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M. Scott Solomon and Mark Rupert
Debates surrounding the question of globalization have spawned a variety of responses, ranging from assertions of the imminent 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 and 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 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 – not unexpected, to be sure, but hardly predestined. Rather, as we see it, globalizing capitalism is contested and open-ended. On this view, ignoring capitalism’s tendencies towards globalization would constitute a scholarly and political error of no less magnitude than acquiescing in the face of representations of its omnipotence and inevitability. Drawing on the resources of historical materialism, it is possible to represent capitalist globalization as a dialectical process: attendant upon globalizing capitalism have been heightened exploitation and class-based social powers, but processes of globalization also bear the potential for various forms of a progressive transnational politics of solidarity, opening up possibilities for alternative future worlds more democratic and less exploitative.
Commentators often point to the increasing and deepening internationalization of production and finance, especially after the dramatic changes of the early 1970s, 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 terrain 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. From Buchanan, Haider, and LePen, to the Australian ‘One Nation’ movement, xenophobic backlashes entailing reassertion of economic, cultural or racial nationalisms are an all too common response. While condemnation of racism and xenophobia is obviously necessary, attempting to understand the roots of these political responses is just as vital to a progressive politics. It is unacceptable to merely dismiss such responses in the hope that they will disappear with the next predicted up-tick in asset value, for this amounts to disengagement from the ideological struggles which will determine the form and political significance of ‘globalization’ (see Rupert 2000).
There is a sense in which ‘freedom’, as understood under capitalist social relations, entails meaningful historical progress over and against feudal relations of personal dependence and extra-economic coercion, but is nonetheless a self-limiting, contradictory concept, producing effects that might potentially generate political friction, struggle, and transformation. We take Marx seriously when he argues that under capitalism workers are free in a dual sense – free of ownership of the means of production (and thus compelled to sell his or her labour-power) but also juridically free and formally equal (Marx 1977a: 272). ‘The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ (Marx 1977a: 280). Freedom, equality, property and Bentham (self-interest) is shorthand for juridically free and equal persons meeting in the market to exchange their property in mutually beneficial transactions – the core of liberalism’s entire (limited) vision of social life. The sarcasm detectable in Marx’s justly famous passage reminds us of the irony that although people may appear as juridically free and equal in the sphere of circulation, relations of private ownership within the sphere of capitalist production subvert both equality and freedom. Capitalism creates new historical possibilities even as it negates or distorts their potential for self-development. The profound ironies of capitalist social life are the sources of Marx’s critical leverage, and may become crucial sites of political resistance. As it reproduces itself on a more global scale, the janus-faced character of capitalism is no less evident: globalizing capitalism entails manifold contradictions and creates the conditions of existence from which new forms of social organization might conceivably emerge.
This dialectic is not limited to class. Divisions based on gender, nationality, and other forms of identity exist in uneasy, complex relationships to class. To our minds 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 if it wishes to effectively engage the politics of globalization. By doing so we hope to suggest that there are possibilities for unity through difference that can contest the hegemonic project of globalization driven by the dictates of capital accumulation. We have developed a set of provisional claims that address specific elements of our perspective on globalization. A connecting thread runs throughout our discussions – a refusal to always and forever privilege class processes, and the concomitant refusal to ignore them. We understand historical materialism as an open-ended mode of inquiry that is, to echo Stuart Hall, ‘without guarantees’.
Globalization: ‘It's the real thing’
While it is possible to exaggerate the novelty and extent of contemporary manifestations of ‘globalization’, there are real material processes underlying the emergence of even the most extreme versions of the globalization thesis. These processes are historically distinct, with a correspondingly unique politics. 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, 2000). Constructing the institutional infrastructure of international trade and finance, this historic bloc fostered the growth of international trade and investment through the post-war 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: 48–9; Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 169; Perraton et al. 1997: 263–4; Henwood 1997: 15; Feenstra 1998; Bordo et al. 1999) – emerged as important forms of transnational economic linkage. The traditional global division of labour – 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: chap. 2; Gordon 1988). Finally, excess liquidity, the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed rate regime, and the emergence of offshore xenocurrency markets, together resulted in rapidly growing volumes of foreign exchange trading and speculative international investment which dwarf the currency reserves of governments and can readily inundate, or leave high and dry, the financial markets of particular nations (Wachtel 1990; Agnew and Corbridge 1995: 171–8; Perraton et al. 1997: 265–71).
The above suggests that the processes associated with globalization are not without author, though the significance of these processes remains an open question. Often, the debate around globalization represents itself 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 in some ways 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 particular social power relations but pregnant with possible futures, implicitly political, contestable and contested.
