File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/aut-op-sy.9708, message 38


From: "FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za>
Date:          Thu, 7 Aug 1997 13:19:25 GMT + 2:00
Subject: AUT: REPORT FROM ENCOUNTER FOR HUMANITY AND AGAINST NEOLIBERALISM


PLEASE NOTE: The following first impressions from our participation
to the Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and against
Neoliberalism are mainly written for comrades in South Africa.
However, I am also sending them to international lists since they
may contain some useful tips for broader discussions. Again, I am
sorry for non English-speaking comrades for being unable to provide
translations at this stage.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN DELEGATION BACK FROM THE
SECOND INTERCONTINENTAL ENCOUNTER FOR HUMANITY AND AGAINST
NEOLIBERALISM (SPAIN, 25 JULY - 2 AUGUST 1997).

What follow are rather sketchy and disordinate suggestions that I
have got from the Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and
against Neoliberalism, just closed in Spain, to which I took part in
a South African delegation that included Rehad Desai as well. Hardy
and myself will produce more articulated texts in the next future,
and we will make copies of the final documents available for
discussion. We also aim to organize public report back and
discussion meetings, hoping that this experience will contribute
towards the definition of a radical, ruthless criticism of
neoliberalism in South Africa.

At an average temperature of 45 Celsius, the Encounter brought
together more than 4.000 comrades, individuals, groups, national
delegations from more than 50 countries (more precise statistics to
follow) of the six continents. The Encounter was articulated into
six tables ("mesas"), dealing with various aspects of neoliberalism
and resistance. Each mesa was divided into "sub mesas" spread
through five locations (Madrid, Barcelona, Almunecar, El Indiano and
Ruesta). The South African delegation submitted its "ponencia"
(paper) in Mesa 1, "Neoliberal Economics: Our Lives beyond Economy",
submesa A ("Work and Production"). This submesa was divided between
Madrid and Barcelona; we discussed the topic in Alcobendas, near
Madrid, at the "G. Lorca" College, after that all the delegations
had met on 26 July at the "Leon Felipe" College in San Sebastian de
los Reyes. At the end of the discussions inside the mesas, a plenary
took place on 1 August in El Indiano (Cadiz), 500 kms. South of
Madrid. However, the work of the mesas (with their proposed lines of
action) was only half of the task of the Encounter. In fact, a
commission was charged with presenting to the plenary a document on
the constitution of strategies and networks of resistance to
neoliberalism, which was expected combine relevant sections of the
various ponencias and in the final reports of the mesas.

The Encounter proper was opened on 27 July by a public meeting,
chaired by Gustavo Esteva (UNAM, Mexico City) with a delegation from
the Zapatista Front of National Liberation. This was centred on the
difficulties of the current phase in Chiapas, marked by the regime's
siege of Zapatista communities and a heightened militarization, to
which was contrasted the recent electoral advance of the left
against the PRI party-state. This seems to open spaces for manoeuvre
based on a further mobilization of Mexican civil society, to confirm
the link between democratization of Mexican society and economy and
the fate of Zapatista demands.

The question of the division of the submesa 1A between Madrid and
Barcelona became soon the object of a hot confrontation between
participants in the mesa and the Spanish organizing commission.
Complaints about the organization of the gathering have been raised
by many delegations. Apart from logistical problems (especially
related to accommodations), these criticisms underlined relevant
political shortcomings. It became in fact apparent that the
organization of the mesas and the venues responded to preoccupations
linked to internal relations between groups which took part in the
organization (notable was the effort of the small and radical CGT,
Spanish Confederation of Labour, of the Farmworkers' Union and of
the comrades in the area of the Social Centres). These dynamics
negatively affected the development of the Encounter. In fact, the
fragmentation of some mesas and the emphasis on delegated forms of
representation in contrast with direct participatory democracy were
often perceived as elements of bureaucratization in substantial
discontinuity with the first Encounter that was held in 1996 in
Chiapas. To these impressions contributed the decision to have the
final plenary, the culminating moment of the whole Encounter, to the
distant, isolated and uncomfortable location of El Indiano, that was
apparently unable to cater for the needs of such a huge and
diversified crowd.

