Ronaldo Munck
Globalisation, labour and the Polanyi problem
Or, the issue of
counter-hegemony[1]
Globalisation and Social Exclusion Unit, The
University of Liverpool
The labour and ‘new’ social
movements are an integral element for a progressive solution of the so-called
‘Polanyi problem’, that is to say, how the current tendency towards the
creation of a global free-market economy can be reconciled with a degree of
stability and cohesion in society.
Taking a Polanyian perspective also allows us to develop a much-needed
historical perspective on the dual transformations of globalisation and labour,
to often viewed in a ‘presentist’ manner.
This contribution develops in three moments, to use a Gramscian term. It first outlines what the ‘Polanyi problem’ consists of and some of
the implications that arise for developing a strategy of counter-hegemony for
the labour and the new social movements today.
A second moment, called Perspectives,
outlines some of the main theoretical perspectives deployed in the study of
labour and globalisation with a view to moving beyond narrow disciplinary
constraints. Finally, we move to Politics where some of the key
strategies and practices of labour and the new social movements are critically
examined. Inevitably, in such a broad
synthesis there is considerable loss of texture and specificity. In terms of the opposing classificatory
strategies of the ‘lumpers’ versus the ‘splitters’ I am undoubtedly acting as a
‘lumper’[2]
in that I take a position in the round and do not dwell on nuances. However, I believe it is sometimes necessary
to stand back from the concrete to develop a more abstract reasoning before
going on to advance a new synthesis that is both grounded and rigorous.
The
Polanyi problem
Towards
the end of the Second World War, Karl Polanyi wrote of how a self-regulating
market ‘could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human
and natural substance of society’ (Polanyi, 2001: 3). This stark utopia, according to Polanyi, would destroy humanity
and transform the world into a wilderness, an opinion mirrored by today’s
eco-socialists of course. This current
strategy and ideology of globalisation as transformative revolution seems to
echo and confirm Polanyi’s account of the 19th Century industrial
revolution aimed at a previous ‘attempt to set up one big self-regulating
market’ (Polanyi, 2001: 70). This
capitalist project was not achieved and the social history of the 19th
Century was transformed by what Polanyi calls a ‘double movement’: while the
market spread and all around it was commodified, society protected itself
through ‘a network of measures and policies [that] was integrated into powerful
institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land
and money’ (Polanyi, 2001: 79). This
deep-seated counter-movement resisted the pernicious effects of the
self-regulating market and sought to ‘re-embed’ its economic structures within
society.
Perhaps
one of the most influential and ‘topical’ of Polanyi’s concepts is, indeed,
that of ‘embeddedness’. Before the
emergence of an unregulated market system towards the end of the 18th
Century, markets (that is to say exchange relations) were governed by certain
‘moral’ principles (such as reciprocity) that could be seen as ‘embedded’ in
the social and political order of the day.
In the course of the 19th Century (as in the late 20th
Century), there was a strong bid to ‘disembed’ market regulations so as to
remove them from social, political or moral regulation. There have been since several cycles of
embedding, dis-embedding and re-embedding of market relations. Most famously, the long post-war boom has
been characterised as a period of ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie, 1982) in which
a transnational liberal order was combined with state intervention at the
domestic level. This was known as a
‘compromise state’ and took various forms.
The question then today, from a Polanyian perspective, is whether, after
a twenty-year period during which capital has moved to free itself from any
restrictions set by society or local communities, we might be heading back
towards a phase of re-embedding and the development of a ‘compromise state’ as
seems to be implicit in the ‘globalisation and governance’ debates[3].
If
economic liberalism was the organising principle of society when Polanyi was
writing, neo-liberalism holds that dominant role today. As Polanyi once wrote: ‘The true
implications of economic liberalism can now be taken in at a glance. Nothing less than a self-regulating market
on a world scale could ensure the functioning of this stupendous mechanism’
(Polanyi, 2001: 145). During the 1970s
and 1980s there was a concerted bid by the transnational capitalist class to
create a ‘disembedded liberalism’ that led to the triumph of ‘globalisation’ as
discourse and practice in the 1990s.
This was Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ in reverse as it were, with the
market successfully defending its prerogatives against what it saw as the
encroachments of society and politics.
As with the first ‘great transformation’, this move towards a
de-regulated market system was achieved through strong state intervention. Capital mobility was encouraged, free trade
was sanctified, labour was made more ‘flexible’ and macro-economic management
became fully market compliant. This was
no smooth, gradual and organic evolution of the market according to natural
principles. On the contrary, as Polanyi
put it for his day and equally relevant today: ‘the market has been the outcome
of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of a government which
imposed the market organisation on society for non-economic ends’ (Polanyi,
2001: 258). Following this lead, we can
develop a more realist account of the rise of globalisation, and its attendant
marketisation and commodification, fully cognisant of the conscious political
intervention it sprang from.
