Resistance is not futile

The growing clout of capital is wiping out the balance of power with labour

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

The dream of the “just society” is giving way to the nightmare of unrestrained globalised capitalism. After the Second World War, developed countries around the world created legislation and institutions that protected their weakest citizens from the worst injustices of the marketplace, but since the 1980s, these protections have been gradually terminated. The pace of termination has been fastest in the United States, but Canada and Western Europe are unmistakably following the American lead. Even social democratic parties are abandoning social reform in favour of market brutality, as witnessed by the BC NDP's recently-unveiled platform, which leaves in place the Campbell government's commitment to balanced budgets and upper-crust tax cuts and thereby ensures the ongoing decimation of social services regardless of what happens on May 17th. To effectively resist the destruction of the welfare state, we have to first understand the deeper structural forces guiding the global economy. A good place to start is by reading Gary Teeple's Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform (Garamond Press/Humanity Books, 2000).

Teeple outlines the factors that helped create the welfare state, as well as the factors bringing about its decline. According to Teeple, the welfare state was a compromise reached between national capitalists and national labour forces following World War Two. On the one hand, widespread reforms imposed limits on corporate power and the ability of elites to hoard the wealth generated by production. On the other hand, the reforms protected the basic division between capital and labour, ensuring that the protections afforded workers in no way threatened capital's control over the forces of production. Under this arrangement, workers were sheltered but still unempowered, while capitalists were restrained but still in command of the economy. Though workers gained some political clout, capitalists retained overwhelming influence over all levels of government.

Capitalists agreed to this compromise for a number of reasons. First, they were frightened by the threat of Marxism, which seemed to offer workers a viable alternative to capitalism, which had largely removed the Soviet Union from capitalism's sphere of influence, and which many recently decolonised states found quite appealing. Second, the decimation of Europe and vast regions of Asia, coupled with decolonisation, required government intervention to rebuild shattered economies and exploit newly-opened markets. Third, widespread labour militancy was threatening the ability of capitalists to generate profit, requiring some level of concession with union demands. Fourth, both labour and capital were essentially confined to national boundaries; neither could easily escape the other. Fifth, as long as capital was confined to national boundaries, it was convenient to socialise the social costs of production: by using public spending to offset the damage private enterprise inflicted upon the populace, capitalists could download the human costs of doing business onto the government. Sixth, technological limitations necessitated centralised, factory-based production and extensive bureaucracies in both the private and the public sectors, creating a politically influential and well-organised class of bureaucrats and civil servants.

These factors underwent significant transformations from the end of World War Two until the end of the 1970s. The rapid economic growth that characterised the recently centralised economies of the Soviet Union and China began to falter and then stagnate while evidence of genocide and other atrocities in the communist world reduced Marxism's appeal among workers in capitalist countries. Western Europe and Japan were rebuilt, and capitalist penetration of decolonised territories approached the saturation point. First World labour militancy died off as the non-unionised labour force expanded and as the unionised labour force was co-opted and domesticated. International trade agreements and organisations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations made it easier for corporations to transcend national boundaries, allowing for the development of multinational and then transnational corporations with powers to rival and at times overshadow those of nation-states. These corporations became increasingly interested in leveling the international playing field, eliminating trade boundaries, expanding property rights at the expense of the public sector, and preventing the development of an international labour movement, and progressively less interested in socialising the costs of production. Finally, computer technology made it possible to collapse bureaucracies, decentralise and outsource production, and downsize the corporate labour force. In the 1980s the consequences of this transformation began to be felt as governments like the Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney administrations took the scissors to their countries' safety nets. The forces of globalisation have grown quickly ever since, creating massive unemployment and underemployment in the developed world and leading to ever-more Dickensian exploitation in the developing world.

In many ways, the global community today resembles Western European national communities at the dawn of capitalism. At that time, capitalists were unrestrained by organised labour, the working class lost the protections afforded by the previous economic order, the most horrific abuses were inflicted upon workers, and ecosystems were ferociously plundered and poisoned to feed the machinery of industry. If left unchecked, the globalisation of capitalism will bring about the globalisation of poverty, as living standards for the majority of people in developed countries plunge to the level of those in developing nations, while the top 5% of the population, locked within their gated communities, make out—quite literally—like bandits.

As society becomes more unjust, and as suffering spreads and deepens, people will naturally resist. The powerful know this; the rampant military spending and the domestic security measures rationalised as part of the War on Terror in developed countries are likely designed to shatter resistance to international corporate exploitation, create lucrative markets for "reconstruction," bankrupt national governments, privatise all but a tiny fraction of the public sphere, and contain the growing radicalisation of the domestic populace. To secure their positions of power, corporate elites have created the preconditions for international tyranny and are turning our democracies into economically impotent police states.

Our resistance must take account of these new realities. We mustn't pin all of our hopes on appealing to the conscience of the powerful, on electing social democratic governments, or on winning scraps from management's table in tightly-confined labour disputes. We need to be as militant and courageous as working people and the impoverished were in Canada, the United States, and Western Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as they are today throughout the developing world. Just as workers were once forced to transcend their local communities to organise within national boundaries, so must workers today transcend national boundaries to organise on a global level. While the fight for social justice and ecological sanity within national boundaries remains important, Teeple argues the real struggle must be fought internationally. The battle to organise labour across national boundaries is immeasurably more complicated and difficult than national organisation, but it's essential if humankind is to have any hope of stopping our descent into a psychotically cruel new world order.

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