Re: Race to the Bottom?

This is all a little too easily said.  First I disagree with the 'de-ruralization'
of the world thesis, which is attributable to Hobsbawm (1986/1994) and Wallerstein.
 It is an exaggeration, which does not take into account the millions of
rural livelihoods in different spaces of South Asia, China, and Southeast
Asia.  To talk about a trend - which is what Hobsbawm does - is one thing:
to arrive at political conclusions out of it - another agrarfrage
- is another, though it is difficult to resist the politics once the trend
itself is accepted as correct.  So, let me begin by strongly disagreeing
with the conclusion that for the first time in its history capitalism has
fully commodified the globe.  To agree with that is to discount the numerous
movements - all land-based - that are contesting precisely such a trend.
 In the process they are also providing the substance for any semblance of
a social  movement in the North. Today it is Chiapistas and their model of
resistance, of cosmopolitan localism,  that constitutes the rallying cry
for Northern left dynamics. And they are contesting the progressive incorporation
of "non-capitalist" environments, i.e., they are contesting imperialism (Luxemburg).
 And increasingly they are not the only ones.  Tomorrow's decisive class
struggles will all take place in the South.  It is from there that the Northern
Left needs to get its most useful lessons.    Regarding the  call for 'a
more superior strategy' - was this not precisely the call of the International?
 And was it not stultified by the parochialisms of the Northern industrial
working classes - with all their patriarchialism and sexism, their racism,
their incorrigible nativism?  It is these contradictions that lie at the
heart of the Northern (and also Southern) worker's movement today as well
as yesterday.  And it is only through expressions of solidarity with the
remants of the peasantry in the South as well as the industrial workers worldwide
that the prospects for a different world labor outcome will be forthcoming.
 There should in short be more solidarity with the working classes in China,
which is the site today of frenzied industrialization.  There should be solidarity
with its peasantry as well.  The whole agrarian question needs to be re-thought,
re-conceptualized, instead of assumed that the solutions have already been
generated by the trends towards global de-ruralization. Also not to be forgotten
is that every bout of depeasantization is accompanied by multifarious forms
of re-peasantization.  Ganesh.

Khaldoun Samman wrote:
> Steve writes,
>
> <<Free trade pacts pit workers against one another,
> but so do protectionist measures of the sort often
> advocated by the more powerful American unions or, for
>
> that matter, George Bush, who has not yet negotiated a
> free trade pact of any importance, but has signed
> bills protecting the American steel industry and
> subsidizing US agriculture.>>
>
> I tend to agree here with Steve, but maybe adding one
> additional argument.  While many on the American left
> are unable to imagine a world-level movement that has
> at its core the interest of the world's workers, those
> who benefit from protectionist policies are small in
> comparison to most American workers who are now
> experiencing retrenchment and a repressive American
> government.  This has to do with the fact that for the
> first time in the history of the Modern World-System,
> capital has commodified/ proletarianized/ de-ruralized
> the entire globe, incorporating fully all hitherto
> other systems, leaving little traces of pre-modern
> historical systems.  Hence, as Wallerstein has argued,
> capitalists, in their search for externalizing the
> costs accrued by the struggles of these prior
> incorporated groups, seek out new zones to reduce the
> overall cost of production.  But in an age where new
> zones are hard to come by, you can expect capitalists
> to become extremely aggressive not only on the workers
> of the periphery but also in the core.  There is
> nowhere to go except towards a more pariah like attack
> on all workers world-wide.  
>
> Hence, those workers, like the Steel workers you
> mentioned, who are on the privileged side of the world
> labor divide, are acting out what they have
> traditionally done: pressuring their powerful state to
> protect them at the expense of other workers.  But I
> predict that this strategy will no longer effectively
> work simply because capitalists do not have an open
> frontier at their disposal and will probably push Bush
> and others to turn on these elite workers as well.  In
> such times, these workers will have to rethink this
> traditional strategy of theirs and work towards a
> world working class movement that has at its
> foundations the promotion of the wretched of the
> earth.  This is a far more superior strategy.  Rather
> than asking less privelege classes to take on the
> burden of this transitional age, it joins workers
> across the seas, forcing capital to relinquish its
> traditional weapons and tools of oppresion. 
>
> Khaldoun
>
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