Report of Madrid Mesa 1a, Work and the Means of
Production, and 1b, Creating Conditions for a Life with Dignity.
2nd Encounter for Humanity & against
Neoliberalism, Spain 1997
I. Introduction
We came together to help make a world of dignity and justice and
well-being for all humanity. This should include the dignified,
democratic participation of us all, women and men, in producing the
material things we need, redistributing the wealth, raising our
children, and taking care of each other. But neoliberal capitalism
offers us misery and exploitation so that to work is to create the
chains of poverty and subservience for most of us and wealth for a
few.
The system of capitalist work is a system of divisions and
hierarchies: isolated individuals competing with each other through
competing national economies, hierarchies between women and men,
between north and south and within them, by race and national origin,
by wage and kind of work. So our struggles against work must also
overcome these divisions if they are to be successful.
Changes in the nature of work under neoliberalism are inherently
contradictory. On one hand, employment is more necessary than ever in
order to survive. But employment is less and less available and
rewarding. This creates the conditions for increasing conflict
against capitalist waged work.
So we meet in this mesa to share our understanding of work under
capitalism and to develop the ideas, strategies, demands and networks
of communication and struggle that will enslave us to go beyond
capitalism and create a diverse and just world, to dare to invent our
future.
II. Work
1. Changing North/South/East Relations
Relations between north and south and within both north and south
are changing, in work and production, and in all social spheres.
Today, there are similarities and differences in the forms of
exploitation between north and south. The similarities are
increasing, but there remain old forms of imperialism which are now
being renewed by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism stimulates both
development and underdevelopment in both north and south, so that we
find the north in the south and the south in the north. Additionally,
the workers in the east are now being prepared for various forms of
exploitation by northern corporations. Workers in the north do not
fundamentally benefit from imperialism -- it is the ruling class and
the transnational corporations, and particularly speculative
financial capital, that benefit -- but there is a lot of complexity
and inequality in relations between the working class in the north
and the working class in the south. Workers in every part of the
world lose under neoliberalism, but the workers in the south lose
more.
The structures, organization and relations of work in both north
and south are changing. One reason is migration, especially from
south to north and from the land to the cities as people are forced
off the land, and neoliberal policies of austerity and opening of
markets create massive poverty. Capitalist investment meanwhile moves
some kinds of jobs from north to south in search of cheaper labor and
no environmental or social regulations.
Those who hold economic and political power have central
organizations that organize structural adjustment, force the payment
of external debts, impose so-called free trade and privatization, and
plan the reorganization of work and investment. These include the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), Work Bank, World Trade
Organization ( WTO ), Asian Pacific Economic Council ( APEC ),
MERCOSUR , and the NAFTA and
Maastricht treaties. Social democratic institutions and the
so-called socialist parties of Africa, Europe, the Americas, Asia and
Oceania, and many trade union bureaucracies have all accepted
neoliberalism and collaborate with global agencies, transnational
corporations and governments to impose the neoliberal agenda. We
oppose all these groups and institutions and their plans for our
exploitation and death.
2. Many Faces of Work
Capitalists try to reduce all of human life to work and
consumption in the market. Capitalist work is thus exploitation, so
that the demand for capitalist work is the demand to be exploited.
Many ways are used to force us into this exploitation. However, to
work as humans is to produce and reproduce our conditions of life and
means to relate with each other. The human way to work is not of
competing atomistic individuals, but of social individuals working in
cooperative, dignified, and democratic arrangements. The question of
human work therefore opens the political question of direct democracy
from below to determine the production and reproduction of our lives.
However, we must all live, and to live today it often requires that
we participate in one of the many forms of capitalist work.
Today, neoliberal capital uses every kind of work in its efforts
to suck profit out of the lives of people. Much of the work in the
world, perhaps that of half the people of the world, is done in ways
that are not directly or immediately part of the market. This
comprises mostly forms of agricultrual work and life, but also
includes the many areas of the informal economy. The rule of money
finds ways to exploit this work, make profit from it, and to bring it
under market control.
