Southern Insurgency

The Coming of the Global Working Class

Immanuel Ness

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783717095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

The site of industrial struggle is shifting. Across the Global South, peasant communities are forced off the land to live and work in harsh and impoverished conditions. Inevitably, new methods of combating the spread of industrial capitalism are evolving in ambitious, militant and creative ways. This is the first book to theorise and examine the present and future shape of global class struggles. Immanuel Ness looks at three key countries: China, India and South Africa. In each case he considers the broader historical forces at play - the effects of imperialism, the decline of the trade union movement, the class struggle and the effects of the growing reserve army of labour. For each case study, he narrows his focus to reveal the specifics of each grassroots insurgency: export promotion and the rise of worker insurgency in China, the new labour organisations in India, and the militancy of the miners in South Africa. This is a study about the nature of the new industrial worker in the Global South; about people living a terrifying, precarious existence - but also one of experimentation, solidarity and struggle.

Part I

Capitalism and Imperialism

1

The Industrial Proletariat of the Global South

In the 20th century manufacturing was deemed essential for national economic development and modernization. Today international economists consider manufacturing as a sign of the subservience of emerging and developing countries to global capitalists and financiers in the advanced economies of the North. The terminology of the World Economic Forum and multinational economic institutions that differentiates between advanced, emerging, and developing economies contains an underlying contradiction. Advanced economies provide high-technology inputs into the consumer goods, such as automobile global positioning systems (GPS), technology, and creative content determined by the tastes of affluent consumers in the advanced countries. A range of industries are now considered dispensable for advanced countries: automobile production, shipbuilding, electronics, and even manufacturing of high-tech products are outsourced to ‘emerging’ and ‘developing’ countries that can produce commodities at a fraction of the cost in wages, while the profits are realized by firms in the North.

The shift of most industrial production to the South from 1980 to the present is a fundamental feature of neoliberalism in which monopoly capitalists in the North gain advantage over workers in the imperial world. The economies of the South, which were once considered to be developing, are in a position of permanent subordination to the advanced countries. Profitability is expanded and a higher surplus on investments is produced using inputs from the South, where newly proletarianized workers are being impoverished.

In the three decades from 1980 to 2011, the share of industrial employment in the Global South expanded from just over 50 per cent to 80 per cent of the world’s 3.27 million workers in the formal sectors of the economy.¹ The shift of foreign direct investment (FDI) to the South for industrial production has dramatically enlarged a class of especially oppressed and exploited industrial workers that far exceeds the development of mass industrialization in Europe and North America in the 20th century. Foreign companies thrive on a workforce composed primarily of migrant contract laborers whose rights to strike are limited. Independent unions are banned or opposed. Contract and temporary workers deprived of rights keep wages down for all and expand profit margins which are appropriated by multinationals in the Global North. These are the New Industrial Proletariat.

As states in the South have competed for capital, they have also succeeded in removing the fangs of traditional unions that formed and consolidated in the postwar era of independence and national liberation struggles. The forces of organized labor formed in the image of their European colonial predecessors have adopted policies that demobilized workers in exchange for dispensations to union members employed in industrial sectors in key industries. Today’s mobilization of workers in the South is challenging not only national and international capitalists, but also the institutional regime responsible for co-opting unions into a system that protected a small proportion of the urban working class. Worker assemblies and newly formed independent workers’ organizations in the South are making demands reminiscent of those made by the mass industrial organizations advanced by rank-and-file workers who formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) a century ago.

POVERTY NORTH AND SOUTH

The focus of media and academic research is on poverty in the North, in response to growing recognition of the generalization of destitution worldwide, as popularized by the Occupy movements in 2011. Poverty and inequality is indeed endemic in the North, above all in states that have eviscerated the social welfare protections that emerged in the mid-20th century in Europe and North America. Growing disparity and indigence intensified in the wake of the economic shocks of 2008–09 through government policies that allowed industrial producers to declare bankruptcy in order to restructure wages while banks foreclosed on the homes of the working poor. The divergence was particularly marked in the centers of finance capital, London and New York.

Yet despite the decline of industrial jobs and the growth of poverty and inequality in the North (especially among racial minorities, immigrants, and youth), wages and material conditions in the imperialist core in Europe and North America remain far better in the era of neoliberal capitalism than those of almost all unionized workers in the South.

The expansion by multinational conglomerates of foreign investments in extractive and production industries in the South has in many ways contributed to a divergence of interests between workers in the North and South. While workers in the North may seek to keep commodity, food, energy, and natural resource prices low, capital is financing investments in the South designed to increase profitability through extracting higher levels of surplus labor, impoverishing industrial workers in poor countries, and threatening the remaining production workers in the North.

An enduring feature of existing trade union leadership in the auto industry of Europe and North America has been opposition to investment in low-wage factories in the global South. Organized labor in the North has only sought to improve conditions in the South with a view to advancing its own organizational interests. Raising the cost of labor in the South has always reduced the propensity of capital to export production, and redounded to the benefit of union members in the North. Given the concentration of mass production in North America, Europe, and Japan during the 20th century, existing trade unions unfailingly aligned with big business in their industrial sectors to prevent free trade. These efforts to preserve industrial production in the North failed miserably, as trade unions typically became allied with national manufacturers to defend shrinking industrial turfs from further outsourcing of production to the South.

THE 21ST-CENTURY ‘FORCES OF LABOR’

A leading interpretation of the rise and fall of workers’ movements is Beverly Silver’s Forces of Labor.² Silver posits that in response to worker militancy in locations of industrial development, capital undertakes two primary fixes in the workplace: spatial and temporal.

Drawing on the development of capitalism in Europe and North America from the 1870s to the 1930s, Silver asserts that the expansion of capitalist production in a specific state and region inevitably leads to a concomitant intensification and strengthening of working-class organizational power, creating a crisis of profitability. The centralization of production tends to stimulate the organization of the working class through the mob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction The New International Working Class
• Part I: Capitalism and Imperialism
• Part II: Case Studies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index