Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 20:37:57 -0500 Subject: M-G: FWD: midnight notes 12 intro 1/3 (fwd) From: "ORIONTEC" <oriontec-AT-prodigy.net> Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 13:41:30 EST >From: Montyneill <Montyneill-AT-aol.com> To: aut-op-sy-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu, encounter2-AT-tao.ca Subject: AUT: midnight notes 12 intro 1/3 One No, Many Yeses [This introduction to Midnight Notes 12 is being posted in three parts. (The printed version has been slightly edited from this version.) The articles in the issue are described at the end of the introduction. Copies of the issue are available for US$5 in the U.S., US$7 from outside the US (surface mail outside North America). A subscription for two issues is US$10 inside US, $US13 from outside US. Please send US money and not a check from another country. If you lack funds, tell us, send what you can, and we will send you a copy. If you are already a subscriber, your copy will be mailed ASAP. Mail to Box 204, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130, USA. You can contact us by email at <montyneill-AT-aol.com>. Steve has said he will post this Introduction on the website. Midnight Notes expects to have its own website in the near future.] Since the end of the Cold War and the supposed triumph of the "global economy," specters of anti-capitalist struggle have swirled into life around the planet. For example, the Zapatista uprising in January 1994 revived the great anti-liberal Revolution of 1910 and helped throw the economic planning of the Mexican state, and the Mexican economy, into crisis. The general strike in France in December 1995 resurrected the Commune, blocked the social welfare cuts the French government had planned, and led to the electoral victory of the Socialists, who are at least promising a shorter work week and an end to "austerity." Finally, the South Korean workers' season of general strikes from December of 1996 to March 1997 ignited the Asian crisis and ended the dreams of endless profit booms for investors and speculators in "emerging markets." Midnight Notes returns in the midst of the second great crisis of the post- Cold War era brought about by these struggles. In Midnight Oil (1992), we evoked the working class struggle which caused the Gulf Crisis. Both the Bush and Hussein regimes tried to crush it with bombs and to obscure it with TV images and nationalistic rhetoric. In One No, Many Yeses we examine the second great crisis of the post-Cold War era. This time it is officially expressed not as a military-diplomatic affair, but as a set of financial crises. Instead of seeing bombed and burning cities, we hear of stock market crashes and currency exchange catastrophes in Asia, Mexico and South America. But the same "specter" is responsible. On the one side, these and other struggles have not yet blocked the continued rule of capital and the extension of more direct capitalist relations of production and consumption to a vastly larger area of the earth. On the other side, they preview the crisis of the neoliberal phase of capitalism itself. Does planetary capitalist expansion and reorganization set the stage for capital's defeat or its successful colonization of greater areas of human life? Has capital bitten off more than it can swallow in its more recent leap forward? Will it choke on an indigestible humanity resisting both reduction of life solely to existence as labor power and the incessant imposition of austerity in all its guises? These and other working class struggles have forced some of capital's thinkers and planners to respond, as witnessed by George Soros' famous Atlantic Monthly piece, warning capital that "the uninhibited pursuit of self- interest" which is not "tempered by the recognition of common interest" will spell disaster for the system (Soros 1997: 48), and also as witnessed more concretely by the willingness of the World Bank to engage in negotiations and planning with the non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Does this, for capital, signal the start of something new, the first halting steps toward a new phase of capitalist development after the neoliberal processes of clearing away the deals and powers of the working class accumulated during most of this century? On the other side, is the planet's complex and contradictory working class itself edging closer to a new phase of offensive against capitalism after a period of micro-social resistance? Amidst many struggles and efforts at developing new circuits of discussion and action, some 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. This issue, the first in a new series from Midnight Notes, is one contribution toward exploring how the class struggles of the decade are reshaping both sides of the class dialectic. Borrowing a phrase from Gustavo Esteva, the title of this issue is "One No, Many Yeses," as one contribution towards hastening the end of capitalism (One No) and supporting the development of new socialities (Many Yeses).(1) I. The Many Names of Capitalism How has it been possible after decades of governmental guarantees of subsistence to its population that the very notion of such a guarantee has been put into doubt in the highest levels of world planning? Why are so many people starving, fleeing genocidal slaughters, dying of quite curable diseases, anxious about their literal survival even though they are =93fully employed,=94 or even finding themselves enslaved a century and a half after the end of slavery? What and/or who is responsible? The answer is obvious: the development of capitalism. But this is not the capitalism of past, it is a new animal. The during the last decade the anti- capitalist movement has increasingly proliferated the names of the beast, from =93globalization,=94 to =93neoliberalism,=94 to =93structural adjustment,=94 to =93the new enclosures,=94 to "recolonization," and to =93a new international division of labor.