Conference 2000 Abstracts
Global Capital and Global Struggles: Strategies, Alliances, Alternatives

This conference was held at the University of London Union (ULU), Malet St, London WC1 on July 1st to 2nd 2000

Abstracts listed in alphabetical order

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Trade unions' possible role in the resistance to neoliberal globalisation.

There is an increasing debate about the possibilities to counter neo-liberal globalisation, and labour is frequently considered to be one of the potential actors in this process. Nevertheless, little discussion has been conducted so far about how labour's potential role at the global level could be conceptualised. Without such a discussion, however, it is unlikely that labour's full potential can be realised in practice. This paper intends to help closing this gap.

The argument consists of two main parts. Firstly, it is shown that labour has to be regarded as a fundamental actor due to its place in the capitalist mode of production. Secondly, it is demonstrated that while the national institutional setting continues to be relevant for labour, this does not imply that it is unable to act at the transnational level.

In more detail, globalisation in International Relations/International Political Economy is either understood as increasing cross-border flows with states still as main actors or as a process that leads to structural change beyond the state system with the emergence of a whole range of new actors such as transnational corporations, international organisations, social movements, etc. In both accounts, labour's potential role is not properly acknowledged. It is either completely negelected since only states are regarded as significant actors in state-centric accounts or it is one interest group next to other social movements within liberal approaches. In contrast, I will argue that the way capitalist production is based on exploitation and class struggle between capital and labour is fundamental to the definition of globalisation and the identification of relevant actors and that this prioritises labour as such.

Secondly, the idea that globalisation leads to a harmonisation of state institutions and state policies has been criticised at an empirical and theoretical level. Instead, it is argued that there is a conflict between different models of capitalism, most importantly an anglo-saxon, neo-liberal model vis-‡-vis a continental European, regulated model of capitalism. While this highlights the continuing importance of different national institutions for the role of labour and domestic economic policy-making, labour as actor is confined to the national level. In this paper, it will be argued that while national institutions are crucial for shaping policy, labour still has to be understood at the transnational level in times of globalisation.

PDF of complete paper available here

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The Independent Metropolis ñ preserving the city state's devalorized services

David Byrne (University of Durham)

One of the most debilitating ideological weapons of the neo-liberal project is the insistence that in globalized postindustrial economies, financial networks represent the real production with residual manufacturing capital representing a subordinate sector in which value is generated. According to this version local services, both private and public, are dependent upon the real global economy for the resources which sustain them. I want to argue, contra the litany of ëglobal is everything', that in postindustrial capitalism particular places, localities, are in fact less open to the global system than was the case under industrial capitalism, that capital is trying desperately to penetrate from a global financial level to local service levels, and that this can and should be resisted. The argument is a combination of strategic overview and tactical recommendation. The elements in the strategic overview are:

1. Postindustrial metropolises are characterized by having a very high proportion of waged work located in services and much of this is in public services delivered on a devalorized basis.

2. This is exactly what we might expect given the modernization account of postindustrial economies.

3. Global capital needs to generate profits from human labour. The labour of workers in not for profit public services is a key potential field for exploitation ñ see Price. Resistance to this process is vital. The tactical recommendation is simple. Given the autonomous character of local services we can construct local alliances which can confidently articulate both resistance to the entry of exploitative capital and a programme of development of services for human needs towards the future.

The locality is a key level for such organization ñ think globally ñ act locally against exploitation and exclusion.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Reading the Struggles : Cycles and phases of the struggles against structural adjustment

George Caffentzis (University of South Maine)

This paper is based on a chronology of struggles and social movements that have developed internationally against structural adjustment programs (SAPs), and the recolonization policy of which they are the carriers, in the period between 1985 and the present. (This Chronology appears as an appendix to the paper). I claim that in these struggles we can glimpse at the lineaments of the new planetary proletariat (both waged and unwaged) that constituted the social force for the anti-capitalist movement of our time.

I will show how a new planetary movement has grown from urban price riots in the mid-1980s in Africa and Latin America to a world-wide movement capable of striking at the highest institutional levels in the heart of the metropolis as we have seen in Seattle in 1999. This process of struggle has had its different phases, internal cycles and class compositions that have not yet been carefully studied. This paper attempts to lay out the framework for such an study that will necessarily call on us to "reconfigure" recent history. Viewed in the light of this process, for example, the Gulf War of 1990/91 and the NATO-Yugoslav War can be seen as definitive turning points of an international class struggle against structural adjustment.

The paper will show how the path of this movement is marked by an increase in circulatory speed, in self-consciousness, in territory (from the city to the land and the commons of knowledge) and in demands. Is this a return to a "meta-narrative"? A recognition of a new subject of history? Or simply a recognition of what the officials of the World Bank and the IMF have had to continually respond to in the last 15 years, as I will show in a brief examination of the shifts in structural adjustment policies during this period.

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The Dangers of the'New Protectionism'

Matthew Caygill (Leeds Metropolitan University) & Pete Green (Kingsway College, London)

1. One major tradition in socialist and Third World discussions about the role of trade and protection in economic development can be traced back to the ideas of Freidrich List. We see this tradition as including Stalin's ësocialism in one country' and the different varieties of third world nationalism. In this tradition there is a focus on the state as the major agent of change and development ñ with ëprotectionist' approaches to trade as a vehicle for ëstate capitalism'. The alternative to this approach has been that of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg and Trotsky among others. This approach located capitalism's creation of a world market as a progressive achievement, one of the foundations for international socialism. This current rejected liberal ideologies of ëfree trade', but also opposed any identification of socialism with state directed projects for constructing ënational capitalism'.

2. Recently there has been discussion about a ënew protectionism' (cf. Colin Hines and Tim Lang). This approach harks back to Proudhon rather than List in its ideal of small-scale virtually self-sufficient communities, but it shares with the ëold protectionism' an hostility to the world market, or ëglobalisation' as such, rather than capitalism, and in practice still appeals to nation-states to implement its program. Most fundamentally the new protectionism locates the problem in the sphere of exchange relationships rather than in the class character of capitalist production and the contradictions between production and circulation which cannot as, Marx insisted, be overcome by any form of protectionism.

3. The wave of global protest around the Seattle conference of the WTO was inspirational. The vast majority of those involved identified not with the right-wing populism of the likes of Buchanan and Goldsmith, but with demands which were anti-capitalist and internationalist. There is however a pressing need for political clarity on the vital issues around the agenda of the WTO, IMF, World Bank, etc. and way forward. On issues such as China's entry into the WTO or international migration the ënew protectionism' is in danger of not opposing the agenda of the populist right clearly enough. On issues such as the environment they fail to recognise that global problems require global ñ not local ñ solutions, which cannot be provided within the existing framework of states.

4. There are specific demands on which we can unite with anyone who is critical of the neo-liberal globalising agenda: scrapping the debt of LDCs, opposition to IMF conditionality, rejection of the MAI and the TNC agenda on TRIPs, GATS, etc; and strict health and safety standards applied to GM foods and the like. However, there is a real danger that demands to reform the WTO, e.g. by including labour standards, are simply used by the US and EU as an excuse for protectionist measures which deprive workers in LDCs of their jobs. What is needed is instead is a new internationalism, focused on solidarity in struggle against the common enemy. What we must reject is the ëreactionary utopianism' of those who appeal to the local in opposition to the global.