Borrowing from Perraton 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 sceptics (Gordon 1988; Hirst and Thompson 1996; Weiss 1998; Sutcliffe and Glyn 1999) 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 TNCs, 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. Whatever the measure, it is clear that the globalization of finance and production has resulted in a definite quantitative acceleration of interdependence 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 nineteenth century. This view sees the enormous disruptions of the First and Second World Wars (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:
1. Economic activity is more nationally based than a globalized economy would suggest.
2. Globalization is more accurately internationalization, the interaction of well-defined and quite sovereign territorial units rather than a borderless world.
3. Global flows (as domestic/international ratios) are similar to the end of the nineteenth century.
4. Globalization is often a reflection of regionalization, the heightened interaction of self-contained regions, rather than an increase in globalized flows.
Perraton et al. rightly object to many of these assessments because of the imputed end-state such measures suggest. The sceptics conceptualize globalization as some terminus against which current global flows can be measured. Utilizing such a standard insures a diminution of the impact of actually existing globalization by establishing a base-line of the perfectly globalized economy. Perraton et al. prefer to conceptualize globalization as a process. We find this analytically superior in that it allows for a more nuanced and subtle assessment of the openness of the global economy. It rejects the either/or option in favour of a continuum, a vision of relations in process. It allows for a recognition that the sovereignty of a state can remain largely intact even as certain policy options become increasingly problematic. Importantly for our political purposes, this view sees globalization as an ongoing process that does not have a predetermined end but is in a state of dynamic flux, politically indeterminate.
Globalization and class
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.
This is, of course, not a thesis commonly found in popular treatments of globalizing capitalism. In his best-selling book, New York Times global affairs columnist Thomas Friedman celebrates what he imagines to be the egalitarian tendencies of this newest capitalism, creating ‘super-empowered individuals’ and, in effect, erasing distinctions of class: ‘For the first time in American history both Joe Six-pack and Billionaire Bob are watching CNBC to see how their shares in the market are faring’ (Friedman 1999: 105). ‘Soon’, Friedman gushes, ‘everyone will have a virtual seat on the New York Stock Exchange’ (1999: 58). Despite hallucinogenic liberal triumphalism of this sort, the classical Marxian concept of class based upon relationship to the means of production seems to us no less relevant than it was in Marx’s lifetime. Friedman’s flights of fantasy notwithstanding, by the late 1990s the ownership of wealth in the USA was more unequal than at any time since the late 1920s. According to Federal Reserve data for 1998, the wealthiest 10 per cent of Americans owned over 82 per cent of stock and 86 per cent of bonds owned by individuals (including indirect ownership through mutual funds), as well as over 91 per cent of business assets. Like a black hole, capitalist wealth is increasingly concentrated, massive and dense closer to the core: ownership of these financial and business assets is even more disproportionately concentrated in the wealthiest half of 1 per cent of the population, who owned over 31 per cent of stocks, more than 32 per cent of bonds, and almost 55 per cent of business assets (Henwood 2000: 3). 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.
Again, let us take the USA as an example. Data generated by Kravis and Lipsey (1992) suggest that even while the USA (as a territorial entity) lost around one-third of its share of world exports of manufactures between 1966 and 1986–8, USA-based multinationals maintained their global share by shifting their production for world export markets towards majority-owned foreign affiliates (MOFAs), whose export share increased over this period. ‘In 1986–88, US multinationals were exporting more from their overseas affiliates than they were from the United States’ (Kravis and Lipsey 1992: 194). Evidence such as this seems to suggest that over the last several decades transnational production for world markets has to a significant degree displaced export production from within the territorial USA. Nominally American multinational firms have maintained their global competitive position, but their US workers now produce less for world markets while workers employed by their foreign affiliates produce more. Further indicative of this tendency, employment in the manufacturing MOFAs of USA-based firms grew from 2.4 million in 1966 to almost 4.1 million in 1987, an increase of about 70 per cent. Although direct foreign investment by US-based firms has remained heavily concentrated in the developed market economies, after 1966 employment by US MNCs engaged in manufacturing in the newly industrializing countries – especially in Brazil, Mexico, and Asia – grew almost five times as rapidly as did such employment in the developed countries. This suggests that US-based MNCs may have sought to transfer some of their more labour-intensive manufacturing activities to these areas (Dicken 1992: 51–3, 59–67). Further, internationalized production has dramatically affected manufacturing within the USA: the import content of US-finished manufactures has increased eightfold – from 3 per cent throughout most of this century and as late as 1963, to 24 per cent in 1985 (Held et al. 1999: 174). Reflecting the increased significance of multinational firms as mediators between the USA and the world economy, Dicken claims that intra-firm trade now constitutes more than half of all US trade, an argument buttressed and extended by Feenstra (Dicken 1992: 48–9; Feenstra 1998; but compare Henwood 1997).
