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George Caffentzis, Greek Interview, Part 2
May 8, 2003 - 6:50pm -- hydrarchist
jim submits: here is part II. The printable version of Part I is to be found here.
Part II
>
G: This will bring us to the second part of the interview. My question is: what has this "antiglobalization movement" contributed to the cause of the liberation of the planetary proletariat? I saw in the text you gave us that you consider the "antiglobalization movement" to be a working class movement. I don't agree with that. Until now we have been talking about issues of wage, capitalist restructuring, decomposition and recomposition of the working class. Now this political movement which started growing in the late 1990s (due perhaps to the social movements against Structural Adjustment Programs in the so-called Third World) doesn't care to mention any of these things we have been discussing. As far as I see, the "antiglobalization movement" is putting the whole question in terms of institutional reforms. That is why I was surprised to see that you considered this as a working class movement.
A: May I give an example? The Ya Basta group, they did their show in Prague defending the bridge, but in Italy they consider working-class struggles of industrial workers for example, as struggles of people who want to maintain their "privileges" instead of struggling, e.g., for a "guaranteed income" that would cover the whole of society. Or the anarchists that participated in the march in Prague; they do not intervene in working-class struggles because they think these struggles are "corporatist" and merely "economic" struggles that don't bring any social change. These are examples of groups from both Greece and Italy who participated in major "anticapitalist" events, but don't participate or rarely participate in class struggles in their own countries.
But there is a continuity with our previous discussion of the wage, capitalist restructuring, and the decomposition and recomposition of the working class, for one of the central objects of the antiglobalization movement has been the debt and how the debt has been used to attack the wage of the planetary proletariat. That insight is at the heart of this movement.
G: You think so? That's what you say.
Of course, that is how I interpret this movement. Very little in the class struggle comes to us with its essence written on its face. When you look at certain events and you're trying to make sense of them, you have to interpret them. For example, was the Paris Commune a working class rebellion?
G: Of course it was.
O.K., but when you look at the Paris Commune you find all sorts of "non-working class" people involved (for example, the teenager Arthur Rimbaud). In fact, in every working class rebellion there are all sorts of "funny" things happening that are not directly expressing its working class content, but does that make it any less a working class rebellion?
G: But the Paris Commune was the expression of a social movement. I think that you don't make a distinction between social movements and pure political movements. I mean the movement in Prague was a pure political movement, it was not a social movement.
No, I would say there was no movement in Prague. The Prague demos were one point of the movement that involves a large number of people, many incidents, many confrontations that were going on long before. In the same way, when you look at the history of the workers' movement in Europe and say that the Paris Commune was one moment in the story which comprised a large number of strikes, meetings, and organizational initiatives. The movement was a complex phenomenon.
G: I see what you mean. But this is our difference. I mean that we think that Prague is a moment in that political movement that tries to represent the social movements against Structural Adjustment Programmes.
What do you mean by "represent"?
G: I mean that these fora that organize the "antiglobalization" events try to act on behalf of diverse and opposing sectors of society: small land-owners, workers, petty-bourgeoisie or fractions of capital that are the losers in the global rat race. They are obsessed with the idea of "exercising power" (directly by the "people" or reforming existing power structures). They try to bring together the most diverse oppositions, some of which are certainly working class, under a social democratic umbrella that aspires to unite these separate movements. For example, the Algerian rioters against SAPs in 1988 never tried to make any connections with Moroccan rioters in 1990 and the Moroccan rioters never tried to make any connections with the Yugoslav workers during the 1980s. So for years you gradually had--although it suddenly appeared to the world in the late 1990s--the building of networks of political groups which were talking about these struggles and were trying to find a way to unite these struggles against the SAPs. I think that the Chiapas uprising in 1994 gave a great push to these political groups. I'm not only talking about the CND in Mexico in 1994. I'm also talking about the Encuentros and Consultas and the Zapatista solidarity movement in Europe and the US, which consisted of political groups and not working-class movements, according to our knowledge of what was going on in the previous years. The movement came to the fore in Seattle, in Washington and now in Prague.
I think that if you had movements of unwaged people, peasants, factory workers, unemployed people (in France there was an unemployed people's movement in 1997-98) who had rioted against SAPs or other programmes of the IMF, the World Bank and national governments (since there have also been neoliberal programmes imposed by national governments which are not directly connected to World Bank and IMF directives), if these people got together only then would we have some kind of working class internationalism like that in the 19th century, when you had the First International and the workers had started exchanging experiences doing something like what you have called the "circulation of struggles." I think there is a big difference between circulating social struggles and circulating political activities and political programmes.
K: I think that the struggle in Chiapas is a typical example of the transformation of a social struggle into a political struggle. It was begun by the ejidatarios, who were against their own exploitation, their "own" government but it soon became a political campaign against "foreign capital"or for the "democratization" of the Mexican state.The struggle aimed at the heart of the capitalist relation, but the EZLN (which sprung from this struggle) and the FZLN managed to represent it and divert its actual social content whose form was the land occupations. The EZLN and the FZLN put forward political demands, institutional reforms, calling for the democratization of the national state and abstractly talking against the "rule of money", the IMF and the "end of national sovereignty." So, in a way, they paved the way for what we see now at all these meetings of the "antiglobalization movement" where you have NGOs of all different kinds, environmentalists, trade unionists, etc. People from Greece went to Prague not as subjects of concrete social struggles looking for class comrades but as members of political organizations, from PASOK Youth to anarchist and Stalinist groups.
G: You even had right-wing groups fighting against the Multilateral Agreements on Investments (MAI) and collaborating with left-wing groups in Europe. Two years ago the Dutch anti-racist organization "De Fabel van de Illegal" quit the international campaign against MAI denouncing these coalitions.
K: And in this protest movement which is not rooted in everyday class struggle the class composition is very weak and I can't see how it is a working class movement.
First, if you look at the "Chronology of Struggle against Structural Adjustment: 1985-2000" Silvia Federici and I put together, you'll see that the antiglobalization movement involves many different kinds of struggles and people over a long period of time. Seattle 1999, Washington and Prague 2000 are merely more recent points of a lengthy line. For the anti-SAP struggles of the 1980s and early 1990s are the foundation of the "antiglobalization movement" and these struggles have a particular class composition and they involve particular kinds of struggles. Debt has not been the basis of working class movements for a long time in Western Europe and the US, but in some periods of history the struggle against debt, debt bondage, and the consequences of debt in terms of disenfranchisement has been very important. A debt struggle (which involves the delegitimization of debt and a refusal to pay it) is a different kind of struggle than the kind you find in the typical wage struggles.
Second, the present debt struggle has been shaped in two ways: (a) the transformation of large-scale national debt into an attack on wages, (b) the use of this debt by the World Bank and IMF to restructure capital internationally (which set the stage for "globalization"). There were many "debt crises" in the history of capitalism which the working class was involved in, but because of the type of capital we have nowadays the debt crisis of the 1980s was used in a new way. For in the past banking was very decentralized, so when British banks invested in Argentina's government bonds in the 19th century and the Argentinean state declared bankruptcy, the British government would send gunboats to Argentina to save "its" banks. In the 1980s the possibility of a Third World state's bankruptcy was used by the World Bank and IMF to take control of that country's economy instead. For the World Bank and IMF could seriously claim to keep the country out of the world credit market for many years in the future in a way that no 19th century institution could.
K: But still there are all forms of debt, from individual debt (which is not an individual affair at all) to farmers' debts to banks.
Surely the struggle between farmers and banks is a very common one in the history of capitalism. But what is important in the contemporary story has been the way that national debt has been used as a mechanism of exploitation and how the World Bank and IMF have used it to coordinate the takeover of dozens of economies in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This is a new phenomenon which even the World Bank and IMF were not capable of using before the 1980s.
K: But there are also consumer loans which are quite new as well.
