The
Labour
The authors say ‘The brunt of the
capitalist globalization process has been borne by labour, the
restructuring of which in effect has been the major mechanism of
structural adjustment…… Our prognosis for the first decade of
the 21st century is that the deepening crisis in Asia
and the continuing crisis in Latin America will lead to an
enormous growth of informal workers with incomes at or below the
level of subsistence; large-scale movements of impoverished
workers and peasants back and forth between urban and rural
economies, the cheapening of industrial production and a decline
in well paid jobs in the advanced capitalist countries, the
growth of poorly paid service-jobs, and world-wide crisis of
living standards for labour.
‘Technological innovations,
largely related to the processing of information will lead to
the growth of relatively small elite of well-paid software
engineers and executives and a mass of poorly paid “information
processors” – the new proletariat. The outsourcing of labour
intensive computer work to low wage areas is already a growing
social phenomenon. Thus the centrality of wage labour contrary
to the prognosis of globalization theorists who talk about the
“disappearance of wage labour” – will greatly increase even as
it is impoverished. In so far as the new information systems are
linked to the vast movement of speculative capital they can be
seen as an integral technical instrument in the assault on
productive capital and the living standards of wage
workers.”(pp.24 & 25).
The
authors do not stop here. Hereafter they make a very important
point: “The social and political implication of the change are
momentous. For one thing, it will generate a radically different
social structure and system of relations. For another, it
highlights the strategic position of labour. Combined with the
growth of huge industrial reserve army (mainly informal and
contingent in form) and its depression effect on the wages of
the employed, the change wrought in the labour force and the
social structure of society will undermine and weaken the
capacity of capital to discipline labour and to stimulate the
accumulation process. (p.25)
This is a formulation demolishing
all other currently fashionable prognosis that labour, in the
wake of the Capitalist globalization is loosing its capacity to
fight or the wisdom of those who jubilantly formulate that the
proletariat is losing or has lost its revolutionary potential
and thereby merrily conclude that Marxist formulation of a
proletarian revolution have all come to be a myth.
<<
Back ||
Next >> |
