Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

Author:Paul Mason
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780374710699
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-02-08T14:00:00+00:00

7

Beautiful Troublemakers

In 1980, the French intellectual André Gorz announced that the working class was dead. It was permanently divided as a social group and culturally dispossessed, and its role as an agent of social progress was over.

The thought was spectacularly mistimed. Between then and now the global workforce has doubled in size. Offshoring, globalization and the entry of former communist countries into the world market have boosted the number of waged workers to above 3 billion.1 In the process, what it means to be a worker has changed. For about 150 years, the word ‘proletariat’ meant a predominantly white, male, manual labour force located in the developed world. Over the past thirty years it has become a multicoloured, majority-female workforce, centred in the global south.

Yet in one sense Gorz was right. In the same thirty years we’ve seen a slide in trade union membership, the decline of labour’s bargaining power in the developed world and a fall in wages as a share of GDP. This is the ultimate cause of the problem lamented by Thomas Piketty: the inability of workers to defend their share of the total product, and the rise in inequality.2

Alongside material weakness, the labour movement has suffered an ideological collapse – and one felt just as keenly in the factories of Nairobi and Shenzhen as in the rust-belt cities of Europe and America. The left’s political defeat after 1989 was so complete that, as the philosopher Fredric Jameson wrote, it became easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.3 Put more brutally, it had become impossible to imagine this working class – disorganized, in thrall to consumerism and individualism – overthrowing capitalism. The old sequence – mass strikes, barricades, soviets and working-class government – looks utopian in a world where the key ingredient, solidarity in the workplace, has gone AWOL.

The optimists among the left countered that the defeats were just cyclical. It was plausible: the history of the labour movement does show clear patterns of formation and decomposition that map closely to the Kondratieff long cycles.

But they were wrong. This is a strategic change. Those who cling to the idea that the proletariat is the only force that can push society beyond capitalism are ignoring two key features of the modern world: that the route to postcapitalism is different; and that the agent of change has become, potentially, everyone on earth.

The new workforce – in the factories of Bangladesh and China – is being formed by a process just as harsh as the one workers in England went through 200 years ago. Who can forget the contract issued at Apple’s Foxconn plants in China, in 2010, forcing workers to sign a pledge not to commit suicide due to workplace stress?4

However, this time around, the process of industrialization is failing to blow away the social and ideological cobwebs of pre-industrial life. Ethnic rivalries, the village network, religious fundamentalism and organized crime are the obstacles labour organizers in the global south encounter constantly – and fail to overcome.

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