The class struggle in China posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalism, china, labour, maoism, neoliberalism, stalinism, state capitalism, trade unions, working class

Chinese working class kicks back posted by Richard Seymour

The Chinese working class is on the move: there is a wave of strikes taking place across China, and they're winning. Workers at Honda have won a 30% pay increase in the latest strike affecting that company, while workers at FoxConn have reportedly been offered a 100% increase in 'basic pay' (with strings attached) after strikes and a string of employee suicides. The strike at FoxConn is particularly auspicious since that company has so far demonstrated considerable success in maintaining a divided, weakened, timid workforce. Across the country, a series of hard-fought strikes have pitted workers against the usual double act of management and cops (strikes are effectively legal, but the Chinese police force is hardly more pacific than the LAPD, and management frequently beat insubordinate workers) resulting in injuries but also some signal successes. The analysis of the China Labour Bulletin suggests two factors here:

1) As ever, the militancy of these workers is driven by hyperintensive rates of exploitation. In recent decades, much of the surplus value accumulated by capital in China has been the result of unpaid labour, accumulated wage arrears that are never paid off. Otherwise, wages are so low that workers have to perform dozens of extra hours of overtime per month in order simply to live.

2) Most of the strikes involve smaller groups of workers, in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands. The absence of independent union organisation and the surveillance capacities of capital mean that workers find it very difficult to organise on a very large scale, which takes time, coordination and an apparatus of communication that those workers as yet lack. But two or three thousand workers in a single factory can much more feasibly halt production.

We have seen waves of strikes and direct action in China before but, Charlie Hore argues, these were mostly of a defensive character. Recent strikes have been offensive. The FT reports:

In fact, China has witnessed considerable industrial unrest in recent decades, much of it localised and attracting little publicity. The causes have tended to be unpaid wages or Dickensian working conditions. While the organisers of such strikes have often got into trouble, in many cases the authorities have taken a relatively relaxed attitude, provided the disputes remained small and non-violent, seeing them as a way of blowing off steam.

Mr Gilholm and other analysts, however, said the Honda strikes were a new development because they focused on wages rather than perceived abuses, meaning even well-run factories could become vulnerable to labour disputes.

“It is a new form of strike – a very symbolic event,” said Liu Cheng, a professor at Shanghai Normal University and an outside adviser in the drafting of the 2008 labour law. After wages had been held down for long periods, he said, “finally there is this explosion. It is because of workers’ growing awareness of labour rights, and more talk and debate about the subject.”

In the strike at the Honda plant in Foshan, notably, workers formed an organisation separately from the official union, with independently elected delegates to represent them vs management. They have also been using new technologies (which the Chinese working class has, after all, manufactured in bulk) to coordinate their actions. The success of those workers has inspired a series of similar actions within Honda, with workers in other plants demanding parity with Foshan. There is another factor that improves labour's bargaining power, and that is the labour shortages that have occurred in many areas as the Chinese government has battled recession by investing heavily in infrastructural projects. To attract workers, some cities have had to raise their minimum wage,which has led to workers in other cities demanding the same. These advantages are temporary - a sudden economic reversal could put workers on the back foot again. But they could produce a movement that will irreversibly alter the status of the Chinese working class.

The threat to capital, the Chinese state and the stock markets, is that a model of de facto independent trade unionism will start to be taken up and replicated among other Chinese workers, and will result in an increasing share of production going to the working class. More generally, it poses a potential long-term political threat to what has been one of the most advantageous states for capitalist investment and development in the world. The ability to appropriate basically free labour, to super-exploit migrant workers moving from the villages to the coastal slums, to accumulate some of the fattest profits in the world, has always depended on containing the expanding working class. For example, the migrant worker economy in China works much the same way as it does elsewhere. Millions of workers flee impoverished rural lives, where a basic safety net is being taken away, many of them relying on false identification papers to get a job. Once they've got a job, they often end up as part of a live-in work-force, sleeping in dormitories, eating collectively. They are a cheap labour force, producing for an export market. If they acquire political and economic rights - increase their class power in other words - their susceptibility to this kind of exploitation is greatly diminished. Foreign investors in the coastal 'boom' areas may, business papers warn, be frightened away by a period of industrial unrest. Since the CCP is not going to restore some mythical Maoist golden age, it will either have to break the strikes with repression, or find ways to accomodate the workers politically, offer some reforms without substantially threatening profits. Or it may lose control in the long run.