=94 These terms have all been used recently to describe the planetary political economic developments since the beginning of the world capitalist =93crisis=94 in 1971-73 (with the end of the Bretton Woods system and the oil price boom). It is worth while to note some of the differences between these names, so that we can get a clearer sense of the relation between cause and effect, for, as chaos theory has taught us, even a slight perturbation in a cause can bring about major instabilities in the effect. Indeed, until the movement has a better consensus as the meaning of its "One No," we will be hampered. Let us take each name in turn. (A) Globalization. Madonna images in Botswana, computers produced in Bangladesh, Burger King in Beijing, exchanging yen in Chile have now become standard experiences. Those who try to explain these recent developments look to a change in the production, consumption and exchange of commodities and money since the early 1970s (Barnet and Cavanagh 1994). Though the world market for commodities, capital and money existed for centuries before, the =93globalization=94 theorists argue that until recently most production, consumption and exchange took place within national (or at least national- imperial) frameworks. This has now changed. Transnational corporations and banks and supranational agencies like the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are =93delinking=94 themselves from political attachments to nation- state =93homes.=94 They have =93deterritorialized=94 and =93globalized=94 themselves and as a consequence have the capacity to move capital, money and expertise at will to the places of highest return. They can produce, market, borrow on a global level while the legal and financial framework for this global capacity for movement and integration has been slowly but definitively put into place. Consequently, nation states, provincial governments, municipalities, local officials, and labor unions are now increasingly helpless in controlling the movement of capital, money, and jobs. =93Corporations rule the world,=94 in David Korten=92s phrase, along with their allies in the supranational level (the IMF, WB, WTO, UN) (Korten 1995). The main consequence of this globalization of corporations has been a widening gap between =93North=94 and =93South,=94 which are the operative conflictual terms for this perspective. The globalizing corporations are =93integrating only about one-third of humanity (most of those in the rich countries plus the elite of the poor countries) into complex chains of production, shopping, culture, and finance=94 (Broad and Cavanagh 1995-96). (B) Neoliberalism. This term has been widely used in South and Meso America and in Europe to describe the contemporary character of the relation of the state to capitalist development. It has not been very popular in the US because of the peculiar US development of the term =93liberal.=94 Sometime in the twentieth century it came to signify exactly the opposite of what it implied in Europe and the Americas south of the Rio Grande. (Although now, with the Clinton Administration, there might be a historical rapprochement of the two senses of the term!) =93Liberal=94 outside the US refers to the market ideology and politics which had its paradigm moment in Britain during the 1840s. The liberals of that time demanded (and got) from the British state free trade (the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws), strict adherence to the gold standard (especially by other nations), the completion of the enclosures (end of common lands) and the repeal of the Poor Laws (and other forms of wage protection). Let us not forget, however, as Polanyi pointed out long ago, classical liberalism did not mean laissez faire (or governmental non- intervention in economic affairs) (Polanyi 1944). On the contrary, for example, if workers combined to force employers to increase their wages, the police and army were expected to break their combinations and strikes; or if South American governments could not pay back their loans to London banks, British gun boats were expected to turn up in their principal ports. Neoliberalism is a late twentieth century reprise of classical liberalism (after almost a half a century of the dominance of anti-liberal Keynesian, social democratic, fascist or socialist state political economic policies), but with appropriate changes. Thus, the gold standard is now replaced by the rule of =93hard=94 currencies and anti-inflationary monetary policy as defined by the IMF; free trade is replaced by the GATT rules overseen by the WTO; the enclosures are replaced by the privatization of the remaining communal lands and of most socialized property and income; the repeal of the Poor laws is replaced by a much larger legislative =93social reform=94 agenda, since the wage and =93welfare=94 legislation of this century produced a giant system to regulate the reproduction of proletariat in most countries. The critics of neoliberalism see, through these shifts, an ideological identity between the =93market reformers=94 of the WB, the Clinton Democrats, the Thatcherites and the Salinistas and the nineteenth century Liberals, but the neolibs present a new global boldness in application. The two themes of this ideology (past and present) has been the liberation of capital from the official constraint of reproducing the proletariat (on either the national or global level) and the apotheosis of market relations to the ideal of human sociality. But the level of =93liberation=94 and =93apotheosis=94 has been given an anti-Eurocentric twist, affirming the possibility of any state (regardless of race, color or creed) to achieve capitalistic bliss. (C) Structural Adjustment. This term originally described a bankers=92 program devised by the WB and IMF to be imposed on any third world or socialist government that needed to reschedule their loan payments. This program included: (a) liberalization of trade, (b) the end of capital controls and promotion of =93free enterprise zones=94 o =93export processing zones,=94 (c) the free convertibility