This
is not the place for a proper evaluation of Polanyi’s contribution to a
critical social science of transformation[4]. However, in terms of the study of social movements
in the era of globalisation we need to consider his incipient theorising of a
concept of counter-hegemony in a way that complements rather than contradicts
Gramsci[5]. For Polanyi: ‘The countermove against
economic liberalism and laissez-faire
possessed all the unmistakable characteristics of a spontaneous reaction’
(Polanyi, 2001: 156). The attempt now,
as in the case of the 19th Century dealt with by Polanyi, to set up
‘one big self-regulating market’ (Polanyi, 2001: 70), was bound to create resistance
in those social sectors ‘most immediately affected by the deleterious action of
the market’ (Polanyi, 2001: 138). While
economic liberalism forged ahead to create a self-regulated market,
untrammelled by any social constraints or even political prudence, the
principles of social protection come into play to protect people and the
environment. Markets could spread
across the global and the circulation of commodities could accelerate to an
unprecedented degree, but the capital, currency and commodity markets would
need to be organised and ultimately regulated.
If this was the case when Polanyi wrote, it is doubly so today as a
successor strategy to the Washington Consensus is debated in the corridors of
power to prevent the global system being destabilised further by a utopian
project to create a global self-regulating market.
While
Polanyi’s problematic can serve as an inspiration to today’s student of labour
and globalisation it is by no means beyond critique. There is in Polanyi’s work a distinct lack of mediations to
explain how the ‘double movement’ might operate. Who precisely would ‘spontaneously’ move against the unregulated,
disembedded market system and why? Polanyi’s
rejection of the mechanical Marxism of his day is understandable but this means
that power is somewhat underspecified in the Polanyi problematic. There is even a whiff of functionalism and
what Mangabeira Unger (1987) calls ‘necessitarianism’ in the way the ‘double
movement’ is conceptualised as arising spontaneously in reaction to the
depredations of the free market. We can
still argue, I believe, that a contemporary version of the notion of a
counter-movement by society in response to the effects of the unregulated
market system is an inspired perspective to focus on globalisation, its
discontents and the counter-movements it generates. One would also have to ‘globalise’ Polanyi who was inevitably
still working within the parameters of the nation-state that he saw as
self-sufficient analytically and in terms of the arena in which the ‘double
movement’ would play itself out.
In
applying Polanyi’s perspective to a broad sweep review of economic ideas and
institutional change in the 20th Century, Mark Blyth has argued
persuasively that: ‘the double movement, in common with other interest-based
explanations of institutional change, sees change as a problem of comparative
statics’ (Blyth, 2002: 7). Thus the
shift from disembedded to embedded liberalism in the mid-20th
Century is imputed to the punctual exogenous variable of the 1929 capitalist
crisis and the economic/political instability of the 1930s. The new order is then used to explain the
past, which simply does not work as an historical account. If we take a complexity perspective we will
be more aware that ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ do not always correspond so
neatly. Rather, ‘an appropriate
analysis of the ‘global age’ necessitates the examination of various notions
that are not reducible to, or explained through, single processes such as
network or empire or markets or disorganization’ (Urry, 2003: 15). We also need to understand better the
discursive construction of reality if we are to develop a more persuasive
account of the rise of free market global liberalism. A crisis, for example, only becomes one when it is narrated as
such and economic ideas are casually can become powerful in their own
right. One need only think of the
ideological operation by which neo-liberal globalisation became hegemonic in
the 1990s to realise the importance of this point. Likewise, counter-movements cannot be seen as spontaneous,
practically automatic responses; they are rather constructed and then they
impact back on the definition and resolution of the crisis itself.
It
would also be necessary to specify rather more than Polanyi does how the
mechanism of social protection in regards to the expansion of the
self-regulating market actually operates. In a broad review of the Limits to Globalization, Rieger and
Leibfried draw attention to Polanyi’s contribution but argue that the different
modalities and timing of moves towards social protectionism contradict
Polanyi’s over-general interpretation (Rieger and Leibried, 2003: 61-2). While
their open-ended comparative analysis of the role of social policy as a framing
condition for the development of a market economy is to be welcomed we do not
necessarily need to accept their Max Weber inspired rejection of what they see
as the Polanyi argument, namely that ‘a market economy per se leads to socially intolerable outcomes’ (Rieger and
Liebried, 2003: 65). A more persuasive critique might be that of van der Pijl
when dealing with international class formation, namely that ‘Polanyi’s “social
protection” is only one modality of a more fundamental process of socialisation
– other modalities being, eg. corporate planning, education or international
integration’ ( van der Pijl, 1998: 15). From this perspective we can conceive
of the different modalities of socialisation in the era of neoliberal
globalisation, taking up forms of nonmarket coordination and other ways through
which social embededness takes place.