At this most recent phase of world capitalist development, in both
north and south slavery increases, as well as many forms of work that
are semi-slavery, such as debt bondage, child labor, forced
prostitution, prison labor and workfare . In free trade zones and the
maquiladora factories, workers labor in near-slavery conditions.
Neoliberalism depends on increased exploitation of the unwaged and
more unpaid work from everyone. Unpaid work includes all the work
traditionally done by women in the home to raise children, make men
ready for work outside the home, nurse the sick, care for the
elderly, and reproduce the entire domestic sphere. It includes unpaid
forced overtime, time spent looking for work, and labor obligations
for landlords and local political bosses. Neoliberalism also blurs
the distinction between waged work and semi- slavery by imposing
flex-time, on-call labor, self-employment, working at home -- all
ways in which the whole life is, like in slavery, reduced to work for
capital.
Without a fundamental redistribution of work time to make it
equal, there will also be more service labor in which the low-waged
workers work for the higher paid workers. Today we see women
migrating from the south to work in the homes of the wealthy in the
north as they have done for generations in the south, while often the
men are gardeners and take care of the property of the wealthy.
The neoliberal offensive removes labor protection laws relating to
limits on hours of work, security of labor contracts, and the minimum
wage. It imposes workfare in which capitalist work is made a
requirement for receiving state unemployment and welfare benefits.
New, superexploited and insecure forms of work are imposed especially
on women and increase the exploitation of the family. These policies
are imposed in both north and south, and they make conditions in the
north more similar to those in the south.
There are also many socially destructive areas of work including
the military and the police, prisons, social welfare bureaucracies,
and the capitalist mass media apparatus. These forms of work destroy
the dignity of those who do that work while even more destroying the
dignity and often the very lives of those against whom they work.
There are also many forms of socially useless work, such as in
banking, insurance, trading and keeping track of who owns what piece
of capital, as well as forms of work that only exist because of the
overwork others of us are forced to do: such as fast food
restaurants. The workers in these sectors must be helped to find
other forms of employment.
We also need to carefully consider technology, to determine what
technology is humanly useful and what is humanly destructive, what
makes less work and what makes more work, what is environmentally
sound and what is not. Neoliberalism uses technology not as a tool to
liberate humanity from tedious and unnecessary work, but as weapon in
the competitive battle, as a means to control and impose work. So we
must also consider the forms of technology, modifying technology as
necessary to use for human ends.
Finally, capitalist work and the search for jobs creates
competition among us. Neoliberal strategies try to reduce us to
isolated individuals and destroy our communities and solidarity in
order to make us unable to resist capitalist work. Having to live
under such conditions is a form of emotional and social work as we
try to recover from these abuses. More, capitalist work involves the
destruction of the environment and having to live with the
consequences.
In response to slavery, semi-slavery, wage slavery and all forms
of exploitation through work for capitalism, we assert the need for
democratic, participatory control of production so that we all can
live a life of dignity, including life at work, while eliminating
useless and destructive work.
3. Consumption
Capitalist work and capitalist consumption are closely related,
but they are mediated by the market, so that consumption requires
money. Only those with money are free to consume in the free market.
Here there is great inequality in both north and south and between
north and south.
A society geared towards the production for profit creates
superfluous consumption and lives devoted to consumption. Some forms
of consumption are not ecologically sustainable or socially positive,
and these must be reduced or eliminated. Neoliberalism also
manipulates production to create new needs and new markets, and it
imposes such forms of production as monocrop agriculture for export
while destroying production of food for subsistence. There is also
the use of enormous areas of land to produce meat, which is not
globally sustainable. Meanwhile, billions of humans live of the edge
of starvation or live with minimal subsistence. Their need must be
met, but in ways that are dignified, and socially and ecologically
sustainable.