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Market economies, society and the environment

Anne Chapman (Lancaster University)

One of the key ideas of Karl Polanyi, expounded in The Great Transformation, is that the creation of markets in labour and land, required by a self-regulating market economy, is destructive of society and nature. The reasons for the destructiveness of markets for labour and land are explored in terms of three elements of the conceptual framework imposed by such markets: instrumentalisation, fragmentation and decontextualisation. This analysis draws on the work of Eric Fromm and on the experience of Ladakh, a remote Himalayan region, now within the boundaries of India. Formerly a largely subsistence, peasant economy, development in Ladakh has brought about a transition to a more market-based economy and with it great changes in Ladakhi people and society. This process took centuries in other societies but in Ladakh has taken place over a mere 30 years. Ladakh therefore shows us more clearly than other societies the impacts of this process.

It is then argued that the market economy, despite the material prosperity it has brought, has not proved to be conducive to human flourishing.

Aristotle's ideas on economics are then discussed to provide an alternative view of how an economy might function. In Aristotle economics is not separated from ethics and politics because the economy is about relations between people. Economic transactions need to be carried out according to the demands of justice if they are to perform their function of binding the community together. It is concluded that an alternative to a market economy would be one in which the quality of the relationships between people and between people and non-human nature was seen as paramount, above the provision of material goods. The possibilities for the bringing about of such a society are then discussed.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Computer-linked social movements and the global threat to capitalism

Harry Cleaver (Univ. of Texas, Austin)

Of all the emerging roles of computer communications in social conflict, the most serious challenge to the basic institutional structures of modern society flow from the emergence of computer-linked global social movements that are, increasingly, challenging both nationa and supranational policy-making institutions. We are currently witnessing an accelerating circulation of social conflicts whose participants recognize a common enemy: contemporary capitalism. In their increasingly common rejection of business priorities their struggles cannot but recall Marxist notions of'class warfare'. Yet the common opposition to capitalism is not accompanied by the old notion of a unified alternative project of socialism. On the contrary, such a vision has been displaced by a proliferation of diverse projects and the notion that there is no need for universal rules. In response to these struggles, the threatened institutions are responding in various ways, sometimes by military and paramilitary force, sometimes by co-optation aimed at reintegrating the antagonistic forcs. The problem for us is finding ever new ways to defeat these responses and continue to build new worlds.

PDF of complete paper available here

Mexico-US Border Region: Political Challenges at the Frontier of Neoliberalism

Paul Cooney (Praxis, New York)

The Mexico-US border region is an amazing cultural crossroads, and it also represents the frontier of neoliberalism. This paper examines the political potential of challenging NAFTA, the free trade discourse and the maquiladora model of development. Now that NAFTA has been in force for six years, it is important to assess the effectiveness and limitations of the side accords on labor and the environment, especially the extent to which they have been able to respond to concerns by labor, environmental and community groups. Maquiladoras came into existence with the Border Industrialization Program in 1965, as foreign-owned assembly plants, operating in conditions similar to a free-trade zone. Although they grew steadily for close to thirty years, after NAFTA and the latest peso crisis, maquiladoras in northern Mexico have experienced extremely rapid growth with a significant impact on the border region. They currently constitute over one third of all manufacturing employment in Mexico. As the second most important source of foreign exchange, the maquiladora industry has seen significant resistance from the multinationals, the Mexican government and their union allies to both independent union organizing and grassroots mobilization around issues of labor and the environment. Despite the significant forces against them, there have been some gains in recent years, but the struggle has a long way to go.

As this social experiment representing the frontier of ëcapitalismo salvaje' continues to develop, this paper also explores the types of alliances, strategies and organizing that are required to tame this beast and challenge the free trade pundits with respect to the maquilizaciÛn of Mexico as a development model.

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Business Internationalization as political struggle

Bruce Cronin (Massey University, New Zealand)

The widespread internationalisation of business since the 1970s has generally been subject to technological or economic determinist explanations. Technological developments in information technology are seen to have encouraged international operations by cheapening the costs of international communication and allowing global scale flexible production. National barriers to trade and investment are said to crumble before the greater productivity of production based on comparative advantages. Monopolists appear driven to expand internationally as they reach the limits of the domestic market, particularly in the face of recession.

But such determinisms leave little room for human agency and suggest an inevitability to trends of the day that seldom prove to be the case.

Research on the process of business internationalisation in a small late internationalising economy identifies conflicts within business social networks as critical to the emergence of internationalisation as a business strategy. Business advisors, such as auditors, bankers and solicitors, together with business political organisations and informal networks played key roles in the development of different international strategies among New Zealand firms in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The results, interpreted within a framework derived from Poulantzas, suggest considerable scope for the development of alternative accumulation strategies and potential points of intervention.

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Trade, the Global Factory and the struggles for new commons.

Massimo De Angelis (University of East London)

This paper discusses trade liberalization as one capital strategy aimed at the formation of a global factory. By this I mean the formation of a socio-economic configuration of power relations which aim is the imposition of work on both waged and unwaged labour. After a brief critical review of the current literature on globalization and definitions of "global factory", in the second part of the paper I will discuss why trade growth is so vital for world accumulation today by analyzing short-terms world macroeconomic conditions under which trade liberalization is promoted, especially by the U.S. In the third part of the paper I instead analyze today's role of trade liberalization within the broader context of neoliberal strategies. On a broader theoretical level, despite various trade blocks have different priorities, they share a common interest in the design of the structural parameters of a new world economy understood as global factory.

Finally, in the last part, I will tackle the issue of the strategic importance of the struggles against the WTO after the events in Seattle last November. I will suggest that the current widespread practice of alliance building across-movements in an international context offers the opportunity for two interrelated broad political objectives: first, the establishment of a social limit to the boundlessness of capital's accumulation; second, the expansion of increasing spheres of society in which new commons are created and within which people exercise power independently from the rules of capital and money. This implies that progressives must promote an open debate within the movements with concrete proposals on non-market, non-money, non-capitalist strategies rooted within the configurations of needs and aspirations of global civil society at large, rather than abstract ideological call for revolution or a return to the reformism of the Keynesian era.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Limits on capitalism without citizenry: Towards a globalization without neoliberalism

Wim Dierckxsens (Latin American Oecumenical Research Center (DEI), San JosÈ Costa Rica)

This study aims to demonstrate there are alternatives to neoliberal globalization. It proposes there is a growing need for discussion and action to avoid this model becoming stuck in a dead end. Such a scenario gives rise to the historic possibility of constructing globalization without neoliberalization. There are different starting points in this analysis of neoliberal theory, its limits and alternatives. For this project I have chosen an approach that first explains the transitory nature of neoliberalism in terms of its own limits. Second, the analytical strength of this approach can help to devise future scenarios. Third, it can shed light on possible alternatives, including globalization without neoliberalism as the most probable one. In other words we are looking for alternatives that are nonexclusive and citizen-based, in function of the Common Good, with a rationality rooted in the reproductive logic of the whole.

The discussion on productive and nonproductive labor is the central axis of this study. Under the banner of neoliberalism, globalization directs investment toward nonproductive labor. With growing investment in the nonproductive sphere as determined by its content, capital tends to free itself by excluding the labor factor, and to realize virtual profits through speculative ventures. Labor relations become more flexible and allow a more intensive utilization. According to neoliberal logic, the rate of gain in the productive sphere will increase with consecuental return of investment to the same. In asmuch as investment actually shows the opposite tendency, sooner or later the economic contraction, that is threatening to engulf the world, will become evident along with a new model of economic regulation. The difficulty in achieving this shift from the nonproductive (speculative) to the productive sphere under the neoliberal banner and even under a neo-Keynesian one provides important clues for anticipating future alternative scenarios.

