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CIAO DATE: 7/99
Eight Theses in Search of a Nail: Historical Materialism, Ideology, and the Politics of Globalization *
M. Scott Solomon and Mark Rupert
Department of Political Science
Syracuse University
International Studies Association
40th Annual Convention
Washington, D.C.
February 16–20, 1999
Debates surrounding the question of globalization have spawned a variety of responses, ranging from assertions of the immanent demise of the nation-state system to arguments that the concept of globalization generates more heat than light—with some calling into question the very notion of something called globalization (Hirst & Thompson, 1996). We enter this debate with the recognition that in a very real sense globalization is the intensification of an old process, the continuing internationalization of commodity production and capital accumulation. However, we approach this question from the tradition of historical materialism, a tradition that brings a unique perspective that is arguably superior to others in its ability to recognize the dynamism that is inherent to commodity capitalism, and the progressive political possibilities which may be latent within it. That is to say, historical materialism approaches the question of globalization not with puzzlement over dramatic changes in forms of accumulation, but fully expecting them. Indeed, as early as 1848 Marx and Engels recognized that “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society” (Communist Manifesto, in Marx 1977a: 224). We understand globalization as exactly this sort of process. A not unexpected dynamic, but one that requires further investigation.
Commentators often point to the increasing and deepening internationalization of production and finance, especially after the dramatic changes of the early 1970’s, as the very essence of globalization. We agree that production and finance are essential elements of this story, but see much more at stake. This internationalization is bound up with a host of political and cultural changes. One element that has been under-theorized is the ideological manifestations of globalization. The increasing integration of global financial and commodity markets has made even the most remote painfully aware of the vagaries of quicksilver capital. However, while markets become more integrated, the various stories people tell themselves to understand these changes vary dramatically. Xenophobic backlashes are an all too common response. Neoliberal narratives of opportunity and efficiency coexist uneasily with racist scapegoating. While condemnation of racism and xenophobia are obviously necessary, attempting to understand the roots of these political responses are just as vital. It is unacceptable to merely dismiss such responses in the hope that they will disappear with the next predicted up-tick in asset value.
We are motivated to write this paper by our desire to contribute to an alternative political vision that is self-consciously progressive and cosmopolitan. We see both danger and possibility in the new constellation of commodity capitalism. While there is much to be critical of in the new international division of labor, historical materialism offers a more nuanced, dialectical view of the possibilities created by this dynamic. Akin to Polanyi’s “double movement,” new forms of exploitation and domination produce new forms of possible solidarity. We take Marx seriously when he argues worker’s are free in a dual sense—free of ownership of the means of production but also juridically free and formally equal. The juridical promise of equality, denied in the marketplace and at the point of production, elicits new demands in the very language of liberalism. Globalization of capitalism entails manifold contradictions and creates the conditions of existence for new forms of social organization.
This dialectic is not limited to class. Divisions based on gender, nationality, and other forms of identity exist in a tense, complex relationship to class. Historical materialism is essential to an understanding of this dialectic, but is not by itself sufficient. We argue that historical materialism needs to rethink some of its more economistic assumptions in order to effectively engage the politics of globalization. By doing so we hope to demonstrate that there are possibilities for unity through difference that can contest the hegemonic project of globalization driven by the dictates of capital accumulation.
1. While it is possible to exaggerate the significance of “globalization”, there are real material processes underlying the emergence of even the most extreme versions of the globalization thesis.
Globalizing capitalism has emerged in a particular historical context, and has been the political project of a transnational historic bloc (van der Pijl, 1984, 1998; Cox, 1987; Gill, 1990; Rupert, 1995). Constructing the institutional infrastructure of international trade and finance, this historic bloc fostered the growth of international trade and investment through the postwar decades, especially within the so-called “triad” regions. In this context, trade led the postwar boom, with trade in manufactured goods expanding most dramatically (Dicken, 1992: 18). While exports grew faster than output, foreign investment grew faster still. Direct foreign investment—and, debatably, transnational production and intra-firm trade (cf. Dicken, 1992, 48-49; Agnew and Corbridge, 1995: 169; Perraton et al., 1997: 263-4; Henwood, 1997: 15)—emerged as important forms of transnational economic linkage. The traditional global division of labor—in which manufacturing activities were concentrated in the advanced capitalist “core” areas, while “peripheral” areas were limited to primary production—was breached as Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) emerged as significant producers of manufactured goods for the world economy (cf. Dicken, 1992: ch. 2; Gordon, 1988). Finally, excess liquidity, the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed rate regime, the emergence of offshore xenocurrency markets, together resulted in growing volumes of foreign exchange trading and speculative international investment which dwarf the currency reserves of governments and can readily swamp, or leave high and dry, the financial markets of particular nations (Wachtel, 1990; Agnew and Corbridge, 1995: 171-78; Perraton et al., 1997: 265-71).
There is temptation to view the debate around globalization as an either/ or proposition. Either globalization has resulted in a borderless world of factor price equalization and the disciplining of all state governments who foolishly dare to challenge the dictates of the market, or globalization is “globaloney”—hype and hysteria that are all out of proportion to the degree of openness in the contemporary global economy (which may be less open than during the classical Gold Standard period).
