Instead of submitting to doom and gloom
when it comes to the implications of global restructuring for labour, Munck
puts forward the bold claim that globalisation has provided labour with new
opportunities for resistance. Not only capital has become integrated across
borders because of globalisation. The ‘uneven nature of workers’
resistance is also combined, and now we can talk realistically of the “workers
of the world” as a unified social presence facing the same problems and looking
for similar outcomes’ (P.3). Throughout the volume, Munck invokes the emerging global
working class, based especially on the global precariat supported by migrant
labour, as the new, powerful subject able to rein in capitalist exploitation.
In his analysis, Munck makes a number of
important contributions to our understanding of the potential future role of
labour. First, he consciously appreciates the different struggles and
experiences of labour in the Global South. Rather than regarding it as less
developed than labour in the Global North and, therefore, in need of assistance
by Northern trade unions, he sees the potential in Southern labour’s strategies
for the global working class as a whole. ‘If in the golden era it
seemed that the workers of the North were the undisputed pioneers of
organization methods and ideological innovation, in the era of globalization
this role has in many ways passed to the workers of the South’ (P.130).
Second, he re-assesses the role of the
global precariat not by understanding it as a separate class, but by
recognising that it has increasingly become the dominant form of labour not
only in the Global South, but increasingly also in the Global North. ‘By
bringing precarity to the North, what globalization has done is to bring the
workers North and workers South into a global working class’ (P.140).
Third, this is combined with a labour
perspective of migration, so often overlooked by labour studies experts. While
recognising migration as a problem for capital, Munck understands it as a
potential positive impetus for labour and trade unions. ‘Certainly,
labour is in movement in many diverse ways and its management is seemingly
beyond even the most stringent border controls of most capitalist states’
(P.159). In short, Munck generates a positive image of the possibilities for an
emerging global working class. ‘I would argue for the concept of a global
precariat (encompassing migrants) as a current manifestation of the working
class that is moving towards a global working class’ (P.148).
As I see it, however, Munck’s reflections
are based on two fundamental theoretical problems. First, he relies on
Polanyi’s notion of ‘double movement’, envisaging that the emergence of an
unfettered market around processes of global restructuring will (almost
inevitably) lead to a counter-movement led by trade unions to re-embed market
relations in a broader social set-up. ‘On the face of it, the global unions are a
formidable social force, and, I would argue, a clear example of the Polanyian
counter-movement, whereby social forces react against the destructive impact of
the unregulated market’ (P.73).
In his analysis of transformations, as
Adam David Morton points out, Polanyi succumbs to a theoretical dualism
‘between an “economy” embedded in social relations or social relations embedded
in the “economy”’ (Morton
2018: 961). Hence, Polanyi is unable to acknowledge the historical
specificity of capitalism and the fact that it is the organisation of
capitalist production around wage labour and the private ownership or control
of the means of production, which produces this separate appearance of economy
and social relations in the first place.
Unsurprisingly, Polanyi himself could only
envisage a re-embedding of the capitalist economy within bourgeois social
relations, a kind of capitalism with a human face. By drawing on Polanyi, Munck
falls into the same trap and condemns his assessment of potential for change to
reformist considerations. The fact that Munck does reflect on overcoming
capitalism in the Conclusion of his book only indicates a misunderstanding of
his own theoretical assumptions.
Second, Munck expresses an unwarranted
optimism when assessing the potential role of his ‘emerging global working
class’. This is not, however, due to his reliance on Polanyi, as is the case of
many others inspired by this notion of ‘double movement’, labelled Pollyanna by
Michael
Burawoy (2010). Rather, the problem here is Munck’s autonomist Marxist
approach, which one-sidedly celebrates labour’s agency without acknowledging
the structuring conditions of capitalism.
Thus, Munck puts the capital/labour relationship
at the heart of his understanding of historical development. ‘Capitalisms
have always responded to strong labour movements through technological
innovation, or through the shift of production to other locations’ (P.220). He
thereby overlooks that capital does not only respond to labour militancy, but
equally to inter-capitalist competition, itself the result of the way
capitalist production is organised around the private ownership or control of
the means of production and wage labour. As Marx pointed out, ‘under free
competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual
capitalist as a coercive force external to him’ (Marx 1867/1990:
381). It is especially this inter-capitalist competition, which drives
capitalism’s relentless outward expansion in search for higher profits.
Hence, the task cannot be to paint an
unwarranted, optimistic picture of an apparently emerging global working class.
Instead, we need to assess soberly the current situation of labour through a
historical materialist approach, which is able to conceptualise the key role of
labour, broadly defined, in class struggle, while at the same time
acknowledging the structuring conditions of capitalism constraining the range
of strategies available to labour (Bieler
and Morton 2018: 36-50).
A brief overview of labour’s current
situation suffices to caution against Munck’s optimistic picture. In Europe, since
the defeat of SYRIZA in Greece in 2015, the left has been almost invisible at
the European level. Gone are the days, when a multitude of groups and tens of
thousands of activists gathered in European Social Forums claiming that
‘Another Europe is possible!’ Many forces of labour such as in Scandinavia have
refocused their attention on the national level, often without much success, as
the recent electoral defeat of the Labour Party in the UK attests. In fact, it
is the far right with its xenophobic, racist rhetoric, which has become
significantly stronger in almost every national context.
Elsewhere, the picture is not much more
promising either. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), South
Africa’s largest labour confederation, has split and is deeply damaged through
its decades-long alliance with the governing African National Congress and
involvement in rolling out neo-liberal restructuring. The Brazilian Central
Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) too, another hopeful, strong trade union in the
past, is in crisis mode, after the coup against the Labour Party’s Dilma
Rousseff in 2016 and the election of the far right Jair Bolsonaro as President
in 2018. The so-called Pink Tide across Latin America in the 2000s has been increasingly
challenged by the right for some time, despite Maduro hanging on in Venezuela
and the recent elections of López Obrador as President of Mexico in 2018 and of
a centre-left government in Argentina in 2019.
Of course, there is always resistance by
labour. Large strikes have contested exploitation in Brazil, South Africa and India
(Nowak 2015,
2019) as well as China
(Bieler
and Lee 2017), for example. Across the European Union, people have
continued to resist the cutbacks of public education and health services or challenged
the shortage of affordable housing (Bailey
et al 2017). Again, however, this does not warrant the notion of an
emerging global working class, able to dictate its conditions to capital.
To be fair, when it comes to concrete
empirical evidence, Munck is actually much more measured than his bold claims
suggest. For example, he acknowledges that ‘our conclusion can only be a
cautious one. Some notable “success stories” have been mentioned, when trade
unions responded imaginatively to the forces unleashed by globalization. This
picture must be tempered, though, with an acknowledgement of the fundamental
social weakening of labour during this period’ (P.135). Again, he seems to be
completely unaware about the implications of his own conceptual assumptions.
Undoubtedly, this book is an important
contribution to our understanding of labour’s potential role in the global
political economy. Munck’s panoramic overview of current labour struggles in
the Global South and North make it a stimulating and interesting read. In sum,
despite the clear theoretical shortcomings, I recommend this book for reading.
This review was first published in the Global Labour Journal, Vol.11(2): 195-8.
Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk
This review was first published in the Global Labour Journal, Vol.11(2): 195-8.
Andreas Bieler
Professor of Political Economy
University of Nottingham/UK
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