True, individual proletarians now have credit cards and can get into debt. In the 19th century there were three things that capitalists were really worried about which in the 20th century they have completely turned around. They were worried about the working class getting the vote, they were worried about the working class being armed, and they were worried about the working class having money. In the 20th century, in fact, capitalism has figured out how the working class can have a vote, a gun and a credit card, and each of these instruments have been turned around against working class power to the point where they have been major moments of legitimation of capital and an attack on proletarian power. It has reached the point where we have to attack electoral democracy, a move that many workers in the 19th century would have thought to be mad. Similarly, in the US much of the proletariat is armed, but the result has been that most often the guns are used to shoot each other. It is important to understand how these reversals were managed. The extension of credit to the working class has been a similar reversal. It has been made a non-issue even though interest rates on individual credit card accounts are far above levels that would be considered usurious a few decades ago.
This was not the case in the 19th century when debt was a big issue for farmers who were dispossessed by bankers due to debt foreclosures. In the 1890s the attack on debt was the basis of one of the most powerful anticapitalist movements in US history.
G: What I want to ask is, how do you connect individual debt and the issue of credit in every nation state with the strategy of the IMF and World Bank?
This has occurred in a number of ways. The debt of large corporations (financial, industrial and agricultural) has been transferred to the national debt in Third World countries since the early 1980s. The state has transferred that debt into taxation. Thus the national debt has now become an attack on the wage and a form of exploitation. Much of the national debt has been the product of state corporations or even private corporations or banks that have been nationalized at the moment of bankruptcy. Consequently, their debts have been nationalized. Similarly, the debt of state corporations run by "corrupt" officials (as in Indonesia, Zaire/Congo, and Nigeria, to name some of the most glaring examples), who were extracting loans and banking them in Switzerland, is now considered national debt, even though the officials are long gone.
G: Yes, but why in the 1970s and early 1980s did nation-states start taking loans from the IMF? This is the crucial question I want to pose. Yugoslavia, for example, is on my mind. It entered the IMF in 1981. How did this happen? Why did the Yugoslav leadership do this? Was it just because of debts of "corrupt" private or state corporations or was it that the Yugoslav national capital needed to attack the working class and restructure class relations and they found some very powerful allies in the IMF and World Bank to achieve this?
"Corruption" is not, of course, a useful category for explaining this development. After all, it is just another name for capital accumulation. So it is important to look at the individual cases. Consider Yugoslavia and other so-called socialist eastern European countries in the period you mentioned. The ruling class in these countries decided that the only path for them was to enter into the world market and to try to find a niche for their manufacturing industry in the world market. This required, from their point of view, large-scale investment in certain industries, e.g., the auto industry in Yugoslavia and the ship building industry in Poland. In retrospect, it was certainly a most ill-advised decision and it was probably the foundation of the collapse of so-called "communism" in these places (although not of the collapse of the ruling classes in these countries!) The loans that were negotiated for this industrial overhaul were accepted at high interest rates. But they were to be the basis of an attack on the working class in two ways. First, these loans immediately became part of the national debt since these countries were socialist! Second, export-oriented industries imposed a totally different work relationship on the whole working class. The pace of the world market is quite different from the pace of the national market. They embody two different logics. The relationship between the worker who produces a commodity and the person who buys it are totally different when you are working in an export-based model compared to producing for a national-market. Surely, the decision to opt for an export-oriented industry in eastern Europe was rooted in a crisis of class relations. At some point at the beginning of this period, the state planners said: "No, this kind of national, inward-looking kind of development does not work, i.e., it does not achieve enough capitalist accumulation and control of the working class."
K: Yes, the explanation can only be based on the crisis of class relations. Until then, it was due to the disconnection between wages and the productivity of labor that federal Yugoslav commodities were not that competitive. And when they realized they needed the Yugoslav economy to get more internationalized they had to subsidize commodities, because this so-called social contract they had with the workers, upon which the federal Yugoslavia was based, didn't allow them to attack the working class by cutting wages, rationalizing production and generally imposing a flexible labor market.
The loans were taken out, in this particular case, with the expectation that they would lead to the reshaping of industry and the imposition of a new level of discipline which working on the international market would bring. But the effort was not successful, they couldn't do it, they could not make the leap into the world-market and therefore they were stuck with these loans and with a recalcitrant working class that was not doing its job to transform Yugoslav capital into a world-class manufacturing industry.
K: Yes, because there were successive waves of strikes against national capital during the 1980s.
The Debt Crisis begins in the early 1980s. The capitalists and state planners in the socialist world and the Third World begin to face the consequences of the loans and their high interest rates in this period. They cannot pay even the interest charges, but they desperately want to remain on the credit market. This is the decisive point for understanding the contemporary antiglobalization movement, for this movement arises from the failure of socialist states and the nations born out of the anticolonial struggle to join together in a debtors' cartel in the early 1980s. This failure made it possible for the IMF and the World Bank to begin to impose structural adjustment conditionalities upon these nations as the price for "turning over" the loans. The IMF and World Bank could say in the face of this failure to each separate country's government, "Look, you've got a billion dollars of principal and interest payments due, but you do not have the money. If you default, we will make it impossible for you to enter into the credit market again. We will loan you the money for the payments, but you must accept and implement this structural adjustment program, however difficult it will be on your people." Here was the decisive movement when all the wisdom of the socialist moment and the anticolonial movement needed to be applied. There were even organizations already in place (like the non-aligned movement with Yugoslavia at its head and the economic organization of socialist states allied to the Soviet Union) that could have taken the lead in saying "No, we are not going to go back to becoming pawns of international capital again." This was the chance of the Third Worldists and Communists to "just say no." But they did not.
G: Why do you think they didn't do that?
The ruling classes of these countries, when they looked at the class situation, saw that the alliance with the most powerful sectors of international capital (represented by the IMF and Wrold Bank) was their only lifeline. They could not ally with the needs of their own workers.
G: So it was a decision dictated by the needs of national capitals.
Yes, but another decision could have been made then. The third world and socialist states still had the possibility to do something else then...it was a real decision. But since then, the collapse of Third Worldist and Communist national ideologies and international organizations was inevitable.
G: You know that the "antiglobalization movement" doesn't stress the responsibility of the national capitalist governments. They just say, "Look at what these big bad guys, the IMF and the World Bank, do to the poor nations."
What do you mean by the "antiglobalization movement"?
G: This is what most of the NGOs and the leftist organizations that take part in this "movement" say.
Yes, perhaps in Greece, Europe and the US, but there are many organizations in Africa, Asia and the Americas that do look at the nation state's failure to say "No." After all, the slogan--"Don't Pay!"--has been chanted in the streets of Sao Paolo, Lagos and Soweto and thousands have died in anti-IMF riots and insurrections since 1985.
G: This is not the only slogan, and it is not clear what is meant by that.
My friends, I appreciate everything you say, but I don't understand something. When you look at any movement you are going to find a tremendous number of different kinds of organizations and groups with a multiplicity of demands and programs.
K: Within a social movement we are not in favor of "purity," if that is what you mean, we're not saying that. To promote our interests we have to collaborate with other fellow workers who have different ideas or a different way of life from ours, but this is not the case with the "antiglobalization movement." We are not talking about a working-class struggle, during which various political ideas certainly play a role, but about NGOs, political organizations, etc., which stress the fact that certain nation-states are "weak" in the face of the IMF and the World Bank which are THE rulers, THE capital.
G: So they say we've got to support these nation states.
K: There's a revival of Third Worldist ideas around issues of "weak" nation states, the hierarchy of states, etc.
Can I make an example here? Are trade unions part of the working class struggle?
A: Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
G: There are unions set up by the bosses or unions which collaborate with the bosses.
A: I wouldn't say that the AFL-CIO or the GSEE here in Greece are working-class organizations. The GSEE doesn't support my interests.
But to understand the working-class movement you've got to understand how the working class is related to bodies like the AFL-CIO or to particular unions. They may be "company unions" or not, but the unions themselves are very important parts of how you tell the story because they are part of the way the struggle is structured. (It is, of course, a much worse error to identify the working class with the unions!) It would be like trying to describe a forest without talking about some trees (even though a forest is not simply a set of trees). One of the most important things that you need to do to tell the story of the working class is to talk of organizational forms, otherwise the story becomes untellable. Surely, you also need to say, "OK, here are organizations, are they 'true' to the working class or not?" But an adequate answer to this question depends on what the working class is at that particular phase. Further, we should recognize that certain organizations that are NGOs now have the character that trade unions had in the past.
