prol-position news #10
Sadly the last issue of Prol-Position. This issue presents 'preliminary thoughts on the current crisis' and the editorial (reproduced here in complete form), reflects upon the global transformation of the conditions of exploitation that PP has tracked and reported on since 2005. We wish best of luck to PPers with the online 'version and any future projects
Last Issue - Looking back in anger
This will be the last issue of the actual prol-position newsletter, but we will keep putting new stuff on the website. The decision to stop publishing is mostly out of logistic reasons, but also some sense of the limitations of the project itself (more below).
We continue working on other projects, for example with Wildcat (www.wildcat-www.de), with gongchao (www.gongchao.org), which is reporting especially on the situation in China, and the newsletter about the developments in the city of Gurgaon, Northern India (http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com).
Since we published the first issue or prol-position news in March 2005 the world-wide transformation of the conditions of exploitation continued, factories and call centers kept on moving around the globe, workers followed them or went ahead, markets boomed and slumped, laws were made and broken, assembly-lines and offices got re-shuffled and re-connected to the world wide web of transport and divided labor. The newsletters reflected these changes, ranging from reports about working-conditions in modern Western-European assembly plants or middle-class homes, migration experiences of Polish work gangs and Spanish olive pickers, occupations of houses, factories or university departments, proletarian self-management in Argentina, workfare in Israel or riots in China. Writing or translating these reports we tried to go beyond eclecticism, we tried to capture the relation between these material changes of exploitation and workers' unrest, we tried to highlight the potential of a real proletarian internationalism based on the international character of social production.
The reports remained isolated glimpses of reality, anything which would go beyond that – an actual research and practical intervention – would require more collective efforts. The newsletter did not end up being the spark for an organized and coherent collective debate, although we love all the correspondence we have got, and all the feedback, and playing our role in providing some empirical reports which we hope have been useful.
The newsletter did not manage to organize a collective debate, in that way its short-comings mirror the current condition of the radical left: an "autonomous" political movement which operates self-organized within a social vacuum. Without any real roots in proletarian reality, which inevitably leaves us as observers and critics, rather than part of the mix. The age-old problem of the political ghetto that we all bemoan, but rarely act on.
Some of the common pitfalls are: some reminisces of 1970s work-place based groups, which barricaded themselves on their shop-floor or within their sector-boundaries; a party- and syndicalist left which relates to workers' reality mainly through their organizational requirements or campaigns; last, but not least, the better wing of academia, which manages to come up with insightful analysis of certain sections or developments of class relations, but which remain on an individual and "scientific" level.
We feel that in this situation better "networking" won't do the job. We rather think that an actual re-composition of the radical left is required. It will mainly depend on the next cycle of class upheavals to materially re-organize and politically re-orientate the radical left, our collectivity – this cycle is in the making, simmering under the surface of international crisis and sped-up re-structuring.
Never mind - Looking forward in anger
The challenge will be to relate the political "world view" on capitalist development, e.g. analytical works like "Forces of Labor" (Beverly Silver) back to the nitty-gritty proletarian reality and our collective intervention in it. The challenge is not taking place in our head-space, but in front of our eyes: industrial conditions in China or South-East Asia enter workers' reality in the global North, not merely on the level of media-hype threatening with low wages or promising cheap consumer goods, but on a practical level, e.g. through migration or cooperation within the production process, like the reports on Romania and Eastern Germany in this newsletter demonstrate. The international crisis is rooted in the industrial profit-squeeze and will return to it, affecting millions of workers at the same time and across borders.
We can do our share to help demonstrate that we are not only victims of lay-offs or personal bankruptcy, but a global class of producers feeding the frenzy. We are looking forward to more trouble, we will keep on translating reports about it, and we will publish these reports as single articles on the prol-position website.
Stay tuned - Love and Rage
Some Prols - October 2008
This edition's articles
Right after this editorial we document some preliminary thoughts on the current crisis: Stop looking into the headlights. Right after that you will find three articles translated from the China-supplement of wildcat #80 (winter 2007/8). The first article, Faces of migration, deals with the formation of a new working class in China, the migrant workers, who leave the countryside to find work in the cities and by now stage strikes in factories, construction sites etc. The second one, The Generation of Unhappy Workers, concerns the old working class, the urban state workers, who where attacked by the economic restructuring during the reforms. Many of them were laid-off and fought back. The third article, Female Workers under Maoist Patriarchy, is about the urban women workers born in the 1950s and 1960s in China. Following a book based on interviews with this generation of women workers it describes how under Maoism there was a particular form of patriarchal repression and exploitation.1
The second part of the newsletter is all about struggles in Romania. It is the result of an ongoing research project into the social changes and conflicts there. More Noise, Self-Respect and Daring is a report from the picket-line during the strike at the Dacia-Renault plant in Pitesti, Romania, in March 2008. It was "the most significant struggle in the Romanian private sector since 1989". Europe's Eastern Gateway Blocked is another report from a picket-line, this time from the port of Constanta, where the workers of a container terminal fought for a wage-increase.
