[Marxism] Who will make our shirts when China is rich?

[Pat Costello <pt_costello@xxxxxxxxx>]

Le Monde diplomatique 
September 2007

THE CLASS STRUGGLE WILL NO LONGER BE OFFSHORED

Who will make our shirts when China is rich?
___________________________________________________________

The defeat of the French left in the presidential and
legislative elections was fair punishment for its lack
of vision. Social democracy is still based on the
exploitation of the third world, with which Europe
must now create a new relationship. 

by Jean Bricmont
___________________________________________________________

This year's catastrophic election results in France
destroyed any illusions created by the victory of the
no campaign during 2005's referendum on the proposed
European Union constitution. The origins of the
current crisis of the French left can be traced back
to its failure to live up to the commitments it made
during the 1981 election. Within two years of victory,
the new socialist government abandoned its programme
and, with no social or economic policies to pursue,
resorted to an unenthusiastic neo-liberalism. Its
discourse became purely moralistic, proposing
antiracist, feminist and antifascist values in an
attempt to distinguish itself from the right.

At a practical level, the left's main initiative was
European construction, with the principal effect of
ruling out any alternative to neo-liberalism. By
encouraging this process in the name of values -
especially anti-nationalism - the Socialists and
Greens created an institutional mechanism designed to
protect them from their own audacity, and that of
their rank and file. In a bid to insulate the
political process from the influence of the people,
they handed over responsibility for as many decisions
as possible to an unelected bureaucracy open to the
influence of private lobby groups. Elections would
continue, but they would be of little importance. And
no serious political alternative would be proposed: no
New Deal, no structural reform, no common leftwing
programme, no Italian road to socialism. 

Unsurprisingly, the beneficiary was the hard right,
whose very different values - discipline, law and
order, the nation - appeal far more powerfully to
minorities. Programmes based on values are designed to
allow those who support them to sleep with a clear
conscience and forget questions about the real balance
of power in the world. (Most people find it easier to
describe themselves as good citizens than as good
antiracists.) The right's economic policies are
perfectly consistent with the European structures
established by the left and the Greens. On the issues
of Europe and values, the right has been victorious on
battlefields mostly chosen by the left yet on which
the left was bound to lose.

To succeed, political movements must believe what they
say. The victors on the right have not been the
Keynesian, conservative wets (as Margaret Thatcher
called them), but the hardliners. Until the left can
come up with something better than moderately
rightwing policies, it has no chance of winning. To
change that, it must go back to the roots of the
conflict between left and right. It must see beyond
values, like feminism or antiracism, which the modern
right is quite happy to adopt. It must address the
fundamental question: who controls the economy?

A belief in socialism

When 18th century liberal thinkers envisaged a society
of small independent producers, the idea of a free
market and hostility to the power of the feudal state
and the church made sense. But the emergence of big
business led to the increased socialisation of
production and raised questions about the private
ownership of the means of that production. The
fundamental principle of socialism is that once the
process of production has been effectively socialised,
its control must also be socialised, if we are to
realise the hopes for freedom expressed by classic
liberalism. 

Once the means of production, and the means of
information that emerged during the 20th century, are
in private hands, specific individuals possess vast,
almost feudal power over the rest of the population.
Today the real successors of classic liberals are the
proponents of socialism; while those who currently
describe themselves as liberals are the supporters of
a particular form of tyranny, that of the employers -
and, often, of a violent form of state control through
US military domination of the rest of the planet. 

Socialism, as I describe it here, is a natural
response to the problems associated with the
development of capitalism. The fact that it is rarely
discussed any more is evidence of the effectiveness of
the targeted systems of indoctrination known in our
societies as education and information. The question
of socialism has nothing to do with the crisis of
capitalism, the destruction (real or imagined) of
nature, or the alleged bourgeoisification of the
working class. Because control over one's own
existence is a fundamental human aspiration, the
question will not go away as living standards rise,
and it does not require a catastrophe to bring it to
the forefront. The more our survival-related
biological needs are met, the more our strictly human
needs for autonomy and freedom demand to be satisfied.

It is a mistake to believe that nobody cares about
socialism any more. One leftist position that retains
its popularity is the defence of public services and
workers' rights, now the main areas of struggle
against the power of capital. The whole point of
European construction is to preserve the appearance of
democracy while dismantling the social Eden - social
security, mass education and public health care -
which is an embryonic form of socialism that remains
popular.

