Tuesday, March 28, 2006

March 2006: labour in the world.

The United Kingdom
: Major strike over cuts in pensions to local government employees under the LGPS (Local Government Pensions Scheme). Other government employees, those not covered by this scheme, are not facing a similar axe. Over a million public-sector employees are having their pensions reduced or being forced to work longer. UNISON, TGWU, NUJ, NUT and other unions are working together on this strike, which is supposedly the largest since the General Strike.
Thatcher, when she introduced a compulsory secret ballot for trade union decisions, was roundly opposed for interfering with the internal functioning of unions. And it’s true that she did this as a move to defeat working-class organization and militancy. But in the long run, it may have backfired, and accomplished more good than harm. Unions have in recent years swung back heavily to the left, even though their membership has shrunk in an age of casualization. And the legitimacy of the left-wing dominance of many unions, achieved through the most democratic means available, is not under a cloud. And in cases like the present strike, where the ballots have unambiguously turned out a vote for sustained industrial action, the extent to which the real and represented interests of public-sector workers coincide is much clearer than it would otherwise have been. The consensus seems to be: strike. And all the best to it, too. The whole wide world is watchin’, as Dylan once wrote.

France: Violent labour protests, involving the burning of cars and massive demonstrations, protesting the Villepin government’s decision to pass a law making it easier for employers to fire new hires in the first two years of employment – a form of ‘flexible employment’. This has tied in, once again, as in May 68, but perhaps more comprehensively in terms of actual interests, with student protest. Students are among those directly affected by the government’s decision, so the Sorbonne is occupied, and the occupation continues as I write (28 March) – so well over a fortnight, at the least. It’s interesting, the way radical movements invoke their past through oblique coded references – the student occupiers of the Sorbonne are circulating pamphlets, redolent with Situationism, soixante-huitard Maoism, and articulations of Marcuse with post-structuralism. May 68 is invoked, time and again – but, in a revealing turn of phrase, not as the revolution that happened, but ‘that which did not’.
I feel ambiguous. There’s a thrill when one reads passages like this. Legitimacy belongs to those who believe in their actions, to those who know what they are doing, and why they are doing it. This idea is obviously opposed to that of the State, majority and representation. It does not submit to the same rationales, it imposes its own rationales. If the politicizing consists in a struggle of different legitimacies, of different ideas of happiness, our task from now on is to give means to this struggle with no other limit but what appears to us to be just and joyful. This is an excerpt from a communiqué from the Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile (murmurs of ’68? A nod to Marcos and the Zapatistas? The language resonates..). It’s thrilling because in the middle of a difficult, meaningful struggle, the philosophic basis for a challenge to the hegemony of the French state and its apparatuses, as well as the apparatuses of global capitalism, is being articulated. It need not refer directly to the issue at hand in formulating its poetics: the point is that a poetics is being spoken, written, invented, as the movement continues. The colours and smells and feels of the occupation, of the labour protests, are invoked, in what is effectively an appeal to an international, virtual, online audience. There is a refusal of logics that many of us have thought, in moments of despair, to be hegemonic to the point of drowning the possibility of any kind of counter-hegemony. Something is opening here, and it is welcome.
But there is an unease, too – perhaps that is unavoidable in a time when the openness of the future seems, for once, demonstrable? – as I read lines like this. The scorn for the procedures of ‘democratic majority’ is more than a sneer at the vacillations and compromises of ‘bourgeois’ democracy. The principles of democratic voting, representation, and collective consultation, replaced in this radical discourse by a poetics of invention and affirmation, were not ‘granted’ by ‘capitalist democracy’, but wrested by patient and strategic deployments of all kinds of oppositional power – working-class, feminist, minority. The easy contempt and dismissal of these in the Sorbonne communiqué worries me. All that space given to the general assemblies paralyses us and only serves to confer legitimacy on paper to a bunch of wannabe bureaucrats. Well, yes, this can often be true. But is the answer as simple as this – It is part of our struggle to limit, as much as possible, the tyranny of the majority vote? That this vote can often be tyrannical, and run counter to the democracy it supposedly embodies, is not in question. Yet should we not also worry, especially given some of the historical trajectories of the Left, about the concrete accountability of movements, however radical and democratic in principle, to real, embodied interests and opinions? Even if this causes delays and fumbling and bickering, given the history of the Left, it seems to me necessary and unavoidable to institute and maintain mechanisms of accountability to something that has more flesh than a spectral idea, a logic of poetic invention, a conceptually watertight philosophic agenda. I’m not suggesting for a moment that that is what is actually happening in France now – it’s just that communiqués of this sort (and this is precisely their strength, their wonder) do and must always provoke arguments and tensions of the kind I’ve just mentioned.

