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Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 20:37:57 -0500
Subject: M-G: FWD: midnight notes 12 intro 1/3 (fwd)
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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 
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Introduction on the
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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.


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