Sadly, the near disappearance of a socialist
perspective from political discourse affects many
aspects of everyday struggle: there is a huge
difference between protesting against abuses committed
by a power whose legitimacy one acknowledges, and
fighting for short term objectives against employers'
power that one regards as fundamentally illegitimate.
This is exactly the difference in the past between
reforming and abolishing slavery, between enlightened
monarchy and republicanism, or between colonies run by
native collaborators and national independence.

    A major transformation

Liberal thinkers deride Marx because the anticipated
transition to socialism in developed capitalist
countries failed to happen. One response should be
that the system under which we live is not just
capitalist, but imperialist as well. Europe owes its
development to the existence of a vast hinterland.
Imagine that Europe was the only landmass on the
planet and that all the other continents had never
risen from the oceans. There would have been no slave
trade, no South American gold, no emigration to North
America. What sort of societies would we have built
without a constant supply of raw materials, cheap
immigrant labour, imports from low-income economies,
and a supply of educated people from the developing
world to rescue our collapsing education systems? We
would have had to save drastically on energy, the
balance of power between workers and employers would
be radically different, and the leisure society would
not exist. 

Socialism failed in the 20th century largely because
the countries where capitalism generated a degree of
cultural and economic development, where the elements
of democracy existed and where, consequently, it was
possible and necessary to go beyond capitalism, were
also the dominant countries in the imperial system.
Imperialism has two consequences. Economically it
allows dominant nations to delocalise problems to the
periphery. Strategically it has a divide and rule
effect: western workers have always enjoyed better
living conditions than their equivalents in the
developing world and acquire a feeling of superiority
that helps stabilise the system.

This is why decolonisation was the most significant
transformation of the 20th century. It freed hundreds
of millions of people in Asia and Africa from a racist
form of domination. Its effects will continue into
this century and bring a definitive end to the
historical period that began with the discovery of
America. Europeans will have to adjust to losing the
benefits associated with our privileged position in
the imperial system. At present the Chinese have to
sell us millions of shirts to buy an Airbus; but once
they can build their own Airbuses, who will make our
shirts?

There is a potential for conflict between the main
beneficiaries of globalisation - those whose control
of capital enables them to exploit the workforce in
Asia - and the huge majority of the population in the
West who have no such luck. Because it lives in the
developed world, that population finds itself forced
to sell its labour power at a price that is no longer
competitive in the global marketplace. This implies
more exclusion and a crisis for the welfare state; but
it could also mean a resumption, in a new form, of the
class struggle.

Adapting to decline

The developing world is becoming more autonomous in
other respects. The US is bogged down in Iraq, unable
to extract itself from an unwinnable war unless it
renounces its imperial ambitions. Iran's nuclear
programme confronts the West with the choice of
backing down or embarking on a catastrophic war. At a
more symbolic but significant level, Israel suffered a
second military defeat at the hands of Hizbullah in
2006. The political and military victories of Hamas
are a sign of the failure of the policy of
collaboration with Israel adopted by some members of
the Palestinian elite after the Oslo accords. All
these unexpected events have provoked a serious crisis
of confidence among world leaders.

The main problem facing Europe is to adapt to our
decline: not an imaginary decline in relation to the
US, but a real decline compared with the developing
world. The ruling class of the US is trying to
maintain its hegemony by force; its failure can only
intensify the Empire's crisis, while the European
right still fantasises that we can solve our problems
by imitating the US. The radical left generally
ignores the question of decline; behind its rhetoric,
it continues to defend social-democratic, Keynesian
policies that globalisation has severely undermined.

The absolute priority is to prevent western
populations from falling for US-Israeli fantasies of
the war on terror and Islamo-fascism (to which a
dangerously large part of the French left have already
succumbed). This is symptomatic of the western left's
long tradition of incomprehension of peripheral
conflicts.

Historically, change has often come from the
periphery. The October 1917 revolution and the Soviet
Union's role in the victory over the Axis powers had
an enormous impact upon decolonisation and upon the
possibility of creating a social-democratic Eden in
Europe. The victory of the colonised nations led to a
number of progressive changes in Europe during the
1960s. If we make the effort to understand and take
account of it, the current revolts in Latin America
and the Middle East may force radical changes upon the
dominant powers. Which may mean a less depressing
future for the rest of us.

Jean Bricmont is professor of theoretical physics at
the University of Louvain (Belgium), author of
Humanitarian Imperialism (New York University Press,
2007) and co-editor, with Julie Franck, of Chomsky
(Herne, Paris, 2007)

Translated by Donald Hounam

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED C 1997-2007 Le Monde diplomatique



       
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