Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 08:47:38 -0500 (EST)
From: Gerald Levy <glevy-AT-pratt.edu>
Subject: M-I: some thoughts on ultra-left debates (fwd)


Here's something with a little beef to think about./Jerry

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 06:05:28 +0000
From: Curtis Price <cansv-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: SOME THOUGHTS ON ULTRA-LEFT DABATES

Below is an article from the new ECHANGES (#80/81)



SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ON-GOING DISCUSSIONS IN ULTRA-LEFT MILIEUS

Discussions which have taken place in various milieus of the
'ultra left', be it about trade unionism, the 'revolutionary
project', 'post-fordism'..., proceed from a basic common
approach. Be they openly marxist or libertarian, or trying to
practice a difficult ecumenicalism, if they express an
reformism, alternative or categorical rejection (in relation
to the unions to reform them from inside, support/create
alternative unions or oppose/reject them), the people involved
in these questions have - beyond their differences - more or
less the same prospect: to find a basis for some kind of
militant activity. (1)

This common militant preoccupation could be summed up as: "How
to find an action, a way of intervention so that one's own
revolt can join the revolt of others in order to change the
world ?" On one hand the deep crisis of the capitalist system
(basically the impossibility to stop the fall of the rate of
profit and to alleviate its consequences) destroys the
previous ideological blankets and the pretended security of
the periods of relative prosperity: the day to day life now
reveals the actual nature of society and how it works. On the
other hand, the fading of this ideological varnish and the
fact that the structures of control have become powerless,
have made obsolete most of the topics which till recently
could give a meaning, a content to this 'intervention'.

In this search for the revolt of the 'others' and for
struggles (as a reservoir of 'revolutionary topics' and
eventually of militants) in which individuals or
'revolutionary' groups could 'work', most of the discussions
make similar statements:
     * The economic structures have evolved towards a new
world division of labour: In the western contries, the first
to have been industrialised, a lot of jobs have been delocated
to remote countries. In these new quickly developing
industrialised locations, the survival conditions are closer
to the conditions of 19th century capitalism. In the old
industrialised countries there only remains high technique
production, services, management and a high rate of
unemployment.
     * The rapid evolution  of the techniques of production
(parallel to and often taken for the new division of labour)
which reduces the importance of the productive sector and
consequently furthers the development of the non-productive
sectors (though these latter sectors are also presently
affected by the technical evolution and the crisis).
     *The consequent evolution of new methods of work
organisation with highly automatised processes and an
individualisation of the workers in a new kind of alienation
centered on the topics of 'participation' and 'cooperation'.
     * An apparent reduction of struggles, according to the
official statistics on the number of strikes and of working
hours 'lost' due to strikes.
     * The weakening of the unions, which see their membership
reduced. A growing class collaboration at every level of the
economic structures would be the consequence and the cause of
this constant shrinking.

However, this latter point in reality appears more as the
transformation of the function of the unions in the new
methods of work organisation and of the new world distribution
of production. This evolution of the unions shows more and
more clearly that any attempt to reform the unions from inside
remains an illusion. The evident consequence of this evolution
has been, especially for the past ten years, the expulsion of
militants or groups who had joined with the belief they could
install more rank and file democracy or act in a
'revolutionary' way (these evictions being only apparently in
contradiction with the weakness of the unions). As many of
those evicted still had some illusions about trade unionism,
they tried to maintain the rank and file organisations of a
concrete struggle or to transform these into or create new
permanent structures with a new label to make them distinct
>from the official unions, often using the general term of
'alternative unions'. However, they ignore the fact that
historically quite a lot of parallel unions existed in the
past on such a basis, often with different names (independent,
unitary, renovated, autonomous, of class struggle, etc...),
but always ending up like the official unions.
     Groups or parties claiming, in writing, word or actions,
to be 'revolutionary' or to work for a new society (i.e.
wanting through various reformist, parliamentary or violent
means to remove or to destroy capitalism and/or its
instruments of domination), have crumbled  just like the
unions. This has opened some fields of action in areas which
have become important only as a consequence of the world
domination of capital, but which through an illogical
inversion are made into substitutes for the system that's
causing and including them: ecology, third worldism,
antiracism, feminism, marginalism of the 'autonomists', etc...
'Workerism' even in its recent form of 'operaism',  looking
desperately for a 'revolutionary proletariat' amongst the
emigrants, or in other ways trying to find a layer/section of
the worker class being especially more revolutionary,
exploited or suitable for intervention towards, has lost most
of its supporters. Some try to use their militancy in only one
specific sector, others try to work in various sectors which
they try to put together in the same bag: often the previous
general political aim is replaced by a kind of strategy
working in various directions which becomes a substitute of a
real 'revolutionary project', even of any kind of real global
coherent thinking. Instead, attempts are made to present these
'new organisations', either unionist or political, and
activities as answering to some 'new situation' as a
consequence of the capitalist evolution and to construct an
ideology laying a new basis for a militant activity for todays
'revolutionaries' looking for a post on which to hang their
flags.