Delegations involved a wide spectrum of participants from left wing
parties, unions, NGOs, church associations, extra-parliamentarian
oppositional movements of any tradition. However, it was
particularly notable the massive, organized presence of comrades
from autonomist, antagonist, anarchist currents. This was apparent
in the impressive presence of delegations from Italy (more than
1.000 comrades, representing a host of umbrella bodies, social
centres, resource centres, radio stations, magazines, collectives
and, of course, individuals). The Mesa 1A (Madrid group) was rather
diversified. It included, apart from the South African delegation,
ponencias from the Swiss comrades of "Red-Red", the British of
"fHuman", the Americans of "Midnight Notes", plus contributions by
comrades from Israel, Morocco, Denmark, Germany, Austria, France,
Burkina Faso, a small contingent of Italians from the Social Centres
and from the internal opposition to the Italian Confederation of
Labour, a host of Latin American delegations (Venezuela, Peru,
Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Brasil) and, of
course, comrades from the Spanish state and the Basque country. All
in all: about 120 comrades divided into four working groups
(English-speaking, French-Italian, Castillan-speaking and one
"mixed" group).

Apart from our paper, the discussion was decisively influenced by
the fHuman paper on "flexible exploitation" in the UK, the Midnight
Notes paper on the Zapatista and strategies of resistance, the
Red-Red paper on building networks of struggles, and by Massimo De
Angelis' (fHuman and University of East London) ponencia on radical
demands. Our submesa revolved mainly around capitalist restructuring
in the nature of work under neoliberalism. This led to a critical
assessment of flexible forms of exploitation. As the final submesa
document testifies, neoliberalism facilitates a proliferation of
forms of work and employment relationships that fragment and
disarticulate the class composition of societies in both North and
South. Precarization and casualization of work are accompanied by a
shift of the state from "welfare" to "workfare" approaches. These
dynamics, combined to international migrations, recreate spaces of
servile labour and semi- slavery, particularly apparent in the case
of many forms of female and children labour, inside capitalist
relations of production. This process spawns from South to North and
defines "multinational working classes" with declining standards and
guarantees even inside historical industrial cores. Household and
life-time are therefore intensely colonized by processes of
production decentralization and they become sites of capitalist
value creation in a logic whereby the whole men's and women's lives
are put to work. Finally, it is to be considered the work of the
unwaged in such a process, that is to say the vulnerability implied
in "the job of looking for a job", a situation that is becoming
widespread.

At the same time, the above process is contradictory. In fact, from
one side the decline of the welfare state and the failure of
socialdemocratic options are making people's lives increasingly
dependent on their ability to be competitive on the market and to
find jobs that for the majority are less and less available,
rewarding, and protected. On the other side, labour is no longer
able in these conditions to provide collective identity, sense of
security and commitment towards the kind of flexible competitive
capitalism spurred by neoliberalism. As a consequence, a terrain
more conducive to resistance at localized levels can be shaped by
these trends.

However, in order to capture the potential for resistance enshrined
in current restructuring of work on a global scale, critical
analyses and forms of organization must start from the shifts in the
subjectivity and the anthropology of labour. The Encounter
underlined that no place can be recognized to the socialdemocratic
discourse in rebuilding anti-neoliberal resistance. However, given
the profound rearticulation of the global working class, even
traditional left radical approaches based on centralized
organizations, parties and images of a unified working class will be
of little use. More important then is the construction of networks
of local processes of resistance whereby struggles over work and
production are linked to a plurality of issues raised by diverse
social movements as struggles over income and the quality of life. A
common ground for such networks is that "employment", as re-defined
by current capitalist restructuring is not the same as "work", as a
plurality a human activities not necessarily related to earning a
wage. The consequence is that peoples' income for the satisfaction
of their needs for social services, culture and sociality can no
longer depend on wage, especially when wage becomes so unpredictable
and linked to dynamics of hyper-exploitation.