G: Yes, they are part of the whole story, but they are not part of the anticapitalist story. What's the use for the working class of a slogan like "Fair Trade, not Free Trade," which was one of the dominant slogans in Seattle? What have we, the workers, got to do with "Fair Trade"? What does it mean for the liberation of the working class? Nothing...
It might be a slogan that, in fact, must be attacked, but it is an important one. Was the working class for or against the Corn Laws in the 1830s in England? In fact, much of the working class movement at that time was for abolishing the Corn Laws (i.e., ending the tariffs on imports of grain). Was it a working class slogan or not at the time? Well, in fact, there were many discussions and debates within the working class movement on this issue. Are workers now really for or against particular aspects of Free Trade? I agree with you, "Free Trade versus Fair Trade" is not the issue, "Trade" is the problem. It is like the argument you have now in working class circles in many countries about privatization. As far as I am concerned, the privatization issue is simply a matter of choosing state capital or private capital, whereas the problem is capital. I might then conclude, why should I enter into that debate? But it is a live discussion among workers, especially those facing privatization, and it is probably the way in which a lot of working class struggle is being shaped. So how can I not enter into the debate, if I want to be involved in the movement? After all, you cannot talk about the present state of class relations unless you speak of neoliberalism and an important part of neoliberalism is privatization. Unfortunately, you cannot choose the terms of engagement in these struggles.
G: What I mean to say is that whenever there is a movement you have to take your stand on it. You have to criticize other people's views, you have to say, "This is not the right slogan, this is not the right thing to do, we should do it this way or that way." But in the "antiglobalization movement" there is almost no essential critique at all. All the people seem to be extremely happy just for participating in it. It looks like everybody is a brother...
This is not correct. Maybe you should have been in Prague and talked to some people to see that there are a lot of debates and differences there and more will go on in Athens as time goes on. There are debates concerning what are the proper slogans, what are the proper demands, what is the way to move ahead, and, even, what is this movement. Does the movement begin in Jamaica in 1985 or in Seattle in 1999? These are some of the issues in the field. Your impression of a placid, homogeneous agreement is mistaken.
The antiglobalization movement challenges us to apply the tools of analysis we have developed over the years. We have to start somewhere in defining the struggle, and I propose that we start with debt. As far as I see, the struggle around debt is one of the most important ones the working class is fighting.
K: The question is how you face the debt problem and the struggle. It is one thing to face it as a worker, to see it as an attack on your wage, as a life-devouring process, to fight with the class perspective that you are not the only victim in the world and it's different to see it as a national problem, as a problem your "own" government, your "own" country faces. That is how I think the NGOs and a lot of the political organizations are trying to present it, as a problem of certain nation-states, as a conflict between "weak" nation-states and the supra-national powers, the IMF and World Bank. I don't want to underestimate these institutions, I think they are responsible for certain decisions as well as for capitalist coordination, but I think that the most important decisions, as I said before, had already been taken by national governments and inside the enterprises. So, if I see the IMF as my main enemy and not "my" boss, "my" government, my everyday alienation, then this is the problem.
Of course, but this also is a debate that was going on in Prague and other places. It takes the form of tactical questions like: Who do you work with? Do you work with national governments? Do you work around reforming the World Bank and IMF? Do you do neither? Do you try to create a movement that does not aim to reform the nation state? Can you afford to ignore the nation state?
G: Can you imagine a workers' organization of the past, like the First International, discussing with liberals and debating with people like those in NGOs, what should be the strategy of the Workers' International? You can't debate these things with those who want to create a capitalism with a "human face."
From what I know of the First International, the International Working Men's Association, it was a pretty "liberal" operation, as far as I can see. (As indeed, was the Communist Manifesto whose final program was similar to that of the social democratic parties of the 20th century!) The First International was not an explicitly communist organization.
G: Well, it was made very clear in the Provisional Rules of the First International that "the emancipation of labor is neither a local nor a national but a social problem," and that "this association is established to afford a central medium of communication and cooperation between working men's societies existing in various countries, and aiming at the same end, viz., the protection, advancement and complete emancipation of the working classes."
In fact, most of the people involved in the First International, e.g., the trade union leaders, were what we would consider now pretty reformist types. Indeed, one of the most important fights Marx made in the First International was to justify trade union struggles over wages and working conditions in Wages, Price and Profit and reject a purely insurrectionist strategy.
G: At that time Marx, Engels and other socialists believed that it was important to demand an extension of democratic liberties so that trade unions were not outlawed; they believed that it was important to set up workers' political parties--this was done especially after the First International, although the idea was always around--which would try to represent workers' interests in the national parliaments. But they wanted these parties to be distinct from and be opposed to all parties formed by the "propertied classes." As far as I know, there wasn't any collaboration with certain fractions of the bourgeoisie or any debate with them about how the workers' issues will be settled inside the capitalist system.
The First International did discuss with parliamentarians all sorts of things. They sent letters and petitions to parliaments, they had debates and discussions with parliamentarians about workers' issues.
G: Had they ever thought of supporting a nation-state that was against a big power of the time, let's say England...?
Yes, they supported the northern states of the US during the Civil War against Britain which was threatening to break the blockade around the southern states. The First International's first order of business was to influence the British state's position on the Confederacy. Representatives of the First International discussed this issue extensively with parliamentarians representing industrial areas.
My job in writing about the antiglobalization movement is not to judge it, but to analyze it. First, it is to say what are the antiglobalization struggles and how they are now being increasingly interconnected and responding to each other. Second, it is to identify the movement's organizations--unions, parties, NGOs, affinity groups, etc. This is not just a census but it involves finding out their programs, the changes they have undergone, and the debates they are involved in. Many of these organizations might be terrible, but we are not writing a Michelin guide, after all. Third, it is to identify the divisions and hierarchies within the movement. Finally, it is to assess capital's response to the movement on the level of social planning (e.g., police tactics), investment, technological innovations and eventually political structure. These are the most elementary levels of analysis. Before we can come to a definitive conclusion about this movement it should be analyzed on these levels.
What should be first on our agenda is to gather information in order to understand the antiglobalization movement's story from a working class perspective.
At one time, capital thought that the idea of allowing workers to legally come together and collectively bargain was revolution. It took them centuries to come around to see that they could "live with it" (although the US capitalists are still not sure, hence the last quarter century of union busting!) This change in capital's attitude is important for us to understand, but this can only be done if we look at the whole story. If you say before hand, "Trade unions are reactionary enslavers of the working class, I'm not interested in them and in the trade union experience," then you end up not being interested in much of the working class' history of the last two centuries.
G: Yes, there is already a whole history of working class movements which is almost two centuries old and many things have happened during that long period of time. You have already mentioned the weak side of the First International, one could also mention some other mistakes that have been made, for example, in the Russian Revolution or in the Spanish Civil War or in May '68. But don't we learn anything from past mistakes? I mean, every time there is a new movement, is it going to start from scratch? Do we have to reproduce again all the past mistakes of the working class, socialist, communist or anarchist movements?
There is a nausea to history, isn't there! The problem with "mistakes" is that they appear in new forms and for many they were not clearly mistakes in the first place. In order to make an assessment that there was a "mistake" you must have a yardstick, and an answer to the question: Did certain strikes and insurrections increase working class power? It is impossible to answer this question in an a priori fashion. Moreover, there are inevitably many novelties in the history of struggles.
G: I'm very suspicious of working class movements that do not make a balance sheet of what they had done in the past or of what their predecessors had done and say that "we will start again from the beginning." That's completely irrational for me. In this case, I don't think that the "antiglobalization movement" is a working class movement, but if it was, I think that this would be its first mistake, not to assess what had been done in the past, what we did wrong in the past. What happened with this or that movement that we had taken part in, this or that state that we had supported. For example, what were the countries of Eastern Europe? Socialist? Communist? State capitalist? What? If people in the Balkans or Eastern Europe, the workers who will start fighting again against capital do not try to assess what happened in the past...