The concepts of productive and nonproductive labor are fundamental to any alternatives proposed from the outset of this study and can be defined following two different perspectives. The first is based on the maximization of private profit aiming economic efficiency that is well illustrated by current formal economics and totalized with neoliberalism. This perspective is rooted in capital its private interests. From this angle, the whole is constituted by the sum of private interests and it does not matter in what kind of activity. The rationality directing this kind of action disregards substantive aspects and ignores problems of a reproductive order and with it the consequences of speculative economy.

The second begins with the reproduction of society as a whole of the substantial part of the economy. Productive labor by content indicates the creation of wealth while nonproductive labor indicates its redistribution. By fleeing the productive sphere, accumulation is not based any more on real valuation of capital. As the pie does not grow, accumulation is possible only through progressive concentration of existing wealth. Individual capital accumulates monetary wealth without a corresponding use of labor in the productive sphere in the system as a whole, culminating in the progressive concentration of existing wealth.

Progressive investment in nonproductive sectors has led to a loss of vitality in the world economy. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s , the world economy has shown symptoms of a declining growth rate and this loss of dynamism is now primarily attributed to the growing cost of innovation. Innovation loses its purpose within capitalism when it no longer contributes to increasing the rates of profit. Profit rates tend to drop when a given percentage of growth in labor productivity requires greater than proportional increase in the cost of innovation. The rising cost of innovation, beyond the growth in productivity results from unlimited competition.

Unlimited competition demands accelerated depreciation; in other words, an increasingly rapid rate of innovation that in turn raises the cost of innovations. Labor productivity growth is more difficult as the cost of innovation increases. The resulting drop in the profit rates in the productive sphere stimulates capital flight toward nonproductive sectors which requires liberalization of individual capital flows to those activities. Liberalization of financial capital flows started in the international context in the late sixties and are the cause of the debt crisis in the eighties and of monetary instability in the Third World. Financial liberation is the principal measure that accelerate the international crisis.

The flight of investments to nonproductive sectors has caused slower growth in the global pie. Competition involves from now on strengthening market positions to capture a larger market segment, rather than stimulating growth via investments in productive areas to generate wealth. In this context it is to understand the mergers and acquisitions policies that constitute the majority of investments in the world today. Mergers and acquisitions policies in a world of liberalized commercial markets raise the expectation that the strongest, that is, the larger transnational corporations, will triumph in the world even without global growth. The stockmarket, where the stronger companies are traded, is an expression of this expectation. Stock transactions are not always made with the money from savings, that is, existing wealth. Over the years an inverted pyramid of private built on growing private debt rather than on savings has led stocks selling much higher than their real market value. Such increases reflect an expectation of future wealth and profits without creating it on a global scale and thus feed speculation. The stakes set on transnational corporations and especially less and less big winners among them in the stock market from the resulting credit are higher than the growth of real profits generated and even much higher than growth of the global pie. As the credit spiral grows without growing global wealth, accumulation becomes more of a virtual reality. As investment is less and less connected with production, there tend to be sooner or later a global financial crisis such as is currently on the horizon. A worldwide breakdown challenges neoliberal economics, for it shows that crisis strike even the largest transnational corporations and financial centers.

Concentration of wealth occurs not only when business are competing for a redistribution of a less and less expanding market, but also at the same time, in the contentious realm of capital and labor. Competition in a nonexpanding market encourages the strengthening of positions by mergers and acquisitions. These investments do not lead to growth of wealth nor employment. The result of the global economy as a whole is a relative and even absolute loss of employment opportunities and income. This tendency contributes to a growing exclusion, a income differentiation and a slow down of global demand.

Progressive exclusion means a loss in acquired rights, that is, a loss in citizenship. The welfare state as far as developed tends to break down in a deregulated market economy, intervening less and less in matters of economic and social rights. Finally it may lead to the loose of the most fundamental right of live. The response to progressive exclusion will firstly lead to questioning the legitimacy of exclusion without questioning the society that created it. One model of exclusion, that of the market, in that case is substituted for another, that of belonging or not to certain communities (racial, national, cultural, etc.). It is in this context that burgeoning xenophobia, the resurgence of nationalism in the world and conflicts among cultures are rising. The panic spawned by a depression will rise the struggle for involvement at any cost and may lead to neofascism and the loose of most fundamental human rights.

The grassroots struggle for noninclusion could overlap with the fight of big capital for noninclusion, as historically has been the case with fascism. In a world that has room for ever fewer transnationals, not excluding citizens from an economic bloc depends on not excluding its transnational corporations. Nationalism as such however no longer represents a unifying banner for furthering transnational capital. The assault on Asian currencies indicates a war of cultures in an economic arena and predicted a Westernizing globalization. A commercial transatlantic war even may lead to Americanizing of globalization at any cost. Neofascism will emerge more aggressively. Progressive exclusion by neofascist causes will not lead to any solution of an economy in depression. Sooner or later and in the middle of (potential) conflicts awareness of the limitations of neoliberalism that lacks perspectives in all probability will lead to a search for economic regulation that is aimed reconciling private interests with Common Good. The response to exclusion so finally will lead to questioning the legitimacy of neoliberal and tendencially neofascist model of exclusion.

The only way the world economy can recover from a world crisis is to give priority to the whole rather than saving the parts. This is only possible with worldwide economic regulation. The demand for globalization without neoliberalism requires subordinate private interest to the worldwide Common Good. It is not easy to shift from values centered on private interests to those centered on the world wide Common Good. Awareness of the limitations of a neoliberalism that lacks real perspectives probably will lead firstly to a search for economic regulation on a world scale that is aimed at reconciling private interests with global Common Good. Basically that is understood to be growth with involvement at a world scale. One means of achieving this could be trough an aggregate global demand and worldwide involvement policies. In this way, private accumulation could continue without being subjected to the global Common Good. This would be a type of global neo- Keynesianism, requiring some sort of worldstate regulator with a worldwide social contract.

Efforts to implement wordwide neo-Keynesian economic regulation will have to lead to more radical changes in economic rationality and its subordination to a visible hand on a global scale. A visible hand will be needed to resolve the downward trend in profit rates in the productive sphere. Neo-Keynesianism is not able to do so. Such intervention is possible only when it is simultaneously introduced throughout the world. Globally regulated depreciation would give impetus to an economy with conservation of natural resources and redistribution to a more equal global income rather than to growth. This regulation represents direct intervention in economic rationality, thus subordinating private interest to the global Common Good. Globalization based on a worldwide Common Good begins by focusing on the reproduction of concrete human life and of nature, in other words, with the citizenry as a whole.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Socialism and human subjects: Theory and practice in global perspective

Clark Everling (SUNY)

This paper explores the logic of human subjective requirements as these develop within capitalism and create the premises for socialism. Marx defines capitalism as a self-limiting opposition between exchange value and use value. The more capitalism develops as a relation to its own creation of value, the more it extends the premises for human subjects as the use values of industrial-urban existence. Private appropriation through value creation concentrates and centralizes capital and limits the forms and availability of use values. Simultaneously, capitalism continually extends itself as a world market in the search for profitable investments. I illustrate this opposition through the logic of the development of the world market in the 20th century. My purpose is to show that the opposition between private appropriation and socialization is, as Marx claims, the most profound within capitalism.