India: Murmurs. Merely murmurs. But a Business Standard report, from January, seems unnerved. ‘…the sight of 400 Toyota Kirloskar workers blocking the entrance to the Deputy Labour Commissioner’s office in Bangalore before a scheduled “peace” meeting between the management and the unions on Monday was unnerving.
‘For it brought back fears of another Black Monday in July last year when protests by Honda Motor employees took a violent turn.’
These euphemisms make me mad. The ‘violent turn’ so coyly mentioned was this: the police at Gurgaon brutally beat up protesting workers, locked them up, and the government looked on. This escalated, and the campaign by the workers, which had initially begun because of the harassment and humiliation of employees by employers, came to be backed, with some success, by the Left. The Business Standard regretfully notes: ‘Apart from the dispute in Honda, there were several other examples of industrial unrest in 2005. And in each of these cases, the management had to beat a hasty retreat.’ Instances mentioned are Tata Motors and Apollo Tyres. One could add to this the defeated, but powerful, strike by airport workers recently, and the 60-million strong countrywide Left-organized strike last winter.
What is happening here? In general, the work-days lost due to strikes in India have gone down considerably, with the spread of casualization and flexible employment, and the expansion of an already overwhelmingly dominant un-unionized sector, because of the shrinking of the organized working class. But over the last couple of years – interestingly, since the assumption of power by a Congress-led coalition backed by the Left – industrial militancy seems to be on the rise. Part of the reason for this is the increased radicalism of the organized Left on a national scale (despite the repressiveness and corruption of the Left Front ministry in West Bengal, whose politics often seem directly at odds with those of the Politbureau). Part of the reason, perhaps, is that the (temporary) decline of the RSS, reflected in the prolonged crises of the BJP, have shifted, for the moment at least, the terms of political discourse. Social conflicts have displaced the politics of Hindu identity from centre-stage for the moment, though the question of which of these political fields has deeper roots and greater resilience is still open.
Perhaps this can be said about the Manmohan Singh government, disappointing though it is on so many counts: real contradictions are visible again in the practice of government and politics, and this is for the better. As opposed to a Hindutva-managed coalition government whose right-wing reaction was uncomplicated and forceful, the political mobilizations and initiatives embodied in the decisions of the current government flow from divergent ideological streams, and are juxtaposed in uncomfortable relationships. We have an uneasy and hesitant articulation of mild social progressivism (protection for victims of domestic abuse), very minimal welfarism (the Employment Guarantee Act), continued economic neo-liberalism (the desperation to strike deals with the US, the commitment to whittling down public welfare and security in the pursuit of increased economic growth) and anti-communalism. To a limited extent, the state has emerged as a battleground of contending political interests and commitments, as a democratic state should. In the reign of the BJP, contrary to this, state, party, and government meshed in frightening ways – Gujarat exemplified this. I am uncomfortably reminded, as I write this, that this elision of the functions of different political apparatuses has achieved near-full form in West Bengal, where a government that describes itself as left-wing rules with an arbitrary, corrupt and reactionary politics. West Bengal will not witness Gujarat-like slaughter, because the CPM, at its worst, cannot compare with the RSS. That does not, however, make its rule defensible.
Labour politics seem to be headed in an uncertain upward trajectory for the moment in India, then, though this of course is part of a story of general decline and confusion. Whether or not unions and movements will devise more imaginative and far-sighted strategies is an open question. It’s a difficult job to accomplish.

Argentina: Factory occupations continue, well into their third year by now. Zanon factory seems to be doing well. Over 300 factories are under worker control. Will it spread, will it collapse under weight and inexperience, will it stay static? The future’s opened, just a crack, but it’s opened. Peronism, socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, workerism: strange bedfellows, but bedded together they seem to be, in this suddenly new world. The occupations are revolutionary by any standards, but they persistently explore the possibilities of the law and of democracy, turning these into positive, affirmative arrangements, pushing for recognition and stabilization through them – for instance, pressing successfully to get the law to recognize the legitimacy of expropriation of factories and the establishment of worker control.
Factory occupations: the strangest reversal of one of the most persistent logics of capital. Everything tamed and organized under the reign of capital repeats its own shape, but in radically bloated, disfigured forms, forms that can appear only as monsters to the interests of capital. The worker who is committed to his job, who under the scrutiny of manager and employer is the best kind of slave, picks up her tools and gets to work when employers no longer require her services, and are trying to dispense with them. And in the process, starts thinking about better ways of organizing work, more justice in the regimes that regulate her labour. Democratic voting. Equalized wages. Work safety. The abolition of private, personal profit. Accountable distributions of the wealth produced. The relations of production, to reverse the terms of an old Marxist speculation, can no longer be contained, in their trajectory, by the forces of production – employers, managers, assembly lines and workshops. Justice, in hesitant, half-articulated, but immense forms, creeps over day-to-day management, and there’s a darkness on the edge of capital’s horizon.
But, after all, only a small darkness, only a small blot. This must not be forgotten. This isn’t victory, even temporary, or anything like it. To repeat: the future’s opened, or at least a dream of it has. But dreams can disappear at a moment’s notice: the twentieth century demonstrated that with chilling effect. How can vigilance be maintained in the middle of a dream? By accepting the paradox, and by pushing it forward and onward.

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