A
Polanyi-inspired analysis of globalisation and labour today would take up, for
example, what Beverley Silver recently referred to as ‘Polanyi-type labor
unrest [by which] we mean the backlash resistances to the spread of a global
self-regulating market, particularly by working classes being unmade by global
economic transformations …’ (Silver, 2003: 20). While capitalism ‘makes’ the working class as Marx demonstrated
so persuasively, in its neo-liberal variant it can also ‘unmake’ or
de-proletarianise vast swathes of the global working class. At a less dramatic level, it can certainly
undo the ‘compromise state’ that delivered to the working classes of the West a
certain stability in its long post-war boom.
While some of the older working classes are being decimated and
resisting as Polanyi’s perspective would predict, new working classes are
constantly being created (in the West but most particularly in the East and
South), which are organising in classical (i.e. Das Kapital) Marxian
style. This dual process is crucial to
our understanding of labour and the social movements in the era of
globalisation. We should on add that,
as E P Thompson (1971) argued so passionately, the working class ‘makes’ itself
and is thus not likely to be absent from its unmaking or re-making under
neo-liberal globalisation.
What
is often forgotten in IPE (International Political Economy) readings of Polanyi
is that he was also an anthropologist and an early pioneer of the sociology of
(under)development[6]. His research on trade, markets and money in
pre-capitalist societies helped Polanyi develop a credible alternative logic to
that of the unregulated market, which he refused to see as the culmination of
human history. Today, as global social
movements challenge unfettered market rule and commodification in multiple
ways, this alternative societal logic is again being developed in
practice. For Amory Starr, the
counter-globalisation (or as she prefers to call it, the anti-corporate)
movement ‘including anti-fascist punk youth, wearily determined homeless
activists, wealthy historical preservationists, organisers and housing
advocates in low-income communities, and third world landless workers’ (Starr,
2000: 64) is today challenging the logic of commodification and development
across the globe in essentially ‘Polanyian’ terms. The logic of profit and enclosures is being contested by an
alternative social logic of non-market goods and values, and open spaces, a
situation that Polanyi, as a forerunner of post-development theories[7]
would probably understand quite well.
It is this broad counter-movement in the spirit of an(other) development
that allows us to find the common terrain where labour and the ‘new’ social
movements may come together in a bold social transformation to match the great
transformation being wrought by globalisation.
Much
of the current debate on globalisation and counter-globalisation is actually
dealing with the Polanyi problem as we have defined it here. In terms of analysing counter-hegemonic
social movements the Polanyi perspective is arguably broader and potentially
more radical than traditional (sociological) resource mobilisation or identity
politics approaches. There is now
considerable interest in theorising the contemporary politics of transformation
through a Polanyian lens[8]. The social and political transformations
being wrought by the globalisation processes reflect Polanyi’s dark vision of
the socially destructive effects of the self-regulating market. Equally, his perspective helps us understand
why the architects of globalisation must also necessarily engage with the
problematic of governance. Scaled up to
engage with global governance, Polanyi’s perspective is fruitful as an overall
framework for understanding the making and continuous re-making of actually
existing globalisation.
Where
Polanyi is most relevant today, however, is as a theorist of
counter-hegemony. He rejects the notion
that labour is a commodity or that trade unions and labour legislation should
not interfere ‘with the laws of supply and demand in respect of human labor,
and removing it from the orbit of the market’ (Polanyi, 2001: 186). The social counter-movement to the ever-expanding
market and commodification process is precisely designed to remove labour from
the sway of market forces and to decommodify labour. The global counter-movement today includes a plethora of
movements (or movement of movements) from the NGOs to anti-capitalist
activists, from small farmers to big developing nations[9]. Polanyi directs us away from class
essentialism and towards an understanding that counter-hegemony will be a broad
social and political spectrum seeking to represent the general interest of
humanity. The task set by Polanyi is
that ‘of creating more abundant freedom for all … This is the meaning of
freedom in a complex society …’ (Polanyi, 2001: 268).
Perspectives
Despite
the relatively long-standing and recently growing interest in Polanyi from an
International Relations and IPE perspective, his influence over international
labour studies has really been quite slight.
