From: Montyneill <Montyneill-AT-aol.com>
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 13:42:17 EST
Subject: AUT: midnight notes 12 intro 3/3



IV. New Enclosures, Neoliberalism and "Dialogue" versus Encuentros and
Autonomous Struggle

	The new enclosures and neoliberalism constitute just a  phase of capitalism
which is neither "late" nor "final."  It came into being as a result of
capital's war against the forms of power and organization and the resulting
capacity of the working class, in various ways in various places, to establish
some material security and supportive sociality. These working class powers
inhibited capitalist accumulation and provoked a world crisis for capital.
(This theme is developed in our book, Midnight Oil.(1992)) Capital's
counteroffensive both reasserted an old enclosures -- such as driving people
from the land and making them dependent on waged and monetarized relations --
and asserted a new form of enclosures, notably ending the welfare state,
"socialism," Keynesianism, and other aspects of the ways in which sectors of
the working class used the state.
	The consequences of this counter-offensive, documented extensively since the
mid- 1970s, have included mass impoverishment, chronic warfare, genocide and
ethnocide, vast migrations from the land and across the continents, fractured
societies, the demise of unions and other forms of workers' organization and
power, and great resistance in almost every area of the planet, though perhaps
least noticeable in the U.S. Thus, capital's strategies of new enclosures and
neoliberalism have once again intensified and expanded both proletarianization
and resistance to it.(2)
	Yet capital cannot be simply destructive. It must "develop" the spaces it
clears and must absorb the people "freed" from the land or the home into more
explicitly and directly capitalist relations. Let us be clear: housework, the
raising of children, teaching, peasant/small farmer or communal agriculture,
and petty trading -- the reproduction of life -- have all been incorporated
into the world capitalist system and form aspects of capitalistically
productive labor, that is work from which capital can extract a surplus. What
capital discovered in the 1960s was that while productive, these areas (along
with the factory) were also sites of resistance to capital, sources of
counter-productivity and a drain on the capacity to accumulate. Thus they had
to be brought more directly under the control of capital through the wage and
the market (while the factory was simultaneously decomposed, restructured, and
often moved to new locales).
	Neoliberalism has had its "productive" side, such as vast leaps in
communication capacity and ease of transport, proliferation of factory
production and pockets of high technology in new areas, and expansion of
industrial agriculture. But these developments have not absorbed the combined
expansion of the working class due to population growth and expulsion from the
land, and those workers contribute to accumulation primarily via the
extraction of surplus through long hours of work and subsistence wages
("absolute surplus value" in Marxist parlance). The leap to accumulation via
increasing productivity of work ("relative surplus value" in Marxist parlance)
has yet to be engineered for most of the human race, despite capitalist
domination of world production. This is the mass of labor that capital, via
neoliberalism  and new enclosures, must now digest to turn into fuel for
expanded accumulation.
	How is this "digestion" to be done? While the neoliberals respond with terror
(e.g., executions, the expansion of prison slave labor and other horrors),
others warn that, contra Dame Thatcher, society does exist and is not
reducible solely to the market, and thus that something more must be included
in the process of development than the market and the police. That is, they
call again for the state to play a constructive role, though not in the same
way as before (World Bank 1997).
	To see how this could begin to work, we can look briefly at the process of
negotiation that has been started between the World Bank (WB) and the non-
governmental organizations (NGOs, which include a wide range groups like the
Ford Foundation, Oxfam, the Red Cross, CARE, and Grassroots International). We
explore this process not because it is now the dominant aspect of capitalist
initiatives, which remain neoliberal, but to suggest directions capital is
exploring in response to working class struggles against capital, and thus to
suggest what the next stage of capitalist reformism could look like.
	Many NGOs have been sharply critical of WB/IMF austerity and "development"
programs. Rather than call for the abolition of these global capitalist
planning agencies, however, the dominant trend has been to call for their
reform. Facing not only the weapon of criticism but more importantly the
criticism of weapons and rebellion from Chiapas to Papua, the WB's President,
James Wolfenson, has suggested a dialogue between NGOs and the WB, explaining,
'if you want us to reform, you must help us do it.'
	Thus, in at least eight nations, mostly in Africa, the WB has funded a vast
organizing process of bringing hundreds of large and small NGOs together to
meet and develop both a critique of the WB and an alternative development
plan. But beyond the dialogues one can begin to see how capital is planning
development through the NGOs. From Grameen Banks to local forms of
participatory democracy to mutual aid in building roads to support expanded
markets, routes to expanded productivity that are instantly part of the
capitalist market are to be supported. Women are typically central to these
processes. Thus, depending on how far the WB will go, the "reformed" WB and
the NGOs proceed hand in hand toward capitalist development "with a human
face." Already, of course, NGO critics of the WB are complaining that the WB
is failing in its obligations to this process , but nonetheless the process
continues.
	For our purposes, we note several things about these processes. First,
capital shows again its understanding that the road to development lies
through working class struggle and energy, which must be captured and turned
into productivity. Where it cannot be, of course it must be smashed, as in
neoliberalism; but where it can be, lies capitalist progress. While, as
always, small capitalist development projects have their space and even
prerogatives,  they will not be allowed to interfere with the broader schemes
(hence the source of NGO complaints about the failures of the WB to honor the
dialogues).
	Second, the line between capitalist accumulation and working class power can
be enormously complex and subtle. At one level, who can complain if
"development" brings potable water (even if it was capitalist underdevelopment
that destroyed clean water)? More complexly, emphasis on such things as
women's participation and democracy can challenge local hierarchies and forms
of exploitation (which historically often have been supported, perhaps even
developed, and certainly exacerbated by capital, as in the marked increase of
bride burnings in India based on expansion of the capitalist market into
family relations; and see the article on Papua in this issue). Unchanneled,
such participatory efforts could lead toward constructing economic relations
relatively unoccupied by capitalist relations  -- which is obviously not what
the WB wants.
	Third, the role of NGOs is thus very complex, but once having accepted to