That's the job that has to be done. It is what is always done in struggle with comrades when one says, "Let's see what happened, let's understand it and let's make some conclusions and use this knowledge to move ahead."
G: Do you think that this is being done inside the "antiglobalization movement"?
It is being done in many different ways. In my work, I have decided to begin with a hypothesis--the antiglobalization movement is a working class movement--and to see what are the results. It is only after you apply class analysis to a movement and the result does not make sense, can you come to the conclusion that it is not a working class movement.
I have just begun by getting together (with Silvia Federici) a Chronology, and that is only a draft. As Hegel pointed out long ago, chronology is only the first level of the study of history. Even at this level there is contestation: Are the riots of Algeria in 1988 and of Morocco in 1990 part of the antiglobalization story?
K: These were the real social struggles against SAPs. But their sequence is not Prague. Although I don't know what is going on now in Morocco or Algeria.
G: I think that in this article you gave us you have presented the most sophisticated defense of this "antiglobalization movement" and it doesn't deserve it.
I am listening to your deep and comradely suggestions, but I would say that the jury involves eleven people, and you only comprise three of the eleven! I want to put together a more thorough presentation than the draft notes I have presented. I want to also deal with objections you and others have made.
For example, consider the rather remarkable organization called "Jubilee 2000." Where did it come from? Why has it split in so many ways? There are parts of the organization demanding total cancellation of Third World Debt and there are parts that are calling for cancellation of the so-called most indebted and poor countries and a gradual pay down for the others. This is a split within an organization that involves more than a thousand groups in all the countries of the world. Where does this split come from? Why is it being articulated in this way? How does this split enter into the debates taking place throughout the world? How does capital respond to this debate? This is really crucial because even now there is a theoretical threat of a debtors' cartel being formed if every indebted country is pushed beyond a certain point.
K: If tomorrow the IMF says, "OK, we must reform ourselves because of this pressure we get from NGOs or from the 'antiglobalization movement' in general," it will have an impact on workers' lives, but in what direction?
Of course, it would be like the Russian Revolution which was a very big development, but it also had problematic consequences for workers' lives both in Russia and the rest of the planet.
G: There are things that a lot of people in the "antiglobalization movement" have not made clear. Do they want to go back to national protectionism? Or do they want to make a breakthrough and create something new, something beyond private and state capital?
That is a big debate within the movement, moreover, this is something you have to make a political decision about yourself. Are these questions politically so important for your work that you will have to take part in these debates? This is the decision you have to make.
I have been involved in these debates for many years because I have been involved in Structural Adjustment struggles in Africa since the mid-1980s. Moreover, I can hardly lightly treat a movement that has brought thousands of people in the streets making the same demands I have been pushing for more than a decade!
As for you, I believe that there is going to be a point where, if you don't deal with the debates this movement is putting up, you will be considered irrelevant.
K: We are dealing with it.
One can deal with it by saying, "I'm not going to deal with it, because it is not an important part of my political work."
K: Criticizing is already taking one's stand.
A: For me it is more important to communicate with people I work with than try to convince members of political organizations that do not seem open to persuasion. It is also important what you are debating about.
K: There are some political choices that have already been made. And for me, apart from the criticisms I have already made so far, there are some dangerous tendencies that can already be seen in this "movement." For example, this transformation of NGOs into something like unions. The union leaders, as pimps of the working class, have been very harmful, but the NGOs are even more harmful. Because at least within trade unions, even in their worst corporatist form, there is preserved some sense of fragmented but still collective worker identity while the members of NGOs are mere individuals/citizens who philanthropically deal with other people's problems and give priority to the notion of "civil society" which is taking us even further away from a class struggle perspective. So, I think there has already been a damage. It is not enough for me to say, "Let's wait and see what will happen in ten years' time and in the end we can judge."
G: I want to continue on what Katerina has said. You say in the article you gave us that it's a mistake for these people who are involved in the "antiglobalization movement" to use the term "civil society" instead of using the term "working class struggle." Well, I don't think this is a mistake on their part. They know very well what they're doing when they are talking about civil society. This is the kind of society they want. They don't want to destroy class rule. They want to democratize capitalism.
The "they" you are speaking about is very varied, and on examination you'll discover that there will be plenty of people in the movement who don't use the notion of "civil society." There are, in fact, many industrial workers' and farmers' organizations involved in the antiglobalization movement who use categories like "working class" and "peasants" as their operative conceptions and they demand the preservation and expansion of common land, they refuse to pay the debt and they refuse national debt slavery. So, I would say to you that you have certain preconceptions of what the movement is all about (due to your experience in Greece perhaps) that I do not share. There are many more questions, debates and discourses in this movement than you recognize.
G: We know all the Greek organizations and groups that went to Prague one by one. We even know some of the people personally. We know what are the ideas of the anarchists who went there to raise hell. We know what are the ideas of the social democrats who went there, the members of PASOK and Sinaspismos, the Socialist Workers' Party and some of the NGOs and, of course, we had criticized these people on various occasions, long before they started participating in events like Prague. For example, in the struggles against the education law 2525 we had come in conflict with these PASOK and Sinaspismos trade unionists who were trying to undermine the movement. When I see these people going to Prague to shout slogans against the IMF and World Bank and I know that they had tried to undermine a social movement which, in my opinion, was very important because it was against the capitalist restructuring in education, then I'm saying to myself, "These people are playing a game that I've got to find out what it is."
You should find out what the game is and realize that the game changes, for the organizations you mentioned are not eternal essences. They too are in motion. They too must live. They too must change their game to respond to the forces arising around them. Yes, "what is their game?" That is what you should find out about. Perhaps you will find that in the process of being involved with the antiglobalization movement, these organization too are beginning to change. Certainly I have noticed that many organizations have changed their "game" quite dramatically in the last five years. I've even seen one of the most dinosauric organizations on the planet, the AFL-CIO, change in the last five years. So if it is changing, then perhaps organizations like Sinaspismos are in transformation as well. If you are not looking for this kind of change, you often won't see it until it is very far advanced.
G: Do you really think that social democratic parties like Sinaspismos would ever come close to our ideas?
No, I don't think that they are coming close to our ideas, but that is not how I measure change.
G: I mean close to anticapitalist ideas.
I say, "Take a look." Five years ago I would never have said that the AFL-CIO would be calling for amnesty for undocumented workers. It was not in my dreams that this would happen. But it has. An organization which has millions of workers as due-paying members and has billions of dollars has actually begun a campaign to demand amnesty for undocumented workers in the US! Surely, the AFL-CIO has not been transformed into an anticapitalist organization and its leadership is not doing this in order to agree with George Kaffentzis's conception of the need to abolish capital. These things are certainly not happening. But the AFL-CIO officials are responding to something very important which is described by the process of "globalization" and they have become part of the antiglobalization movement in order for their organization to survive. I don't judge this change on the basis of whether the AFL-CIO uses "Midnight Oil" as the reading text for its next congress. If that was the way I judged things, I would not see much change on this planet.
G: Again, you're talking like there can't be any lessons of the last two centuries of struggles. That's the problem with what you're saying.
I know that this criticism is given in a comradely way, but I am using the method developed in the last two hundred years to understand the present planetary class struggle. I am saying that there are features of the antiglobalization movement which do require some different thinking about organizational forms that looked like total impossibilities before. If you are claiming that the antiglobalization movement has nothing to do with the class struggle now, then I am asking you to take another look. The processes and programs variously called globalization, neoliberalism, recolonization, structural adjustment, or the new international division of labor are putting so much pressure on many older organizational forms that they are being forced to undergo a major transformation. I am not saying that these transformations mean that the end of capitalism is around the corner. But I should point out that the process is not only defined by capital. There has been a real change in working class power in the recent period. Perhaps this power is coming from a recomposition from the bottom, since billions of people have been driven so badly, have lost or are losing everything. You know, if you and the people around you are paying 30% of your income for water--as in Cochabamba--then you all are going to blow up and decide that it's time to fight to the finish.
K: My final comment is that you are too optimistic. We would like to continue this discussion in another way in the future.