This may well be related to the disciplinary boundaries still respected
by those who work within Western modernist parameters as Polanyi was anything
but bounded. Apart from my own Globalisation and Labour: The New ‘Great
Transformation’ (Munck, 2002) and Beverly Silver’s Forces of Labour. Workers’
Movements and Globalisation Since 1870 (Silver, 2003) from a world-systems
perspective, there were only general allusions to Polanyi in Robert Cox (1971
and 1977) of course, and a tantalisingly brief mention by Peter Evans
(2000). However, international labour
is back in focus since Seattle 1999 at least, and a number of substantial texts
have appeared in the last few years.
Four edited collections stand out: the Socialist Register for 2001 entitled Working Classes: Global Realities (Panitch and Leys, 2000); a
collection by political scientists, The
Politics of Labour in a Global Age (Candland and Sil, 2001); an ILO
(International Labour Organisation) sponsored collection, Organised Labour in the 21st Century (José (ed), 2002);
and an IPE conference proceedings, Global
Unions? Theory and Strategies of Organised Labour in the Global Political
Economy (Harrod and O’Brien, 2002) that does feature Polanyi, albeit in the
background and via Cox.
This
set of texts brings to bear an impressive set of case studies and a number of
relevant theoretical perspectives are also advanced. They must be welcomed as building blocks in the creation of an
adequate understanding of labour as a social movement in the era of
globalisation but they suffer, to my mind, from certain limitations. With the exception of Global Unions?, these texts more or less take for granted the
nation-state as the natural and self-sufficient lens and arena for the study of
labour. From the Socialist Register through to the ILO the emphasis is almost
exclusively on national case studies.
Yet not only has neo-liberal globalisation undermined the national order
of things for a quarter of a century at least, but the theoretical critique of
methodological nationalism is now well established[10]. Equally outdated (in my view) is the
continued emphasis on Western Enlightenment disciplinary paradigms: political
science for Candland and Sil (2001), and the rather implausible marriage of
‘the two IRs’ (International relations and industrial relations) proposed by
Harrod and O’Brien (2002). These
perspectives, whatever their merits as tools of analysis, will not really
assist labour in becoming part of the new counter-globalisation movement that
is rapidly moving beyond traditional conceptions of how politics is both
analysed and conducted. For some time
now, disciplinary boundaries have been breaking down, even between the
‘natural’ and the ‘social’ sciences[11],
both of which are domains characterised by complexity[12],
the necessary antidote to over-unified conceptions of globalisation.
Industrial
relations are, of course, a product of a particular period (the ‘compromise
state’) and pertained to a particular region of the global (the ‘advanced’ or
‘developed’ countries). It is
understandable, although questionable, that a book emerging from an ILO
research department (José (ed), 2002) will be set within the parameters of
industrial relations and collective bargaining. Less understandable, is that other texts proposing a more radical
intellectual agenda (Candland and Sil (eds), 2001) should also share the ILO
discursive space of human relations, social partnerships and labour relations,
all set within the confines of the nation-state, albeit one buffeted by the
winds of globalisation. Certainly
workers and trade unions operate, to some extent and in some regions, within
the confines of industrial relations regimes.
However, to assume tripartite (state-business-unions) or bipartite
(business-unions) industrial relations as they existed in the past is hardly
the most adequate paradigm to examine the changing fortunes of labour in the
complex and changing era of globalisation we now live in. Not least of the problems of this
perspective is that the ILO and its philosophy have been largely marginalised
in a world order dominated by the free market philosophy of the WTO. So it is a bit like fighting with
yesterday’s weapons on today’s terrain.
At
the other end of the spectrum of labour studies are those who believe Karl Marx
is still the single and simple beacon to guide us forward. Also here there is a certain mismatch
between the changing terrain of struggle and the weapons chosen. For this approach the forward march of
labour proceeds under its traditional banners and all that is needed is more
energy and commitment. Thus we have the
‘Monthly Review school’[13]
and the Socialist Workers’ Party[14]
firmly repeating the nostrums of working class primacy and rejecting any
engagement with what they dub ‘globaloney’.
Vanguard politics are taken for granted, and socialism is assumed to be
in its pristine state, pre-1989, pre-1956, pre-1917 too, probably. Interestingly, while the Monthly Review still firmly prioritises
the nation-state as the terrain of choice for labour struggle, the SWP, in its
own narrow fashion, is more ‘internationalist’, although still firmly within a
vanguardist perspective. Seeking to
transcend the limitations of these approaches but still within the same
theological domain is the work of Peter Waterman (1998), which seeks to develop
a ‘new’ labour internationalism more appropriate to the era of globalisation
and the global justice movement. None
of these approaches is polluted by anything as open-ended and complex as the
Polanyi perspective, however. Nor does
an abstract internationalism really connect with the lives and needs of (most)
workers on the ground. What is also a
problem is a general neglect of the spatial dimension springing from a
traditional Marxist emphasis on the social.
