II. Strategies and Deals
Strategies and deals are necessarily intertwined:
a class deal is a result of class struggle and thus of the degree of success
of a particular class strategy in the context of the material and social
possibilities of the time and place. On the basis of a deal, new strategies
are launched. In overview, then, and in a highly schematic fashion, some
elements of twentieth century strategies and deals:
One strategy has focused on wages and employment: full employment and high
wages could be used to put capital into crisis. That is, the Keynesian or
social democratic deal, itself the result of struggles (e.g., for jobs,
wages, unionization) which forced capital to incorporate the working class
into its planning and into a reorganized mode of accumulation, results also
in a strategy based on the deal that looks simultaneously to improve the
deal and to transcend the deal and thus capital. (As a result, in this discussion
we somewhat deliberately conflate "strategy" and "deal.")
By the 1960s, this strategy developed into the refusal of work based on
a relatively guaranteed access to wages. It threatened the end of profitability
for capital through the reduction of surplus value. To seize the means of
production and reshape them to proletarian ends requires, additionally,
a project of controlling the state, if not abolishing it. The notion of
a strike, a general strike, flows throughout this strategic thinking, both
as a generalization of a microscopic, daily refusal and as the possibility
of overt, massive, public refusal of work and potentially occupying the
means of production.
In the refusal of work version of this strategy, the wage is understood
as political. The Italian autonomists and Wages for Housework represent
the high points of conceptualizing this strategy, which was acted on much
more widely, if not so defined. By understanding wages as political, they
potentially overcame the split between economics and politics prominent
in leftist thought at least since Lenin, and thus understand a dialectical
relationship between the struggle for income within capital and the rejection
of capital: gaining the wage opens the possibility of taking the money and
then refusing the work, thus rejecting the legitimacy of surplus value and
the wages system (Federici, 1975; Midnight Notes, 1992; Zerowork, 1975).
Additionally, the hugely developed powers of production provided a material
basis for the minimization of many forms of labor, of the refusal of work.
It became possible to think through more specifically what Marx (1967) suggested,
using proletarian control over the means of production to reduce working
time.(5) Here
an environmental perspective also becomes necessary (c.f., Mies & Shiva,
1993; Dalla Costa, 1995).
A second strategy proposed the war of national liberation, the seizure of
progressively larger territory, encircling the cities, using one or another
military strategy (Maoist, Guevarist), culminating in the seizure of the
state and the "commanding heights of the economy." Control of
the national territory and state was simultaneously an end in itself and
means to a wider attack on capitalism, through two routes. One was the development
of an alternative to capital, "socialism"; the other was the withdrawal
of labor and products from the world market, thus a form of a strike. Inasmuch
as the socialist state was in actual fact part of an expanding attack on
capitalism, the size and scope of the alternative and the scope of the withdrawal
from the capitalist market would both increase. As a result, the model of
"encircling the cities" was adapted from national to world scale.
Note that we are deliberately treating Social Democracy, Leninism and national
liberation struggles as working class strategies, not just class deals,
though we recognize all have proven to be aspects of capitalism. We might
say that these are all variants of the major capitalist deal of the twentieth
century: socialism. While some Marxists and anarchists might argue that
these never were, and perhaps never were intended to be, working-class controlled
societies, our point is that working class movements in fact often treated
these as forms of working class power.(6)
Whether we like either strategy or not, we cannot
deny their power in the twentieth century -- they substantially defined
the terms of class debate, in their guises as Stalinism and Maoism; Keynesianism
and social democracy, within the working class and between working class
and capital, from the end of World War I, and more so from the end of World
War II, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Though Lenin himself clearly
understood that Russia was a capitalist nation in the 1920s (the New Economic
Policy), capital's ability to block the expansion of revolution into Europe
after WWI caused the Soviet Union to become the first "national liberation"
model, a model that came to include, in a variety of forms, most of the
world's population in "second" or "third world" variations
(here including "mixed" forms such as developed in India). And
social democracy has been the deal through which working classes in the
"West" fought and negotiated for full employment and higher wages.
Most importantly, while the ideologies were either rather explicitly not
posing the end of capitalism (social democracy and "mixed economies")
or conceptualized capitalism and thus the end of capitalism in ways that
fostered an autarkic capitalist fraction rather than the end of capitalism
(Leninism, Maoism), the struggles of the class described within these ideologies
pointed toward the possibility of the end of capitalism. That is, class
practice is more important than the ideologies employed (on this, see esp.