These problems ultimately cannot be solved within the capitalist
market. We must have participatory democratic control over production
in order to solve questions of consumption. To solve these problems,
we must be able to reorganize consumption on a more collective and
ecologically sustainable basis so that we do not have to consider
consumption in terms of more or less, but in terms of the quality it
brings to our lives. Thus the political and ethical aspects of
consumption could be taken into account, such as the real costs of
our consumption to producers, other consumer, and the environment.
III. Struggles and Alternatives: Reducing Work Time and Creating
Non-Capitalist Work
Struggles to reduce capitalist work time, to control land and the
means of production, and to build alternative ways to produce and
reproduce our life can unite diverse people against the inhuman
vampire called neoliberal capital. We recognize that to survive we
engage in many particular struggles over immediate issues, but when
linked these struggles can open the door to wider and deeper
struggles.
We need therefore to develop principles with which we can analyze
our struggles to see if they put us in a better position to overcome
the inhuman way of life we are forced into, whether they reduce
hierarchies and create wider spaces of shared democratic
participants. Some of these principles include: to reduce the risk of
being co-opted by capital; to ensure that our struggles and demands
correspond to many sectors, needs and aspirations; and to ensure they
embody a principle of human liberation. We must therefore be sure
that reductions in work in one place are not at the expense of work
in another. We can also develop principles that distinguish between
projects imposed from the top or outside by capitalism, and those
from the bottom and inside, from the people.
The struggle to reduce capitalist work allows more time to
struggle against capital and more time to develop alternative was to
produce, live and redistribute domestic chores. We simultaneously
demand higher wages and equalization of wages, between men and women,
citizens and migrants, north and south, different kinds of workers,
and races. The struggle to reduce work time for capital is a struggle
not only of the waged workers, but also of the unwaged workers, the
millions of farmers and peasants, students, unemployed, elderly,
housewives and indigenous of the world. For example, a well in a
village could mean the reduction of arduous work by men and women.
When we reduce work time, we must ensure the equal distribution of
the work that we decide needs to be done. While we reduce work time,
me must insist on conditions that ensure dignity and health for the
work that remains to be done.
A guaranteed income assuring life with dignity for all residents
of nation is also right. We say residents because this right belongs
to migrants as well as citizens: we all have rights to inherit the
wealth and knowledge that are products of centuries of collective
human activity. This right is independent of requirement to work for
capital. Income without work can also be gained through various
struggles such as occupying houses or land, reappropriations , and
refusing to pay for services.
In the south, and in some places of the north, rights to land,
water, and other means of agricultural production are essential to
life with dignity and the creation of just societies. These rights
must not be limited by requirements to produce for the capitalist
market.
Creating alternative spaces for production and social life is good
in itself because these spaces enable relations that are outside of
and beyond the market. They also can put limits to capitalist
expansion and support creation of spaces in which struggles can grow
and be protected. We can learn through this how to create many
visions of ways to organize our lives and production. The
satisfaction of needs outside of direct control of the capitalist
market enables us to fight capital on a terrain that is more
favorable to us. These forms of alternatives can develop out of
traditional forms of work, but some traditional forms involve
exploitation and also must be abolished. Many forms of third sector
work (supposedly depending neither on the market nor the state) are
not true alternatives to capitalist work, but instead are a new form
of lower-waged capitalist work.
All these struggles -- to reduce work time, guarantee income, gain
control of means of production, and developing alternatives -- can be
raised in both south and north, but in different ways that respond to
the different particularities. These struggles can be contradictory,
so we need to pay careful attention to how they can support and
strengthen each other and not be used against each other. Our
struggles are much stronger when they are combined so that each
particular demand is not isolated or coopted. We need to create a
process of building on and enriching our struggles that includes
careful study and honest discussion. It is also important in this
process of work to transform the relations between women and men in
both personal and political lives. This means that men, not only
women, assume the responsibility of this struggle.
To make successful struggles and to win a new world, we need many
forms of organization. We insist on the right of all people to
organize and defend themselves from attack by states, corporations,
paramilitary and fascist groups.