There
is, of course, much grounded and theoretically astute work being carried out on
labour and internationalism that is neither theological nor institutional, the
two overarching problems we have identified so far. Beverly Silver (2003) takes the comparative historical approach
deployed productively in the past by the likes of Charles Tilly, Eric Wolf,
Barrington Moore and F H Cardoso. There
are also studies coming out of the critical industrial relations school[15]
and from the political sociology school (Tarrow, 2002) that demonstrate a real
and imaginative engagement with the new realities of labour in the era of
globalisation. Then, of course, there
are the more recent post-structuralist perspectives[16]
that provide the labour scholar/activist with a whole host of new
perspectives. The break with class
essentialism and the adoption of a broader, more ‘culturalist’ and gendered
approach to labour is certainly overdue.
As is an understanding of globalisation not as monolith but as a
complex, contingent and hybrid set of shifting social relations. The world is changing rapidly and our
theoretical lenses need to be adjusted accordingly to take account of the fluid
and complex setting of labour and social movement activities.
From
my own, non-geographer’s perspective, what is most essential to integrate into
a contemporary labour analysis is a spatial dimension. Recent debates in human geography[17]
allow us to break with previous conceptions of global/local, urban/rural,
home/work as ontologically given, and direct us instead to the social
construction of scale. Labour and
labour practices can now be conceived of as multiscalar (with the imaginatively
termed ‘scale jumping’ now possible) with those scales being socially
constructed and embedded. Already being
pushed out into the area of labour studies[18],
this perspective is still being debated and developed. This approach is not without its problems,
notably a tendency (perhaps inevitable) to reify the scales of human activity
and to hierarchise them to some extent.
Also, we sometimes (as in Herod’s analysis of East Coast the longshoring
industry) note a certain neglect of the historical dimension and of traditional
‘sociological’ concerns with ‘race’, ethnicity and gender in spite of ritual
incantations of the ‘holy trinity’ of race, gender and class to which ‘space’
is now added. However, we must
certainly accept that globalisation can no longer be seen to have simple causal
effects on other ‘levels’ such as the national, the regional and the
local. A focus on the interpenetration
of the ‘scales’ of human activity is a breakthrough for conceptualising labour
today. As we displace the place-space
ontological distinction so we open up labour analysis and strategising in ways
that recognise the complexity and fluidity of the world we now live in.
What
I would like to propose to move the debate forward now is a simple
spatial/social matrix as a heuristic model that would combine the ‘Polanyi
problem’ problematic with the recent debates on the politics of scale.
Figure 1. Spatial and
Social Matrix
Global
Regional
MERCOSUR trade unions groupgroupgroup MERCOSUR trade
union
Market
Society
National
Global Social Movement Unionism Political Unionism Urban Growth Coalitions Social Movement Unionism
Local
The various poles of this
diagram can be conceived of as poles of attraction setting up force fields
affecting the activity of labour in complex and interrelated ways. Workers and labour movements operate within
the parameters of the market but they are also embedded within social
relations. So we can see how a business
unionism is closer to the logic of the market than, say, a social movement
unionism, which is more attuned to the needs of society or even a political
unionism that still operates within the parameters of the nation-state. Then, without posing a hierarchy, labour
actions can also be seen to have a spatial dimension, ranging from the local
community level to the global transnational space that has its official (ILO)
and more ‘unofficial’ sub-spaces. Then,
the regional scale of union activity can show a more market-oriented repertoire
of action and approach (European Works Councils) or a more ‘social’ orientation
as with the MERCOSUR union alliance between the Brazilian, Argentinian,
Paraguayan and Uruguayan labour movements.
Unions may participate in the urban growth coalitions that many cities
engaged in the race towards ‘competitiveness’ have developed. I would argue in conclusion that neither
axis of social formation and political action is self-sufficient; it is rather
their combined and uneven effects that shape the making of the contemporary
workers’ movement.
What
still needs to be done is to relate globalisation and labour as a problematic
to the counter-globalisation movement as a whole. There is a growing literature on the latter, much of it
(understandably) celebratory and proclamatory.
It tends to leave organised labour out of the story, relegated to the
ranks of the ‘old’ social movements, certainly not an effective player in the
era of globalisation as did Castells (1997) in his influential broad brush
analysis of the global capitalist order today.