Tronti, 1972); and class struggles are typically both within and against
capital, a point reflected in complex ways in ideologies of the working
class.
These two strategies -- wages against work, socialist liberation -- are
not necessarily antithetical, though historically the first has been located
in the capitalistically more developed areas, the latter in the less capitalistically
developed areas. It is true that adherents of one strategy often denigrated
the other -- Eurocentric workerism vs. peasant, pre-proletarian uprisings,
to say nothing of the battles between Communists and Social Democrats. By
the late 1960s, however, several factors suggested a unifying thrust to
the struggles that simultaneously built on and transcended/rejected the
deals. bolo'bolo (P.M., 1985) summarized the analysis of these developments
as a refusal of three "deals" that had been erected on and reflected
the class composition of the period. They revealed themselves in an extension
of wages and a generalization of the refusal of work.
The refusal of work in the "first world" was reflected in the
rising share of the product obtained by the working class and the declining
work offered in exchange, producing the profits crisis of the end of the
1960s (c.f., Caffentzis, 1980). The refusal of work in the "second
world" was summed up in a joke, "We pretend to work, they pretend
to pay us"; but in fact, workers were paid, often in highly socialized
ways, albeit by say US standards not a high wage. The result in the Soviet
bloc was rising wages (under Brezhnev) and economic stagnation.
In the third world, the demand was for development without the exploitation
that everywhere else attended development, the call was for socialism as
simultaneously accumulation and not working in ways that produced profits.
Thus, for example, substantial portions of oil revenues in oil-producing
nations were spent "unproductively" as working class income, often
through subsidized food, shelter, medical care and education (Neill, 1983).
(bolo'bolo did not mention them, but we could note now that stirrings
of a resurgent "fourth world" or indigenous peoples refusal was
taking the form of openly attempting to entirely opt out of capitalist development,
to refuse a work deal entirely, and was rooted in traditions of original
communism.)
These effective expressions of a generalized refusal of capitalist work
occurring simultaneously in time -- a circulation of struggles -- pushed
the capitalist system into crisis as the system attempted to confront the
struggles launched on the terrain of the deals that had been structured
in the period after the second world war. As it became clear to capitalist
thinkers that they could not win on that terrain, they realized that the
deals would have to be torn up, class war launched in new ways. Midnight
Notes has discussed over the years the ways in which capital has used oil,
debt, structural adjustment, what we summed up as New Enclosures (1990),
to attack all the old deals and decompose the political homogeneity of the
working class. Computers and information technology have also been basic
tools of the capitalist attack. The capitalist class has been fundamentally
successful in this effort, although several cycles of resistance to structural
adjustment has caused capital to pause and reconfigure its attacks (see
Midnight Notes, 1992, 1990).
Flaws in the Deals and Strategies
While the working class had established sufficient political homogeneity
by the late 1960s to push the capitalist system into crisis, the working
class did not have sufficient unity to prevail against capital's attempts
to decompose the homogeneity, to force the class to fight itself, to accept
"mineness" as the law of human behavior.
Thus the crisis of the deals is also the crisis of the strategies -- wages
are declining, unemployment rising, and the social wage disappearing in
first and second worlds, while virtually all third world states, and much
of the old second world, are effectively controlled by the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But why were the limits of the strategies
reached, apparently quite quickly, enabling capital to recompose itself
at a higher level of global integration and smash the forms and spaces of
proletarian power?
Each of the strategies and each of the deals shared similar flaws, though
they manifested in different particulars. We choose to mention hierarchy
within the class, racism, sexism/patriarchy, nationalism, and work. Each
of these was a division in the class imperfectly overcome and thus susceptible
to capitalist attack in which the division would be the basis of a reshaped,
more powerful division organized for capital's benefit.
(A) Hierarchy in the class, by which we mean divisions of wages,
of security of employment, of status. Thus, for example, within the US one
could talk of secure, high-waged workers, unionized or "white collar,"
who substantially failed to spread those gains across the class. In part,
this failure ensures that those excluded from the gains have had little
interest in supporting the efforts by those who have them to keep them;
and those who had the relatively better deal have failed to support sufficiently
the efforts of the more precarious, lower paid workers to maintain what
little they had gained (e.g., more secure workers' failure to support a
high "welfare wage" in the US). Across nations, it takes the form
of support for imperialism. In the socialist bloc, there was a privileging
of some class sectors over others, as has also been the case in "third
world" nations.