The opposition between private appropriation and socialization has the transnational corporation as its present form. The evolution of the transnational corporation in the period after 1945 is the concentration and centralization of capital on a global scale. I demonstrate that its development repeats and deepens the opposition to the use values of urban-industrial life within nations. Transnational corporate and financial forms come to combine within themselves control over fiscal and monetary policies on a global scale. The opposition to the use values of social life are manifested in the growing deprivation to various kinds of employment, urban life requirements, and in patterns of regional development within nations, including those of the leading capitalist countries. I illustrate this growing deprivation and regional decline in the contexts of the US and UK economies. The institutions and policies of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, I argue, reflect historically developed limits within capitalism itself.

PDF of complete paper available here

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New forms of Anti-Capitalist Internationalism

Silvia Federici (Hofstra University)

My paper's main objective is to analyze (1) the new forms of resistance to globalized capitalist planning, (2) the new forms of anti-capitalist internationalism that are developing through them. In the first part of the paper, we connect the struggles against globalization that are being waged at the traditional point of production --that is the production of commodities-- with the struggles that are being waged at the level of the reproduction of labor and look at the political implications of this broader perspective. This approach, we argue, is indispensable to understand the social composition of the anti-globalization movement, the full spectrum of the forces raised against globalization, the new organizational questions these struggles pose and the full spectrum of demands and alternative programs that are coming out of them.

The questions I consider here are: (1) what is the relation between struggles around land and struggles around money? (2) What is the relation between the struggles of high-wage workers and the struggles against free export zones, and prison labor and mass incarceration, the different faces of the contemporary anti-slavery movement? In the second part of the paper, I look at the struggles against globalization at the political level. Here the key questions are: Is there a role for NGOs in the anti-globalization struggle? What is the relation between the economic and the political struggle at this juncture? Can we use the nation-state in our struggle against globalization? Is the further internationalization of capitalist power opening up possibilities at the "local" level, as some claim or is this an illusion? What is the relation between the local and global? We want to discuss these questions not in general terms but on the basis of a "reading of the struggles."

This paper deals with organizational questions posed by the struggles against structural adjustment throughout the planet since 1985. Here I criticize (a) the tendency to overvalue the possibilities opened by internet and computer technology as helpers in the construction of a new international, (b) the postmodern thesis that no unitary project today is possible.

In contrast to (a) and (b) I examine the internationalization issuing from the new third world immigrant diaspora, and the new forms of internationalism that are being built on the basis of globalization's attack on the very conditions of our reproduction (e.g. Indian farmers' attack on patenting of life forms, the Zapatista's demand for indigenous autonomy, and the urban garden movement, the anti-genetic engineering movement, etc.) My argument (echoing the Seattle slogans) is that a new internationalism is being built finally uniting the sickle, the hammer, and the broom.

Finally, I also discuss some of the organizational questions the new movement and the new international division of labor are raising. Here we want to reconnect with the Black Power Movement and Feminist Movement which taught us the key role of forms of organizations that recognize and address the existing power relations in the building of solidarity, so that unification does not occur at the terms of the most powerful, which, we hope, all will agree would be a certain defeat.

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Global enclosures of environmental management and resistance

Lucy Ford (University of Sussex)

This paper examines the relationship between environmental governance and social movements from a Gramscian perspective. Mainstream solutions to environmental problems are embedded in processes of global governance, which some claim, are becoming democratised through the incorporation of "global civil society". This paper argues rather that this process presents an enclosure (of political space, language, ideas and expertise) and further questions the possibility of radical resistance through "global civil society" within the present system.

The dominant approach to environmental issues focuses on "global" issues, such as global warming and climate change, demanding "global" policy solutions. The globalisation of environmental governance is reflected above all in multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) that are being negotiated within the insitutions of global governance (e.g. WTO, World Bank, IMF, UN). Social movement access to these fora is increasingly organised through the sphere of global civil society, raising questions about co-optation and marginalisation amongst the range of movements from established NGOs to radical grassroots movements such as the PGA (Peoples' Global Action).

In an alternative more holistic conception of the "global" it is not the effects that make an environmental problem global but the causes. Environmental problems are caused by global structures such as the capitalist world economy and are not separate from other causes and consequences of modernity. Such a view departs from the dominant approach of global governance. Within this system an enclosure of "civil society" and of knowledge is taking place. The paper takes issue with notions of a "global civil society" and further questions whether the present system provides the space for social movements - and indeed whether social movements are equipped - to embark on a politics of radical change which must follow the more inclusive approach rather than single issues.

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Class-struggle anarchism and the revolutionary subject

Benjamin Franks (University of Nottingham)

The origins of British anarchism lie in the working class movements and the immigrant socialist groups of the late Nineteenth Century, yet by the start of the 1980s anarchism in the UK was most strongly associated with radical liberalism and militant pacifism. The revolutionary agent for change had been replaced from the working class in general and the industrial working class in particular to the abstract moral individual. From being a minority trend within the general anarchist milieu in the early 1980s, class-struggle libertarianism at the start of the new millennium has reasserted itself as the dominant form of anarchism.

This paper draws upon my PhD thesis on contemporary British anarchist tactics and examines two interlinked questions: What underlies the reconstruction of class struggle anarchism? And how does contemporary class struggle anarchism in theory and in practice deal with questions concerning agency and the location of power? It is demonstrated that there are a variety of class struggle anarchisms. The most sophisticated and consistent recognise that liberation requires that the oppressed subject takes the primary role, without the interference of a mediating party, in creating non-hierarchical social relations. This notion is captured in the anarchist preference for'direct action'. The second feature of the sophisticated strains of contemporary anarchism is that it recognises that oppressive practices need to be confronted in a variety of locations, with no objectively identifiable central strategic struggle taking precedence. Resistance to oppressive practices require the intervention of the oppressed subject to take precedence in resisting hierarchical procedures. Capitalist oppression is often a dominant form of oppressive power, but may not be the sole or primary form, and thus different agents of change are required. Contemporary class struggle anarchism requires multiple agents, who create their own links of solidarity, some temporary and pragmatic, otherwise of greater duration and stability.

Rather than concentrate on the works of the classical anarchist canon (Bakunin, Goldman, Kropotkin), this paper concentrates on analysis of contemporary anarchist texts (1979-2000) and events in which libertarians have taken part or drawn inspiration.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Globalisation as self-defeating process: why capital fails the capitalists?

Alan Freeman (University of Greenwich)

The financial crash of August 1998, and the inconclusive break-up of the 1999 World Trade Organisation, throw a different light on globalisation. Existing accounts, even those opposed it, treat it as an inevitable process which can continue without internal limit. Insofar as the world market fails to function or extend, therefore, most branches of theory treat this as the consequence either of exogenous interference, or of a reciprocal reaction between the market and factors exogenous to it.

This paper will present an alternative view. It can be empirically shown and, with the appropriate explanatory categories -- economic activity expressed in terms of human labour conserved in circulation -- it can be theoretically demonstrated that:

(1) capital accumulation is uneven in time, setting intrinsic limits on itself which bring about both periodic cyclic crisis and prolonged phases of stagnation, including the present one, which alternate with phases of feverish expansion.

(2) capital accumulation is uneven in space, leading to a secular polarisation between rich and poor nations. Unlike periodic cycles this phenomenon is secular and uninterrrupted, or interrupted only when the market itself - above all the market in capital - is suspended or regulated.

This constitutes a direct theoretical opposite to the principal tenet of neoliberalism that the market itself cures its own ills; it argues, on the contrary, that the market creates its own ills.