of national currency, (d) an anti-inflationary monetary policy, (d) the reduction of government budgets, (e) the cutting of governmental employment, (f) the end of subsidies for education, health, and subsistence goods, (g) the privatization of government parastatals, (h) the individuation and free exchange of land titles. Almost every government in the Americas, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia has agreed to impose a structural adjustment program (with more or less rapidity and rigor) in the wake of the Debt Crisis. The WB and IMF claimed that structural adjustment programs would reduce inflation, lead to a favorable balance of payments, reduce government internal and external debt, make national industries more efficient, and force workers to become more productive. All these changes would inevitably, the world bankers claimed, lead to a reduction of a nation=92s international debt, and so they were justified in requiring these programs as conditionalities for any future loans or payment rescheduling. At first these programs were largely seen as immediate responses to emergency financial situations in a wide variety of different settings during the 1980s. But soon the cumulative effect of these programs on national capitalists, on the national proletariats, and on the total international debt itself was assessed. Inevitably: the national enterprises were swamped by transnational corporations entering into local markets they were previously barred from, while wages plummeted due to the rise in unemployment, the devaluation of national currencies, and the inability of workers to organize against transnational corporations operating in free export zones where protection of workers was systematically and legally banned. The result has been, on the one side, an actual increase in international debt and, on the other, a recolonization of the economic life of regions that had in the 1950s experienced decolonization (Danaher 1994). Hence, the critics of structural adjustment have seen in the WB=92s and IMF=92s strategy an attempt to =93roll back=94 the economic gains of =93Southern=94 societies that were achieved in the period between decolonization and the Debt Crisis.. These gains were supposedly leading to the development of an autonomous capitalist development which was increasingly challenging the dominance of Northern states. This trend had to be stopped if the old hierarchies were to remain intact and the Debt Crisis provided a perfect opportunity for the WB and IMF, as representatives of the North, to sabotage this Southern autonomy and recolonize, in a more subtle and therefore more irresistible way. the nation states of Africa, Asia, South and Meso America (Bello 1994). (D) Recolonization. This view takes the period between the Berlin Conference of 1885 and the First World War as the point of reference for understanding the present conjuncture. The Berlin Conference laid down the rules for a new period of capitalist colonization (or "imperialism" a la Lenin and Hobson) of Africa, but it also set the stage for the colonization efforts of the U.S. in the Caribbean, of the U.S. and Japan in the Pacific, and of all the imperial powers in China and South East Asia. As analyzed by the original theorists of late-nineteenth century colonialism, the "imperialism" game involved militarily conquering large sections of Africa, Asia and Oceania to create guaranteed markets for the home countries' cartels and monopolies, to spur the ascendancy of financial capital, to provide migratory outlets for rebellious workers from the European cities, and to force new masses of workers in the colonies to labor in almost slave-like conditions, all without entering into direct military confrontation with each other! This regime collapsed after the Second World for a number of reasons, not least of which was the recognition by imperialist governments that official colonization had many of the disadvantages of slavery for the masters. It put the costs of reproducing the colony in bad times on the colonizing country, just as the slave had to be reproduced at cost to the master even when there was little demand for the slave- produced commodity. The contemporary projection of this scenario by recolonization theorists replaces the imperialist countries with the G-7 dominated supra-national organizations like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO that impose their conditions on previously decolonized countries through a combination of military and economic action. Attempts at direct military conquest ended with the U.S. failure in Vietnam. Consequently a more subtle approach was developed in the 1980s. On the one side, the techniques of low-intensity warfare and "humanitarian intervention" and, on the other, threats to isolate the countries from credit markets and to restrict their commodities from markets in Europe and North America, have created the conditions for a total subjection of Third World economies to the needs of international banks and transnational corporations (the modern equivalent of the late- 19th century cartels and monopolies). The processes unleashed by recolonization also expanded the global labor market enormously through the use of "free enterprise zones" and "maquiladoras," while they created a new stratum of "global" managers whose primary loyalty is to the transnational corporations or supra-national agencies that employ them and not to their "own" country. Thus recolonization realizes many of the advantages of colonization without the troubling obligations to reproduce the colony. (E) New International Division of Labor. This view takes as primary neither the behavior of global corporations and banks (A), nor the behavior of states and national ruling classes (B), nor the behavior of the supranational financial agencies like the WB, IMF and WTO (C). Rather, it starts from the basic problem in any period of capitalist development: production, and hence the integration of capital and labor. Labor and capital are never