(B) Racism. Race is a hierarchy in the class (James, 1975a). As a
genetic category within humans, it is essentially meaningless (Discover,
1994). In the US, African Americans, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, and indigenous
American Indians have been systematically excluded from access to the high-wage
deals, been treated in a caste-like fashion within a wage and class system.
Nothing has been or continues to be a more powerful form of division in
the US working class than racism. On a world scale, it is the racism of
imperial conquest, and following that racism toward immigrants from the
historically subordinated areas, a racism now virulently visible across
"Fortress Europe" as well as the US. Anti-racism did emerge as
parts of strategies of some sectors of higher waged workers, particularly
after World War II; but the degree of success of anti-racism within various
working classes has been limited, and it rapidly succumbed when capital
attacked the standards of living of the entire working class (Midnight Notes
Collective, 1981). Thus in the US there have been the often-successful attacks
on affirmative action. In the "third world," racism also contributes
to dividing the working class, as in racism against the indigenous in Latin
America.
(C) Patriarchy and sexism. The sexual division of labor has been
available for capitalist re-creation and manipulation from capitalism's
birth. As Wages for Housework made clear, the unwaged status of women's
work has been the material basis for unwaged work elsewhere in the system
and for lower wages paid to women, and it provides the floor for the wages
system -- all work, no pay (Dalla Costa and James, 1975). (Indeed, most
of the world has never worked in a formal waged relationship; Mies and Shiva,
1993.) The socialist solution of socializing housework (day care, restaurants,
etc.) and paying women to work outside the home, which developed in the
first and second world deals to varying degrees, blunted the demands for
more pay for less work. Women still did most of the still extensive unpaid
housework, while often doing equivalent work as men but for lower wages
outside the home. In the third world deals, women clearly did and do the
majority of the work, producing and reproducing people and products for
no or little wage (including where the "wage" takes the form of
subsistence farming, marketing and peddling). By and large, the strategies
of the working class prior to the post-1960's crises did not address the
exploitation of women rooted in lack of social payment for their work, thus
ensuring the continued subordination of women and perpetuating a fundamental
division within the class.
(D) Nationalism. Classes have been defined substantially on a national
basis, e.g. "the US working class." We have done so thus far in
this discussion, though we also refer to classes that were organized into
one or another of the deals, e.g., "third world" working class.
While there has been obvious reason to use the nation-state as a basis for
class struggles (and thus for speaking of nation-based classes), doing so
has immediately re-posed the division of the classes along national lines.
In Africa, for example, pan-African unity sank beneath the needs of emerging
ruling (usually comprador) classes in a variety of nations cobbled out of
the colonial boundaries.
Another example is the history of the self-labeled Communist states. For
example, subordinating the branches of the Comintern and Cominform to the
needs of building socialism in one country -- the USSR, the supposed alternative
to capitalism that was to prove the superiority of socialism -- was central
in the history of that body (Claudin, 1975). With too-rare exception, internationalism
has been subordinate to nationalism.
In socialism, "nation-building" became a form of capitalist accumulation
under the direction of a state "owned" by a single party. Territory
was extracted from the existing world capitalist system, but an alternate
capitalism emerged, only finally to be re-subsumed into one global capitalism
again. Thus, rather than competing social systems, the two blocs were competing
forms of capitalist development in which the existence of the other block
was fundamental to organizing control over each's "own" working
class, and in each of which the working class was capable of organizing
particular deals. As a strategy for socialism defined as a working-class-led
transition out of capitalism, nation-building failed. All told, the various
forms of national struggles have failed to facilitate the development of
planetary working class unity.
Discussion of the nation-state in light of the failures of nationalism as
socialism necessarily raises two fundamental issues. One is imperialism
(in response to which national struggles can play a positive role) and the
consequences of centuries of development and underdevelopment as two necessary
and complementary aspects of world capitalism (c.f., Rodney, 1974). How
can the distorted fruits of capitalism be used to help a non-capitalist
overcoming of the legacy of planned underdevelopment and the legacy of capitalist
development?
The second, related question is that of the workers' state: can such
a thing exist? If the state is merely an armed body used to ensure one class
retains power over others, as Lenin argued in State and Revolution,
then it is easy to say yes, there can be and for a time even must be a workers'
state. But if the state necessarily means a body separate from and above
society (c.f., Clastres, 1994), then "workers' state" becomes
a self-contradictory term. At a minimum, another term must be used -- and
more importantly, working class struggle must aim toward something other
than seizing or creating a state apparatus. Thus, if nationalism presumes
a state, then nationalism is necessarily not working class. It may not necessarily
be the case that "nation" must presume "state."(7) On all this, the
working class faces an unresolved problem bound up with not having solved
the question of the transition from capitalism to communism. The working
class must find a non-state form of social-economic-political organization,
and part of its conception must involve overcoming the legacy of underdevelopment.