This new set of thinking often develops an eurocentrist
tendency and some narrow views when modern capitalism is
quickly expanding all over the world, mainly in the
'backwards' zones which still cover 2/3 of the world
population in whole continents like Africa and Asia.
This globalisation and transformation of capital still permits
individual capitalists to exploit the enormous differences in
the exploitation of labour between the various countries and
to suvive in a world of  fierce competition. But because of
these differences and of the consequent huge accumulation of
capital, the rate of profit still continues to fall: the
destabilising effect of this situation can be seen in the rush
of speculative capital, in the exacerebation of capitalist
competition, in the developing crisis itself.
     Present ideological activity in western capitalism
converges to pretend that the production system is the scene
of fundamental transformations, with theories about the 'end'
of the proletariat, of social classes and of class struggle,
the end of History, etc. All that is not coming by chance, but
corresponds to a need of the new techniques of production to
work efficiently by participation and  cooperation of those
involved in these new production processes, which often no
longer are called 'workers', 'employees' or 'wage earners'...
but 'collaborators', 'cooperators', etc:

     "For 20 years sociologists, philosophers and
anthropologists looking for fame have every day foreseen new
revolutions which never occured.  All this happens as if these
'researchers' projected their wishes and their optimum
solutions on the society and on the factory. A small
transformation is interpreted as the break with a pretended
out of date system... One has too quickly... confused the
crisis of capital accumulation and the emergence of new
productive structures... This crisis brought about a certain
financial restructuring in the economic activities in general
and an readjustment of the relationship employers-workers: for
a time the positions of capital have become stronger in
relation to labour... [Note by Echanges: This pressure on the
individual workers corresponds to a greater fragility of
capital at the general level of the vital need to extract an
always larger part of surplus value, exactly as the rise of
profit of individual capitalists corresponds to the
impossibility to stop the fall of the rate of profit]. It is
in the light of this that we have to see the social changes
and to consider the reenforcement of capitalist domination to
analyse these theories about 'the end of fordism', to
understand both the innovations and the continuity... One has
too often a tendency to take the details for the most
essential thing of the actual movement...". (Quotation from
J.P. Durand: 'La realite fordienne du post fordisme' -
Contradictions no. 69-70).
     Following this new dominant capitalist ideology, a
parallel ideology try to find in the mysteries of 'post
fordism' the causes of their dispair as militants and the
terrain for a new-born activity. In the past, in a society
dominated by the ideology of the value of labour as intrument
for liberation, the revolutionary ideologies of 'communism by
decree' glorified labour as the main ingredient for the
'building of a socialism'. The present 'revolutionary'
ideologies walk in the footsteps of bourgeois ideology by
promoting such ideas as the disappearance of the kind of
worker which formerly was the symbol of emancipation (with
labour as the main agent for liberation); they discuss what
could be in such a situation the activity of a 'revolutionary'
group or militant, a very hard task indeed in a period where
we can see the collapse of all the previous beliefs in the
efficiency or even the possibility of any kind of reformism
(social democracy) or of a 'communist society ' built after
the 'revolutionary conquest' or the destruction of the
bourgeois state.
     Theories are also constructed which see the 'end of
fordism' as a total transformation of capitalism and as the
birth of a new system in which capitalism will achieve a total
command over labour, wiping out not only the reformist or
revolutionary organisations, the official or alternative
unions, and reducing the workers to some kind of easily
manipulated zombies and the class struggle to a programmed
management of survival. The only way out of this cul de sac
where old ideologies are located, is not, according to these
new theories, a fundamental analysis of what their previous
relationship to the working class was, but only the definition
of a new aim for this relationship. Again, the 'conscious'
activity of the militant is at the center of a new theoretical
system where the 'imaginary' has to replace the hurricane
which would have wiped off all kinds of prospects for a future
among all 'active' people (and also the non-active ones): for
them and for everybody only the 'individual' revolt remains.
These theories are spreading precisely when capitalism is
invading not only all possible locations in the world, but
also the slightest part of human activity. They neglect as out
of date the essential points in any analysis of capitalism
(the fundamental features of which 'modernism' has not at all
eliminated but on the contrary reinforced), of the class
struggle (whose fundamental basis 'modernism' has not at all
removed, but only changed some superficial features of), and
of the critical analysis which is more than ever needed of a
jacobinist revolution concept completely separated from its
economico-social context.