We reject the formulation of the globalization question in bipolar “either/or” terms. Instead, we seek to contribute to the recasting of this debate. While the empirical record suggests that globalization is in fact neither/nor but somewhere in between, the import of globalization cannot be determined by purely empirical measures. We understand globalization not as an event or a condition, nor even an accretion of secular trends, but as the continuation of an ongoing process of social self-production, structured by social power relations but pregnant with possible futures, implicitly political, contestable and contested.
Borrowing from Parreton et al (1997) two broad categories of commentary about globalization can be defined. The hyper-globalization school (Reich, 1991; Ohmae 1990; others) sees changes in global production and finance resulting in a frictionless political economy that leaves states in a reactive mode to the dictates of capital. The globalization skeptics (Hirst and Thompson 1996) find that most of these claims have been greatly exaggerated and that states and other political actors need not cower in the face of international capital movements. The hyper-globalization school defend their hypothesis by appealing to empirical measures of globally integrated production techniques by TNC’s, the internationalization of services, massive and turbulent flows of portfolio investment, large speculative currency flows (vastly outstripping the necessities of foreign trade) and the increasing efforts of states to make their investment environment more solicitous to the demands of investors. There is much to support this thesis. It is undeniable that the post-war order has seen the institutionalization of an open and liberal political economy, first envisioned at Bretton Woods. Whatever the measure, it is clear that the globalization of finance and production has resulted in a definite quantitative acceleration of inter-dependence and openness since 1945. The collapse of the Bretton Woods exchange rate system and end of the Cold War haven’t slowed this trend, but have accelerated it.
The global sceptics acknowledge as much, but don’t see a qualitatively different world. On a variety of empirical measures the current global economy is similar to, or only marginally different, from the close of the 19th century. This view sees the enormous disruptions of WWI and WWII (and the inter-war period) as aberrations with the modern era a return to the status quo ante. Perraton, et al have isolated four main objections by the sceptics, paraphrased below:
Parreton et al rightly object to many of these measure because of the imputed end-state such measures suggest. The skeptics conceptualize globalization as some terminus by which current global flows can be measured against. Utilizing such a standard insures a diminution of the impact of globalization by establishing a base-line of the perfectly globalized economy. Parreton et al prefer to conceptualize globalization as a process. We find this analytically superior in that it allows for a more nuanced and subtle measure of the openness of the global economy. It rejects the either/or option in favor of a continuum. It allows for a recognition that the sovereignty of a state can remain largely intact while certain policy options are almost entirely foreclosed. Importantly, it sees globalization as an ongoing process that does not have a predetermined end but is in a state of dynamic flux.
2. Insofar as these material processes represent a continuation of capitalism’s longstanding globalizing tendencies, relations of class and class-based social powers are inextricably bound up with these material processes. Historical Materialism remains an indispensable resource for critical analyses of these processes, and the political possibilities they may entail.
Despite the triumphalist liberalism of the post-Cold War era, with its noisy pronouncements of the bankruptcy of Marxian socialism, the classical Marxian concept of class based upon relationship to the means of production surely has some purchase in the contemporary political economy. In the US, ownership of the means of production is concentrated within the wealthiest ten percent of American families: according to Federal Reserve data for 1995, this top decile owned 84 percent of the stock and 90 percent of the bonds owned by individuals (including indirect ownership through mutual funds), as well as 92 percent of business assets. And ownership of these assets is even more highly concentrated in the upper reaches of the top decile: the richest one percent of the population owned over 42 percent of stocks, almost 56 percent of bonds, and more than 71 percent of business assets (Federal Reserve data reported in Henwood, 1997c: 3). On the classical Marxian view, the private ownership of the means of production (and appropriation of its product by the owning class) presupposes the existence of a class of people who are, from day to day, dependent upon the sale of their labor-power to secure the necessities of life. Bowles and Edwards report that in 1988, the richest one percent of US families (enjoying annual incomes of more than one million dollars) received almost three quarters of their income from property ownership in the form of profit, interest, capital gain, rents and royalties. This contrasts markedly with the great majority of families who are primarily dependent upon wage labor to enable them to meet their needs and who are, therefore, fully subject to the manifold relations of power and domination which inhere in the capitalist wage relation. In 1988, the 46 million families whose incomes fell between 20 and 75 thousand dollars received almost 84 percent of their income from labor (Bowles and Edwards, 1993: 105). To these relations of class correspond particular kinds of social power. Owners of the means of production may be socially empowered as employers and as investors, and both aspects of capitalist class power are enhanced by the reality and the ideological constructions of globalizing capitalism.
That employers are fully aware of the fearful dependence of working people upon their jobs, and in an era of increasingly transnationalized investment and production are prepared to exploit this economic insecurity as a source of workplace power, is demonstrated by the fact that employers now commonly threaten to close plants and eliminate jobs when they are faced with unionization drives or new collective bargaining situations. According to one of the most comprehensive and systematic studies of unionization campaigns in the post-NAFTA period, this type of workplace extortion has taken a variety of forms: “specific unambiguous threats ranged from attaching shipping labels to equipment throughout the plant with a Mexican address, to posting maps of North America with an arrow pointing from the current plant site to Mexico, to a letter directly stating that the company will have to shout down if the union wins the election”. One firm shut down a production line without warning and “parked thirteen flat-bed tractor-trailers loaded with shrink-wrapped production equipment in front of the plant for the duration” of the unionization campaign, marked with large hot pink signs reading “Mexico Transfer Job”. Between 1993 and 1995, such threats accompanied at least half of all union certification elections in the US (Bronfenbrenner, 1997: 8-9). In the words of one auto worker contemplating his future in a transnationalized economy, the threat of runaway jobs “puts the fear in you” (quoted in Rupert, 1995: 195); and, indeed, it is intended to do so.