homogeneous. Labor, for example, is always divided into hierarchies of skills, wages, organic compositions (i.e., mixtures of labor power of varying skills with machines of different value) and these hierarchies are associated geographically across a city, a national territory and, most crucially, the planet. In this view, capitalist production has always been =93global,=94 it is simply that the international division of labor has undergone major transformations. The post-1968 transformation has been the latest and perhaps the most consequential for the geographical distribution of production (Carnoy et al. 1993). The older division of labor that put manufacturing industries in the core and agricultural and extraction industries in the periphery has ended. On the one side, the core countries (U.S.,, Western Europe and Japan) have de- industrialized and have focused on the production of services and information, while on the other side, the periphery has become increasingly the center of manufacturing. This has created a new division within the periphery between the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) and those which, for a variety of reasons, have been left out (Amin et al. 1982). (F) The New Enclosures. This analysis was developed by Midnight Notes in the late 1980s (Midnight Notes 1990). It takes as its root historical metaphor for the present neither mid-19th century =93Liberalism=94 nor late-19th century imperial colonialism, but the dawn of capitalism in the sixteenth (or =93Iron=94) century which saw the original (or primitive) creation of a proletariat (both slave and waged). For no one is born a slave or a waged laborer, s/he must be made one by stripping from him/her any alternative but to be a slave (waged or not). The claim is that in every period of capitalist accumulation, the capitalist class must recreate a proletariat by =93liberating=94 it from autonomous access to the means of subsistence. The Old Atlantic Enclosures of the sixteenth century in Europe, the Americas and Africa which involved the driving of European peasants from the commons; the genocide of native Americans who refused to abandon their lands in the face of colonialist demands; and the origin of the African slave trade are the model of this =93liberation=94 (which often ended in slavery!) (Midnight Notes 1992) (Midnight Notes 1990). This analysis puts to the center of the discussion a fact that the other approaches seem to have forgotten: labor is not only necessary for production, it is antagonistic to capital. The reason why =93a great transformation=94 began during the trigger years (1968-1973) can be provided neither by the logic of capitalist development (from local to global production), nor by the autonomous ideological preferences of the national capitalist classes (from Keynesian to neoliberal ideologies), nor by the =93anti- Southern=94 machinations of the IMF/WB/GATT/WTO or the imperialist G-7 nations, nor by the autonomous creation of a new division of labor. This transformation was a response to the increasingly aggressive proletarian rejection of the three =93deals=94 (or =93constitutions=94 in European parlance) that had been negotiated at the end of WWII: the Keynesian in Western Europe and the US, the socialist in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China, and the third world nationalist. This world revolution was not capable of achieving a homogenization on a planetary level, however, and the counter-revolution of the New Enclosures inevitably followed, beginning with Chile in September 1973. The post-1973 task of capital was to create a new planetary proletariat that would generate profits and continue accumulation. This required many changes in production (Fordism to Neo-fordism), in ideology (from welfarism to neoliberalism), in economic strategy (Keynesianism or socialism to monetarism), in technology (internal combustion engines to computerization and genetic engineering), in management (from nation state to supranational agency), as well as much invention, murder and mayhem (often called =93risk taking=94 and =93entrepreneurship=94). These symptomatic developments have been commented upon by those who have developed the previous approaches. But most crucially this task logically required the elimination of access to means of subsistence, either through communal or non-alienable land tenure, or through pensions, doles, guaranteed employment and other instruments of the social commons that the previous period of class struggles had achieved). The methods used to extirpate this access were and are multifarious and devious, leaving their tangled trail in the field of class struggle for the last quarter century. But, in the process, the self-consciousness and self- certainty of capital as a class has definitely increased, from the hesitations of a Carter, Wilson, Gorbachev and Mitterand to the increasing clarity of a Reagan, Thatcher, Yeltsin and Chirac. The same cannot, unfortunately, be said of the vanguards that stormed the heavens in the late 1960s and early 1970s; for the process of the offensive against capital inevitably undermined and delegitimated the defensive organs of the working class (party, union and neighborhood). Though the key feature of the new enclosures is the cutting off of any access to subsistence independent of capital (hence the cutting off from the past, the tearing out of the roots, the cult of the artificial seen in postmodern ideology), the problem of the creation of a working class and its reproduction is still with capital. It is one thing is to relentlessly drive people from access to subsistence, but it is quite another thing to transform these rootless ones to profit-making workers (be it slave or =93free.=94) This is not an automatic process. The NIDL conception, the one which at least focuses on work, does not problematicize these most problematic of social preconditions for capitalist development. --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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