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... --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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