Bronfenbrenner’s study demonstrates effectively the importance of perceptions about globalization. After the passage of NAFTA the bargaining environment changed not because of plant movement but because of the possibility of plant movement. A plant that effectively forestalls an organizing drive by such threats (however realistic) achieves an outcome that is not measurable in terms of capital movement, employment changes, etc. Yet, the outcome of this conflict has been dramatically affected by the liberalization of trade through the NAFTA treaty. However great or little the job creation/destruction of NAFTA, the environment that workers face has changed. There seems to be sufficient cause in their minds to understand globalization as a credible threat to their job security. To the extent that they become embedded in popular common sense, this ideological construction of “footloose capital”, and its evil twin, the discourse of “competitiveness” in a seamless global economy, enhance the effective power of capital relative to working people.
These shifting relations of power have had measurable effects. During the “golden years” of postwar Fordism, real wages rose steadily along with productivity (Rupert, 1995a: 179). That relationship has since been severed: productivity continues to rise (albeit more slowly than during the “golden age”), while real wages have been declining over the long-term 1 and total compensation (wages + benefits) have stagnated (Mishel et al., 1997: 131-38). Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer, explains:
We’re constantly told by economists and pundits that the key to getting wages up again is raising productivity. But over the last several decades, productivity—the inflation-adjusted value of output per hour of work—has risen much faster than real compensation (wages plus fringe benefits adjusted for inflation)... Here’s another way to think about the growing gap between productivity and wages. According to the World Bank, in 1966, U.S. manufacturing wages were equal to 46% of the value added in production (value-added is the difference between selling price and the costs of raw material and other inputs). In 1990, that figure had fallen to 36% (Henwood, 1997a).
This intensified exploitation of workers is a large part of the explanation for higher corporate profits, a roaring stock market, and extravagant growth in executive compensation.
In an environment where the rewards to corporate managers and investors have far outstripped the wages of working people, it should not be surprising to discover that inequalities of income and wealth are at historically high levels. According to the US Census Bureau, income inequality increased markedly between 1968 and 1994, such that the income gap between rich and poor was wider in 1994 than at any time since 1947, when they began collecting such data (US Census Bureau, 1996, see also Wolff, 1995: 28 and Mishel et al., 1997: 52-64). Inequality of wealth is even more stark than the income gap. According to Federal Reserve data for 1995, the top one percent now control more wealth than the bottom ninety percent of the population. While unequal ownership of wealth is nothing new in the American political economy, such inequality is now more extreme than at any time since the 1920s (Henwood 1997c; also Wolff, 1995: 7; and Mishel et al., 1997: 278-81).
Employers and investors in the US have then enjoyed the fruits of their enhanced social power. But this power is not confined within the boundaries of the “economy”; it has broader political manifestations as well. “Even in a society whose government meets the liberal democratic ideal, capital has a kind of veto power over public policy that is quite independent of its ability to intervene directly in elections or in state decision making” (Bowles and Gintis, 1986: 88). Even if members of the owning class were somehow unable or unwilling to access political influence through massive campaign contributions, private coffees with the President or nights spent in the Lincoln bedroom, they would nonetheless be uniquely privileged by virtue of their structural situation and social powers. Insofar as the state under capitalism depends for its economic vitality upon the investment activities of a class of “private” owners of the social means of production, it is effectively subject to their collective blackmail. If a state fails to maintain conditions of “business confidence” (Block, 1977: 16), or if it enacts policies which appear threatening to the interests of the owning class, investors responsible only to their own pocketbooks may decline to invest there. In effect, they may subject the state to a “capital strike”—driving up interest rates, depressing levels of economic activity, throwing people out of work, exacerbating the fiscal crisis of the state and endangering the popular legitimacy of the incumbent government. Thus are market values enforced upon governments which claim to be responsive to popular democratic pressures. “The presumed sovereignty of the democratic citizenry fails in the presence of the capital strike” (Bowles and Gintis, 1986: 90).
Ideologies of globalization can also operate so as to further constrain the (already limited) possibilities of democratically enacted public policy. The volume and speed of foreign exchange trading and international capital flows has heightened the disciplinary effect of a threatened capital strike. Governments are increasingly obliged to weigh carefully their welfare, fiscal and monetary policies against the interests of investors who may exit en masse in response to expectations of lower relative interest rates or higher relative inflation rates. Intensifying this disciplinary effect is an ideology of globalization which prioritizes the interests of investors. The particular interests of the owning class are represented as if they were the general interests of all: “since profit is the necessary condition of universal expansion, capitalists appear within capitalist societies as bearers of a universal interest” (Przeworski, quoted in Thomas, 1994: 153). In this ideological construction, the social and moral claims of working people and the poor are reduced to the pleadings of “special interests” which must be resisted in order to secure the conditions of stable accumulation. In William Greider’s apt summary, “Like bondholders in general, the new governing consensus explicitly assumed that faster economic growth was dangerous—threatening to the stable financial order—so nations were effectively blocked from measures that might reduce permanent unemployment or ameliorate the decline in wages. ...Governments were expected to withdraw more and more benefits from dependent classes of citizens—the poor and elderly and unemployed—but also in various ways from the broad middle class, in order to honor their obligations to the creditor class...” (Greider, 1997: 298, 308). To the extent that state managers understand the world in terms of ideologies of hyper-globalization (e.g., Reich, 1993) this very real disciplinary power is intensified to the point that consideration of pro-worker or environmentally friendly policies is precluded, and policies my be specifically designed to attract and hold (putatively footloose) capital by offering the most favorable business climate possible.