Athens, October 15th 2000
CONTACTS:
GEORGE CAFFENTZIS:
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE
P.O. BOX 9300
PORTLAND, MAINE 04104-9300
USA
email: caffentz@usm.maine.edu
TPTG:
P.O BOX 76149
17110
N. SMIRNI
ATHENS, GREECE
jim submits: here is part II. The printable version of Part I is to be found here.
Part II
>
G: This will bring us to the second part of the interview. My question is: what has this "antiglobalization movement" contributed to the cause of the liberation of the planetary proletariat? I saw in the text you gave us that you consider the "antiglobalization movement" to be a working class movement. I don't agree with that. Until now we have been talking about issues of wage, capitalist restructuring, decomposition and recomposition of the working class. Now this political movement which started growing in the late 1990s (due perhaps to the social movements against Structural Adjustment Programs in the so-called Third World) doesn't care to mention any of these things we have been discussing. As far as I see, the "antiglobalization movement" is putting the whole question in terms of institutional reforms. That is why I was surprised to see that you considered this as a working class movement.
A: May I give an example? The Ya Basta group, they did their show in Prague defending the bridge, but in Italy they consider working-class struggles of industrial workers for example, as struggles of people who want to maintain their "privileges" instead of struggling, e.g., for a "guaranteed income" that would cover the whole of society. Or the anarchists that participated in the march in Prague; they do not intervene in working-class struggles because they think these struggles are "corporatist" and merely "economic" struggles that don't bring any social change. These are examples of groups from both Greece and Italy who participated in major "anticapitalist" events, but don't participate or rarely participate in class struggles in their own countries.
But there is a continuity with our previous discussion of the wage, capitalist restructuring, and the decomposition and recomposition of the working class, for one of the central objects of the antiglobalization movement has been the debt and how the debt has been used to attack the wage of the planetary proletariat. That insight is at the heart of this movement.
G: You think so? That's what you say.
Of course, that is how I interpret this movement. Very little in the class struggle comes to us with its essence written on its face. When you look at certain events and you're trying to make sense of them, you have to interpret them. For example, was the Paris Commune a working class rebellion?
G: Of course it was.
O.K., but when you look at the Paris Commune you find all sorts of "non-working class" people involved (for example, the teenager Arthur Rimbaud). In fact, in every working class rebellion there are all sorts of "funny" things happening that are not directly expressing its working class content, but does that make it any less a working class rebellion?
G: But the Paris Commune was the expression of a social movement. I think that you don't make a distinction between social movements and pure political movements. I mean the movement in Prague was a pure political movement, it was not a social movement.
No, I would say there was no movement in Prague. The Prague demos were one point of the movement that involves a large number of people, many incidents, many confrontations that were going on long before. In the same way, when you look at the history of the workers' movement in Europe and say that the Paris Commune was one moment in the story which comprised a large number of strikes, meetings, and organizational initiatives. The movement was a complex phenomenon.
G: I see what you mean. But this is our difference. I mean that we think that Prague is a moment in that political movement that tries to represent the social movements against Structural Adjustment Programmes.
What do you mean by "represent"?
G: I mean that these fora that organize the "antiglobalization" events try to act on behalf of diverse and opposing sectors of society: small land-owners, workers, petty-bourgeoisie or fractions of capital that are the losers in the global rat race. They are obsessed with the idea of "exercising power" (directly by the "people" or reforming existing power structures). They try to bring together the most diverse oppositions, some of which are certainly working class, under a social democratic umbrella that aspires to unite these separate movements. For example, the Algerian rioters against SAPs in 1988 never tried to make any connections with Moroccan rioters in 1990 and the Moroccan rioters never tried to make any connections with the Yugoslav workers during the 1980s. So for years you gradually had--although it suddenly appeared to the world in the late 1990s--the building of networks of political groups which were talking about these struggles and were trying to find a way to unite these struggles against the SAPs. I think that the Chiapas uprising in 1994 gave a great push to these political groups. I'm not only talking about the CND in Mexico in 1994. I'm also talking about the Encuentros and Consultas and the Zapatista solidarity movement in Europe and the US, which consisted of political groups and not working-class movements, according to our knowledge of what was going on in the previous years. The movement came to the fore in Seattle, in Washington and now in Prague.
I think that if you had movements of unwaged people, peasants, factory workers, unemployed people (in France there was an unemployed people's movement in 1997-98) who had rioted against SAPs or other programmes of the IMF, the World Bank and national governments (since there have also been neoliberal programmes imposed by national governments which are not directly connected to World Bank and IMF directives), if these people got together only then would we have some kind of working class internationalism like that in the 19th century, when you had the First International and the workers had started exchanging experiences doing something like what you have called the "circulation of struggles." I think there is a big difference between circulating social struggles and circulating political activities and political programmes.
K: I think that the struggle in Chiapas is a typical example of the transformation of a social struggle into a political struggle. It was begun by the ejidatarios, who were against their own exploitation, their "own" government but it soon became a political campaign against "foreign capital"or for the "democratization" of the Mexican state.The struggle aimed at the heart of the capitalist relation, but the EZLN (which sprung from this struggle) and the FZLN managed to represent it and divert its actual social content whose form was the land occupations. The EZLN and the FZLN put forward political demands, institutional reforms, calling for the democratization of the national state and abstractly talking against the "rule of money", the IMF and the "end of national sovereignty." So, in a way, they paved the way for what we see now at all these meetings of the "antiglobalization movement" where you have NGOs of all different kinds, environmentalists, trade unionists, etc. People from Greece went to Prague not as subjects of concrete social struggles looking for class comrades but as members of political organizations, from PASOK Youth to anarchist and Stalinist groups.
G: You even had right-wing groups fighting against the Multilateral Agreements on Investments (MAI) and collaborating with left-wing groups in Europe. Two years ago the Dutch anti-racist organization "De Fabel van de Illegal" quit the international campaign against MAI denouncing these coalitions.
K: And in this protest movement which is not rooted in everyday class struggle the class composition is very weak and I can't see how it is a working class movement.
First, if you look at the "Chronology of Struggle against Structural Adjustment: 1985-2000" Silvia Federici and I put together, you'll see that the antiglobalization movement involves many different kinds of struggles and people over a long period of time. Seattle 1999, Washington and Prague 2000 are merely more recent points of a lengthy line. For the anti-SAP struggles of the 1980s and early 1990s are the foundation of the "antiglobalization movement" and these struggles have a particular class composition and they involve particular kinds of struggles. Debt has not been the basis of working class movements for a long time in Western Europe and the US, but in some periods of history the struggle against debt, debt bondage, and the consequences of debt in terms of disenfranchisement has been very important. A debt struggle (which involves the delegitimization of debt and a refusal to pay it) is a different kind of struggle than the kind you find in the typical wage struggles.
Second, the present debt struggle has been shaped in two ways: (a) the transformation of large-scale national debt into an attack on wages, (b) the use of this debt by the World Bank and IMF to restructure capital internationally (which set the stage for "globalization"). There were many "debt crises" in the history of capitalism which the working class was involved in, but because of the type of capital we have nowadays the debt crisis of the 1980s was used in a new way. For in the past banking was very decentralized, so when British banks invested in Argentina's government bonds in the 19th century and the Argentinean state declared bankruptcy, the British government would send gunboats to Argentina to save "its" banks. In the 1980s the possibility of a Third World state's bankruptcy was used by the World Bank and IMF to take control of that country's economy instead. For the World Bank and IMF could seriously claim to keep the country out of the world credit market for many years in the future in a way that no 19th century institution could.
K: But still there are all forms of debt, from individual debt (which is not an individual affair at all) to farmers' debts to banks.
Surely the struggle between farmers and banks is a very common one in the history of capitalism. But what is important in the contemporary story has been the way that national debt has been used as a mechanism of exploitation and how the World Bank and IMF have used it to coordinate the takeover of dozens of economies in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This is a new phenomenon which even the World Bank and IMF were not capable of using before the 1980s.
K: But there are also consumer loans which are quite new as well.