However, in practice trade unions have begun to engage, unevenly and
sporadically with the World Social Forum and other more punctual initiatives of
the counter-globalisation movement[19]. The tensions and even contradictions in this
movement are only now beginning to show and the next few years may clarify this
emerging problematic. In the meantime,
labour will seek to be included, albeit not always comfortably. In terms of analysis I tend to agree with
Boaventura de Sousa Santos when he argues that: ‘The problem with the new
social movements is that in order to do them justice a new social theory and
new analytical concepts are called for’ (de Sousa Santos, 2003: 2). Having said that, a Polanyi-inspired focus
on the counter-movement generated by the self-regulating global market project
can serve to sensitise us to the ways in which labour and the new (or maybe not
so new) social movements emerge to contest the dominant order. From a transformationalist perspective it
would be wrong, I believe, to write labour out of this ongoing story, however
‘old’ labour may appear in comparison to the new actors engaged against the
commodification of society. Or, as Hardt and Negri put it rather more
eloquently: ‘ Just when the proletariat seems to be disappearing from the world
stage, the proletariat is becoming the universal figure of labor’ (Hardt and
Negri, 2000:256)
The
most influential and wide-ranging alternative treatment of labour and the new
social movements in the era of globalisation is undoubtedly that provided by
Manuel Castells in the second volume of his magnum
opus on The Information Age
(Castells, 1997, 2001). In a sweeping
review of contemporary social movements from the Zapatistas to the American
Militia and from the women’s movement to Aum Shinrikyo, Castells finds no room
for the labour movement. In fact, he
makes the rather apocalyptic statement that: “the labour movement seems to be
historically superseded” (Castells, 1997: 360). Castells thus seems to join those who see the labour movement as
part of the ‘old’ capitalism, marooned in yesterday’s politics.[20] In contrast to the ‘new’ social movements,
labour for Castells is unable anymore to articulate a project identity “by
itself and for itself” (Castells, 1997: 360), a failing which prevents trade
unions from being a transformative force in the new (post-capitalist?)
Information Age we supposedly live in.
Politics
As
neo-liberal globalisation forges ahead in its project to ensure the worldwide
dominance of market forces, so a global labour force is taking shape. In terms
of Hardt and Negri’s terminology: ‘ When the new disciplinary regime constructs
the tendency toward a global market of labor power, it constructs also the
possibility of its antithesis’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 253). While deprived of
a viable socialist alternative, transnational workers’ organisations did at
least go into the post-Cold War period unencumbered by the politics of that
era. From the ICFTU (International
Confederation of Trade Unions), through the ITSs (International Trade
Secretariats, now renamed Global Union Federations), to the international
departments of the big national federations, these organisations went through a
process of social and political transformation. Thus we have the veteran AFL-CIO (American Federation of
Labor-Congress of Industrial Organisations) leader, Lane Kirkland declaring in
the early 1990s that: “You can’t be a trade unionist unless you are an
internationalist” (cited French et al, 1994: 1). This belated return to traditional trade union values, including
international solidarity, was by no means a simple radical turn. However, taken as a broad trend it can be
seen as part of a developing Polanyi-type ‘counter-movement’ against the
encroachment of the unregulated market into all areas of society.
At
its 1996 World Congress the ICFTU discussed a document entitled ‘Globalisation,
the greatest challenge for unions in the 21st Century’. They recognised that the position of workers
worldwide had changed fundamentally as a result of the complex social,
economic, political and cultural processes we know through the shorthand term
of ‘globalisation’. Since then the
ICFTU can be said to be in transition between the old statist-corporatist model
and the new, more campaigning networked role it needs to play to effectively
defend workers’ interests (see van der Linden 2003 for this argument). A recent interview[21]
with a leading member of one of the more active ITSs reveals the changes of
context and attitude that have taken place since unions began ‘going global’:
‘The main change
for us is that we are dealing much more with global institutions than we were a
decade ago. That’s in terms of the
World Bank because of the policy decisions made there with regard to
restructuring, structural adjustment programmes, their support for the
neo-liberal agenda, privatisation’
But it is not simply a
question of will to become a counter-movement but also of resources. As the same ITS leader put it:
‘… on the one hand
you’ve got the whole globalisation debate and the reality that workers are
facing in terms of how they’re affected … but then, on the other hand you’ve
got unions with a declining membership, with less resources and greater demands
on the needs at a national level and therefore the amount of time and energy
and money they can put into working internationally and perhaps almost taking
solidarity for granted, is perhaps less not more than it was a decade ago’.
The will to ‘globalise’ is
thus tempered by national level resources implications and the simple fact that
without strong national level unions there can hardly be a strong transnational
trade union presence.