It also constitutes a theoretical alternative to the idea that the source of such endogenous failures in world market are located in some special aspect of it such as technology, government policy, regulatory regime, or monetary regime. Empirically these phenomena are visible under many different combinations of such special factors, and so cannot be explained by any one of them. Theoretically, I argue that, when expressed in the appropriate categories, these phenomena are an expression, not a cause, of laws of motion of capital itself which assert themselves regardless of, and overriding, any special circumstance in the organisation of capital.

Thus for example, the question is not whether the appropriate technology is in existence for a new'Kontradieff', but whether its general dissemination can be accomplished by the world market as it now exists.

The approach also permits a restatement of early 20th-Century theories of capitalist breakdown (Luxemburg-Grossman-etc), a thesis that is empirically falsified by the post-World War II reconstruction. Instead, I argue, what is necessary is to distinguish *endogenous* from *exogenous* processes of failure and reconstruction in the capital market.

Neoliberalism argues that failure is exogenous and recovery is endogenous; a value-theoretic approach, if it is based on the new insights provided by the'temporal single system' interpretation of Marx's value theory, suggests that failure is endogenous and recovery is exogenous.

I will present evidence and explanations directly counter to the view that the world is entering a new phase of prolonged expansion. Phases of expansion, I will argue, do not result from an endogenous process of recovery but can be achieved only through exogenous, political interventions that entirely restructure the territories and markets of the world by violent means (the British defeat of Napoleon, classical imperialism 1890-1914, the re-organisation of the world under US hegemony 1941-47)

'Globalisation' therefore emerges as the outcome of a perfectly conscious attempt by the US to re-assert in the commercial, military and financial sphere the superiority that it has lost in the productive sphere, by constructing a political order that permits it to finance the deficit imposed by the relatively superior productivity growth of its rivals. It is not an internal, inevitable or'natural' outcome of the internal force of the market, and moreover, this enforced extension of the market has accelerated the impact of all those internal forces through which the accumulation of capital endogenously interferes with itself. The financial crisis, the instability of the US stock market, and the intractability of trade relations are not therefore an external obstacle to globalisation but products of it, and an expression of its inherent limits.

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Neoclassicals, Keynesians and Marxists on unemployment: diagnoses and policies

Diego Guerrero (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Keynesianism is a form of neoclassical liberalism which distinguishes itself from contemporary neo-liberalism by a higher realism regarding the limits of its theoretical analysis of unemployment. However, both Neoclassicals and Keynesians think it possible, after an accurate diagnose of the problem, to find out the appropriate recipes to cure unemployment in the framework of the capitalist system. After reviewing both explanations, a third, heterodox view is offered, according to which the value of the labour force, as that of any other commodity, is determined by its costs of social reproduction (ultimately, in labour terms). This commodity is supplied in the magnitude given by social conditions determining the size of the active labour force.

When capital accumulation develops itself healthily, the market labour approaches full employment; whereas after an overaccumulation crisis and depression the demand of labour shrinks, with no possibility for any force --including government policies-- to convince the capitalists that they should lose more money by hiring more workers. As long as the economy is based on private profits, it is illusory to hope an end to both a cyclical behaviour of unemployment and a trend towards its long-run increase, as it is the case with any other commodity, ruled by the same "airbag logic". As for the policy implications, my view is that theorists should, beginning with the third approach, redirect their focus from the very limited possibilities of finding out the way to a lower rate of unemployment inside the capitalism, toward the effort to build up an alternative with profits replaced by another engine of the economy. My case is for a simple reform consisting in linking the decentralized and equalized "remuneration" of each individual to their condition of citizens (not to their conditon as labour suppliers) which amounts to make the labour market unnecessary.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Information Technology, organization structure, and earnings inequality.

Fredrick Guy (Birkbeck College, London)

Progressive economists tend to attribute recent increases in income inequality to globalization. Others attribute the increases to technological changes which have raised the demand for certain skills while reducing that for unskilled labour. We offer a third explanation for the same phenomena: information technology changes the structure of organizations in ways which reduce the bargaining power of lower ranking employees, and increase that of managers. The implication of our argument is that increased income inequality, and the institutional changes associated with it (decline in trade union power, retreat of the welfare state) are largely driven by technologically driven changes in bargaining power within nation states; they can be reversed within nation states, if they can be reversed at all.

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Joseph Hanlon (Jubilee 2000)

(awaiting abstract)

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A political reading of financial liberalization

Conrad Herold (Hofstra University, New York)

This essay argues first that global financial liberalization--the free movement of capital across national borders--is a linchpin of the neo-liberal strategy. The history of the rise of the contemporary period of financial liberalization is reviewed, showing how we can understand financial liberalization in the 1980's and 90's as a capitalist strategy that effectively undermined the struggles of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The essay then reviews the pre-WW2 period of free capital mobility and asks what was the role of class struggle in ending the financial liberalization of the pre-war period, seeking to distill the strategic lessons of past struggles. Finally, the current capitalist debates around the issues of capital mobility and capital controls--in the context of the three financial crises of the 90's--is reviewed, seeking again to distill its strategic content. The possibility of exploiting the divisions within the capitalist class is explored.

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The Global, the Local and the New Protectionism

Colin Hines (Protect the Local, Globally)

PDF of complete paper available here

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Exploitation of immigrant labour in Europe: the case of intensive agriculture in Spain.

Andy Higginbottom

Plastic hothouse technology has been harnessed under conditions of intense exploitation to turn Almeria into the'Orchard of Europe'. The explosion of racist violence against the Moroccan immigrant community in El Ejido and the subsequent strike of the Moroccan workers has brought international attention to their plight. The racism directed against the Morrocans has many dimensions. The basic economic relation is one of super-exploitation. Southern Spain is strategically placed on the European Union's frontier with Africa, where the movement of labour into the rich north is policed. Spanish culture is imbued with the Moorish influence, which is superficially recognised and packaged into commodity tourism, and yet also co-exists as deeply rooted historical fears. Spain has never brought to justice the criminals of the Franco era, a historical compromise was reached which has resulted in a conservative party, the Partido Popular, with explicit Francoist antecedents in government, and active fascist groups.

The employers strategy is to break the Moroccans by bringing in alternative cheap labourers from Eastern Europe. The government is policing the immigrant community heavily and is implementing the new law on the Rights and Freedoms of Foreigners to intercept and deport illegal immigrants. It has started to provide hostel accommodation for a few.

The strategy of the CCOO trade union and the main left opposition alliance in Spain (PSOE -IU) is to work for peaceful coexistence between the local and immigrant communities; to support the new Foreigners Law while emphasising the social and civil rights of the immigrants; and to work for a'regularisation' of the immigrant labour market.

Representation of the Morrocans is in a state of flux. The mass of the workers are still in the process of organising themselves. Amongst them are voices who question the adequacy of the trade union response in solving the desperate conditions of the traumatised, homeless, casually employed and often illegal workers. The main themes of a new strategy are likely to include immediate aid to those suffering; direct democracy in decision making; the need for national and international organisations of immigrants and refugees.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Counter-insurgency and Anglo-American imperialism in Columbia.

The Collective against the US invasion of Columbia

US military aid to Colombia was already more than its aid to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean put together when Clinton announced in January a fourfold increase. The £1.3bn is to part finance Pastrana's a plan for the military to regain the upper hand in the civil war. Central to this will be a push into the southern states Putumayo and Caqueta, sending in anti-narcotics battalions to secure drug-producing areas. The aid will equip these elite battalions with helicopters and is for'more aggressive interdiction' of the drugs trade in the Andean region. The Pentagon has designed a'rapid reaction force'.