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. 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 shut down if the union wins the election.
Between 1993 and 1995, such threats accompanied at least half of all union certification elections in the USA (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, of course, 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 necessarily because of actual plant movement (although some of that has occurred) but because of the widely perceived 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 and investment through the NAFTA agreement. However great or little the job creation/destruction of NAFTA, the political environment that workers face has changed, and their bargaining power has been effectively attenuated. There seems to be sufficient cause in their minds to understand globalization as a credible threat to their job security and their livelihoods. To the extent that they become embedded in popular common sense, ideological constructions of ‘footloose capital’ – along with 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. Real wages of working people have been in a long-term decline since the early mid-1970s, with growth in real wages lagging further and further behind productivity growth. Reflecting shifting power relations within the historical structures of contemporary capitalism, we suspect that these processes are likely to be only temporarily retarded by the 1990s ‘boom’ – the longest business cycle expansion in US history but relatively feeble in its effects on the economic and political circumstances of working people (Bernstein and Mishel 1999). This intensified exploitation of workers is a large part of the explanation for higher corporate profits, a record-setting 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 wealth are at historically high levels (Henwood 2000; also Wolff 1995: 7; and Mishel et al. 1997: 278–81).
Increasing inequality in the USA mirrors global processes. As more states embrace and deepen neoliberal market-driven policies, the world economy becomes increasingly polarized. According to the United Nations Development Report of 1999, the income gap between the globe’s richest and poorest quintiles ‘was 74 to 1 in 1997, up from 60 to 1 in 1990 and 30 to 1 in 1960’. By the late 1990s, the fifth of the world’s population living in the highest income countries had 86 per cent of world GDP, 82 per cent of world market exports, 68 per cent of foreign direct investment, and 74 per cent of the world’s telephone lines; while the poorest fifth had only about 1 per cent of each of these (UNDP 1999: 3). Evidence such as this points towards the emergence of an unprecedentedly hierarchic global political economy, which concentrates power and wealth effectively in the hands of the wealthiest people in the richest countries.
Employers and investors in the USA, and globally, have 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 manipulation of their relationships with particular politicians or officials, 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 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 constrain further 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 1991) this very real disciplinary power is intensified to the point that consideration of effectively pro-worker or environmentally friendly policies is precluded, and policies may be specifically designed to attract and hold (putatively footloose) capital by offering the most favourable business climate possible.
Historical materialism and critique
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. 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 explicitly political – sites for, and objects of, reflective dialogue and contestation, mutable aspects of a broad process of social self-determination.
Accepting in broad outline Marx’s analysis of the structure and dynamics of capitalism (e.g. 1971: 201–2), Antonio Gramsci resisted more mechanical and economistic interpretations of Marx. For Gramsci, progressive social change must be produced by historically situated social agents whose actions are enabled and constrained by their social self-understandings (1971: 164–5, 326, 375–777, 420). 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. Gramsci’s project 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.
From this perspective, we have found non-teleological conceptions of historical materialism to be politically congenial. Stuart Hall’s vision of ‘marxism without guarantees’ foregrounds the significance of ideological struggle. Without presuming a pre-determined outcome, Hall is seeking to understand the conditions and processes through which ideological self-understandings are formed and reformed within particular historical circumstances. We understand Hall to be suggesting that class relations are human social products, contradictory and contested, and in no sense ‘exogenous’ or simply pre-given. Like all social structures, the class-based organization of production does not (re-)produce itself automatically but through the actions of concretely situated social agents, agents whose self-understandings and political horizons may be shaped by ideologies which foreground social identities other than class. ‘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 1988: 45)
Hall’s Gramsci is one who 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. Insofar as Marx’s social ontology posits the internal relation of human beings, their social relations, and their natural environment, we would suggest that various non-class social determinations are always already present within processes of social self-production, and that these should be explicitly addressed in an effective anti-capitalist politics.
Critique of competitiveness ideology
Ideologies of globalization which centre 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. A crucial terrain of struggle for contestations of ‘common sense’, and an important correlate of globalization, is the relentless 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 seek out production sites with lower wage or lax environmental and labour standards (among other things) in the name of competitiveness. Workers feel compelled continually to 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 and, therefore, their livelihoods are continually at risk.
