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Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo wrote
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/06/private-sector-strike-wave-union-strategy
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This article, with its emphasis on reviving the strike, especially in
the "private sector," gets us not one flea-hop closer to any resolution
of the barriers to working class organization. Referring to the "private
sector" as some kind of monolithic entity is one problem. There are
virtually countless divisions within private sector employment and
moreover within the working class generally, including the workers whose
labor cannot be shipped offshore; and there's the obvious, but
completely overlooked in this article, move of capital to cut costs by
shipping more and more production jobs to low-wage areas. And what's
also blindingly obvious is that this cries out for worker organizing and
solidarity globally, not just locally, and an end to pitting national
divisions of labor against each other. As far as the author gets is:
"isolated groups of workers...will require the support of national unions."
There's the long-established, structurally entrenched practice of labor
leadership aligning with capital, behind workers' backs and against
workers' interests; and as well, the virtually undisguised state support
of capital against labor, through repressive labor legislation and
stacked mediating bodies set up by government.
There's the fact that almost all areas of labor are increasingly subject
to automation, artificial intelligence, digitation, unforeseen
permutations and spin-offs leading to further ways capital can displace
human labor, if and when the cost of labor is perceived to be greater
than the cost of the dead labor/constant capital which can replace it.
There's the threat that this furthers invidious distinctions among
fully-employed, partially employed and unemployed workers, and the
threat of increase in the reserve army of labor, adding to the
effectiveness with which wages are kept below subsistence, and
augmentation of the pool from which labor is easily replaced.
There is the undoubted fact that workers in the privileged regions of
the world, and within national boundaries, are separated by jealously
guarded distinctions from workers in lower-wage areas. This is
reinforced by nationalism, racism, anti-immigrant bias, invidious job
description and feelings of cultural superiority. It would seem, at
least for now with worker power decimated, as if the only discernible
way out is through a growing downward spiral of wages in dominant
privileged areas toward global wage equalization.
There's the growing recognition by capital of its global positioning,
and of its need for closer, more sophisticated, more authoritarian
combination among segments of world-wide capital - facilitated through
international organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, ILO,
NAFTA, CAFTA, EU, G7 and G20, instrumentalized UN organizations, Davos,
Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, World Economic Forum.
It does not so much as mention any of these impediments to worker
organization, let alone any discussion of the blindingly obvious need to
kick over the whole vicious, treacherous, dangerously destructive system
of capital accumulation.
One thing going for us, which calls for a wholly expanded discussion pro
and con, is the diversifying global supply chain, where work stoppage in
any sector of these channels can impede over-all profitable production
in multiple areas. Another is the shrinking opportunities for profitable
return on productive capital entailed in the dwindling market for
commodities and services, and the growing spread of cheapened machinery,
as an increasingly unemployed and inadequately employed world population
can no longer buy these commodities.
There's much more wrong with this piece, but the foregoing is a taste of
the woeful, sophomoric level of analysis produced here.
Kind of appears that this article typifies the orientation of Jacobin.
Who vets selection and quality, and who is presently on the board?
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