IV. Strategies and Actions
To win our demands along the way toward a new world that contains
many worlds, we must develop strategies and analyze them in light of
our goals and principles. We must also understand the institutions
and process of neoliberalism in their military, financial, political,
ideological and cultural forms, as well as neoliberal forms of
production and consumption. We understand that the neoliberal
capitalist system is only one of many expressions of exploitative
power that exist, some of which pre-date capitalism, including
patriarchy, racism, and caste distinctions. We are committed to fight
against exploitative power and oppression in all their multiple forms
and guises.
We have agreed to create networks as a fundamental form of
organization, rather than parties or other forms of organization. We
see these networks as horizontal and participatory, as ways of living
in part the future we are struggling to make, though we recognize
that the construction of the networks as such will not solve the
problems of power and democracy in the ways we organize ourselves.
But we have many questions about the best ways to proceed: --how can
we build upon existing networks? --should we set up our own network
and undertake struggles specific to our own network so that people
will take the Encuentro even more seriously? --how should we begin
networks - locally, regionally, nationally, globally, or by subject
or some combination? --how can we include struggles not represented
by participants in the network? --how can we create new ways to link
struggles and networks and support each other? --how can we best use
a mix of electronics and print media to reach people? --are there
limits to networks as a form of struggle, and if so, what more do we
need to create?
Actions coordinated across national boundaries by a network for
practical struggle can take many forms including: --civil
disobedience --boycotts of specific transnational corporations,
against their labor practices, their attacks on indigenous peoples
and their ecologically destructive actions --campaigns against
payment of taxes for destructive ends, such as the military
--political and solidarity strikes --mass public actions against
austerity, structural adjustment and the institutions which impose
them, and all neoliberal practices; and --self-defense by any means
necessary.
Using these methods and more, we can take actions against the
institutions and practices that attack us. Mesa 1A and 1B recognize
that there are many actions worthy of support, but we here explicitly
state our general support for the following: --support for the
Declaration of Alcobenda
--counter-summit to protest the WTO meeting in Geneva in May 1998
--actions against Maastricht , NAFTA , and other continental of
subcontinental strategies of strangulation on humanity --actions
against the arms trade; and --campaigns against external debt.
V. Conclusion
We come together to help make a world of dignity and humanity. The
richness of our discussions, the warmth of our exchanges, and the
humanity of our experiences and struggles have demonstrated to us
that we are dignified subjects. But this dignity is taken away from
us when the capitalist work machine uses us for its purposes. We have
outlined the general elements that could give voice to a strong
collective NO! to this inhuman way of life. But we also know that
there are many YESES! , many different but compatible visions of ways
to exercise power on our lives as dignified human beings. The
creation for the flowering of these YESES!
On these foundations we must now develop, discuss and debate
strategies that we can use in our different circumstances to create a
world of justice, direct democracy from below, and dignity. We expect
that the next Encuentro will focus on the question of strategies and
build on the work we do between now and then.
One NO! many YESES!
31 August 1997, Madrid, Spanish State, Third Planet from Sol.
P.S. Finally, we want to thank the companeras and compeneros who
have organized this
Encuetro for the enormous work they have done. This silent effort
has made it possible for us to get together and create, within the
brutal capitalist world that surrounds us, what one member of our
group call this precious communist bubble.
[Editor's note: Mesas 1a and b in Madrid involved 80-100
people from probably 15-20 nations (I do not have a count), mostly
people from Europe.]
{Second editor's note: I hope persons interested in the
work of this mesa will continue to discuss the issues raised and more
importantly develop strategy that will help us reach the goals we
have outlined in this report. I will circulate by the start of Sept.
a brief proposal for this. If you see this report and want to see the
brief proposal but do not receive it by the start of Sept., please
contact me by email at <montyneill@aol.com> and I will forward
it to you. If you see it and do not have email, write to me at Monty
Neill, Box 204, Boston, MA 02130 USA.]