Confronting exploitation: What labour movement for the 21st century?

Against a back-ground of global economic crisis and heightened geo-political confron-tations, the inter-national labour movement has remained as important as ever for the defence of working people and wider society. And yet international organised labour is also in crisis. In my article ‘Confronting exploitation: What labour movement for the 21^st century’, published in the journal International Union Rights, I argue that we need to go beyond a narrow focus on trade unions as the privileged agent of workers’ interests and understand ‘class’ and ‘class struggle’ more broadly for successful resistance against capitalist exploitation.

 

The capitalist social relations of production, organised around the private ownership or control of the means of production as well as wage labour, is enormously dynamic, but also inevitably crisis ridden. In response to the latter, there is constant structural pressure towards outward expansion to overcome crisis and be it only temporarily. Additionally, this particular mode of production generates labour and capital as the two main classes, inevitably in conflict over wages and working conditions. While the latter are structurally pushed to maximise profits in capitalist competition via lower wages and worse working conditions, the former are inevitably poised to demand a larger share of the products resulting from their labour. Hence, the focus on class struggle between capital and labour and employers’ associations and trade unions as their institutional expressions.

 

Nevertheless, as feminist Marxists assert, capitalist accumulation also depends on unpaid labour in the sphere of social reproduction. In order for a worker to appear at the workplace rested each day, ready to be exploited, a lot of work has to go on in the background to ensure they are clothed, fed and relaxed. This work often takes place in the household and is predominantly carried out by women. Equally, as scholars of racial capitalism remind us, from the very beginning of its emergence and outward expansion, capitalism depended heavily on racial forms of oppression including the proceeds of the Atlantic slave trade and the commodities such as cotton and sugar produced on slave plantations in the Americas. Today, capitalism continues to draw on racism in its expropriation of Indigenous land for extractivist industries, various forms of unfree labour and generally worse conditions of non-white groups when it comes to social services provision. Finally, there is a relentless need for capitalism to draw on fresh cheap natures, underpinning the ongoing destruction of the environment.

 

If capitalism relies not only on the exploitation of wage labour in the sphere of production, but also on the expropriation of unpaid labour in the sphere of social reproduction, on expropriation along racial forms of oppression and a constant flow of cheap natures, then struggles against patriarchy, against racism and against environmental destruction are also moments, when capitalist exploitation is being resisted. These are also moments of class struggle and social movements, environmental groups, feminists and anti-racist movements such as Black Lives Matter are also actors in these class struggles.

 

In short, the labour movements of the 21st century need to go beyond organised labour and include informal labour organisations as well as these other feminist, anti-racist and environmental groups, forming broad alliances in the resistance to capitalist accumulation.

Andreas Bieler

Professor of Political Economy

University of Nottingham/UK

Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk

24 November 2023