negotiate with the devil, it is difficult for them not to cut deals that will
steer development onto a capitalist path. Thus, rather than help in organizing
for development outside of capitalist relations, the NGOs become the modern
version of church and state in "bringing capitalism to the natives."
	Fourth, we can begin to see outlines of what capitalist development after
Keynesianism/socialism and after the onslaught of new enclosures and
neoliberalism could begin to look like. The "new social democracy" will not be
statist but substantially "localist," in which the local is not so much
mediated by or regulated by the state as engaging in direct relations with
transnational capital. Labor not directly working for transnational capital
will be channeled into work, often locally planned and organized through
participatory schemes, that enables local capitalist development. There
emerges a form of "autonomy" --  within the limits of capital's needs.
	It is important here to remember just how powerfully the working class itself
rejected the state, even while demanding social welfarism from the state. Such
rejection, coupled with the general inability of the working class to create a
viable alternative to capital, opened ready space for offensives by capital
that took neoliberal form. Thus working class rejection meets "non-state"
development in which the needs for sociality and security are localized and
development is locally managed, in part. "Communitarianism" is, for example,
one form of this planning in the U.S. Most assuredly, military and police and
fascistic responses, continued neoliberalism, enclosures and ethnocide, await
working class refusal to participate.
	Fifth, a new social psychology of the worker is being constructed: the eager
participant. While Grameen Banks and participatory decision-making are
intended to produce the eager participant in the reshaped economy of the
regions of  historical underdevelopment, childrearing, schooling and changing
work patterns in the areas of historical development are intended to produce
the worker who eagerly participates, to replace the reluctant laborer of the
assembly-line era. Of course this heads toward capitalist paradise: the worker
who voluntarily and actively participates in planing and executing her/his own
exploitation. In both instances, the category of the "thinking" worker is
presumably encouraged, provided however that the thinking can remain confined
to capitalist channels.
	The "eager participant" and the "autonomous" wage-slave are capitalist uses
of working class struggles for a life in which work has meaning and humans
freely choose their social and productive relations. It is the impulse for the
communal kitchen perverted into the local franchise McDonalds. Capital is here
promising what it cannot deliver. Instead of real human control, local
autonomy is merely a terminal of the global machine. These plans are a
response to struggles, just as the Grameen banks were a response to fear that
famine in Bangladesh in 1974, following on war and enclosures which drove
millions from the land, would provoke revolution.
	We are not arguing that the lowering of wages and smashing of social
securities is now over, that capital has decided in general to move beyond
neoliberalism and the new enclosures. Far from it. The New Enclosures remains
the dominant aspect of capitalism, and resistance to them is at this time
necessarily anti-capitalist. The work of the World Trade Organization (WTO),
the emerging Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI), the expansion of the
North American Free Trade Agreement Association (NAFTA) and NATO and the
strengthening of the Maastricht treaty are among a plethora of capitalist
supra- national organizing efforts, all of which are fundamentally neoliberal
and continue the new enclosures.
	We are here simply pointing to hints of where capital might be heading if it
can begin to control working class resistance and harness it productively.  It
is not impossible for capital to shift from neoliberalism to new forms of
development. In that case, we need to keep two things in mind: this can happen
if and only if capital can control and channel working class struggles and
energies; and therefore the nature of working class struggles, the class'
multifold goals and strategies, must be considered in light of a capitalist
strategizing that is far more complex than a simply an unending imposition of
new enclosures. While a return to statist social democracy is, we think, an
impossibility, at least for generations to come, "constructive"
developmentalism is not only not impossible, it is a capitalist necessity if
the system is to expand.
	At root, it was the Zapatistas, the Papuans, the Indian farmers, and the
multitudinous struggles against the WB/IMF which propelled the WB to accept
the dialogue with the NGOs. The crisis of Keynesianism was for capital a
crisis of its  ability to use working class energy productively. It therefore
had to attack and destroy working class power. Thus, so- called development
schemes remained underdevelopment schemes, destruction of local powers and
implanting alien nodes of production emphasizing dead, not living, labor. Yet
working class power is the very heart of capital, and capital cannot survive
without it. Thus, capital must continue to think seriously about how to use
working class energy as the fuel for capitalist development, how to control
local moments of power while fostering energy that can produce capitalist
development.
	In this, agencies such as the WB and IMF are only doing their job. But what
of the NGOs who allow the WB to shape the process of discussion and networking
in nation after nation, who end up forsaking the possibility of autonomous
activity for deals with the WB? What, in short, will be the main relationship
between NGOs and the emerging world state of supranational bodies controlled
by transnational capital, the new coordinating committees of capital? And how
do anti- neoliberal activists address not only the NGOs but also emerging
aspects of capitalist developmentalism? Most importantly, how should such
activists think about organizing and strategizing, developing clear anti-
capitalist plans and routes?
	For us, amidst many struggles and efforts at developing new circuits of
discussion and action, the key moments of the past several years have been the
Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Intercontinental Encuentros
Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity, initiated by the Zapatistas and held
first in Chiapas in 1996 and then in the Spanish state in 1997. We see these
efforts as an important part of a slow and still uncertain beginning of new
possibilities for the world anti-capitalist struggle. Most critically, these
efforts are initiated by people in struggle, not by NGOs collaborating with
the WB. They are autonomous, self- defined. They bring together people from a
multiplicity of struggles in a dialogue to learn from each other, to think
about how to support one another and together create a means to overcome the
world capitalist system. We do not argue that the Encuentros are the only such
entity and process, only that they are important in themselves and as
representing, through their autonomous self-development, the process of
developing new capacities to struggle.
	In this edition of Midnight Notes we open the first of a series of issues
intended to explore and discuss the current shape of capitalism and class
struggle. We ask the reader to participate with us in this effort.