The following two articles describe the fate of Asian migrant workers in Romania. With young Romanian workers moving to the West to find better incomes, there is a labor shortage in most parts of Romania. The textile industry is hit hard because the wages are even lower than in other industries in Romania. Without local skilled workers some bosses started experimeting with getting migrant labor from Asia. "We have to work like horses!" is an account of the experience of about 100 female textile workers from the Philippines in Sibiu, Romania. Hired in Manila they discovered that their employer, the Romanian company Mondostar, did not pay them the promised wage and overtime bonus, so they staged an overtime boycott. Factory or Prison follows the experience of 500 male textile workers from Bangladesh, working for the Italian company Wear in Bacau, Romania. Again the company did not pay the promised wages, locked up the workers so they could not escape, and did not give them enough food.2
A workplace report from a machine plant in Brandenburg, Germany, entitled Bad vibrations, and an interview and critique on an experience with an organizing-campaign of precarious service workers, "New Labor – New Unions", rounds up this edition.3
1 If you can read German you find more information and texts on the new website www.gongchao.org and the wildcat-dossier on China www.wildcat-www.de/dossiers/china
2 The German versions of these articles and upcoming updates on the struggles in Romania can be found on http://www.labournet.de
3 More on organizing see this article in the previous edition: http://www.prol-position.net/nl/2007/09/organizing)
Summaries and links to individual reports in the issue:
The current financial crisis is rooted in the crisis of social production: profit squeeze / over-accumulation in the industrialized regions of the world, workers unrests and increasing desires in the newly industrialized periphery, major pressure from the roaming rural proletariat of the South, trying to escape the misery of the soil and village life. More...
Even before the beginning of the reforms in 1978 socialist China had experienced migration movements. In the early 1950s millions came from the countryside to the cities to work in the new state industries. At first, they were needed there, but with unemployment and problems with supplies of e.g. food in the mid-50s the government introduced a strict household registration system (hukou). The hukou-system restricted the mobility of most Chinese and kept them in the countryside for the next decades. More...
The Generation of Unhappy Workers in China
During the restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s the urban proletariat of the state-owned factories – the gongren – was the focus of the restructuring and experienced massive layoffs after 1997. Before the reforms the differences between the gongren and the peasants and migrant workers were all too obvious. A part of the gongren had a number of benefits, like a guaranteed work place and better health care, and were considered a strong pillar of the socialist regime. But after the reforms, the urban proletariat became the losers. More...
Female Workers Under Maoist Patriarchy
One may think socialism wiped out the Chinese form of "feudalistic" patriarchy. At least, Maoism improved the women's situation in comparison to the time before "liberation", in the cities as well as on the countryside. After "liberation" in 1949 most urban women did wage labor in state-owned factories or other businesses, while rural women were drawn into the people's communes' labor service. That changed their position in the family, also because due to the low wages in the Mao-era the women's wage was an important part of the family income. More...
On March 24, 2008, about 8,000 of the 13,000 workers at the Dacia car factory in Romania went on an open-ended strike. One of their demands was a wage increase of 50 to 70 percent. For the first time in a strike in Romania, the strikers did not base their demands on standard wages in Romania but compared themselves to Renault workers in Turkey or France, who earn between 900 and 2,000 Euros for the same work (the workers at Dacia earn about 300 Euros). This strike at Dacia is the most significant struggle in the Romanian private sector since 1989 and could be the beginning of a wave of strikes for better living conditions across the country. More...
In Romania the strike wave continues: on Thursday morning, 17th of July 2008, five hundred dock workers at the Agigea Sud terminal went on indefinite strike. The terminal belongs to the container port of Constanta , a town at the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. Their main demands: a wage increase of 700 Ron (about 200 Euros), a bonus for seniority, extra-payment for overtime and a clear regulation of the working-time.The author of this article was in Constanta and talked to the workers. More...
Filipina Textile Workers in Romania
Like many other companies in the Romanian textile and construction sectors, textiles firm Mondostar has had to struggle with a persistent labor shortage for several years. Amongst the local workers hardly anyone is willing to work for the low wages paid in the textile industries. Since three months ago Mondostar has employed 95 women from the Philippines in order to counteract the shrinking supply of labor. Hoping for a good job in Europe, the workers from the Philippines borrowed money while still in their home country. More...
Bangladeshi Workers in Romania
The first workers from Bangladesh that we meet in the town-center of Bacau belong to the 74 construction-workers who have been employed for three months by the firm Rombet S.A. They are working with local construction-workers on the large construction-site for a new shopping mall. They cannot complain about the food and accommodation. "But the wages are much too low! We have a contract for 500 US-Dollars on 8 hours a day. But we work 10 hours each day, including Saturday, and we only get 375 US-Dollars!" More...
Winter 2008. Lunch break at MOB, a special machine manufacturing company in Luckenwalde, 60 kilometers south of Berlin, an industrial dormitory town, high unemployment, and the home town of Rudi Dutschke, the 1968 SDS student leader. China and the international supply chains reverberate in this German small town proletarian daily life. The 80 workmates are from the hinterland of Brandenburg and Saxony, mostly village types, but they have assembled giant engine washing-machines in car factories around the globe: for VW in Poznan, Poland, Chery in China, Daimler in Western Germany, Volvo in Sweden, BMW in the USA, Conti in Japan or for wheel rim manufacturing plants in Tijuana, Mexico. More...
(Former) left radicals and unions work together – not only in political alliances, e.g. when organizing certain campaigns (clean clothes, campaigns for global social rights etc.). In wildcat #78 we explained and criticized the "organizing"-approach which has created illusions concerning a "new type of union". The illusions prevail mainly amongst those lefties who got engaged in the debate about 'precarity' during the last years. If we start from the general critique of unions as organizations of representation of workers then we have to state that 'organizing' is not better than the traditional union work, but rather its continuation. 'Organizing' certainly does not stand for a rupture neither with the traditional claim to represent and nor with social partnership. More...
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