Liberal US commentators have criticised Clinton's military solution to the drugs problem, preferring an alternative crop strategy, but they miss the point. US intervention will not stop the drugs, which is a pretext for a major offensive targeted straight at the guerrilla strongholds, its aim is to smash the armed resistance.

There are profound regional repercussions. The outcome of struggles in Ecuador and Venezuela against neo-liberal impoverishment are especially linked to Colombia. The 10,000 US forces formerly in Panama as a forward deployment force are now in Miami, Puerto Rico, Honduras, and Colombia where they remain targeted at over 400 million people.

Colombia's armed forces and the paramilitary death squads they have spawned kill with impunity. Pastrana vetoed a new law removing protection, and the US is opposed to an International Criminal Court. New initiatives are needed from international progressive forces to support human rights in Colombia and to remove impunity.

The USA has decided that it will not let the Colombian people settle the civil war themselves, a new phase of escalating the conflict has been deliberately set in motion. Whether or not the US invasion of Colombia will become another Central America, another Balkans or another Vietnam, is an open question; depending on the balance of forces for and against US intervention. Clinton and Pastrana have targeted Britain and Spain as countries that are vital to wider international support for the plan.

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How to change the world without taking power

John Holloway (Universidad AutÛnoma de Puebla.)

The challenge which the zapatistas have articulated for us all is to change the world without taking power.

The zapatista challenge takes us beyond the state illusion, the old paradigm of revolutionary thought, according to which it was necessary first to gain state power (by violent or non-violent means) in order then to change society. Both historical experience and theoretical reflection suggest that the road to radical social change cannot lie through the state.

After the tragic history of state-centred conceptions of revolution, the only way forward now seems to be to think of revolution as the dissolution (rather than the conquest) of power. But this leaves us with enormous political-theoretical challenges. What on earth can revolution through the dissolution of power mean? How does such a conception affect the categories we use? Does it make any sense to talk of anti-power and what might it mean? If we do not see struggle as lying through the state, then the notion of struggle as being'national' or'inter-national' falls: all struggle is to be understood as global � but what does this mean and what does it imply for organisation?

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Worker perspectives on life in the call centre industry of a Hinterland Region

Jennifer Jarman (Dalhousie University, Canada.)

The economy of the Atlantic Canadian provinces has been based in natural resource exploitation since the Europeans first developed an interest in the region in the 1500s. Fishing, forestry and farming were the dominant industries with the later discovery of coal and the subsequent development of a mining industry, and a steel industry. All of these industries have been troubled in the last twenty years, and those firms that have survived have done so by shedding labour costs in a substantial manner. This has meant provincial governments have faced major deficits and the management of economies with unemployment levels ranging from 10 to 60 % in some communities. Provincial governments have been trying to find ways to re-orient the industrial basis of provincial economies, from resource-based industries to the new telecommunications industries. To attract major telecommunications employers to the province, they are forced to offer substantial multi-million deals and tax concessions to bring informatics firms to the region. While there is no doubt that the governments have been successful in terms of job creation, there has been little or no assessment of the overall impact of these strategies from the perspective of working class men and women.

This paper will focus on the call centre industry, which has been the major new source of working class jobs in the region. The work process in the call centre industry is intense, fast-paced, highly monitored, quality-controlled and scientifically created and managed. The industry is almost entirely un-unionized and so workers must rely solely on governments for protection of basic employment rights. This paper attempts to provide insight into the views of working people in this industry as a first step to being able to understand the nature of grassroots support or resistance to the political agendas of neoliberal governments and global capitalists.

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The international anti-globalisation campaign

Dot Keet (University of the Western Cape South Africa)

(awaiting abstract)

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The East Asian crisis and the politics of globalization

Jim Kincaid (Leeds University)

The assault on the East Asian developmental state (especially in South Korea) by the interlinked forces of the financial markets and the IMF has evoked a strong defence of that model by Robert Wade, Ha-Joon Chang, Peter Gowan, and others who share their state-oriented socialist perspective.

The high growth, with relative equity, achieved in East Asia has also attracted support from a left Keynesianism revitalised by the traumas of liberalisation in the 1990s. In two notable recent collections - (Michie and Smith) (Baker, Epstein and Pollin) - the developmental success of the pre-liberalised Korean state is invoked to argue that: (1) a deregulated financial system destablises production and trade, and (2) the world needs a return to the formula proposed by Keynes at Bretton Woods, but not implemented - an IMF which would encourage and support national economic development based on capital controls.

Development in Korea, and elsewhere in the region, was based on a savage repression of labour by a military-industrial-state complex established during the Cold War. The Korean democratisation of 1987 mobilised domestic popular forces who consider that international liberalisation helps them to combat the entrenched power of the chaebol. Although the crisis has inflicted immense social and economic damage, there is widespread recognition in Korea that a return to the earlier state-directed model offers no viable future in a world of increasing global integration of production, markets, and finance.

IMF methods of encouraging the assertion of the law of value on a world scale must be opposed - but not by demands for the capitalist state to assume control of the allocation of capital. A socialist perspective on world development should decisively reject left Keynesian agendas.

References:
Baker, Dean, Gerald Epstein and Robert Pollin, eds. (1998) Globalisationand Progressive Economic Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Michie, Jonathan and John Grieve Smith, eds. (1999) Global Instability:The Political Economy of World Economic Governance, London: Routledge.

PDF of complete paper available here

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The IMF, debt, and global economic crisis

Andrew Kliman (Pace University, Pleasantville)

Abstract: The world economy is controlled, not the IMF, World Bank, etc., but by impersonal economic laws, especially the law of value. Capitalist agencies do not plan crises. Rather, the law of value is inherently self-contradictory, and this gives rise to crises. The IMF has recently assumed a new role, that of manager of global economic crisis. The key aim is to restore investors' confidence. This is crucial not because the IMF wants to satisfy investors' greed, but because crises of confidence threaten to cause a collapse of the whole world economy. But in the event of a serious debt crisis in the US or Japan, the IMF could not piece together a large enough bail-out.

Whether or not that scenario comes to pass, the debt crises and the consequent crises of confidence seem bound to recur, because they are part of the working of the capitalism's law of value. Capitalist production is the production of material goods and services, but also the production of value. There's a continual contradiction between these aspects. As productivity rises, commodities' values fall. Value fails to "self-expand" sufficiently. This gives rise to a falling tendency of the profit rate, debt crisis and financial instability, fiscal crises of the state, "overproduction," etc. The "overexpansion of credit" that seemed to be the "cause" of the 1997-99 Asian crisis can be understood as the effect of insufficient expansion of value.

Because capitalism is founded on an unresolvable contradiction, its crises are necessary and recurrent. Struggle thus needs to be directed not just against one or another manifestation of capital. We need to struggle against -- and abolish -- value production itself, and work out new relations, founded on the principle of the self-development of each individual person, not the self-expansion of value.

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UK trade unions: resisting or legitimizing flexploitation?

Les Levidow (Open University, UK)

As part of neoliberal globalization, labour has been systematically flexibilised in order to intensify competition among workers and to reinforce capitalist work discipline. This flexploitation strategy has been implemented by various means, especially privatization and subcontracting, sometimes through multinational companies. To resist this threat, trade unions are exhorted to develop solidarity links among wider communities and on an international scale. How have UK trade unions related to such efforts in practice?

Some disturbing answers emerge from two key disputes over casualisation in Britain during 1995-97. These remain important test cases because the conditions were relatively favourable: workers continued to struggle independently for reinstatement after being sacked, they were sustained by wider support networks, and their trade unions had Left-wing leaderships. In both cases, ultimately the latter chose to build their union membership upon those workers who accepted the flexploitation regime rather than resist it. Why?

