From: Bruce Cronin <b.cronin-AT-auckland.ac.nz>
Subject: RE: Western factory workers...faceless and docile?
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 14:01:30 +1300


Kia ora Donna

Nice to encounter another kiwi on this list.

>It seems to me that terms like 'working-class'
>that are assumed to be just-there disguise a much larger reality.

I agree that there is quite a lot of usage of the term in the way you describe, particularly by many of the sectarian groups, but I think it is still a very important conception.

Like any category, "working-class" is an abstraction that appears in "reality" as the many varied individuals and members of groups we interact with every day. I don't think the category precludes more specific identities, but nor does that make the category useless (as I hope the rest of this discussion will demonstrate).

I think Marxist theory tends to concentrate on that level of abstraction because this provides a lot of revealing analysis about capitalism, colonialism, imperialism etc. But there is no particular reason why the analysis cannot be developed to more concrete levels, and there is a fair amount of work around doing this.

>I also wonder at the those connections between colonialism and the industrialisation of >Europe, and ensuing workforce?

There are many theories in this area. My view is that the plunder of indigenous civilisations strengthened the position of European merchant capitalists and contributed to the overthrow of feudalism in Europe and the subsequent development of industrial capitalism; the uprooting of the European peasantry and their transformation into industrial workers.

>What is the relationship between workers freedom and the
>position of indigeneous peoples under colonialism?

I would reject any idea of a simple relationship between rising living standards for workers in Europe benefiting from the devastation of indigenous peoples in the colonies.

It seems to me that, arising from the triumph of capitalism (and the colonial plunder), workers in Europe were freed from feudal restrictions, but also freed from any means to live (their feudal rights to land) and so were forced to submit to the capitalists' terms to work. As the capitalist class became more confident of their position, they allowed the European workers more freedom, like the right to vote and social welfare, in order to buttress their own position.

Certainly the capitalists were able to make these concessions to the European working class more easily because their own position was strengthened by their ongoing exploitation of the indigenous people in the colonies.

However a similar (though significantly different) process to the freeing of the European working class went on in the colonies. Like European feudalism, indigenous feudal and pre-feudal societies were destroyed by the military power of the European merchant capitalists; their rulers killed or co-opted, the indigenous people uprooted from their lands.

Unlike the European peasantry, however, they were not totally uprooted and the freeing of the indigenous peoples was curtailed. Normally the indigenous communities were allowed to exist in a weakened form alongside the colonial enclave. The pre-capitalist social organisation - communal or feudal - served to cheapen the costs of labour provided to the colonial enclave. In the Americas the merchants organised large-scale slavery to a similar end. Often this 'dual economy' was based on an alliance between the colonial merchants and the feudal leaders of the indigenous community. This is often referred to as a situation of 'semi-feudalism'.

But, as in Europe, indigenous people who became workers in the enclave were gradually allowed more freedom to the extent that the colonial capitalists were confident they could be contained, allowed to vote and some access to social services etc. But compared to the workers in Europe (or white workers in the settler colonies), indigenous workers' freedoms have been far more limited.

So, in short, the (limited) freedom of the European working class and the situation of the indigenous peoples (free and unfree) both arise and are primarily perpetuated by the exploitation of both by the capitalist class.

In addition however the European working class (and the white settler working class) have been keen to defend their relative advantage in freedoms over indigenous peoples rather than challenge the basis of their own exploitation. Such workers, the "labour aristocracy" (represented best in NZ by figures such as Ken Douglas, Mike Moore and Helen Clark), will ally with the capitalists for a few more crumbs, against workers in other countries or indigenous peoples in the colonies. Large sections of the white working class have bought into this approach, (aided by poor or corrupt political leadership by "workers'" parties). The clearest example in my mind was the 1921 strike by white coal miners in South Africa against higher wages for black miners.

Bruce Cronin