Answer to The Open Letter

Peter Waterman

I welcome the Open Letter from the Youngstown Socialists - and hope to see it published in full in Labor Notes, WorkingUSA, and other such magazines, so that discussion will not be confined to the Web.

I think such interventions are especially relevant now, at a moment of crisis (Chinese: opportunity/danger) for neoliberalism as a global project, and of a revival of an implicitly or explicity anti-capitalist and internationalist social movement (that owes few debts to labour unions or parties).

I appreciate its sober recognition of the limitations of the 'new unionism' in South Africa (similar to Brazil and even South Korea).

I regret that the letter reproduces, extensively, the sin it itself condemns, by concentrating overwhelmingly on 'opposition' rather than 'proposition'. Contrast here the latest book by Jeremy Brecher and friends, 'Globalisation from Below' (Southend Press, Boston).

I regret that it appears to draw little if any inspiration from the collective identities, movements, ideas and strategies coming out of the so-called new social movements. I noted no prominent reference to women/feminism, peace/pacifism, human rights - and only a passing one to environmentalists (not to environmentalism). Nor any awareness of 'difference' amongst the oppressed/exploited/alienated, and the consequent possibility/necessity of a universalism allowing for such difference.

I regret that whilst it criticises the nomination of Walter Reuther for the Social Movement Unionist of the (last) Millennium Prize, it does not tell us what Social Movement Unionism is or could be.

I further believe that its alternative relates to the old national industrial capitalism, working class and socialism, rather than one focussed on the new. Here I am talking about a globalised networked financial and services capitalism (GNC), a nationally and internationally diffused and often individualised labour force (but with higher education levels, skills and capacities), and the necessity for a new kind of global labour and general solidarity movement (in which cross-national collective bargaining would be a minor result rather than a the basis of or stimulus to further solidarity).

So much for my opposition. Now for proposition.

I think that the problem of the labour movement is structural in a quite literal sense: the labour movement has an inappropriate structure for a social movement in the era of a GNC. The dynamic part of the new capitalism is networked, consisting of complex and changing relations of contract and sub-contracting - reaching right into the homes of armies of homeworkers.

My own current experience of a networked capitalism is in negotiating the publication of a book I am writing. I am exploring possibilities with a company (of 1? 5? 20? 1 worker/owner and 15 subcontractees?) that does both print-on-demand (just in time) and e-books. This means that I either myself do the work of the typesetting, editing and publicity, or buy one or more of these extra services from the company or one of the other specialised services it links with, or permits to publicise on its website. What kind of printing or publication industry, what kind of workers, are implied here? Where lie the relations traditional for Fordism/Keynesianism between intellectual and manual labour, investor (I would here put up $400 but would receive 25-40% instead of 5%-10% royalties) and producer, between work and supervision?).

It is my strong feeling that the form of labour-self-articulation (joing and expression) needed here is that of networking - the very form taken by the anti-globalisation movement, and many others, which have grown up during the transition from a national industrial capitalism to a globalised networked one. Or, to put it another way, that the dynamic and innovatory form and force for the revival of the labour movement will be provided by and through networking. This is, in any case, the form taken by most effective labour internationalism today. And it is both required and facilitated by the electronic media - particular by the Web. (How many of the keywords in this paragraph are absent from the Impact letter?). It may even be that this is what the positive proposal made by the Impact group is leading toward, or at least allows for. But, then, it would really be necessary to make this explicit.

I also believe that labour (socialists, rather) have to abandon the notion that labour is the sole or primary force for human emancipation. Marx was wrong then - but understandably so during an epoch in which capitalism was creating this modern class of the exploited, oppressed and alienated, which had no rights and therefore no country. However fundamental to capitalism alienated labour continues to be, the identities, values, interests of labouring people go way beyond this 'fundament', and express themselves in an increasing numbers of spheres - each with their own quite specific contradictions. To persist ín pressing the 'true' interests of the working class, and its pre-destined 'vanguard' role, is, thus, to be a socialist fundamentalist. And, given the number of these on the right and extreme right, they really don't need any socialist addition to their cancerous causes...

The myth of labour movement primacy is counter-productive to the development of a general (all forms of imposed work) and global (formerly: inter-national) movement to end wage-slavery and its associated forms. It is also counter-productive to a real social partnership with the other collective interests/identities and movements - which have their own well-founded suspicions of being ignored, condemned and instrumentalised by unions and socialists, in the name of corporatist self-interest and/or elitist ideologies.

This is more than enough.

Anyone interested can follow up this brief statement by visiting the Global Solidarity Site www.antenna.nl/~waterman/, or checking out my own 'Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms' (Paperback edition, new preface, Continuum Press, London and Washington, announced for June 2001), or, with Jane Wills, the edited collection 'Space, Place and the New Labour Internationalisms' (New paperback, Blackwells, Oxford and ???, announced for June 2001).

For my critique of the Brecher book mentioned above, see WorkingUSA, Spring 2001, www.workingusa.org. (This happens to be in the same issue as both an article by and a critique of Staughton Lynd. May the dialogue continue).

The next issue of WorkingUSA should, I think, be my guest-edited issue on 'A Social Clause for Labour's Cause?'. My article here is on 'Capitalist Trade Privileges and Social Labour Rights'. Whilst focussed on the international level, on labour internationalism, and the rights issue, it spells out much of what is sketched above. (labour rights as human rights, incidentally, seems to me to have infinitely more potential as an international/ist project than that of inter-national and intra-company collective bargaining).

I'd be happy to have a response to the above from Youngstown. As also their response to any of the publications mentioned above.

Forward to the networked and internationalist labour movement of the future!

Peter W

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