3. These material processes of globalizing capitalism are not prescripted and ineluctable, but contradictory and contestable. They may be interpreted in different ways, and their political effects and possibilities will be mediated by the social meanings attached to them.
We maintain that historical materialism retains its relevance to contemporary social life insofar as it offers critical resources for the de-reification of capitalism and its various forms of appearance. It reminds us that commodification of social life, and especially commodification of labor, are not natural, necessary, universal or absolute; nor, therefore, is the separation of the political from the economic which is entailed in the capitalist wage relation. Historical materialist critiques imply that capitalism’s abstraction of politics from the economy and the naturalization of a civil society of abstract individuals are historical conditions which are open to question and hence potentially to transformation. This transformation would necessarily entail (but not necessarily be limited to) the re-politicization and democratization of the economy and of civil society, such that they cease to be pseudo-objective and apparently natural conditions which confront isolated individuals as an ineluctable external “reality”. Rather, they would become sites for—and objects of—reflective dialogue and contestation, mutable aspects of a broad process of social self-determination, explicitly political.
Marx suggested that such a transformation might emerge out of the confluence of capitalism’s endemic crisis tendencies, the polarization of its class structure and the relative immiseration of the proletariat and, most importantly, the emergence of the latter as a collective agent through the realization of its socially productive power, heretofore developed in distorted and self-limiting form under the conditions of concentrated capitalist production (e.g., Marx, 1977b). Accepting in broad outline Marx’s analysis of the structure and dynamics of capitalism (e.g., 1971: 201-2), Gramsci was unwilling to embrace the more mechanical and economistic interpretations of Marx then circulating in the international socialist movement. For him, progressive social change would not automatically follow in train behind economic developments, but must instead be produced by historically situated social agents whose actions are enabled and constrained by their social self-understandings (1971: 164-65, 326, 375-777, 420). How, indeed whether, such change occurs depends upon struggles to delimit or expand the horizons of these social self-understandings. Popular “common sense,” then, becomes a critical terrain of political struggle (1971: 323-34, 419-25). Gramsci’s theorization of a social politics of ideological struggle—which he called “war of position” to distinguish it from a Bolshevik strategy of frontal assault on the state (1971: 229-39, 242-3)—contributed to the historical materialist project of de-reifying capitalist social relations (including state-based conceptions of politics) and constructing an alternative—more enabling, participatory, democratic—social order out of the historical conditions of capitalism.
For Gramsci, popular common sense could become a ground of struggle because it is not univocal and coherent, but an amalgam of historically effective ideologies, scientific doctrines and social mythologies. This historical “sedimentation” of popular common sense “is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life. [It] is the folklore of philosophy...” (1971: 326). As such, it is “fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is” (1971: 419). Gramsci’s project thus entailed addressing popular common sense, making explicit the tensions and contradictions within it as well as the socio-political consequences of these, in order to enable critical social analysis and transformative political practice. “First of all,” Gramsci says of historical materialism (which he called the philosophy of praxis), “it must be a criticism of ‘common sense,’ basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that ‘everyone’ is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone’s individual life, but of renovating and making ‘critical’ an already existing activity” (1971: 330-31). At the core of Gramsci’s project, then, was a critical pedagogy which took as its starting point the tensions and possibilities latent within popular common sense.
Among contemporary theorists, we have found Stuart Hall’s non-teleological conception of a ‘marxism without guarantees’ especially helpful in thinking about this set of issues. Hall frankly acknowledges the drawbacks inherent in more economistic interpretations of Marxist theory, and seeks to address them through a sophisticated combination of discourse analysis and Gramscian historical materialism . 2
...the class/ideology identity Marxism assumes in the beginning is, for me, the end result, the product of politics. Politics must always construct meanings and deliver the group to the slogans, not assume that the group always ‘really’ knew the slogans and always believed in them. ...It’s quite possible for a class to be mobilized behind other slogans...That is what gives political practice a certain necessary openness. Somebody else might have a more effective politics and a organize the class around some other slogan; then the connections get forged in a different way.(Hall, 1988a: 60) 3
This does not entail an abandonment of historical materialism or of an identifiable socialist project. Rather, Hall is seeking to understand the conditions and processes through which ideological self-understandings are formed and reformed within particular historical circumstances.
Ideologies may not be affixed, as organic entities, to their appropriate classes, but this does not mean that the production and transformation of ideology in society could proceed free of or outside the structuring lines of power and class.
...class interest, class position, and material factors are useful, even necessary, starting points in the analysis of any ideological formation. But they are not sufficient—because they are not sufficiently determinate—to account for the actual empirical disposition and movement of ideas in real historical societies (Hall, 1988a, p. 45).