True, individual proletarians now have credit cards and can get into debt. In the 19th century there were three things that capitalists were really worried about which in the 20th century they have completely turned around. They were worried about the working class getting the vote, they were worried about the working class being armed, and they were worried about the working class having money. In the 20th century, in fact, capitalism has figured out how the working class can have a vote, a gun and a credit card, and each of these instruments have been turned around against working class power to the point where they have been major moments of legitimation of capital and an attack on proletarian power. It has reached the point where we have to attack electoral democracy, a move that many workers in the 19th century would have thought to be mad. Similarly, in the US much of the proletariat is armed, but the result has been that most often the guns are used to shoot each other. It is important to understand how these reversals were managed. The extension of credit to the working class has been a similar reversal. It has been made a non-issue even though interest rates on individual credit card accounts are far above levels that would be considered usurious a few decades ago.
This was not the case in the 19th century when debt was a big issue for farmers who were dispossessed by bankers due to debt foreclosures. In the 1890s the attack on debt was the basis of one of the most powerful anticapitalist movements in US history.
G: What I want to ask is, how do you connect individual debt and the issue of credit in every nation state with the strategy of the IMF and World Bank?
This has occurred in a number of ways. The debt of large corporations (financial, industrial and agricultural) has been transferred to the national debt in Third World countries since the early 1980s. The state has transferred that debt into taxation. Thus the national debt has now become an attack on the wage and a form of exploitation. Much of the national debt has been the product of state corporations or even private corporations or banks that have been nationalized at the moment of bankruptcy. Consequently, their debts have been nationalized. Similarly, the debt of state corporations run by "corrupt" officials (as in Indonesia, Zaire/Congo, and Nigeria, to name some of the most glaring examples), who were extracting loans and banking them in Switzerland, is now considered national debt, even though the officials are long gone.
G: Yes, but why in the 1970s and early 1980s did nation-states start taking loans from the IMF? This is the crucial question I want to pose. Yugoslavia, for example, is on my mind. It entered the IMF in 1981. How did this happen? Why did the Yugoslav leadership do this? Was it just because of debts of "corrupt" private or state corporations or was it that the Yugoslav national capital needed to attack the working class and restructure class relations and they found some very powerful allies in the IMF and World Bank to achieve this?
"Corruption" is not, of course, a useful category for explaining this development. After all, it is just another name for capital accumulation. So it is important to look at the individual cases. Consider Yugoslavia and other so-called socialist eastern European countries in the period you mentioned. The ruling class in these countries decided that the only path for them was to enter into the world market and to try to find a niche for their manufacturing industry in the world market. This required, from their point of view, large-scale investment in certain industries, e.g., the auto industry in Yugoslavia and the ship building industry in Poland. In retrospect, it was certainly a most ill-advised decision and it was probably the foundation of the collapse of so-called "communism" in these places (although not of the collapse of the ruling classes in these countries!) The loans that were negotiated for this industrial overhaul were accepted at high interest rates. But they were to be the basis of an attack on the working class in two ways. First, these loans immediately became part of the national debt since these countries were socialist! Second, export-oriented industries imposed a totally different work relationship on the whole working class. The pace of the world market is quite different from the pace of the national market. They embody two different logics. The relationship between the worker who produces a commodity and the person who buys it are totally different when you are working in an export-based model compared to producing for a national-market. Surely, the decision to opt for an export-oriented industry in eastern Europe was rooted in a crisis of class relations. At some point at the beginning of this period, the state planners said: "No, this kind of national, inward-looking kind of development does not work, i.e., it does not achieve enough capitalist accumulation and control of the working class."
K: Yes, the explanation can only be based on the crisis of class relations. Until then, it was due to the disconnection between wages and the productivity of labor that federal Yugoslav commodities were not that competitive. And when they realized they needed the Yugoslav economy to get more internationalized they had to subsidize commodities, because this so-called social contract they had with the workers, upon which the federal Yugoslavia was based, didn't allow them to attack the working class by cutting wages, rationalizing production and generally imposing a flexible labor market.
The loans were taken out, in this particular case, with the expectation that they would lead to the reshaping of industry and the imposition of a new level of discipline which working on the international market would bring. But the effort was not successful, they couldn't do it, they could not make the leap into the world-market and therefore they were stuck with these loans and with a recalcitrant working class that was not doing its job to transform Yugoslav capital into a world-class manufacturing industry.
K: Yes, because there were successive waves of strikes against national capital during the 1980s.
The Debt Crisis begins in the early 1980s. The capitalists and state planners in the socialist world and the Third World begin to face the consequences of the loans and their high interest rates in this period. They cannot pay even the interest charges, but they desperately want to remain on the credit market. This is the decisive point for understanding the contemporary antiglobalization movement, for this movement arises from the failure of socialist states and the nations born out of the anticolonial struggle to join together in a debtors' cartel in the early 1980s. This failure made it possible for the IMF and the World Bank to begin to impose structural adjustment conditionalities upon these nations as the price for "turning over" the loans. The IMF and World Bank could say in the face of this failure to each separate country's government, "Look, you've got a billion dollars of principal and interest payments due, but you do not have the money. If you default, we will make it impossible for you to enter into the credit market again. We will loan you the money for the payments, but you must accept and implement this structural adjustment program, however difficult it will be on your people." Here was the decisive movement when all the wisdom of the socialist moment and the anticolonial movement needed to be applied. There were even organizations already in place (like the non-aligned movement with Yugoslavia at its head and the economic organization of socialist states allied to the Soviet Union) that could have taken the lead in saying "No, we are not going to go back to becoming pawns of international capital again." This was the chance of the Third Worldists and Communists to "just say no." But they did not.
G: Why do you think they didn't do that?
The ruling classes of these countries, when they looked at the class situation, saw that the alliance with the most powerful sectors of international capital (represented by the IMF and Wrold Bank) was their only lifeline. They could not ally with the needs of their own workers.
G: So it was a decision dictated by the needs of national capitals.
Yes, but another decision could have been made then. The third world and socialist states still had the possibility to do something else then...it was a real decision. But since then, the collapse of Third Worldist and Communist national ideologies and international organizations was inevitable.
G: You know that the "antiglobalization movement" doesn't stress the responsibility of the national capitalist governments. They just say, "Look at what these big bad guys, the IMF and the World Bank, do to the poor nations."
What do you mean by the "antiglobalization movement"?
G: This is what most of the NGOs and the leftist organizations that take part in this "movement" say.
Yes, perhaps in Greece, Europe and the US, but there are many organizations in Africa, Asia and the Americas that do look at the nation state's failure to say "No." After all, the slogan--"Don't Pay!"--has been chanted in the streets of Sao Paolo, Lagos and Soweto and thousands have died in anti-IMF riots and insurrections since 1985.
G: This is not the only slogan, and it is not clear what is meant by that.
My friends, I appreciate everything you say, but I don't understand something. When you look at any movement you are going to find a tremendous number of different kinds of organizations and groups with a multiplicity of demands and programs.
K: Within a social movement we are not in favor of "purity," if that is what you mean, we're not saying that. To promote our interests we have to collaborate with other fellow workers who have different ideas or a different way of life from ours, but this is not the case with the "antiglobalization movement." We are not talking about a working-class struggle, during which various political ideas certainly play a role, but about NGOs, political organizations, etc., which stress the fact that certain nation-states are "weak" in the face of the IMF and the World Bank which are THE rulers, THE capital.
G: So they say we've got to support these nation states.
K: There's a revival of Third Worldist ideas around issues of "weak" nation states, the hierarchy of states, etc.
Can I make an example here? Are trade unions part of the working class struggle?
A: Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
G: There are unions set up by the bosses or unions which collaborate with the bosses.
A: I wouldn't say that the AFL-CIO or the GSEE here in Greece are working-class organizations. The GSEE doesn't support my interests.
But to understand the working-class movement you've got to understand how the working class is related to bodies like the AFL-CIO or to particular unions. They may be "company unions" or not, but the unions themselves are very important parts of how you tell the story because they are part of the way the struggle is structured. (It is, of course, a much worse error to identify the working class with the unions!) It would be like trying to describe a forest without talking about some trees (even though a forest is not simply a set of trees). One of the most important things that you need to do to tell the story of the working class is to talk of organizational forms, otherwise the story becomes untellable. Surely, you also need to say, "OK, here are organizations, are they 'true' to the working class or not?" But an adequate answer to this question depends on what the working class is at that particular phase. Further, we should recognize that certain organizations that are NGOs now have the character that trade unions had in the past.