The
regional scale of labour activity is still distinctly under-researched and
problematised even though regionalism and regionalisation are seen to be
crucial moments of globalisation’s drive to transform the world of work. A long-standing example of regional trade
unionism is that of the ETUC (European Trade Union Congress) and the EWCs
(European Works Councils), which began to operate in the mid-1990s. There is much debate on the nature of the
EWCs[22],
and many trade unionists are quite sceptical of their potential, but they
remain an ambitious aspect of the European Union’s social charter, which could
yet lead to a degree of transnational industrial relations. For one thing, if we accept that the
different ‘models’ of capitalism mean something to workers, and then we can
follow Will Hutton (2002) in tactically supporting the European model over the
UK-US one. Secondly, any vehicle for
the horizontal exchange of ideas and the development of even low-key joint
action must be welcome elements building counter-hegemony. More explicitly, radical regional trade
union organisations such as SIGTUR (Southern Initiative on Globalisation and
Trade Union Rights) have also developed a regional voice, but the ‘radical’
option is now less prone to divisions and demoralisation than the more
‘conservative’ or bureaucratic European model[23]. Over and above the very particular cases we
do note the importance of moving towards a better understanding of the regional
movement in the making of labour in the era of globalisation and in refusing
the binary opposition of global-local or global-national that bedevils much
recent and more traditional labour studies.
It
is in the Americas that some of the most dramatic tensions between
globalisation, regionalism, nationalism and trade unions have been played
out. In North America there was a
fierce debate within the US, Canadian and Mexican unions over what the
formation of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association) in 1994 would mean[24]. Nationalist and protectionist responses
gradually gave way, albeit hesitantly and unevenly, to development of a common
labour response to this significant step in North/South capitalist
rationalisation. Establishing a community
of interests amongst workers across North America was not easy and has not done
away with national and sectional interests of course. In South America, trade unions in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and
Paraguay have developed an intense regional transnationalism within MERCOSUR
(Common Market of the Southern Cone), which has had a significant impact in
promoting a more desarollista
(developmentalist) agenda in response to the neo-liberal agenda[25]. Workers solidarity in this type of context
can take transnational forms but also be thoroughly imbued with
nationalism. Is this type of action
incompatible with ‘global solidarity’ or does it rather illustrate the tension
between inter-nationalism and the new global solidarity movements?
The
‘death of the nation state’ must surely rank as one of the weakest of the
globalisation or globaliser discourses (one with its left wing as well as
establishment manifestations).
Certainly the state and nation have been reconfigured by the global free
market initiative. However, the
national terrain has not been superseded, workers still live in particular
places and make demands on national governments. So, fire fighters in Britain, autoworkers in Brazil and street
traders in Bangladesh are involved in ‘national’ struggles. However, the global level may well serve to
unify these struggles insofar as the ‘real enemy’ in all three cases is
probably the neo-liberal, privatising, competitivity drives of the global
neo-liberal agenda. The politics of
scale have changed but internationalism is no magic answer to neo-liberal
globalisation. Sam Gindin is surely
correct to argue, on the basis of considerable experience, that: ‘Strategic
international co-ordination is dependent on the strength of national movements’
(Gindin, 1998: 202). Many of these
movements have recovered from the neo-liberal offensive of the 1980s and are
commencing to reorganise, restructure and resist.
There
are several reasons why it is wrong to ‘downgrade’ the national terrain from a
transformative labour perspective.
First of all, it tends to over-emphasise the distance between the global
new social movements and the ‘old’ trade union movements. It is analytically incorrect and politically
divisive. In the second place, workers
in Brazil, South Africa or the Philippines will not only work at the national
level but they may be nationalist as well.
Neo-liberal globalisation – as Polanyi showed so eloquently for a
previous wave – dissolves social bonds and society resists. This resistance will often take a nationalist
form that does not merit a sniffy cosmopolitan sneer. In third place, there is a strong argument to be made that if
globalisation was created by a number of leading capitalist states, then these
should be the targets for the global labour movement as a whole. A strategic view of the global labour
movement may, indeed, wish to prioritise certain pivotal points of capital’s
global architecture, at a given point in time.
It
is the ‘local’ level that is most often promoted by counter-globalisation
movement intellectuals as a priority.
The local is sometimes prioritised as a particularly virtuous domain
where an ethic of care and solidarity might prevail. The benefits of ‘community’ are contrasted with the detrimental
and impersonal effects of ‘globalisation’.