The explosion, since the mid-to-late 1970s, 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 and very many more feel their livelihoods imperilled, 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 seemingly 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 that competitiveness compels them 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 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 attractive environment for capital. While it is true that states do not compete in the same fashion as firms, Krugman doesn’t demonstrate the irrelevance of competitiveness discourse by such a conclusion. Krugman’s argument demonstrates something important – the notion of competitiveness has resonance regardless of its accuracy in describing the reality of competitive pressures on nations, firms, plants or workers. Even in the absence of acute competitive pressure, the rhetoric of competitiveness fosters an environment that heavily favours the owners of capital and challenges attempts at solidarity. When workers, states and communities are pitted against each other in a ‘race to the bottom’ or in movements towards downward harmonization, the competition is not between firms but between the owners of the means of production and those whose income is derived from labour. On this view, competitiveness can be understood as a rhetorical tool in the competition over the division of surplus.
From competitiveness to solidarity?
Resistance to the globalizing powers of capital may be enabled by ideologies of transnational solidarity, grounded in – if not wholly determined by – capital’s increasingly transnational subsumption of labour, and the intensified exploitation this entails. The globalization of production has increased the need for ideologies of resistance that are global as well. A new internationalism seems to be recognizing the necessity of rethinking traditional forms of labour organization and the irreducibility of class, race, and gender. Theoretical work envisioning new possibilities of international organizing have recognized as much. DeMartino’s (2000) ‘Social-Index Tariff Structure’ (SITS) policy approach suggests that trade be discouraged with social tariffs to the extent that competitive advantage is gained by worker repression, environmental degradation, exploitation of women and children, and prison and slave labour. The SITS approach seeks to establish criteria that allow trade to flourish, but only trade that does not gain advantage through exploitation. Kidder and McGinn (1995) have suggested that transnational worker networks (TWNs) be encouraged in place of bureaucratic structures that may be too rigid to move quickly or embrace multifaceted movements. TWNs are conceived as loose coalitions that can form around broadly progressive themes in order to check the suzerainty of transnational capital without succumbing to one-dimensional struggles. In the wake of NAFTA, cross-border solidarity efforts have mushroomed. The Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, a loose-knit coalition of maquiladora workers and progressive, grass-roots groups from Mexico, Canada, and the United States, exemplify a TWN that is truly transnational. Moody’s (1997) vision of a transnational social movement unionism is likewise encouraging, rethinking traditional labour politics in an environment of transnational production. All of these approaches recognize that exclusively local resistance to globalization is insufficient and ultimately self-defeating.
There are early but significant signs of a growing internationalism in labour solidarity. An important example of a truly global campaign was the Ravenswood Aluminum campaign in the early 1990s. Herod (1995) and Juracvich and Bronfenbrenner (1999) have documented the extensive reach of this campaign. Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation (RAC), located near Ravenswood, West Virginia, locked out its unionized workforce (United Steel Workers of America, 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 (until his recent pardon by the outgoing Clinton administration).
The USWA and AFL-CIO took a multifaceted 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 labour 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 labour when Rich attempted to acquire firms in their countries. 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 (1995). 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, labour groups were active on the basis of international solidarity. Herod (1997) has demonstrated that labour has always been international in a sense, but that far too often it was focused on securing national labour goals and frequently acted against international solidarity. The new internationalism aspires to be more truly international in its struggles.
Another interesting development in the new internationalism has been the willingness of industrialized and developing countries’ labour unions to act cooperatively. Estrada-Levinson 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 manufacturers of men’s suits in North America.1 Peerless’ factory in Quebec employs roughly 2,400 workers, over 80 per cent 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 labour at Peerless are not solely centred 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 centred around bridging language barriers. Trade unionists 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 dramatic events at the Seattle meetings intended to inaugurate a new round of WTO talks testify to the potential of a transnational and multifaceted resistance to elements of globalization. While the real effects of the decidedly indeterminate negation of ‘the battle in Seattle’ remain to be seen, it serves as further evidence of the nascent transnational resistance to capitalist globalization. The global expansion of solidarity networks may be the corollary to the global expansion of production and exchange.
Unity through difference?
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.
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 negotiation with issues of gender, race, postcoloniality, and other facets of identity politics. 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 (Goldfìeld 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 colour 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 (Gabriel and Macdonald 1994; Pettman 1996; Eschle 2001). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to engage substantively with these debates (see Rupert 2000), we want at least to acknowledge their relevance to an historical materialism which projects its emancipatory horizons on a global scale.
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 a 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.
Note
1. The information presented here was acquired by Scott Solomon in interviews with Josh Remis and Sam Luebke of UNITE during December 1996.