“It is therefore possible”, Hall tells us, “to hold both the proposition that material interests help to structure ideas and the proposition that position in the social structure has the tendency to influence the direction of social thought, without also arguing that material factors univocally determine ideology or that class position represents a guarantee that a class will have the appropriate forms of consciousness” (Hall, 1988a, p. 45). And here we arrive at Hall’s appropriation of Gramsci as the theorist of open-ended ideological struggle, the “war of position” waged across various social sites:
Where Gramsci departs from classical versions of Marxism is that he does not think that politics is an arena which simply reflects already unified collective political identities, already constituted forms of struggle. Politics for him is not a dependent sphere. It is where forces and relations, in the economy, in society, in culture, have to be actively worked on to produce particular forms of power, forms of domination. This is the production of politics—politics as a production. This conception of politics is fundamentally contingent, fundamentally open-ended (Hall, 1988b: 169).
Hall’s Gramsci is one which sees history as a complex and contradictory story of social self-production under specific social circumstances; it is, in Gramsci’s words, a process of “becoming which...does not start from unity, but contains in itself the reasons for a possible unity” (Gramsci, 1971: 355-6). We understand this to mean that the class-based relations of production under capitalism create the possibility of particular kinds of agency, but these possibilities can only be realized through the political practices of concretely situated social actors, practices which must negotiate the tensions and possibilities—the multiple social identities, powers, and forms of agency—resident within popular common sense.
4. Ideologies of globalization which center around “competitiveness”—whether cast in terms of competition among abstract individuals in a market, or in terms of economic, cultural or racial nationalisms—effectively reinforce the class-based powers available to the owners of capital, and divide and disempower non-owners.
Another important correlate of globalization has been the explosion of the discourse of “competitiveness.” Nation-states and municipalities offer subsidies and tax incentives in order to remain competitive in the market of firm placement. Firms lay-off workers, cut wages, and move production sites to lower wage or lax environmental and labor standard environs (among other things) in the name of competitiveness. Workers feel compelled to continually sharpen skills and improve their marketability, or more often work longer hours for less pay, because it appears as self-evident that something called the international economy (and hence, the domestic economy) is a very competitive place.
The explosion, since the mid-to-late 1970’s, of both popular and academic literature that relates to competitiveness demonstrates two things. First, there is something going on that encourages authors and academics to think about and make prescriptions about competitiveness. Second, the variety of approaches in the literature reveal much agreement about something called competitiveness requiring a response from states, firms, and workers and very little agreement about what this response should be.
What is interesting about the competitiveness issue is the importance of the actions taken in its name when there seems so little agreement on what competitiveness is or should be. Communities are devastated, vast numbers of workers are laid-off or feel imperiled by the number of lay-offs occurring, and states, counties, and municipalities forego significant public revenues, all in the name of this quite nebulous concept of competitiveness. While commentary varies dramatically, investors seem to be of one mind about what competitiveness means. A guaranteed strategy for a dramatic increase in the value of a large firm’s stock is the announcement of lay-offs in the name of international competitiveness. (Henwood, 1997) While profit rates soar, firms plead competitiveness to cut jobs and wages. There can be no clearer indication of how class interests diverge around the issue of “competitiveness.”
The notion of competitiveness is sufficiently indeterminate to mean nearly all things all to all people. No less an authority than the eminent economist Paul Krugman (1994) has argued competitiveness is “a dangerous obsession.” Krugman argues that nation-states don’t compete meaningfully in any economic sense. Krugman is right but for the wrong reasons. States do compete. They don’t compete qua firms but for firms—competing in various ways to secure an investment environment that is conducive for production of goods and services. Krugman’s argument demonstrates something important. The notion of competitiveness has resonance regardless of its accuracy in describing the reality of competitiveness pressures on firms. The rhetoric, not the reality, of competitiveness fosters an environment that heavily favors the owners of capital and challenges attempts at solidarity. When workers and states are pitted against each other in a “race to the bottom” or in movements toward downward harmonization, the competition is not between firms but between the owners of the means of production and those who income is derived from labor. Competitiveness can be more accurately understood to include competition over the division of surplus.
5. Resistance to the globalizing powers of capital may however be enabled by ideologies of transnational solidarity, grounded in—if not wholly determined by—capital’s increasingly transnational subsumption of labor, and the intensified exploitation this may entail.
The globalization of production has increased the need for ideologies of resistance that are global as well. The New Internationalism seems to be recognizing the necessity of rethinking traditional forms of labor organization and the irreducibility of class, race, and gender. Theoretical work envisioning new possibilities of international organizing have recognized as much. Cullenberg and DeMartino’s Single Index Tariff Structure (SITS) (1994) policy approach suggests that trade be restricted to the extent that competition is centered around worker repression, environmental degradation, exploitation of women and children, and prison and slave labor. The SITS approach seeks to establish criteria that encourages trade, but only trade that does not exploit. Kidder and McGinn (1995) have suggested that Transnational Worker Networks (TWN’s) be encouraged in place of bureaucratic structures that may be too rigid to move quickly or embrace multi-faceted movements. TWN’s are conceived as loose coalitions that can form around broadly progressive themes in order to check the suzerainty of international capital without succumbing to one-dimensional struggles. TWN’s envision grass roots efforts that fight on various terrains for multiple concerns. All of these approaches recognize that local resistance to globalism is insufficient and ultimately self-defeating.