In other words, building a network of struggles is not an
organizational task in the traditional sense of the word, as fixed
by the tradition of working class movements. It is rather a task of
conceptualizing a circulation of struggles based on the focus on
common demands, trends and horizons that can be detected in the
development of diverse proletarian needs and subjectivity. It is in
the nature of actuality of those needs, and in the commonality of
their aspirations, that a possibility for liberation lies. Following
from the Encounter's suggestion that income and quality of life
cannot be made dependent on wages, two demands were identified as
crucial: a guaranteed citizenship income on a universal basis, and
the reduction of working time as an issue of redistribution of life
activities.

Guaranteed income and reduction of working time are not compatible
with demands developed inside a capitalist framework such as "job
creation", given that job creation depends on investment, markets
and productivity dynamics, rather than on working time by itself.
Demands on income and time are rather issues to gather dynamics of
conflict around an anti-neoliberal agenda to stop capitalist
restructuring and shift the balance of forces on a terrain more
favourable to antagonist movements. At the same time, they represent
an alternative in the use of time and income that develops from
inside the contradictions of the present system, without any easy
sloganeering on the seizure of state power and the establishment of
a workers' state. Finally, privileging the terrain of income implies
that anti-neoliberal struggles should support experiences of direct
action for the reappropriation of resources, from the Zapatista
communities, to land occupations, to squatting in urban areas. It is
here crucial, however, that struggles developed on those grounds are
not cooptable by capitalism.

A difference emerged inside our submesa on whether "alternative
economies", non marketized, no-profit and de-commodified, as
developed inside capitalism represent alternatives of struggle to
neoliberalism. The Madrid group, and especially the Latin American
delegations, supported this option, that was instead rejected by the
Barcelona group, and especially the Italians there, who argued that
there is no alternative or non-capitalist form of economy that is by
itself not cooptable by capital, as long as we are inside a
capitalist system, and that our struggles around income and time
should consciously prefigure a societal and life-style alternative,
even if at a localized level.

The definition of a unified document for the two groups of the
submesa 1A in Barcelona and Madrid was made difficult, of course, by
the division of the submesa. However, the South African delegation
was crucial in pushing the organization to allow for the two groups
to meet before the final plenary at El Indiano in order to define a
common set of immediate actions that could unite the two groups.
This was accepted by the organization at a meeting attended by four
representatives of the submesa (two from Madrid, one South African
and one Swiss, and two from Barcelona, one French and one German).
As a result, the submesa 1A supported the following immediate
actions:

* Mobilization against the summit of the World Trade Organization to
be held in Geneva (Switzerland) on May 1998; 
* An international weekof action against Maastricht Europe in the 
first week of December; 
* Support to the "Declaration of Alcobendas" in support of the EZLN in
Chiapas and for an end to repression and militarization; 
* An international day of action to be organized against flexibility,
casualization and the agencies for the employment of flexible
labour.

For the South African comrades, it may be interesting that there was
a heated discussion around the ANC. People were generally surprised
to hear our criticisms on the ANC's current neoliberal orientation.
At the end, the draft of the final submesa document, which mentioned
the failure of socialdemocratic parties and their conversion to
basic neoliberal assumptions, explicitly mentioned the ANC, together
with European and Latin American socialdemocracies. However, the
inclusion of the ANC as a specific example was challenged in the
final submesa plenary, and comrades from Herri Batasuna (Basque
nationalists) asked to scrap that point (nationalisms holding
together all over the world?). At the end, we came to the vote on
the issue of the ANC (a quite unique event in the whole Encounter).
With half of the people absent or abstained, a majority of 32 (Latin
Americans, Basque, most Italians, some Spanish) voted to scrap the
reference to the ANC in the final document, against a minority of 24
(mainly SA, British, American, Swiss, Danish comrades). Comments are
that in so far this vote represents an assumption of the current ANC
line as a model of anti- neoliberal struggle, this contradicts
orientations emerged in our submesa.