The history of capitalism and of class struggle did not start
in I917 with the Russian revolution, which with the present
perspective appears more like another episode in the
geographical expansion of capital. Leninism and its various
children have not distorted in a reactionary way class
struggle for decades. They were only - in various forms -
different versions of the idea that socialism or communism
could be implemented by decrees from a superior authority (the
parliament for the reformists, the revolutionary party for
others, with the numerous varieties of the 'dictatorship of
the proletariat', of the conquest or the destruction of the
state through a direct attack, etc): this authority would
settle the golden rules of a new society. Such a concept was
widespread around the first world war and largely shared by
reformists and 'revolutionaries' (marxists and anarchists):
most of them thought that it will be enough to 'abolish', to
conquer and to put something else instead. The fact that such
a concept was accepted by a large part of exploited workers
for almost one century was not at all by accident, the action
of 'bad' leaders or of traitors, or the consequence of
propaganda. It corresponded not only with the global ideology
of a system pretending to work for 'progress', but also and
above all to the economico-social reality of a hierarchised
society in which everybody could think it was sufficient to
change the top people to transform it into a human society. In
a world where the techniques took a larger and larger room,
most of the proletariat could think it was completely unable
to manage a complex economy and so consider that it had to
rely not on the ones who owned but on the ones who knew. It is
this last concept which is presently swept away by History,
not because of the collapse of the last of Lenin's children
but because of the extent of the technical progress used by
capital and of the general extension of capital in any world
location and in every aspect of social life. It's no longer
regimes which needs to be overthrown or leaders which one must
change. Even the revolt often has no other meaning that its
powerlessness; the revolution has to come from the very inside
of the capitalist society and has to be the work of everybody.
The 'revolutionary' critique has at first to get rid of all
the rags of the past, out of date ideologies - an important
concern for all of us irrespective of the 'political school'
where we were nurtured.
     Preoccupied, not to say obsessed, by the organisation of
the big battalions of the Revolution, the whole
'revolutionary' movement has practically ignored those
features of the class struggle which weren't the open, direct
fights of a certain size allowing some hope that they would
expand into a general movement. It also neglected the totality
of the various forms of the class struggle (often despising
most of them because they were not expressing, according to
them, a 'class consciousness', something we also can find
today among the apostles of  post-fordism). They haven't only
ignored the facts themselves, but also the fact that - and the
ways in which - the struggle moves from one form to another,
for example when the pressure is too strong to allow a
previous form (for instance a strike) to exist openly. All the
theories about the refusal of work has been pushed aside
behind a pretended workers submission to the capitalist
imperatives linked to the threat of unemployment. Everything
is discussed as if the 10-15% of unemployed - temporarily or
permanently - outside the field of exploitation had not in
front of them 85-90% of the workers who are still exploited
and still struggling according to their possibilities. The
struggles can be less and less visible so a systematical
campaign of disinformation can pretend they don't exist any
longer, which gives some credit to the thesis about the
disappearance of the proletariat, of class struggle and the
emergence of a new individualised subject, participating and
cooperating in a new concept of labour.