There are early but significant signs of a growing internationalism in labor solidarity. An important example of a truly global campaign was the Ravenswood Aluminum campaign in the early 1990’s. Herod (1996) has documented the extensive reach of this campaign. Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation (RAC), located near Ravenswood, West Virginia locked out its unionized workforce (USWA) in 1990 in order to break the union. The corporate ownership of RAC is complicated, but it included Marc Rich an American with vast holdings in firms in forty countries. Rich was indicted in 1985 for tax evasion, fraud, and other federal violations and fled to Switzerland from where he managed his investments.
The USWA and AFL-CIO took a multi-faceted approach to the lockout and included a strong international dimension in their campaign. Linking up with the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF), the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), and a host of other national and international labor groups and secretariats, the campaign organized resistance to all manner of Marc Rich’s business dealings. From organizing public relations pressure embarrassing Rich to organizing mass demonstrations to prevent Rich from acquiring recently privatized firms in Eastern Europe, the international campaign made RAC a significant thorn in the side of Marc Rich. End-user boycotts were organized and heads of state including Vaclav Havel and Michael Manley weighed in on the side of labor when Rich attempted to acquire firms in their country’s. The campaign was effective in industrialized as well as developing countries. The lockout was ended with a new contract in the spring of 1992. The contract provided for dismissal of replacement workers, reinstatement of locked-out workers with full seniority and wage and pension increases.
The effectiveness of the RAC campaign demonstrates the possibility of international resistance to capital. Herod argues that an important insight of the RAC campaign is the willingness of the participants to define community in a broad, not parochial, sense (1996:354-5). Local resistances to globalization choose to define community geographically, not in terms of interests or identity. Importantly, the RAC campaign utilized global resources and both thought and acted globally in the face of globally active capital. Further, labor groups were active on the basis of international solidarity. Herod (1995) has demonstrated that labor has always been international in a sense, but that far too often it was focused on securing national labor goals and frequently acted against international solidarity. The New Internationalism is truly international in its struggles.
Another interesting development in the New Internationalism has been the willingness of industrialized and developing country’s labor unions to act cooperatively. Levinson-Estrada and Frundt (1995) have argued that international efforts were crucial to Guatemalan organizing of its Coca-Cola bottling plant, and continues to be important in the attempted organization of maquiladora processing plants. A further development that heightens the necessity for international solidarity has been the large number of immigrants that often find themselves forced into unskilled factory work in hostile environments. Exploring an example of this phenomenon demonstrates the importance of international solidarity even where it seems least likely to occur.
The Peerless Clothing corporation is one of the largest manufactures of men’s suits in North America 4 . Peerless’ factory in Quebec employs roughly 2,400 workers, over 80% immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, Laos, Guatemala, Cambodia (Kampuchea) and other countries. Peerless actively recruits immigrants for their assumed docility in the face of management pressure, their willingness to accept sub-par wages for the industry and the assumed disunity that such a polyglot workforce seems to represent. Peerless utilizes a company union called Fraternite. Many of the workers at Peerless have found the company union to be ineffective in addressing grievances. Importantly, the grievances of labor at Peerless are not solely centered around wages, but also are concerned with racism and sexual harassment in the workplace.
A campaign was launched by UNITE in November of 1995 to organize the workers under an independent union. As could be expected, initially language difficulties were problematic for organization. However UNITE, combined with others sympathetic to the campaign, were able to form a coalition of activists and trade unionists centered around bridging language barriers. Trade Unionist were actually flown from Bangladesh to assist in organizing the Bengali speaking workers (in the dead of winter no less!). The trade unionists were women affiliated with BIGWU, a Bangladeshi trade union. Sympathizers from Guatemala, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and the Philippines among others have either visited or participated locally (emigrants) in the campaign. This kind of activity is a unique example of an outside-in approach in that Peerless is not a global firm, but it is being confronted by an international force.
While these examples only scratch the surface of new forms of resistance in the face of new forms of exploitation, they demonstrate that international solidarity is a very real possibility. While these forms of solidarity often emanate from class struggles, they are not wholly determined by class. The global expansion of solidarity networks is the necessary corollary to the global expansion of production.
6. This cosmopolitan project of resistance is complicated, however, by the situation of productive activity within a nexus of relations which—as Marx steadfastly maintained—is at once natural and social. We believe this implies that at the point of production, where the necessary social interchange with the natural world takes place, various historically specific social determinations are already present. These may entail a variety of “extra-economic” or non-class based social identities and power relations variously articulated with class.
A longstanding weakness of economistic interpretations of Marxism has been an inability, or an unwillingness, to come to grips with issues of gender and their articulation with class. We suggest that there is much to be learned from the efforts of materialist feminists seeking to forge such linkages. In contrast to those who would reify gender relations by deploying a transhistorical notion of patriarchy as near-universal male domination, as well as those who would subsume gender relations as but one of the areas where capitalism secures its functional reproduction, Michelle Barrett once championed a marxian feminism in which gender and capitalism were understood to be mutually irreducible but historically intertwined. “No one would want to deny that there are physiological differences between the sexes, but what is at issue is how these differences are constructed as divisions by human social agency” (Barrett, 1988: 250). The social construction of gender difference did not begin with capitalism, but capitalist relations of production emerged from (conflictual and open-ended) historical processes which included the reworking of socially constructed gender relations, such that they became interwoven with the social fabric of capitalism.
