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C. Method
Here I am thinking of the fixation on institutions
in international labour studies, a fixation I have contributed to for the
last 30 years. Or, rather, I am thinking of the necessity for cross-disciplinarity,
multi-disciplinarity, extra-disciplinarity - for ‘indiscipline’ (see again
here Castree, Ward and Coe 2003).
I have been confronted, on a number of occasions,
even around the new movement, with remarks to the effect that Naomi Klein
(2001), and her many admirable ilk, who tend to talk about and to people,
are ‘just journalists’ Let us disregard the hypothetical motive here of envy.
Let us impute to such opinions nothing graver than bourgeois, elitist, academic
arrogance.
I think that any work concerning labour internationalism,
including testimonies, novels, videos, banners, auto/biographies, grafiti
and music (and PowerPoint productions!), should be evaluated according to,
·
critical technical or artistic criteria relevant to the mode, and
·
argued contribution to human emancipation.
Stating this is not a vulgar anti-academic populism.
Because I have equal interest in emancipatory academic work around globalisation
with which I have to struggle.
Bringing this wandering chicken home to roost,
I want to refer to anthropology, ethnology, ethnography. This is because,
with very rare exceptions, we do not really know how workers understand ‘international
solidarity’, nor how they experience it. These inter-related disciplines have
their own problems in dealing with international solidarity (Edelman 2002).
But I have been, in my reviews of the literature, much concerned with the
absence of people (in Spanish, more evocatively, lo popular)
here. And, in so far as ethnography is supposed to concern itself with these,
I am particularly sympathetic to such work, at least when put together in
a cocktail with globalisation. And then stirred rather than shaken.
Here I would draw attention to the work of Michael
Burawoy and his students (Burawoy et. al. 2000, cf Lee 1998, Edelman 2002).
Reflecting on a common Ph.D. research project he himself co-ordinated, Burawoy
calls for ‘grounding globalisation’ (337-50). This is not a work that even
touches on international unionism or labour internationalism. What it nonetheless
reveals is the way in which working people, some of them waged or formerly
so, today experience globalisation, survive it and sometimes challenge it.
And how, in one case, isolated rural women, in the Brazil North-East, were
able to locally re-cycle, for their own ends, the work of North American academic
feminists and regional or national NGOs.
We really do have to say adieu to Marx’s 19th
century proletariat. Those requiring Marxist licence for so doing may take
recourse to another passage from him. This is where he says that Communism
(a 19th century word for emancipation) is neither a theory in the
minds of intellectuals, nor a present or future state of affairs, but ‘the
real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (cited Waterman
2001:31). Take a look around, check out the press or TV, and you will get
at least an impression of which are the real movements.
Burawoy is evidently aware of labouring people,
but he does not hint at union internationalism or even labour struggles, except
in so far as he mentions ‘appropriating the market’ and ‘professional associations’.
This is an area in which a new labour internationalism, like the classical
one, could and should be pro-active. An emancipatory labour internationalism,
in other words, must today be constructed on a terrain which may privilege
labour as activity, but does not prioritise it as identity or movement. It
is this broader terrain that simultaneously provides labour internationalism
with an opportunity for re-commencing its forward march. Toward the end of
his book, Burawoy says the following:
Global Imperialism called forth wars of movement,
violent anticolonial struggles, inter-national wars, but in the Global Postmodern
wars of movement are doomed to defeat. Just as national hegemony cannot be
overthrown by revolution, so Western global hegemonies cannot be overthrown
through violence. Instead we turn to wars of position in which different groups
with multiple identities have to be woven together around universalistic principles
such as human rights or environmental justice. It is a war of position because
it builds up a mosaic from multiple locations. Its trenches lie in the burgeoning
transnational society of ethnic diasporas, deterritorialised nations, nongovernment
organisations, professional associations, the global civil society that becomes
denser by the day. It is not so much a matter of creating movements outside
the hegemonic order but rather on its terrain, radicalising the meaning of
democracy, appropriating the market, democratising sovereignty and expanding
human rights. (349)
This was written before ‘nine-eleven’, and the
return to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘savage wars of peace’ by the oiliest part of
the US elite (and its foreign pro-consuls). But it is an important reminder
to the international left that this neo-imperialist policy operates
within an epoch of globalisation. And that, therefore, other such hegemonic
policies – a global neo-Keynesianism for example – cannot be discounted (Griffin
Forthcoming, Monbiot 2003, Munck 2003). A left that reverts to the rhetoric
and strategies of traditional socialisms will fail to effectively recognise
and surpass the appeal of such a neo-Keynesianism - just as it did the first
time round.
However, the major significance of Burawoy’s
conclusion lies for me not so much in what it says as where it comes from
and what it implies for labour internationalism. It comes out of studies of
working people, of many kinds, in radically different locales, all
profoundly re-shaped by neo-liberal globalisation. Its implication for labour
internationalism is: this is the new terrain, discourse and orientation.
Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Conclusion: science, critique, vision and recipe
for revolution
‘Marxism’, says my old friend Bertell Ollman (2003:82), ‘is an unusual,
perhaps unique, combination of...science, critique, vision and recipe for
revolution...with each of these qualities contributing to and feeding off
the others.
This is a statement of such gargantuan appetite as to swallow all time,
space, critique, vision, every strategy and aspiration for human emancipation.
This is a Marxism returning to the Jewish messianic tradition from which it
– but only, thank Goddess, in part - descends. As a Liberation Marxist (one
who tries to liberate Marxism from the Marxists, from Marxism and from Marx)
let me confine myself to The Revolution. This was, of course, part of the
secular trilogy of 19th century socialism, which I above disguise/generalise
as ‘emanicipation’.
Marxist-inspired revolutions have had miserable results, particularly
for the proletariat, particularly in overcoming proletarianisation, particularly
for internationalism. The remaining ‘revolutionary regimes’ are shackled by
a paralysing fear of external invasion, of internal counter-revolution, of
the revolution being ‘betrayed’ by its own leaders. (Such betrayals appear
as intrinsic to the notion of revolution: there’s always one just shaping
up somewhere but also about to be betrayed by someone).
I have elsewhere suggested that the contemporary task of revolutionaries
is to make the revolution unnecessary and, by this same token, the counter-revolution
impossible. I prefer the spirit of the radical-democratic British social workers
of the 1970s or 80s, who declared themselves to be ‘in and against the state’
(compare Foran 2003).
Surpassal of The Revolution appears to be no bad thing. Particularly
if this abandonment is extended also to The Evolution – currently represented
in the UK by the Twin Tonys. The Evolution has suffered less from explosion
or implosion, more from erosion. But, like its own evil twin, The Revolution,
it has clearly failed to de-proletarianise, to emancipate or empower those
whose desires and hopes it so long ‘represented’. It has continued to reduce
international solidarity to international substitutionism. It has dramatically
increased commodification and alienation. Citizenship, privatised and restricted,
continues to be traded in for Consumerism. The Evolution has failed, signally,
to warn or prepare workers for, a GNC. It is failing to defend workers and
other citizens from neoliberal globalisation, except by pointing backwards
in the direction of Welfare Capitalism Past – or at least the Tale of such.
Locked in a dance of death that gripped the international labour movement
for 100 years or more, we can leave Insurrectionism and Reformism to bury
each other.
We don’t have to celebrate or embrace globalisation. But we can recognise
the potential of its profound contradictions. So, those of us today involved
with ELI and EILSs may be finally ready to say, like the therapist to whom
Philip Roth’s (1970) Portnoy has been revealing his sorely-divided soul and
sexuality for several hundred pages,
‘Now ve may perhaps to begin?’.
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