JOURNAL: Pillay and van der Walt, 2012, "Assessing the Politics of Organized Labour in Asia, Africa and Latin America at the Start of the 21st Century" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Labor, Capital and Society, 2012
This is the introduction to a special issue of ‘Labour, Capital and Society’ produced in collaboration with the Global Labour University (GLU). The papers included address some of the key issues about organized labour’s current political role and organizing challenges, with countries covered including Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Ecuador, India, Indonesia and South Africa. The studies, editors Devan Pillay and Lucien van der Walt argue, demonstrate the on-going importance of unions, despite their contradictions, as an irreplaceable force for progressive social change for the popular classes, not least in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The world today is not in a “post-industrial”, information” phase, or in a post-neo-liberal era; it is instead essentially classic capitalism, with an ever-growing working class majority. Post-colonial ruling classes have been active authors of the neoliberal agenda, at the expense of their working classes. The current context affirms the centrality of unions, and of organized workers more generally, and it demonstrates that union struggles – and alliances with other sectors of the popular classes – make key reforms like the so-called Standard Employment Relationship possible in the first place. The more that the fracturing of the popular classes is challenged by linking unions to other popular class forces, the more successful such struggles become. The more that unions build solidarity within and across borders, the more space is opened for real social and economic change. While there is a political vacuum in the heart of current labour struggles – in that they are often defensive, and lack a clear vision of transformation beyond minor reforms – this same situation also opens space for a profound renewal of a left project centred upon participatory democracy. But what form could this take? Should unions participate in state forums and elections, seeking to wield the state (in a more traditional labour / socialist mode)? Or instead, build autonomous and oppositional bodies of counter-power that pressure the state for reforms from outside (while refusing participate in the state), instead stressing forms of mobilization that prefigure a post-capitalist, self-managed, stateless future (in a more anarchist/syndicalist mode)? Or are there other options? This paper opens these questions, without providing easy answers."""
Rethinking unions, registering socialism
Socialist Register, 2012
A fter three decades of the waning of trade unions as a social force, their generally anaemic response to the Great Financial Crisis cannot but be registered. With the failure to build on the golden opportunity offered up by Occupy's demonstration that audacious action can touch a populist nerve-punctuated by the eventual defeat of Wisconsin labour's recall electoral strategy over a year after its exemplary occupation of the state assembly (which predated Occupy Wall Street by six months)-the left today confronts a more discomfiting question: does the rejuvenation of unions still really remain possible, or are unions now exhausted as an effective historical form through which working people organize themselves? To be clear, the issue is not whether unions and union-led struggles are about to disappear. Unions will stagger on, sometimes very heroically. They will carry on organizing, bargaining and filing grievances. And they will continue to strike, march, demonstrate and on occasion remind us of working-class potentials. But trade unions as they now exist no longer appear capable of adequately responding to the scale of the problems working classes face-whether the arena of struggle is the workplace, the bargaining table, the community, electoral politics or ideological debate. 1 Although a recent symposium on unions in developed capitalist countries concluded that 'the declining trend is visible everywhere', this essay will focus on the impasse in US labour. 2 The last time the US working class faced a comparable economic and internal crisis, during the 1930s, industrial unionism came to the fore. What new form of working-class organization might explode onto the agenda this time? Then, communists and socialists were vital to the formation and orientation of unions, at a time when radical organizers were inspired by the notion that workers could become the historical agents of a new society and unions might become schools for socialism. Is it still credible, in light of recent history, to believe that working people might one day be at the centre of radical social transformations? 3
Introduction to Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism
Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India, 2011
Introduction to Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India, (New York: Columbia University Press and New Delhi: Tulika Books), 2011, pp. 1-8.
Labor Unions and their Role in the Political Economy of Nations
Worldwide Journal of Multi-Disciplinary Studies | Published by: Dama Academic Scholarly & Scientific , 2020
We are all aware of the existence of labor unions as part of the socioeconomic structure and the political economy of nations. However, many of us are sometimes confused between whether there exists a need for labor unions especially in the context of the routine bad press they receive as obstacles to progress and economic growth of nations. Indeed, in recent years, thanks to the dominance of the neoliberal policies pursued in the West and beginning to spread across the globe, it is common for capitalists and the media alike to paint the functioning of labor unions in a negative light. However, this was not always the case and there was a time when labor unions were looked upon as necessary and even vital bodies for the healthy functioning of democracy and capitalism.
The “urgent anthropology” of labor unions
Dialectical Anthropology
A propsectivist anthropology should be concerned first of all with a kind of 'urgent anthropology' that consists of understanding the social forms into which we may be about to move. Nash and Hopkins 1976 These co-authored words of feminist anthropologist June Nash are a fitting coda for this set of ethnographic articles on labor unions of miners in Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo, maquila and agricultural workers on the U.S.-Mexico border, steelworkers in Argentina, and ship workers in Greece. June Nash was a pioneer in the anthropology of unions. She saw them embedded in community life and as agents of social and political change. She understood that unionsmembership in them, identification with them, and the subjectivities they make-combine local social structures, rituals, and belief systems with ideologies, organizational structures, and political aspiration that are authored in national and international arenas. She mapped how unions are connected to uneven capitalist accumulation at a world scale, whether that manifests as the reimposition of colonial capitalist extraction after the 1964 coup in Bolivia or deindustrialization in a New England U.S. city in the 1980s. Nash was a dedicated fieldworker, and she wrote eloquently about what unions meant to her informants. She dealt in affect, social relations, and politics, and she had her eye on labor and capital at local and global scales. I offer comments on this special issue as a tribute to June Nash who died in the last weeks of 2019 at the age of 93. We would not have such a developed anthropology of unions today without her foundational scholarship. Her legacy should remind us of the importance of both close ethnography and world historical anthropology for understating the role of unions in the contemporary moment. The epigraph is taken from Nash's co-edited Popular Participation in Social Change: Cooperatives, Collectives, and Nationalized Industry (Nash and Hopkins 1976). Her own contribution was a chapter on workers' control in Bolivia during the Revolutionary Nationalist