It is clear that on the one hand the wage relation characteristic of capitalism, and the accompanying separation of home and workplace, have historically made a substantial contribution to the formation of the present sexual division of labor in which women’s position is located principally in relation to responsibility for domestic labor and dependence upon a male wage-earner. On the other hand, some elements of this sexual division undoubtedly existed prior to the development of capitalism; they have not been totally constructed by capitalism. In addition to this historically prior sexual division of labor, upon which capitalism has built a more rigidly segregated division , we can isolate many points of struggle in which the eventual outcome is not pre-given in terms of the requirements of capital (1988: 137).
A model of women’s dependence has become entrenched in the relations of production of capitalism, in the divisions of labor in wage work and between wage labor and domestic labor. As such, an oppression of women that is not in any essentialist sense pre-given by the logic of capitalist development has become necessary for the ongoing reproduction of the mode of production in its present form. Hence, the oppression of women, although not a functional pre-requisite of capitalism, has acquired a material basis in the relations of production and reproduction of capitalism today (Barrett, 1988: 249).
Under capitalist relations of production, women are seen to have a “dual relationship” to class structure: they may be wage laborers themselves, directly exploited through the sale of their own labor-power, and/or they may be involved in a mediated relationship of exploitation through their dependence upon a male wage-earner and their responsibility for domestic labor and child care (1988: 139, 151). The dependent position of women in the context of modern capitalism is thus produced both in the workplace and in the family.
In the workplace, women are subject to a “vertical” division of labor in which they are subordinated to men in terms of power and remuneration, and a “horizontal” division of labor in which women are over-represented in some types of work and under-represented in others. Evidence from the US political economy strongly supports the existence of these divisions: at every level of education, women are paid substantially less than men; and women tend to be concentrated in clerical and service jobs, and in the relatively lower-status and lower-paid professions such as nursing and teaching (Albelda and Tilly, 1997: 4-6, 46-47). Both the “vertical” and “horizontal” divisions of labor are related to women’s positioning with the family. Insofar as women are assigned primary responsibility for child rearing and domestic labor, they may be more likely to work part time or to leave the work force altogether for extended periods, and correspondingly they may be less powerful and more insecure at work, less able to develop and defend job skills, to form ties of solidarity and bargain from a position of (relative) strength, to accumulate seniority and to be promoted along a career track parallel to that traveled by many men. “Furthermore, the construction of a family form in which the male head of household is supposedly responsible for the financial support of a dependent wife and children has militated against demands for equal pay and an equal ‘right to work’ by women” (Barrett, 1988: 157). According to Albelda and Tilly (1997: 4-5), women in the US make about two-thirds of men’s hourly wage, but women tend to work fewer hours a year than men, primarily because of their domestic burdens, which means that women’s average annual earnings are about one-half those of men. The ideology of domesticity also affects the “horizontally” gendered division of labor, insofar as women may be disproportionately assigned to areas of work which involve service or caring, and hence are understood in terms of this ideology as quintessentially “female”.
Barrett points toward the “family-household system” (uniting kinship with co-habitation and, under capitalism, separating residence and consumption from waged work) as the primary historical locus of women’s oppression, for it is here that the material relations of dependence upon male wage-earners, and the ideological construction of women as domestics and care-givers, have been situated. Women have been enveloped in a privatized domestic sphere which is culturally defined as the home of all that is feminine at the same time that they have been effectively blocked from equal participation in the labor force and thus rendered economically dependent. “The family-household system has resulted in the ‘double shift’ of wage labor and domestic labor for many working class women, and the assumption of their household dependence has left many ‘unsupported’ women in a very vulnerable position” (Barrett, 1988: 219). This division of the labor force by gender has been politically consequential not just for the disempowerment of women, but for the working class as a whole. Gendering the division of labor in these ways has meant the relative privileging of male workers and the concomitant assignment of women disproportionately to the ranks of the poorly paid and the insecure. The real, if also partial, gains which organized (mostly male) workers have won are made vulnerable under conditions in which a feminized “reserve army of labor” can be employed by capital to undercut the power of the labor movement (Barrett, 1988: 171, 218, 258).
Overturning this situation requires de-reification and restructuring of the family-household system such that domestic and child-care responsibilities are no longer gendered in the same way that they have been. This, in turn, implies massive changes in the gendered divisions of labor in the workplace and in the state policies which support them; in short, a gendered emancipatory project entails transforming much of the contemporary political economy of capitalism, as well as “domestic” life. This creates considerable potential, Barrett argued, for the confluence of feminist and socialist political projects.
Johanna Brenner (1993) has provided an analysis of contemporary US feminism which is in many ways complementary to Barrett’s understanding of a socialist-feminist project. Brenner argues that gendered aspects of the current wave of transnational capitalist restructuring and the retrenchment of the welfare state in the US have combined to place great political-economic pressures upon women, especially working class women and women of color.