(E) Class defensive organizations and work. Finally, there is the
relationship between working class strategies and the role of unions, parties
and states around the question of work. Essentially, while workers launched
a powerful struggle against work in the first world in the 1960s, the unions,
parties and states defended the regime of work. Around the world, similar
activities under highly similar social relations were merely renamed, from
exploitation to "contribution to socialism," or as the worker's
"contribution" to the expanding pie of wealth in which workers
would get their "fair slice" (and hence supposedly were not exploited),
or as "nation building."
Through considering the two sides of work -- as producing use values and
as producing values -- we can consider various aspects of the strategies.
For example, as use value, clearly humans produce and reproduce their existence.
The question could be, Does production for nation, socialism, the "greater
good," eliminate exploitation, the expropriation and accumulation of
surplus value? Rephrased, the questions include: Who controls the use of
that share of the product which is beyond what the workers take for personal
use (in capitalism, the wage)? Who decides, through what means, just how
much and what kind of use-values should be produced, as well as what should
be done with what is produced?
In all three deals work remained exploitation; all were forms of accumulation,
and thus variations on capitalism. It was the rejection of the deals that
posed a crisis for capitalism. Yet rarely did the formal representatives
of the working class, the various parties and unions, pose the escape from
work as anything other than a vague future promise. Ideologically, of course,
the left has generally glorified work as much as any Puritan (though, to
be fair, in part to assert the dignity of working people). Moreover, none
of the deals or the strategies that created those deals dealt adequately
with the unwaged labor of women, housework.
This history poses, not for the first time, the question of the role of
working class defensive organizations. Is it possible for the instruments
of arranging a deal with capital to ever play a useful role against capital,
to be both defensive and offensive, to make and undermine and transcend
the deals? In the US, the IWW certainly tried to do this, but did not succeed.
It remains probable that such organizations are needed, but the question
of how the working class can actually create these organizations is not
known. It is likely that any such organization will not be able to survive
in such a precarious and self-contradictory state for long: it is possible
when on the offensive, but if a new fundamental deal is organized, the organization
will at a minimum splinter over its two roles. -- mediating the deal and
opposing the deal.
A Cautionary Discussion of this Analysis
Before concluding, we mention that the discussion in this section
has presented perhaps the most problems to friends who have read the draft
of the whole article (see remarks from Harald Beyer-Arnesen, above). Hugo
Aboites raised some points we think should be considered, in addition to
those noted above:
"[The discussion of "Strategies and Deals"] poses the question of which should be the main direction of political work: the structure within the class itself or the relations of that class with the capitalist one (which at a level can be solved by saying - true - that any restructuring of the working class eliminating racism, etc., requires confronting the capitalist class, thus both struggles go together), but more profoundly - precisely - it focuses on obstacles rather in the objective and thus gives them a life of their own. This not only moves the thinking away from the main problem of strategy -- how to create widening zones of agreement within the class itself -- but also pre-determines for every situation that those precisely are the obstacles in every particular situation.
"If the purpose of the struggle is, bottom line, to establish and consolidate the hegemony of the working class in a planetary basis, we should start from how specific movements advance toward that goal and how they interact with a diversity of obstacles. If one starts from the obstacles, one is forced to analyze those ones in the concrete situation, kind of superimposing them onto the situation...
"More than fixed obstacles, and which removal may be determinant, I think that the focus should be set in the need and shape that such agreements can take and how to achieve them, much as it is done in the discussion of the Zapatistas [Part III]. To throw the questions of sexism, nationalism, hierarchy first and isolated from specific struggles (which may or may not see these as obstacles) poses, I think, not only the danger of creating the sense of no immediacy to the local concrete struggle (which objective is to gain a part of the disputed power territory of the ruling class), but also a different direction to the struggle. The Zapatistas objective may be, for example, to redefine the relations of an entire region with the national economy, political apparatus, and education and culture, in the terms of autonomy. Ten or twelve years of organizing and learning to take power tell them not only how they want to achieve but also how they have to change to achieve that; that is, how as a part of the class they have to restructure their relations. To do that, they proceed to rethink relations between man and woman, society and women, hierarchy, etc.
