Worker resistance
Working people are hardly prepared to face the present financial crisis, writes Dan La Botz. But they are now resisting. Their resistance to the assaults by capital is on the rise globally as corporations are using the crisis as a cover for laying off workers and restructuring labor markets through plant relocation and wage cuts. Labor which are mostly working in automotive and real estate industry are inside this resistance
Dan, who teaches history and Latin American studies at Miami University in Ohio, writes: “The working class does not have independent organizations with which it can fight for itself and for society at large”. Labor unions in most countries have long been subordinated to capital and government, and have become thoroughly bureaucratic and unresponsive to workers’ needs. In some places company and gangster unions dominate the scene, while in other countries the so-called unions are really state institutions created to control workers (“The Global Crisis and the World Labor Movement”,
The Economic Crisis Reader, Economic Affairs Bureau, Boston, 2009). But this has failed to eliminate the process of protest. Dan observes: “History suggests that from the onset of a depression to the beginning of a mass movement it may take years for the working class to absorb intellectually and emotionally what has happened to them and then finally assert their righteous indignation and begin to act.”
Capitalism in the twenty-first century has “expanded, and its penetration of peoples, states, and regions of the world has deepened”. [A]lmost everywhere the system has reduced government social welfare budgets and reorganized social welfare programs. In the course of these developments, capital has transformed its relationship to unions in the workplace and to labor parties in society” (ibid). But the transformation of the relationship could not transform the relationship between labour and capital.
Capital’s all out effort is to appropriate labour. “The fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe opened up that region to private capitalist investment from the West. The collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s evolution to a capitalist economy, and the opening up of India’s economy have brought about what Thomas L. Friedman called “the great doubling” of the world capitalist labor force, adding 1.3 billion workers.
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