Apart from this, my opinion is that crucial lessons can be drawn
from the Encounter. It has become particularly evident that a
different kind of opposition to neoliberalism exists and is
expanding. Albeit plural and differentiated, this alternative finds
a common ground on strategies of resistance and subversion based on
the liberation of the quality of life from the wage relation and on
the rejection of capitalist waged employment. It expresses a
priority for autonomy and self-government of struggles and
communities as a vehicle of struggle. It is opened to a plurality of
movements in the respect of their diversity and independence and it
is suspicious of the state- and party- based discourses that have
been traditionally conveyed by working class mainstream
organizations. Moreover, it openly criticizes the return to welfare
state and developmentalist options as strategies of critique of
neoliberalism. All this is very refreshing, coming from a country
like South Africa, where the mainstream socialdemocratic left has
just discovered "German-based" co-determination and it is
disseminating it as the new flower of the season. Another crucial
lesson is that no chance for resistance to neoliberalism can exist
unless it roots its analysis and organization to the understanding
of the profound changes in the nature of production and of
proletarian subjectivity. And this is the final word to be sent to
any approach based on institutionalized dynamics and reified images
of class, consciousness and organization.

The problems emerged at the Encounter are the problems that are
common to any unfinished projects, to any navigation that proceeds
on uncertain coordinates. The shortcomings in the organization of
the Encounter exhacerbated these problems but they did not create
them. The best expression used to define the Encounter was that of a
"productive chaos": a plurality of voices heard to testify the
diversity of resistant processes and the needs for common elements
to circulate these struggles. However, the definition of networks
and localized strategies is not a task of the Encounter. It rather
implies focusing on neoliberalism not as a monolithic, all-powerful
force, but as patterns of capitalist strategies influenced by
contradictions, loopholes and class contestation at local and
regional levels. This Encounter has reportedly been much more
concrete and less ideological in many demands and contributions than
the previous one.

But such an effort will be meaningful only in so far it contributes
to ignite in every different country and locality those processes of
discussion, analysis and rearticulation of an antagonist movement
that rejects both neoliberalism and conventional, self-defined,
centralized forms of response. In other words, now it's up to us
comrades in South Africa. Our journal, "Debate", has always tried to
act as a forum for an anti-neoliberal, non-socialdemocratic
opposition to emerge out of the materiality of struggles and social
movements. Now, building on the Encounter, forums for discussion and
debate among all the committed comrades must be created to test the
viability of the Encounter's conclusions for the South African case
and to translate them in demands and strategies appropriate to the
struggles developed in our country. Developing this alternative
opposition is imperative if we want to avoid what in our ponencia we
called the alternative between institutionalisation and
invisibility, with which neoliberalism is facing any kind of
opposition.

These forums for discussion and strategy must be created soon, and I
am confident they will be created.

IF YOU WANT COPIES OF THE SUBMESA 1A DOCUMENT, OF THE FINAL MESA 1
DEMANDS, OF THE FINAL DOCUMENT ON NETWORKS, OR OF ANY OTHER
ENCOUNTER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT ME BY REPLYING TO THIS E-MAIL. 

FURTHER REPORT-BACK AND DISCUSSION MEETINGS ON THE ENCOUNTER WILL BE 
NOTIFIED.

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Unit
Dept of Sociology
University of the Witwatersrand
Private Bag 3
PO Wits 2050
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel. (++27 11) 716.3290
Fax  (++27 11) 716.3781
E-Mail 029frb-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html
http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/direct.htm

Home:
98 6th Avenue
Melville 2092
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel. (++27 11) 482.5011


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