived the ancient 
practice of letter-writing. The minus is that one is tempted to load 
everyone else's hard
disk with torrents of half-baked words which might not deserve to reach a
piece of real paper. So before more of them emerge,goodnight...



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