"I am not saying that the Strategies text opposes this view, I think there is not basic disagreement, I just think it is necessary to emphasize it. Basically what I am saying is that maybe a better starting point is the Zapatista movement. How in the Mexican situation and in the international scene the Zapatistas include radically new elements that facilitate the creation of local, regional, national and international agreements that consolidate new working class power."
We print this lengthy critique for two reasons. First,
it offers a caution to a too-rigid application of our own methodology. That
is, we should not simply lay over a particular struggle our own conceptions
(ideology) derived from our particular experiences and our political and
historical analyses; we will return to this point later in the piece.
Second, it raises a question about the relationship between "global"
understandings (e.g., our admittedly schematic attempt to extract lessons
from the struggles of the working class in the twentieth century) and particular
struggles. Partly there is a methodological question: Aboites argues for
starting from the particulars of the struggle and understanding the struggles
in their own context, a quite reasonable and necessary undertaking. However,
we think it is simultaneously necessary to also look from the "global"
perspective. For example, the particulars of patriarchy in a society can
in fundamental ways only be understood and struggled within those particulars.
However, we should also understand from working class history that failure
to deal with patriarchy undermines the working class movement (to say nothing
of what it does to the lives of women) -- that is, we should learn from
analyses of each others' struggles. That is, we conclude that patriarchy
within the working class perpetuates divisions capital can use, and this
is an understanding we should bring to our efforts to grasp particular revolutionary
efforts. And yet, to double back, our global understandings must also always
be further refined by dealing with the particulars.
We agree with Aboites that there is not a basic disagreement. We hope this
discussion of working class deals and strategies is both approached with
appropriate caution and that it spurs more thinking about what the working
class can learn from the past so as not to make similar mistakes and about
how best to share what the think we have learned. We are, of course, also
arguing for what we value and therefore what we want revolutionary movements
to aim for (e.g., eradication of patriarchy, racism, etc.). Thus, we do
try to draw lessons and apply them.
Conclusion to Analysis of the Crisis of the Deals
Working class strategies produced three basic deals in the post-WWII
period. Each contained a possibility of generating the refusal of work and
of capitalist development, and thus the possibility of non-capitalist society.
Unsatisfied with their deals, the working classes, often outside (autonomous
from) the official organs of union, party and state, attacked the three
deals. But the strategies used to establish the deals and the resulting
deals had included various forms of division and hierarchy within the class:
wage and occupational hierarchy, race, gender, and nation. In not understanding
and often opposing the refusal of work, the ostensible organs of working
class struggle revealed themselves as tools of capitalist organization of
the working class, thus stating another division within the class, its organizations
and institutions against its struggles. The extent of class unity against
capital was insufficient to overcome the various divisions, rendering the
class unable to remain unified in the face of capital's attacks.
In analyzing the history of class struggle, crisis and capitalist offensive
since the 1960s, only parts of which we addressed above, we conclude that
to be successful, a struggle against capital and its regime of work and
accumulation requires at least the following:
1) a high degree of overcoming of class hierarchy, of divisions of wages, gender, race and nation: where insufficient, these are all moments of capitalist decomposition of proletarian unity;
2) a sense of unity of a world proletariat: that such a proletariat does exist (contra post-ism) and that "we" are all in it together: "If we do not hang together, we assuredly will all hang separately";
3) a means of subsistence: capital's control over production means it can starve the working class (note that "encircling the cities" and "alternative production" both propose solutions to this problem);
4) a means of defense, whether from armies or death penalties or prisons: if they can kill workers with impunity, the working class cannot sustain its gains; we did not above address the white terror, the military, police and death squad attacks on working class movements that were an essential element of capital's success against the planetary movements of the "sixties" (c.f., Midnight Notes Collective, 1985, for an analysis of this issue in the US);
5) a sense
of an alternative possibility: the idea that another world can exist and
can be created ("commons-ism" or "communism"), though
that world does not presume uniformity, indeed will support great diversity.
There are no doubt more. A new proletarian strategy must take these needs
into account, must learn from the limitations of the previous strategies,
must see how capital is reconstructing the proletariat at this moment, and
must continually and rapidly learn from its own multifold struggles, all
in order to launch anti-capitalist struggles that simultaneously build and
point toward communism. In new and interesting ways, the Zapatistas appear
to be doing so, and so it is to their struggle we now turn our attention.
III. Reflections on the Zapatistas' Strategy||Back to Home Page