V. The Articles in this Issue

	This text presents four pieces. In "From Structural Adjustment to Land
Mobilization to Expropriation," a World Bank Watcher details how the IMF was
unable to make its land policy work, which provoked a crisis in Papua New
Guinea. The control of land remains fundamental for capitalist  development
schemes, and despite terrible destruction inflicted on the population in the
name of progress, people's struggles inflicted a defeat on the IMF and its
subservient government. In fact, this defeat marked the beginning of the Asian
Crisis.
	Hugo Aboites, in "Globalization and the Transformation of the Mexican
University," details the twists and turns of battles over the state's efforts
to reshape Mexican universities to meet the imperatives of the capitalist
world economy. Control over knowledge and the workers who produce and
manipulate knowledge is critical to capitalist production, so the state has
been required to reshape the universities. While the details in Mexico may
vary from those in other parts of the world, the story illustrates capital's
intent and efforts everywhere. In Mexico, students and faculty have not
acceded quietly to the plans, and though those plans have managed to move
ahead, the battles continue.
	"Resistance to Neoliberalism: A View from South Africa" was written as a
paper for the second Intercontinental Encuentro by South African Comrades for
the Encounter. In this piece, the authors show how "homegrown structural
adjustment" emerges from the particular class composition of South Africa, in
the aftermath of the freedom struggle, within the context of global capitalist
initiatives, into which South African capital and state seek to insert
themselves. The paper also illustrates contradictions
in the process and suggests avenues of struggle against the neoliberal
project.
	We close with a chronology of class struggle in Asia and Oceania from 1995 to
the present. We believe that a careful examination of the movement of workers
struggles for wages and land hold the key in understanding the unfolding of
the crisis. One chronology of struggle is worth a thousand corporate annual
reports!


