I took this rather dense paragraph from http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/CGPE/conference/papers/radice.pdf GLOBALIZATION, STATE FAILURE AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT: IMPERIALISM? by Hugo Radice.
It is an observation which is important at it touches on some critical aspects - especially important is his last sentence, which I would apply much more widely then he does and reflect it back on conditions in the North where the position of unions as they are now composed also fall into the same contradictions despite the logic of concentration he uses. "Yet if socialism can no longer take advantage of the immediately ‘mass’ character of capitalist production and consumption, the consequence is that the appreciation of common interests takes on a more complex, subtle, but more politically educational character. Within the single giant factory, the common interest of workers is based upon the apparently ‘economic’ employment relation. This has a self-evident ‘class’ character, based on both the exchange of labour-power for wages, and the direct subordination of labour in the workplace. Yet the political foundations of that class relation are rendered opaque by the boundaries of the invidual workplaces, and the pressures of competition between them: hence the long struggle for the formation of national unions, aiming to prevent the pitting of workers against each other; but hence too the honey traps of sectoral corporatism, and the reinvention of capitalist domination through the exigencies of international competition. Now i! n today’s transnationalised, disintegrated and outsourced ‘network capitalism’ -even making due allowance for the vacuous hyping of these trends by people who ought to know better - capitalists have learnt not to provide a ready ‘material base’ for collective opposition. But they find that it reemerges around issues, and in forms and in places, where it is not so easily contained. If traditional labour movements, once recognised as ‘social partners’, could be sedated and their leaderships tamed by mixtures of paternalism and material advance, our rulers now find it more difficult to head off ‘social movements’ that reject hierarchy and demand not ‘more’ but ‘different’. In addition, if low-skill mass assembly work is transferred increasingly to the imperial peripheries, we get the growth of classic labour movements, but without the sophisticated liberal-democratic ‘competition state’ that can guide their transformation into the kind of tame business unions that increasingly ! govern Northern organized labour." --- Message Received --- From: Michael Pugliese <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: pen-l <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 08:04:17 -0800 Subject: [PEN-L:21528] GLOBALIZATION, STATE FAILURE AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT: IMPERIALISM? ... GLOBALIZATION, STATE FAILURE AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT: IMPERIALISM? ... ... both Marxist (Bukharin, Hilferding, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg ... links between that current conjuncture and broader ... struggles of and against Stalinism, though the ... http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/CGPE/conference/papers/radice.pdf