In a study published by the London School of Economics, Simon
Milner (quoted by Financial Times 19/5/93) wipe away - with
quite a lot of figures - the idea of the disappearance of the
struggles opening a new era in the relations of production
(this discussion concerns the UK but it could also concern any
other industrialised country):
     "Most managers must rate industrial relations as the
least of their current worries given the virtual disappearance
of strikes. But the absence of strikes does not necessarily
mean a contended workforce. Currently conflict-free industrial
relations appear to result more from worker compliance than
>from co-operation with management.
     The UK has seen important changes in industrial relations
over the past decade, with many observers now talking of the
"new industrial relations"' (N.I.R. ). One of the most
important features of  N.I.R. is the decline in strike
incidence since the mid-1980s. There has also been a
reassertion of managerial prerogatives, the death of the
closed shop and a slump in trade union membership.
     According to some, we have moved from an era of
industrial conflict to one of co-operation, with workplace
relations no longer characterised by "them and us", but simply
referred to as "us".
     The evidence on strikes is fairly clear cut. Fewer
working days were lost due to strikes in 1992 than in any
other year since records began a century ago. There were only
240 officially recorded strikes last year, less than a tenth
of the number 15 years ago. But other evidence suggests that
the NIR label may be somewhat misplaced.
     A strike has two basic elements: an unsatisfied grievance
and an ability to strike. The reduction in strike activity
must have resulted from either a decline in unsatisfied
employee grievances and /or a decline in the ability to
strike. If advocates of N.I.R. are correct, then a fall in the
level and intensity of grievances must be the more important
explanation.
     There are at least three points to make against the
N.I.R. case. The most obvious is the current spring of
discontent, with industrial action at the Timex electronics
plant in Dundee, on British Rail and buses, in the pits and in
schools '. [Note from Echanges: we could make the same
statement for Italy, Germany, France, USA, Poland,etc...]
     Evidence has also emerged that the official record of
strike activity does not tell the whole story. [Note of
Echanges: we could say the same for France for instance, not
only with a systematic boycott of industrial information and
due to the fact that in the previous period figures were
artificially swollen by numerous and useless union 'days of
action' or similar token actions which don't exist any longer
or are not followed at all because of the declining influence
of the unions]. Alongside the contraction in strikes was a
shift in favour of the overtime ban.
     Using information collected by the CBI Pay Databank
survey of manufacturing pay negotiations, research at the
London School of Economics has revealed that, on average in
the period 1979-89, overtime bans were twice as likely to
occur as strikes. This was not the case throughout the
economy, however, as public sector workers have continued to
favour strikes over non-strike action.
     Why did employees turn increasingly to overtime bans to
pursue their grievances? Contributing factors include: the
role of the law which concentrated, before 1988 at least, on
stamping out strikes and largely ignore non-strike forms of
action; leaner production systems, such as just-in-time and
other techniques which made an overtime ban more effective,
and high unemployment which appears more effective in
discouraging strikes than overtime bans. The common thread is
that the overtime ban provides a relatively low-cost way for
workers to express their dissatisfaction.
     A final piece of evidence on worker disquiet concerns the
use of dispute procedures. The recently published Acas report
for 1992 reveals that the statutory advisory and conciliation
body was busier than ever last year... As strike incidence has
plummeted to an all-time low, the number of conciliation
requests has stayed stable at around 1200 -1300 a year.
     The number of individual conciliation cases shows a more
marked trend upwards. Last year, Acas received more than
72,000 requests, up 12,000 on 1991. In part, this increase
results from the recession, since most conciliation cases
concern claims for unfair dismissal. But it must also result
>from a decline in workers' ability to pursue disputes in
another way.
     The decline in strike action... results largely from the
most disaffected employees no longer being able to take strike
action, rather than from the absence of grievances... The fact
that some dissatisfaction is still being expressed through
non-strike industrial action and the use of Acas suggests that
the foundation of  N.I.R. is workplace compliance rather than
co-operation.
     Compliant employees may be sufficiently productive when
labour markets give management the upper hand. But when (and
if) unemployment starts to fall, the absence of a co-operative
spirit may lead to problems of employee turnover, absenteeism
and a lack of effort ..."