Labels: 'communism', 'socialism', capitalism, china, inequality, maoism, neoliberalism, poverty, ruling class, stalinism, working class

Arundhati Roy and the Maoists posted by Richard Seymour

I see that Arundhati Roy is to be investigated by police in Chhattisgarh over her "links" with Maoist insurgents, who recently killed seventy-six Indian paramilitaries. This is a backlash by the BJP-controlled state in response to an article that she wrote for Outlook magazine, which detailed her encounters with Maoist insurgents in Dantewada, central India, where the ambush was staged. The Maoists are among the forces resisting the capitalist takeover of rural India and growing in influence due in part to the failures of the Left Front in West Bengal and to state repression meted out to the communities they operate in - though they are far from alone. In a sympathetic piece, Roy argues that the Maoists are being forced into violence by the state, pushed into a situation where strategies of non-violence are guaranteed to fail. Watch her interview on Indian television here (wherein she castigates the "empty condemnation industry", something we are all very familiar with):



The recent attack in Dantedawa targeted members of the Central Reserve Police Force, a state paramilitary outfit that forms the sharp edge of its counterinsurgency operations. A new wing of the CRPF, known as the Combat Battalions for Resolute Action (CoBRA), was created two years ago to lead the fight against the Naxals. But their actions, in a campaign that has become known as "Operation Green Hunt", are also aimed at activists and forest workers, where there are movements to assert popular control of the forest resources. The Indian state has also been using various acts of draconian legislation to attack activists among the rural poor and label them 'gangsters'. The Adivasis are subject to torture and rape in Indian state prisons. The war is unnecessary. I think the Maoists are serious when they say they are prepared for talks. Their statement after the Dantedawa attack repeats the point that they are prepared for negotiations, but if negotiations are not available then more attacks will follow. If they ultimately believe that armed insurrection is the route to emancipation, it does not mean that they are unwilling to resolve this battle through discussions.

However, it does not follow from this that the Maoists are behaving in a responsible, politically appropriate fashion. Their tendency to impose themselves as the 'vanguard' of popular movements, by force if necessary, gives the state an opportunity to go on a war footing. In this way, popular resistance to the acts of enclosure by the state, by mining companies and so on, can be repressed. The Indian journal Liberation has a four part analysis of the Maoists, which critically engages with their politics here, here, here and here. The analysis concludes:

While resisting the Operation Green Hunt, progressive democratic forces must also question and reject the Maoists’ exclusive emphasis on armed actions. The neo-liberal policies and especially the corporate plunder of our precious natural and human resources have generated tremendous amount of mass resentment across the country. Whether it is the rural poor’s struggle for land, wages and survival or outburst of farmers’ anger against corporate acquisition of agricultural land or distress sale of agricultural produce, student unrest against commercialization and privatization of education or struggle of dalits, adivasis and women for dignity and equality, the demand for separate states or for withdrawal of draconian laws, the country is witnessing powerful mass struggles in almost all states. The Maoists have no policy of participating in or advancing these struggles except by armed means.

...

While not disregarding the ultimate role of force as the midwife of any fundamental or radical social change, the political nature and grammar of the struggle of contending classes in modern society must be recognized. To put an end to the political hegemony of the ruling classes, the working people must assert themselves as an alternative and independent political force – they must develop an alternative discourse of people’s power against the power and domination of capital. And this can be achieved only through wide-ranging initiatives and assertion of the people. There can be no shortcuts, no bypasses. Will the Indian Maoists ever realize this?

Today Left politics in India is poised for a new turn. The CPI(M)-led politics of ‘Marxist’ elitism and bourgeois respectability which revolves around compromise and capitulation vis-à-vis the ruling classes has all but collapsed on the soil of Bengal. Naturally, its projection on the all-India plane is also in for a serious crisis. The Left ground today can only be reclaimed through powerful struggles and initiatives in the democratic arena. For a resurgence of the Left we need a new realignment, a new model of fighting unity based on mass struggles. It remains to be seen how and to what extent this new situation is grasped, in theory and practice, by different Left trends in the country. And the future alone will tell us whether the Maoists too will come out of their orbit of one-dimensional theory and practice to reposition themselves as a constituent or participant in this new realignment of the Left.

And Roy's approach to the issue has stimulated some debate among socialists (see here, here, and here). In general, the criticism is that she is naive about the politics of the Maoists and thus uncritically celebrates their resistance without recognising the limitations of their outlook and methods, and the damage they can do the popular movements that Roy supports. Nevertheless, whatever the weaknesses of Roy's approach, she has used her celebrity to champion the oppressed, to lay into the Hindutva reactionaries, attack the Gandhian pieties of the liberal bourgeoisie which relies on the right-wing and the state do its dirty work, and force these issues into the capitalist media.

Labels: capitalism, india, maoism, marxism, neoliberalism, privatisation, socialism