In Liverpool dockers' dispute, the T&GWU leadership pleaded impotence on grounds that Tory legislation prohibited'secondary' picketing, yet this legalistic excuse was a convenient pretext. In practice the union used the Tory laws against the dockers, e.g. by refusing to organize a ballot for strike action before the dispute erupted, and actively undermined solidarity action by dockers worldwide. It allied with management against a common threat -- dockers' collective organization which lay beyond the union's control.

At Hillingdon Hospital, after unionised Asian workers refused to sign a new contract from an employment agency, they were replaced by cheaper, non-union staff on short-term contracts. Initially UNISON attempted to discourage picketing; eventually it recommended that the strikers accept redundancy payments, ceased official support, and even tried to expel the recalcitrant strikers from union membership. UNISON and management found a common interest in'normalizing relations', i.e. formalizing the new-style casualized terms of employment.

Some lessons emerge: Labour internationalism cannot be simply equated with international links among trade unions. Trade unions face a choice: either encourage broader resistance networks and share authority with them, or else cooperate with management to attack that resistance -- i.e., to legitimize and manage flexploitation. How can that choice be influenced for the better?

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Movement strategy and the globalizer's dilemma

Larry Lohmann (The Corner House)

South-North networks of radical resistance to globalization often focus on specific development or trade projects. Such networks' effectiveness is often hampered, however, by a lack of understanding among their Northern partners of the "globalizer's dilemma". This dilemma is a general condition affecting any group -- whether TNC or grassroots resistance movement -- which seeks to act across many cultural arenas at once. To be effective at a distance, such groups must seek "enclaves" in or "pipelines" into these different arenas, made up of social practices friendly to their own projects and maintained largely through face-to-face interaction. These enclaves or pipelines, however, inevitably have their own norms, rules, and social pressures, merely adding to the number of cultural arenas whose distinctness throws up Wittgensteinian obstacles to effective action at a distance. The result is that all global struggles are played out in multiple translations and genres, each of which reciprocally "contains" the others and each of which is itself in many ways at odds with others.

Appreciation of the globalizer's dilemma calls into question the idea, reinforced by class, institution, and professional peer group, that directed global action can be the result of the application of unsituated power and knowledge. In so doing, it calls into question most of the framework of debate of traditional Left strategy in the West, in particular "reform vs. revolution", "cooperation v. non-cooperation", "lobbying vs. new blueprints for society" and "being co-opted vs.'proper resistance'". Strategy, identity and analysis cannot be effectively determined a priori outside intercultural space. At the same time, however, appreciation of the globalizer's dilemma opens up new resources of power and influence for popular movements. Alliance-building, movement strategy, and analysis of power relations are more likely to succeed when they do not assume the existence of packageable, lumpish "global forces" different in kind from "local" ones.

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Europe-wide struggles against neoliberalism

Andrew Mathers & Graham Taylor (University of the West of England, Bristol)

Neo-liberal restructuring has had a fundamental impact on the form of class struggle and mechanisms of class concertation in Europe. The process of European integration has increasingly undermined national corporatisms whilst the form of new European modes of regulation effectively preclude the development of corporatism at the European level. In the resulting vacuum there are emerging transnational networks of activists that are united by an opposition to the negative effects of neo-liberal restructuring and in particular the poverty and unemployment resulting from economic liberalisation and Economic and Monetary Union and increasingly restrictive legislation on immigration associated with the Schengen agreement. The late 1990's have seen a convergence of these networks around the European Marches against Unemployment, Job Insecurity and Social Exclusion that has mobilised opposition centred on European Union summits.

While it is important not to overstate the significance and durability of these networks, it is relevant to recognise the dynamics of restructuring underlying the development of these movements and the form of internationalism and transnationalism resulting from the organisation of these networks.

This paper explores the emergence of new forms of resistance in the context of a protracted crisis of the capital relation within European societies and the development of new forms of regulation at the European level. While this has involved the imposition of abstract forms of regulation on labour at the European level, the form of regulation and in particular the principle of subsidiarity built into the EU has resulted in an enduring role for the nation state in the process of neo-liberal restructuring. This has important political and strategic implications for the labour movement in its bid to rediscover a form of internationalism that is capable of successfully resisting global capitalist restructuring. The examples of European networks of resistance suggest that this will be an internationalism of alliances between struggles that are rooted in resistance to the concrete particular experience of exploitation and oppression.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Ghettoisation to the Direct Action Movement: the end of ideology and the creation of myths

Ryan O'Kane (University of East London)

At the end of the 20th century Fukuyama and others declared the'end of ideology'. Yet to many this was merely a cynical and triumphant fanfare to celebrate globalised capital's supposed victory over political and ideological opposition.

Over the last decade the direct action movement in Europe and America has widened its focus from environmental or localised issues to recognise that the underlying priorities and drives of globalised capitalism connect together many seemingly distinct political struggles. Remarkably many sections within the new social movements behind J18, N30 and M1, like the political and economic powers they oppose, also claim to have reached the'end of ideology'. In the sense of a rigid and coherent set of political ideas which constrain and limit the debate and activities of direct action groups this may be true. However, this paper will argue that similar constraints emerge in the substitution of a coherent ideology with an anti-capitalism and direct action rhetoric. Amongst other factors this rhetoric includes the fetishisation of "disorganisation", a rejection of mainstream media and an uncritical often dogmatic embracing of confrontational methods of protest.

The widening of focus has brought together the red, green and black of political activism. However, large sections of the direct action movement in this country have been mostly unsuccessful in either addressing their demonisation and marginalisation by the state and political media or in forging meaningful working relationships with the huge diversity of civil society groups and other members of society who do not define themselves as activists.

This paper makes the suggestion that these failures can be put down in large part to the romantic attachment to certain methods of organisation and types of action quite distinct to a broader activist movement. It will also be argued that much of the rhetoric of sections of the direct action movement represented by such groups as Earth First! and RTS are still largely limiting their identity as chaotic elements in opposition to the global system. In so doing they only allow building connections with other marginalised groups rather than helping bringing the margin at the center of political discourse and action by linking with sympathetic elements working within society at large.

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Is there a Post-Washington Consensus?

Colin Parkins (Open University)

In the wake of the debt crisis, an ideological offensive was unleashed, spearheaded by the IMF and the World Bank, to impose an open, deregulated, market-driven economic policy regime on much of the Third World. This offensive came to be known by it's proponents and detractors as the Washington consensus; an indication that the package of measures in question, and the monoeconomics that underpinned it, were unchallenged in dominant global policy making circles for most of the 1980s and 1990s. But in the last few years things appear to have been changing. Joe Stiglitz the recently departed chief economist of the World Bank announced the arrival of an new, post-Washington consensus, development paradigm, and his intervention was followed up at the recent 10th session of UNCTAD, where its Secretary-General proclaimed of a new'spirit of Bangkok'.