G: Yes, they are part of the whole story, but they are not part of the anticapitalist story. What's the use for the working class of a slogan like "Fair Trade, not Free Trade," which was one of the dominant slogans in Seattle? What have we, the workers, got to do with "Fair Trade"? What does it mean for the liberation of the working class? Nothing...
It might be a slogan that, in fact, must be attacked, but it is an important one. Was the working class for or against the Corn Laws in the 1830s in England? In fact, much of the working class movement at that time was for abolishing the Corn Laws (i.e., ending the tariffs on imports of grain). Was it a working class slogan or not at the time? Well, in fact, there were many discussions and debates within the working class movement on this issue. Are workers now really for or against particular aspects of Free Trade? I agree with you, "Free Trade versus Fair Trade" is not the issue, "Trade" is the problem. It is like the argument you have now in working class circles in many countries about privatization. As far as I am concerned, the privatization issue is simply a matter of choosing state capital or private capital, whereas the problem is capital. I might then conclude, why should I enter into that debate? But it is a live discussion among workers, especially those facing privatization, and it is probably the way in which a lot of working class struggle is being shaped. So how can I not enter into the debate, if I want to be involved in the movement? After all, you cannot talk about the present state of class relations unless you speak of neoliberalism and an important part of neoliberalism is privatization. Unfortunately, you cannot choose the terms of engagement in these struggles.
G: What I mean to say is that whenever there is a movement you have to take your stand on it. You have to criticize other people's views, you have to say, "This is not the right slogan, this is not the right thing to do, we should do it this way or that way." But in the "antiglobalization movement" there is almost no essential critique at all. All the people seem to be extremely happy just for participating in it. It looks like everybody is a brother...
This is not correct. Maybe you should have been in Prague and talked to some people to see that there are a lot of debates and differences there and more will go on in Athens as time goes on. There are debates concerning what are the proper slogans, what are the proper demands, what is the way to move ahead, and, even, what is this movement. Does the movement begin in Jamaica in 1985 or in Seattle in 1999? These are some of the issues in the field. Your impression of a placid, homogeneous agreement is mistaken.
The antiglobalization movement challenges us to apply the tools of analysis we have developed over the years. We have to start somewhere in defining the struggle, and I propose that we start with debt. As far as I see, the struggle around debt is one of the most important ones the working class is fighting.
K: The question is how you face the debt problem and the struggle. It is one thing to face it as a worker, to see it as an attack on your wage, as a life-devouring process, to fight with the class perspective that you are not the only victim in the world and it's different to see it as a national problem, as a problem your "own" government, your "own" country faces. That is how I think the NGOs and a lot of the political organizations are trying to present it, as a problem of certain nation-states, as a conflict between "weak" nation-states and the supra-national powers, the IMF and World Bank. I don't want to underestimate these institutions, I think they are responsible for certain decisions as well as for capitalist coordination, but I think that the most important decisions, as I said before, had already been taken by national governments and inside the enterprises. So, if I see the IMF as my main enemy and not "my" boss, "my" government, my everyday alienation, then this is the problem.
Of course, but this also is a debate that was going on in Prague and other places. It takes the form of tactical questions like: Who do you work with? Do you work with national governments? Do you work around reforming the World Bank and IMF? Do you do neither? Do you try to create a movement that does not aim to reform the nation state? Can you afford to ignore the nation state?
G: Can you imagine a workers' organization of the past, like the First International, discussing with liberals and debating with people like those in NGOs, what should be the strategy of the Workers' International? You can't debate these things with those who want to create a capitalism with a "human face."
From what I know of the First International, the International Working Men's Association, it was a pretty "liberal" operation, as far as I can see. (As indeed, was the Communist Manifesto whose final program was similar to that of the social democratic parties of the 20th century!) The First International was not an explicitly communist organization.
G: Well, it was made very clear in the Provisional Rules of the First International that "the emancipation of labor is neither a local nor a national but a social problem," and that "this association is established to afford a central medium of communication and cooperation between working men's societies existing in various countries, and aiming at the same end, viz., the protection, advancement and complete emancipation of the working classes."
In fact, most of the people involved in the First International, e.g., the trade union leaders, were what we would consider now pretty reformist types. Indeed, one of the most important fights Marx made in the First International was to justify trade union struggles over wages and working conditions in Wages, Price and Profit and reject a purely insurrectionist strategy.
G: At that time Marx, Engels and other socialists believed that it was important to demand an extension of democratic liberties so that trade unions were not outlawed; they believed that it was important to set up workers' political parties--this was done especially after the First International, although the idea was always around--which would try to represent workers' interests in the national parliaments. But they wanted these parties to be distinct from and be opposed to all parties formed by the "propertied classes." As far as I know, there wasn't any collaboration with certain fractions of the bourgeoisie or any debate with them about how the workers' issues will be settled inside the capitalist system.
The First International did discuss with parliamentarians all sorts of things. They sent letters and petitions to parliaments, they had debates and discussions with parliamentarians about workers' issues.
G: Had they ever thought of supporting a nation-state that was against a big power of the time, let's say England...?
Yes, they supported the northern states of the US during the Civil War against Britain which was threatening to break the blockade around the southern states. The First International's first order of business was to influence the British state's position on the Confederacy. Representatives of the First International discussed this issue extensively with parliamentarians representing industrial areas.
My job in writing about the antiglobalization movement is not to judge it, but to analyze it. First, it is to say what are the antiglobalization struggles and how they are now being increasingly interconnected and responding to each other. Second, it is to identify the movement's organizations--unions, parties, NGOs, affinity groups, etc. This is not just a census but it involves finding out their programs, the changes they have undergone, and the debates they are involved in. Many of these organizations might be terrible, but we are not writing a Michelin guide, after all. Third, it is to identify the divisions and hierarchies within the movement. Finally, it is to assess capital's response to the movement on the level of social planning (e.g., police tactics), investment, technological innovations and eventually political structure. These are the most elementary levels of analysis. Before we can come to a definitive conclusion about this movement it should be analyzed on these levels.
What should be first on our agenda is to gather information in order to understand the antiglobalization movement's story from a working class perspective.
At one time, capital thought that the idea of allowing workers to legally come together and collectively bargain was revolution. It took them centuries to come around to see that they could "live with it" (although the US capitalists are still not sure, hence the last quarter century of union busting!) This change in capital's attitude is important for us to understand, but this can only be done if we look at the whole story. If you say before hand, "Trade unions are reactionary enslavers of the working class, I'm not interested in them and in the trade union experience," then you end up not being interested in much of the working class' history of the last two centuries.
G: Yes, there is already a whole history of working class movements which is almost two centuries old and many things have happened during that long period of time. You have already mentioned the weak side of the First International, one could also mention some other mistakes that have been made, for example, in the Russian Revolution or in the Spanish Civil War or in May '68. But don't we learn anything from past mistakes? I mean, every time there is a new movement, is it going to start from scratch? Do we have to reproduce again all the past mistakes of the working class, socialist, communist or anarchist movements?
There is a nausea to history, isn't there! The problem with "mistakes" is that they appear in new forms and for many they were not clearly mistakes in the first place. In order to make an assessment that there was a "mistake" you must have a yardstick, and an answer to the question: Did certain strikes and insurrections increase working class power? It is impossible to answer this question in an a priori fashion. Moreover, there are inevitably many novelties in the history of struggles.
G: I'm very suspicious of working class movements that do not make a balance sheet of what they had done in the past or of what their predecessors had done and say that "we will start again from the beginning." That's completely irrational for me. In this case, I don't think that the "antiglobalization movement" is a working class movement, but if it was, I think that this would be its first mistake, not to assess what had been done in the past, what we did wrong in the past. What happened with this or that movement that we had taken part in, this or that state that we had supported. For example, what were the countries of Eastern Europe? Socialist? Communist? State capitalist? What? If people in the Balkans or Eastern Europe, the workers who will start fighting again against capital do not try to assess what happened in the past...