In this “new gender order”, two major tributaries of “second wave” feminism may appear to have run dry. Liberal feminism, with its demands for abstract equality of women and men, has been largely “institutionalized and culturally incorporated as women’s right to compete and contract free from limitations imposed on account of our sex” (1993: 102). Enabling women to participate in the market more fully, however, may seem something of a pyric victory in an era when the conditions surrounding the sale of labor-power are dramatically worsening for all but the most privileged workers. Moreover, “a politics which focuses exclusively on discriminatory treatment is inevitably class and race biased because it ignores women’s differential resources for competing in the market” (1993: 117). However, “social welfare feminism” which seeks to go beyond abstract equality and more directly address material issues which affect working women—for instance, advocating government assistance in securing paid parental leave, universal healthcare and quality childcare—is hobbled by its strategic dependence upon a Democratic Party whose concern for working people (much less working women) is ambiguous at best and duplicitous at worst.
Brenner concludes that these two wings of “second wave” feminism should be supplanted by a new, more broadly-based strategy, “a serious and disruptive challenge to capital, a broad and militant ‘rainbow movement’, including new, more social and political forms of trade union struggle and national political organization independent of the Democratic Party” (Brenner, 1993: 103). She envisions the development of a “third wave” politics that “combines the liberatory moments (the demand for individual self-expression, self-determination, and democratic participation) of the movements for democratic inclusion (feminism, civil rights, gay/lesbian rights) with new struggles over material needs (for healthcare, for childcare and paid prenatal leave, for living-wage jobs, for a clean environment)” (1993: 157). Crucial to this renewed socialist-feminist agenda is the fostering of “grassroots networks and solidarities” which will be enabling, and which will support a kind of snowball effect whereby those engaged in organized struggle grow and develop as members of more self-determining communities. Organization, then, is not to be understood instrumentally, but as part of a self-transformative process: “The main point of organizing people around their immediate needs is to develop the capacities of women activists, their critical understanding and confidence in collective action, their commitments to ways of organizing social life that are democratic and participatory” (Brenner, 1993: 149).
7. Construction of democratizing projects which would challenge the globalizing social powers of capital, then, requires the formulation of ideologies of globalization which speak to the complex social situations in which the world economy’s waged and un-waged workers find themselves. If such projects are to forge a unified resistance to globalizing capitalism, they must find ways to articulate class-based identities with other social identities and powers already resident and active within the popular common sense of working people in various parts of the world.
This implies direct confrontation with issues of race and postcoloniality. A strong case can be made that processes of class formation within the US political economy have been integrally related to construction of racial identities and systems of white dominance (Goldfield, 1997). Indeed for at least five hundred years, racialized identities and ideologies of racial hierarchy have been used to justify the domination and exploitation of peoples of color by Europeans and North Americans (Stavrianos, 1981; Hall, 1996). We recognize that this history poses serious issues for any project of transnational political solidarity, if it is to avoid replacing one structure of Western white male power with another. We believe that historical materialism has much to learn on this score from struggles over race and postcoloniality within the feminist movement (Lovell, 1996; Tong, 1997). While it is beyond the scope of this paper to engage substantively with these debates, we want at least to acknowledge their relevance to an historical materialism which projects its emancipatory horizons on a global scale.
8. We conclude that progressives in the age of globalizing capitalism cannot afford to presume the emergence of a simple and homogeneous identity such as “global proletariat”. Rather, a political movement must be built through the recognition that those exploited and dominated by globalizing capitalism share a potential unity in view of their common structural relation to capital, but that this commonality is embedded in and mediated by manifold social relations which mark them off as meaningfully different. We are arguing, in other words, that democratizing transnational social movement can only be constructed through the negotiation of difference, and that ideological struggles to construct a common political project must recognize and respect these differences if they are to attain their object.
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Endnotes
*: Prepared for presentation at the 40th annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, D.C., February 16–20, 1999. Back.
Note 1: Much ballyhooed have been the wage gains generated by tightening labor markets at the peak of the current business cycle. However, the Economic Policy Institute puts this wage growth in perspective: “even with these recent gains, the pay of the typical worker in mid-1998 is still not as high as it was in 1989, the year of the last business cycle peak. Moreover, these recent wage gains, dependent upon current tight labor markets, low inflation, and one-time increases in the minimum wage, are unlikely to withstand the inevitable shift in the business cycle” (Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, 1998). These conjunctural wage gains, then, do not portend a significant shift in what we might call the “underlying fundamentals” of the US political economy: the relative disempowerment of people who depend upon wages to live. Back.
Note 2: For a helpful overview of the British cultural studies movement with which Hall’s work is associated, see Turner, 1996. The classic formulation of Hall’s interpretation of historical materialism is his ’The Problem of Ideology—Marxism without Guarantees’ in D. Morley and K.H. Chen, eds, 1996; see also Hall 1988a and the essays collected in Hall, 1988b. On representation and discourse, see Hall, 1997. For critiques of Hall’s work and tendencies toward “ideologism” to which his approach may lend itself, see B. Jessop et al., 1984, and Smith, 1997, pp. 152-57. Back.
Note 3: On possible articulations of a regressive populist political agenda in the US, see Rupert 1997a, 1997b. Back.
Note 4: The information presented here was acquired in interviews with Josh Remis and Sam Luebke of UNITE during December, 1996. Back.
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