The IMF and the World Bank have developed a new found interest in the idea of institutions and social capital; an admission that market solutions are not enough. While at a policy level debt relief has risen up the agenda and both of the Bretton Woods twins have now identified poverty reduction as their number one priority, to widespread astonishment in the case of the IMF. What does this amount to? Is a post-Washington consensus emerging? If so what does it look like? And why now? What do these developments mean for oppositional social movements that have seen the Washington consensus as their principal intellectual target for so long? This presentation will provide the basis for a discussion of these issues.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Recomposition of the state and capital in the era of globalisation

Sol Picciotto (University of Bristol)

Many debates about `globalisation' have been fruitless because they have tended to focus on the issue of whether the nation-state has become less powerful or relevant, instead of considering the changes in its forms and functions. Too often socialists have defended outdated models of classical liberal internationalism and national state autonomy, neglecting the transformations of the state, or the public sphere more generally, which have resulted from widespread experiences of state failure (not only the collapse of state socialism, but also crises and radical reforms of developed capitalist states, and the Asian `developmental' states). Many of these have resulted from pressures from below, but while undermining patriarchy and hierarchy, these anti-authoritarian movements have also paved the way to post-industrial capitalism, with its emphasis on information-management, flexible working and a global outlook. These changes have undoubtedly been very liberating for some, but the benefits have been limited, partial and exclusionary.

This paper will analyse the recomposition of the international state, as part of the broader process of remodelling of the `public' sphere of politics and its relationship to the `private' sphere of economic activity, that is to say the business economy dominated by the giant corporation, in which the centralized bureaucratic firm has become the `lean and mean' corporation operating within a web of strategic alliances, supplier chains, and financial and governmental networks. It will focus on proposals for democratisation, based on new forms of social and political action, and ideas of direct, deliberative democracy.

PDF of complete paper available here

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The GATS, NAFTA, and the substitution of private for public services

David Price (University College London and University of Northumbria)

Public sector reform and the expansion of the market are directly linked. Financial and legal reforms are among the most important but least understood and least debated aspects of an international privatisation programme dedicated to exporting the US model of health care and private property.

The public sector in the core OECD countries (Canada, New Zealand, and the UK) has been opened to markets and foreign competition by restructuring services on the lines of competing private corporations which contract with the government to provide services. Most critical attention has focused on the structural changes which have taken place such as the establishment of public corporations competing for patients and funds, but there have also been far-reaching changes to funding mechanisms as governments have moved away from area-based budgets and block budget service allocations.

Among public health services, the most significant and widespread of these changes has been the adoption of capitated allocations to health care purchasers coupled with ëdiagnosis related group' (DRG) remuneration to health care providers. This combination creates a market-like payment mechanism within public health care systems. Market-like payment mechanisms involve provider-generated price signals for purchasers under conditions where both parties face the financial risks of an allocative system which does not guarantee full cost reimbursement. Fundholders operating under these conditions will behave like private health insurers and try to adjust their risk pools. This creates pressure to eliminate high-cost patient groups (the elderly and chronically sick) from public health plans.

DRG remuneration also allows governments to devolve total capital costs to provider level. When this reform is linked to the introduction of resource accounting (which is the case in the UK), private sector and public sector providers become interchangeable because both now pay returns to shareholders.

The greater involvement of private firms in service and infrastructure provision has been underpinned by internationally driven changes to the constitutional position of private property. Trade agreements like the General Agreement on Trade in Services (the GATS) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are being used to force reforms in member states' domestic laws so that legal treatment of private property conforms to the US constitutional position.

Multilateral agreements on investment are crucial components of the liberalising agenda. Various political movements have mobilised to contest international trade and investment agreements.

PDF of complete paper available here

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Globalization, labour and socialist renewal

Hugo Radice (University of Leeds)

In this paper I argue that the development of a credible socialist movement for the coming century is held back by two central features of left politics in the last century: its repeated compromises with bourgeois nationalism, and its failure to develop a critique of labour. On the national question, the trend of concentration and centralization of capital has unquestionably re-emerged as a global rather than a national phenomenon: this is the real content of the much-touted'globalization'. This transfromation has by now rendered meaningless the concept of national economic development which tied the working classes and their political leaderships to the bourgeoisie - even when they had supposedly overthrown it ("socialism in one country").

Now more than ever, socialism has to be conceived and fought for on a global level. At the same time, socialists have mostly relied on a radical bourgeois critique of the organization of production and work. This focuses on the labour market, and especially on the issue of unemployment, seeking not to overthrow but to extend and universalise the capitalist form of wage labour. It largely ignores the social divisions of labour, the forms of non-wage labour, and the real subordination of labour through the evolution of the capitalist labour process. The resulting politics of labour has restricted trade union movements to reformism goals, structures and methods, and has driven a wedge between unions and the'new social movements'.

The paper argues that a decisive break with these two components of 20th-century left theory and practice is a necessary (if not sufficient) feature of a meaningful socialist renewal.

PDF of complete paper available here

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New Labour's Knowledge Economy vs critical pedagogy: the Battle in Seattle and its significance for education

Glenn Rikowski (University of Central England, Birmingham)

What do struggles against transnational institutions (such as the WTO) and globalisation have to do with what goes on in education? This paper explores this question.

Section 1 focuses on establishing links between globalisation, competitiveness, enhancing the quality of labour-power throughout the national capital and'modernisation' of education and training systems as strategy for raising labour-power quality. These relations are explored within the context of UK education policy.

In section two, the relationship between New Labour's education policy and its perspective on the Knowledge Economy (using DfEE/DTI web site material) is explored. New Labour's Knowledge Economy is critically examined through an analysis of labour-power and human capital (the social form that labour-power assumes in capitalist society). The claim that the Knowledge Economy is a ënew economy' is exploded through an analysis of value (based principally on Marx's TSV Part One).

Section 3 indicates how struggles against capital(ism) blow holes in New Labour's strategy of'active education policy for globalisation'. Hitching education policy to globalisation and the knowledge economy incurs risks both for labour and capital. Section 4 poses an alternative to ëEducation for the Knowledge Economy': critical pedagogy. Through recent work of Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur, critical pedagogy is presented as a socialist form of pedagogy that disrupts the'logic' of education flowing from an acceptance of capitalist reality in general, and the knowledge economy in particular. Linking up with the pedagogy of Che Guevara and Paulo Freire, McLaren's most recent book outlines a ëpedagogy of revolution'.

The Concluding section summarises the issues and discusses a recent call by the Hillcole Group of Radical Left Educators for an Assembly of Alternatives in Education.

Glenn Rikowski is Senior Research Fellow in Lifelong Learning, Faculty of Education, University of Central England. He is a member of the Hillcole Group of Radical Left Educators. His recent co-edited collection (with Dave Hill, Peter McLaren and Mike Cole), Postmodernism in Educational Theory: Education and the Politics of Human Resistance - a collection of articles by Marxist educators providing wide-ranging critiques and alternatives to educational postmodernism - was published by the Tufnell Press (London) in 1999.

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The Co-option of Radicalism: coercion, community and civil society

Terry Robson (University of Ulster, Derry)

There are many who view the emergence of a community action dynamic as one which has the constituency and the power to affect the pace of local development. Such a dynamic implies a rejection of the planned economy as well as a passionate embracing of the philosophy of ësmall is best'. Many disenchanted by the failure of socialist parties to respond effectively to the widening gulf between rich and poor, turned to a more inclusive ëcommunity' politics as an alternative. A new political correctness appeared in which community rather than class became the motor for change. Many of these developments satisfy a ëNew' Labour leadership's needs aimed at minimising and nullifying the negative effects of them finally abandoning socialist solutions. Against such a background community workers warmly embrace this new direction; enthusiastically endorsing a new communitarianism in which principles of subsidiarity are believed to have the power to replace a weakening welfare state.

In this paper three contrasting examples are presented as evidence of these changes. All of the following represent the nature of the failing expectations taking place in the world of ëcommunity' politics as the concept of ësocial partnership'