That's the job that has to be done. It is what is always done in struggle with comrades when one says, "Let's see what happened, let's understand it and let's make some conclusions and use this knowledge to move ahead."
G: Do you think that this is being done inside the "antiglobalization movement"?
It is being done in many different ways. In my work, I have decided to begin with a hypothesis--the antiglobalization movement is a working class movement--and to see what are the results. It is only after you apply class analysis to a movement and the result does not make sense, can you come to the conclusion that it is not a working class movement.
I have just begun by getting together (with Silvia Federici) a Chronology, and that is only a draft. As Hegel pointed out long ago, chronology is only the first level of the study of history. Even at this level there is contestation: Are the riots of Algeria in 1988 and of Morocco in 1990 part of the antiglobalization story?
K: These were the real social struggles against SAPs. But their sequence is not Prague. Although I don't know what is going on now in Morocco or Algeria.
G: I think that in this article you gave us you have presented the most sophisticated defense of this "antiglobalization movement" and it doesn't deserve it.
I am listening to your deep and comradely suggestions, but I would say that the jury involves eleven people, and you only comprise three of the eleven! I want to put together a more thorough presentation than the draft notes I have presented. I want to also deal with objections you and others have made.
For example, consider the rather remarkable organization called "Jubilee 2000." Where did it come from? Why has it split in so many ways? There are parts of the organization demanding total cancellation of Third World Debt and there are parts that are calling for cancellation of the so-called most indebted and poor countries and a gradual pay down for the others. This is a split within an organization that involves more than a thousand groups in all the countries of the world. Where does this split come from? Why is it being articulated in this way? How does this split enter into the debates taking place throughout the world? How does capital respond to this debate? This is really crucial because even now there is a theoretical threat of a debtors' cartel being formed if every indebted country is pushed beyond a certain point.
K: If tomorrow the IMF says, "OK, we must reform ourselves because of this pressure we get from NGOs or from the 'antiglobalization movement' in general," it will have an impact on workers' lives, but in what direction?
Of course, it would be like the Russian Revolution which was a very big development, but it also had problematic consequences for workers' lives both in Russia and the rest of the planet.
G: There are things that a lot of people in the "antiglobalization movement" have not made clear. Do they want to go back to national protectionism? Or do they want to make a breakthrough and create something new, something beyond private and state capital?
That is a big debate within the movement, moreover, this is something you have to make a political decision about yourself. Are these questions politically so important for your work that you will have to take part in these debates? This is the decision you have to make.
I have been involved in these debates for many years because I have been involved in Structural Adjustment struggles in Africa since the mid-1980s. Moreover, I can hardly lightly treat a movement that has brought thousands of people in the streets making the same demands I have been pushing for more than a decade!
As for you, I believe that there is going to be a point where, if you don't deal with the debates this movement is putting up, you will be considered irrelevant.
K: We are dealing with it.
One can deal with it by saying, "I'm not going to deal with it, because it is not an important part of my political work."
K: Criticizing is already taking one's stand.
A: For me it is more important to communicate with people I work with than try to convince members of political organizations that do not seem open to persuasion. It is also important what you are debating about.
K: There are some political choices that have already been made. And for me, apart from the criticisms I have already made so far, there are some dangerous tendencies that can already be seen in this "movement." For example, this transformation of NGOs into something like unions. The union leaders, as pimps of the working class, have been very harmful, but the NGOs are even more harmful. Because at least within trade unions, even in their worst corporatist form, there is preserved some sense of fragmented but still collective worker identity while the members of NGOs are mere individuals/citizens who philanthropically deal with other people's problems and give priority to the notion of "civil society" which is taking us even further away from a class struggle perspective. So, I think there has already been a damage. It is not enough for me to say, "Let's wait and see what will happen in ten years' time and in the end we can judge."
G: I want to continue on what Katerina has said. You say in the article you gave us that it's a mistake for these people who are involved in the "antiglobalization movement" to use the term "civil society" instead of using the term "working class struggle." Well, I don't think this is a mistake on their part. They know very well what they're doing when they are talking about civil society. This is the kind of society they want. They don't want to destroy class rule. They want to democratize capitalism.
The "they" you are speaking about is very varied, and on examination you'll discover that there will be plenty of people in the movement who don't use the notion of "civil society." There are, in fact, many industrial workers' and farmers' organizations involved in the antiglobalization movement who use categories like "working class" and "peasants" as their operative conceptions and they demand the preservation and expansion of common land, they refuse to pay the debt and they refuse national debt slavery. So, I would say to you that you have certain preconceptions of what the movement is all about (due to your experience in Greece perhaps) that I do not share. There are many more questions, debates and discourses in this movement than you recognize.
G: We know all the Greek organizations and groups that went to Prague one by one. We even know some of the people personally. We know what are the ideas of the anarchists who went there to raise hell. We know what are the ideas of the social democrats who went there, the members of PASOK and Sinaspismos, the Socialist Workers' Party and some of the NGOs and, of course, we had criticized these people on various occasions, long before they started participating in events like Prague. For example, in the struggles against the education law 2525 we had come in conflict with these PASOK and Sinaspismos trade unionists who were trying to undermine the movement. When I see these people going to Prague to shout slogans against the IMF and World Bank and I know that they had tried to undermine a social movement which, in my opinion, was very important because it was against the capitalist restructuring in education, then I'm saying to myself, "These people are playing a game that I've got to find out what it is."
You should find out what the game is and realize that the game changes, for the organizations you mentioned are not eternal essences. They too are in motion. They too must live. They too must change their game to respond to the forces arising around them. Yes, "what is their game?" That is what you should find out about. Perhaps you will find that in the process of being involved with the antiglobalization movement, these organization too are beginning to change. Certainly I have noticed that many organizations have changed their "game" quite dramatically in the last five years. I've even seen one of the most dinosauric organizations on the planet, the AFL-CIO, change in the last five years. So if it is changing, then perhaps organizations like Sinaspismos are in transformation as well. If you are not looking for this kind of change, you often won't see it until it is very far advanced.
G: Do you really think that social democratic parties like Sinaspismos would ever come close to our ideas?
No, I don't think that they are coming close to our ideas, but that is not how I measure change.
G: I mean close to anticapitalist ideas.
I say, "Take a look." Five years ago I would never have said that the AFL-CIO would be calling for amnesty for undocumented workers. It was not in my dreams that this would happen. But it has. An organization which has millions of workers as due-paying members and has billions of dollars has actually begun a campaign to demand amnesty for undocumented workers in the US! Surely, the AFL-CIO has not been transformed into an anticapitalist organization and its leadership is not doing this in order to agree with George Kaffentzis's conception of the need to abolish capital. These things are certainly not happening. But the AFL-CIO officials are responding to something very important which is described by the process of "globalization" and they have become part of the antiglobalization movement in order for their organization to survive. I don't judge this change on the basis of whether the AFL-CIO uses "Midnight Oil" as the reading text for its next congress. If that was the way I judged things, I would not see much change on this planet.
G: Again, you're talking like there can't be any lessons of the last two centuries of struggles. That's the problem with what you're saying.
I know that this criticism is given in a comradely way, but I am using the method developed in the last two hundred years to understand the present planetary class struggle. I am saying that there are features of the antiglobalization movement which do require some different thinking about organizational forms that looked like total impossibilities before. If you are claiming that the antiglobalization movement has nothing to do with the class struggle now, then I am asking you to take another look. The processes and programs variously called globalization, neoliberalism, recolonization, structural adjustment, or the new international division of labor are putting so much pressure on many older organizational forms that they are being forced to undergo a major transformation. I am not saying that these transformations mean that the end of capitalism is around the corner. But I should point out that the process is not only defined by capital. There has been a real change in working class power in the recent period. Perhaps this power is coming from a recomposition from the bottom, since billions of people have been driven so badly, have lost or are losing everything. You know, if you and the people around you are paying 30% of your income for water--as in Cochabamba--then you all are going to blow up and decide that it's time to fight to the finish.
K: My final comment is that you are too optimistic. We would like to continue this discussion in another way in the future.
Athens, October 15th 2000
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