Capitalism and accumulation by dispossession
In his introduction to the
meeting, Eddie Webster
emphasised the importance of a Southern perspective on globalisation and
labour. The increasing informalisation of workers in the periphery of the
labour market in the Global South and their daily struggles for survival and
against exploitation, has made their organisation a key task in the global
political economy. Drawing on David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by
dispossession, Webster identified new ways of dispossession in times of
neo-liberalism around expanded free trade treaties, processes of
financialisation and increasing forms of insecure work. And yet, starting from
a sense of injustice, there are also new sources of labour power as reflected
in the occupation of space, the blocking of roads, or societal power expressed
in alliances between workers and other social movements around issues of social
justice.
From Free Trade to Fair Trade
Against the background of
capitalism’s uneven and combined development, national labour movements find
themselves in rather different positions within the global political economy.
Unsurprisingly, there are tensions over free trade policies. While many
Northern trade unions still assume that free trade as such is positive in
helping to protect their members’ jobs in export industries, labour movements
from the Global South are critical, since free trade has often resulted in
deindustrialisation and the loss of jobs in their countries.
In my paper ‘From Free Trade
to Fair Trade’, I focused on proposals of potentially joint demands, which
could be adopted by all labour movements regardless of their particular
position in the global political economy. These proposals centred around two
areas, (1) the protection of national sovereignty and national policy space
allowing countries to pursue independently additional objectives to trade and
including potentially food sovereignty, the independent use of raw materials
and democratisation of trade policy-making, as well as (2) demands towards
curtailing the power of TNCs, including the establishment of new regulations of
transnational finance to combat tax avoidance and an international commitment
to eradicate corporate corruption.
 |
| Delegates at the SIGTUR Congress in Perth, December 2013 |
In discussions of this
paper, colleagues from Cosatu emphasised Samir Amin’s focus on delinking from
the global economy as a way towards independent development. Self-reliance of
individual countries or perhaps regional groups of countries may be a more
sustainable way forward than incorporation into global capitalism and its
exploitative core-periphery relations. By contrast, colleagues from Latin
America and here the Brazilian CUT and the Argentinian CTA were sceptical about
the notion of delinking. In their view, this was a concept of the past.
Perhaps, members of the Futures Commission concluded, delinking from capitalism
was necessary, but trade relations based on solidarity with other countries
remained important.
Tax Justice
Robert O’Brien,
together with colleagues from McMaster University in Canada, looked more
closely at the issues surrounding tax avoidance and tax evasion. As he made
clear, from a labour perspective, it is not useful to distinguish between tax
evasion, assumed to be illegal, and tax avoidance, since the latter is often
badly defined and still involves the non-payment of large amounts of tax by
TNCs. Against the background of international competition, large TNCs and
accounting firms are the main beneficiaries of these practices. By using tax
havens through strategies of transfer pricing, relocation of property rights,
etc., they secure enormous profits often at expense of some of the poorest
countries in the world.
In order to counter these
exploitative practices, O’Brien referred to work by the Tax Justice Network, which demands a
country by country report of TNCs, a unitary tax as well as automatic reporting
on wealthy individuals. In general, should we not demand higher corporate tax
levels from a labour perspective?
In discussions of tax
justice, Samantha Ashman pointed out that capital flight, made possible by the
deregulation of national financial markets, is one of the key problems.
Neo-liberal deregulation of national financial markets, supposed to attract
foreign direct investment, often results in long-term outflows, when TNCs
siphon off their profits without paying taxes. The re-introduction of capital
controls is, therefore, an essential part of any alternative to neo-liberalism.
Alternatives to Privatisation: The Potential of the Public.
In her contribution to the meeting,
Hilary Wainwright made clear that the private sector has proven itself to be
highly inefficient when it comes to providing essential services. If the move
towards the privatisation of the public sector continues, then also because the
private sector has become increasingly embedded in the state, the public sector
as such depoliticised and neo-liberalism the dominant economic ideology within
international organisations such as the WTO.
And yet, against the failure of the
private, the public contains the alternative to neo-liberalism. Organised
workers, Wainwright argued, can become the democratic drivers of public sector
improvement. Thus, it is workers’ practical knowledge of their own jobs, which
is used as the source of innovation. Importantly, in a range of concrete
examples from public sector workers in Newcastly/UK to the water sector in Uruguay
(see The
Tragedy of the Private – The Potential of the Public), she made clear that
trade unions, while working together with management in these processes of
innovation, always need to maintain their autonomy.
Alternative
Conceptions of a ‘Just Transition’ from Fossil-fuel Capitalism
The
challenge of transnational capital
The key issue, ultimately, is who is
controlling the transition and who benefits? As long as transition is captured
by corporate actors, workers, people and the environment will suffer.
Ultimately, it is the power of large TNCs, which is at the heart of the problem
in all these areas of trade, tax avoidance, privatisation of services and
climate change. Any alternative to neo-liberalism will have to address the
power of transnational capital.
As Rob Lambert argued in his closing
comments, unions need to establish links with wider society in new ways to
rebuild power, able to counter transnational capital. Could trade unions as part
of a broader movement of the dispossessed fulfil this role? What are the new
ways of organising informal workers and the dispossessed? What can be the role
of political parties in this process and how can they be linked more closely to
civil society? The key objective of the Futures Commission is to contribute to
answering this kind of questions.
The
next steps of the Futures Commission
Importantly, the Commission can only
develop proposals for further discussion within SIGTUR affiliates. The Commission
cannot produce blueprints for an alternative future. Alternatives will always
only result from concrete struggles against neo-liberal exploitation. Hence, it
was decided to produce an educational booklet on the basis of the four papers
presented at the meeting, with which these proposals can then be disseminated
amongst the members of the various trade unions, affiliated to SIGTUR. The hope
is that a process is thereby started, in which the discussion of alternatives
is broadened and deepened, ultimately resulting in concrete change towards a
more just and sustainable future.
Prof. Andreas Bieler
Professor of Political Economy
University of Nottingham/UK
Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk
Personal website: http://andreasbieler.net
13 April 2015
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