All these explanations can be summed up in some words, more or
less what the author of the report above said: the antagonism
between labour and capital always exists. It can take quite a
lot of different forms, and the movement and changes of the
balance of struggle at the state, industry and factory level
could see a quick shift of the present specifically adaptated
forms of struggle to other more agressive forms. Only a
superficial observation, however, can bring people to think
that some forms of struggle have definitely disappeared and
that some new forms of industrial relations are developing.
     Such a statement does not at all mean that the change in
the production techniques has no influence on the form and
character of the struggles. In the article quoted above, "La
realite fordienne du postfordisme", the author underlines that
"to talk about a break, for example the wages system would
have to evolves towards another system of social relations of
labour, or even more that the repartition of the social
surplus is radically transformed, or that the organisation and
division of work is no longer a kind of semi-military
dictatorship... In fact, the social transformations we can
observe are closely linked to the crisis of capital
accumulation since the early 70s and in which the exhaustion
of the productivity gains, of the consumer power and the
development of the unproductive services (public and private)
are the main basic elements.... One has too often the tendency
to take the details for the essential of the real movement...
post-fordism could appear as an accident in fordism or more
like its natural perfect adult form achieved only now after a
lot of crisis during its growth..."
     We will not here develop further this point of view which
is radically different from the thesis of the advocates of
post-fordism and of the consequences it could have on workers
combativity, on the role of the unions and on the
'revolutionary perspectives'. On the other hand, we want to
underline a field of thinking completely ignored in the
debates we're discussing: the role of the development of new
techniques and especially of the communication techniques
(taken in their widest meaning), not only in the media (it is
not essential though most of the attention is directed towards
this point), but in the functioning of the whole productive
system. This development introduces something at the very
center of any productive system: the joining (and the
immediate implementation) of the close connection between
production and consumption where the socalled market laws are
located. On one hand these new techniques bring about a high
vulnerability of the whole system (and the need to get a
minimum of co-operation from everybody involved in the
production process to allow the company to stay competitive
and to answer immediately at every moment to the 'needs of the
market'). On the other hand the immediate circulation of all
data and the quick response in terms of production of what is
needed, in a more and more simple way linked to the general
appropriation by ever more people of these new information
techniques. The utopian prospects which formerly could shape
the ideas about the functioning of another society, can be
radically transformed into a close reality which is already in
front of us.
     Another point could deserve to be discussed in these
debates on the present form of capitalism and on the
consequences of this evolution on the struggles for
emancipation: The fact that a large share of the surplus value
extracted from the intensive utilisation of the differences in
the conditions of the exploitation of labour all over the
world is used to maintain (with more and more difficulty) a
social status quo in the old industrialised countries (mixing
social benefits and a growing repression) and in the
developing countries (from the cancelling of debts to local
wars). It is a problem which can't be solved: the most
profitable sources of surplus value have to be maintained by
the use of repression, corruption, etc... and their extension
through the global pressure of capital reduces at the same
time the possibility of realising this surplus value in the
industrialised countries, where a more and more important
number of the workers are obliged to manage on the minimum
consumption level  necessary to maintain the social peace and
to allow the crisis not to go deeper. How can such a system be
maintained and what are the consequences on the workers
movement? This question has to be linked to the accumulation
crisis mentioned above, not as a theoretical question but
considering the practical effects on the life of the workers
and on their struggles.
HS

(1) This article was written by a French comrade and part of
the debates and facts pointed to are to a great extent
oriented towards French and Italian debates and experiences.
The text is consciously written with general references to
debates and opinions, without any particular reference to
specific groups and journals, without a lot of polemical
footnotes, etc.
     Concerning the ideas elaborated in the text, we can also
refer to other Echanges material, for example the pamphlet
"Myths of dispersed fordism. A controversy about the
transformation of the working class" and to various material
in the latest issues of Echanges like no.74/75 (debates about
Spain and with Spanish comrades), no.76/77 (material about
France and Italy and debates about 'alternative unions') and
no.78/79 (Discussion about present socety, 'marxism' and
workers' struggles).

(End)




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