I think it is correct to point out that a transnational corporation
might be particularly vulnerable at one of its local ‘nodes’ to vigorous labour
and community action. Yet this is not
always the case and often the ‘militant particularism’ (Harvey, 1996: 19) of
the local struggle will either fail or take on distinctly right-wing
characteristics. The whole debate about
the ‘glocal’ – as the new local-global hybrid – steers us away from contrasting
the local domain with others. The local
is hardly separate from the global, which is made and unmade in particular
places. The community resources that
can be accessed and mobilised at local level can also, of course, result in
sub-regional, national, regional and transnational networks, alliances and
struggles.
During
the long Liverpool dock strike/lockout of 1995-98 many of these debates were
played out in practice, offering a salutary lesson to any one-sided analysis
and strategy. While the dockers had
considerable support amongst the local ‘community’ (including some trade
unions) they were essentially blocked from obtaining national solidarity due to
trade union legislation and a general mood that things had ‘moved on’ from such
actions (set-piece confrontations as the miners had previously engaged
in). The Liverpool dockers were,
however, able to generate considerable international support particularly in
Western Europe and North America, generated to some extent by Internet
networks. Now, what is interesting is
how diametrically opposed views of this conflict have been articulated quite
persuasively[26]. It could be seen as the last kick of a
particularist macho model of trade
unionism or a harbinger of a new electronic or communication solidarity
model. It was argued that the
international solidarity efforts were basically a diversion from generating
more effective local/national solidarity, but also that this transnational
work, if more grassroots-oriented and dynamic, could have delivered
victory. Perhaps refusal of binary
oppositions and an embrace of complexity is the only sensible response to these
conundrums.
A
‘global strategy for labour’ (Faux, 2000) need not be global any more than the
local arena can be privileged in building a counter-movement to neo-liberal
globalisation. The local and the global
cannot exist without one another; the national scale of human activity still
counts for a lot and the regional movement is incorrectly underestimated. The brisk review of recent literature I have
carried out above points, I would argue, towards the need for a strong
inter-disciplinary focus and an engagement with the new complexity approach
gaining ground in the critical social sciences. The heuristic diamond-shaped model establishing some of the main
parameters of labour activity may have some usefulness in this task. The main issue, however, is not to develop
sophisticated academic models but to focus on the complexity of the focus we
need to understand the various processes in the world around us, and the
interpenetration of the various ‘scales’ of human activity. As Ash Amin rightly argues in contesting any
naturalistic conception of scale globalisation is best conceived as: ‘an
energised network space marked by the intensification of mixture and
connectivity as more and more thins become interdependent (in associative links
and exclusions)’ (Amin: 2002: 395).
This is probably a sound starting point for an analysis of labour in the
era of globalisation that is radical but grounded, conscious of what is new but
fully cognisant of history and structure.
In
terms of an overall conclusion on a labour politics of transformation for the
21st Century, I would like to refer to A. V. José’s bold
introduction to the ILO volume Organised
Labour in the 21st Century (José, 2002). While firmly reformist in orientation and
limited by the UN ‘family’ view of global governance, a strong Polanyian theme
also emerges. José argues that:
‘Throughout the twentieth century, trade unions have functioned in an environment
marked by dynamic changes in the world of work … During the period they built
organisational strength and capacity to mobilise their constituents … At the
same time unions influenced social policy and assisted the development of
institutions to regulate markets’ (José, 2002: 17). Trade unions have transcended narrow special interest politics to
take on the Polanyian task of regulating or controlling the free market. José calls on unions to ‘resume their
traditional role as guardians of social cohesion’ (José, 2002: 13). Certainly this may be read in an
integrationist manner as will the discourse of social inclusion but the ILO is
also now promoting the radical strategy of ‘global social movement unionism’
(Bezuidenhout, 2002), something unthinkable even a decade ago.
The
point is not that the ICFTU or the ILO or the AFL-CIO have suddenly become
radicalised by globalisation but that the ‘Polanyi problem’ requires a degree
of global governance that in turn requires some participation by labour and
hence creates some opportunities. It is
significant that Joseph Stiglitz, ex chief economist of the World Bank and
Chair of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors provides an enthusiastic
Foreword to the recent new edition of Polanyi’s classic (Stiglitz, 2001). Stiglitz challenges the myth of the self-regulating
economy, in classic laissez-faire
garb or its current Washington Consensus, and calls for greater
regulation. Regulation may restrict
some freedoms – such as the freedom to move capital in and out of a country –
but it may enhance those of others: ‘for the poor face a greater sense of
insecurity than everyone else … there is less freedom, less freedom from
hunger, less freedom from fear’ (Stiglitz, 2002: xvi-xvii). Taking up the tasks of development and
poverty alleviation will be part of the global labour movement’s strategy as it
rises to the challenge of a counter-hegemonic response to the Polanyi problem
faced by globalisation from above.
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