VI. Future Steps
	In the near future, Midnight Notes plans additional issues. We propose next a
discussion and analysis of the Encuentros and their relation to the Zapatista
struggle. Already we have some material:
reports from the Encuentros some of which can be found on the web at:
	http://www.pangea.org/encuentro/ and at 	
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3849/gatherdx.html,
 and a lengthy draft of a piece by some Midnight Noters which builds on the
work of the encuentros ("Towards a New Commons," a short version of which is
available at the above sites and the full version at
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/mngcjm.html). (If you are not on the
net, we will mail you the short version of "Towards the New Commons," if you
send us a self-addressed stamped envelope with postage for two ounces.)
 	For that issue, we seek to explore the meaning and uses of the Encuentros
with an eye to strengthening them, as we expect there will be more, and in any
event the process of planetary connections of anti-capitalist struggles must
expand. We are therefore interested in articles in this vein which respond to
the encuentros or to "Towards the New Commons." We expect to publish the issue
on the Encuentros in the spring of 1998.
	Beyond this issue, we intend to focus on research and analysis about the
developments of class struggle on a planetary level. We have many questions.
On what basis can unity among complexly diverse sectors of the class, which is
fragmented hierarchically, be established? What are the forms of organization
being developed by the working class that can facilitate unity and cycles of
struggles that will overcome capital?  The key term today seems to be
"network." While we find much that is problematic behind this concept, still
we can think of networking that needs to be done.
	One network that needs to be developed is one focused on analysis in the
service of overcoming hierarchies and strengthening unity-with-diversity
within the class against capital. Understanding capitalist strategies is one
part of this effort, but such work needs clearly to connect to developing
struggles. At a minimum, this network needs to do two things: circulate
knowledge of particular struggles throughout the planet and simultaneously
circulate understanding of the strategies used to create and develop these
struggles.
	The task first requires reports and analyses that would provide rich material
for deepening class analysis. The issues related to this knowledge include how
to make the reports and analyses accessible and usable (including but not
limited to the web); how to share the work of analysis and synthesis,
evaluation and interpretation, to reduce duplication; how to develop better
frames of analysis and ways to critique each others' frames or methodologies.
Much of this used to be done by parties or supra-national entities from the
first to the last International. While not seeking to replicate past
organizational practices, how we can strengthen networks of people and groups
working on these issues without the discipline and coherence of party
structures is not clear and needs to be discussed.
	But one cannot understand a struggle without having some knowledge of its
strategy. Thus we need to develop our strategic discussion and analysis as
well. To foreshadow one point to be addressed in the next issue, at least one
glaring weakness of the second Encuentro was its very limited progress in
strategic thinking, including on the topic of networks. While important issues
were raised and questions posed, progress in resolving them was very limited.
	Thus we conclude with a call to participate in an expanded discussion of
analyzing class struggles -- capital's side, the working class' side, and
their development. We hope the pieces in this issue help spur  thinking about
the struggle, and thus more effective class struggle. We hope further to
present many analyses of particular struggles in many sectors and locales of
struggle around the planet, as well as discussions of developing planetary
working class anti-capitalist strategy.

Endnotes

(1) Gustavo Esteva has informed us that the slogan "One No, Many Yeses"
originated in the Mexican anti-nuclear movement of the early 1980s.
Apparently, this movement brought together a complex alliance of groups and
interests, just as it did in the U.S. and Europe during the same period (p.m.,
1992).

(2) We prefer to use "new enclosures" and "neoliberalism" over the other names
of capitalism because they refer more clearly to its impact on the proletariat
and the state.

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