SENEGAL / FREE TRADE ZONES forces in internal affairs. • Over past months many African countries - such as the Ivory Coast, Gabon, Kenya and Benin -have experienced social and political upheavals. What lies behind this?
First of all in all these countries people are feeling fed up with the IMF's "adjustment" regime. The local ruling classes are short of crumbs to distribute, there is rapid population growth, while very few jobs are being created.
Finally, there is the impact of recent East European events. People are saying: "if walls are coming down in those countries, why not here?" The international context is encouraging democratic movements.
Finally, the Western countries have been making noises, sometimes sincerely, but mostly for demagogic reasons, about the African dictatorships - which the West have been supporting for decades. Now they are becoming an obstacle to imperialist projects. This too is fuelling the popular movements.
Movements demanding more democracy — rights to organization, association, the separation of the party and the state, against corruption - have been emerging. At the same time border-problems between states have reared their head — for example, between Senegal and Guinea-Bissau or Senegal and Gambia, Rwanda, Sudan and so on — the fruit of colonial divisions that ignored social and ethnic realities. • What direction will these struggles take? Could they foster the appearance of revolutionary forces and an independent workers' movement that could challenge capitalist rule?
In all these countries the left must understand that the youth and the population as a whole want democracy and enough to eat. Democratic demands are essential in all these countries, as is the struggle against corruption. Indeed, this latter issue goes beyond strictly democratic questions to call into question the very fundamentals of the system. The movements pose a whole series of economic demands - there can be no real democracy if people have empty stomachs.
Whether or not a workers' movement or a revolutionary movement emerges depends to a large extent on the existing level of organization and traditions of struggle in the particular country. There will be no miracles. People hope that their day-to-day demands will become a part of the democratic battle.
In a country like Senegal, it is hardly possible to speak about democracy when 60% of the people are illiterate, nearly 34% of children suffer from malnutrition and the overwhelming majority of the • population has no proper job. Along with the enjoyment of basic freedoms there must be education, healthcare and work. • An agreement on a unification project has been signed between different groups of the Senegalese left. What has been happening here?
This project involves our organization, the OST, And-Jef, the Union for People's Democracy (UDP) and the Suxuba readers circles. Its basis was the belief that we are approaching the national situation from a similar point of view and are working on similar lines.
We have started off with common actions, at the same time discussing the type of organization we want to build and broad perspectives on the African and world revolution. Each had drawn their own balance-sheet. We had all had a clear project for the construction of a revolutionary organization without being able to carry it through.
The Senegalese left has been unable to build a mass organization that could appear as a credible alternative. We had no other choice than to come together.
Such a process is always complicated and slow. Each group has its own traditions, ways of working and weight, but the debate has been opened.
We have even planned the construction of joint grassroots committees with people outside our organizations. We think we will be able to put this into practise in the near future. • What was the balance-sheet drawn by the Senegalese left of its activity?
The background to the balance-sheet includes such things as: a longestablished dictatorial regime, affecting our opportunities for work; the fact that the left took time to really understand the importance of democratic questions in a country such as ours, leaving the field open to bourgeois forces such as the PDS; the Stalinist background of the oldest organizations, which meant they operated in a way which stifled the development of a genuinely independent mass movement; the ruling Socialist Party's control over the unions, and the fact that the left has been unable to establish itself outside the teaching sector.
We have often worked in a way that was poorly adapted to our national reality. Furthermore we have been faced with the task of at once building ourselves and a broader workers' movement, since what exists is highly unstable and there is a lack of class consciousness.
It is clear that the building of a revolutionary force in Africa is a different matter from the Western countries where a developed working class and traditions of struggle and organization exist.
Without an independent workers' movement, all the democratic struggles to come will miss the mark. *
A new model of underdevelopment
FREE Trade Zones (FIZS) are territorial enclaves exempt from the common laws of a state with the objective of attracting investors. Their rapid development is directly due to the economic crisis striking regions or entire countries, particularly in the third world. This crisis allows capital to put numerous potential "host' countries in competition with each other and to haggle for the best price for its new locations.
CLAUDE GABRIEL
N the dominated countries, the FTZs increasingly tend to grant total exoneration from taxes and custom duties on the import of products transformed or assembled in the host country — rights at work and notably trade union rights are non-existent or ignored totally or partially, wages are kept as low as possible. The enterprises installing themselves in FTZs are not so much industries, as simple assembly or at best subcontracting workshops.
FTZs, under various names, are spreading, as much in the imperialist as in the dominated countries. They are even present in certain countries with planned economies, such as China where they are called special economic zones. The USSR also envisages opening up FTZs as a part of the economic reform programme. In 1982, around 90 FTZs employed less than a million people around the world. In 1989, there were nearly 200, employing nearly 2.5 million workers.
The multiplication of TZs illustrates the breadth of the structural crisis affecting the countries of the third world and the manner in which under-development reproduces itself. The FTZs have often been presented as remedies for the crisis of those economies subjected to a division of labour inherited from colonialism.The industrial jobs thus created are supposed to lead these countries out of dependence on the less and less remunerative market in primary materials. But in fact, the FTZs
International Viewpoint #196 • December 10, 1990
aggravate unequal development. They confirm the traditional character of capitalism in the third world - its violence and its rapid and brutal changes under the diktat of the world market.
This conception of third world industrialization recalls the dawn of capitalism. It combines the oppression of women and anti-worker repression. A brochure for investment in a Sri Lankan FTZ claims, underneath a photo of a young girl, that here is "the highest rate of competitivity of labour in Asia". Similar publicity from the Malaysian government affirms: "The dexterity of the Oriental woman is known the world over. Her hands are fine and she works rapidly with an extreme care. Who, then, could be better qualified to contribute to the efficiency of an assembly line than Oriental girls?".
Often employed very young, rapidly worn out by the rhythms of work, the young girls must give place to others who can perform better. The rotation of the labour force is very high and, taking account of the agrarian and urban crisis, these women have sometimes no other solution, afterwards, than to become prostitutes. Thus, the FTZs pose serious social and strategic problems for the local workers' movements. How to organize this population? How to defend it?
In Mauritius, for example, traditionally an exporter of sugar, it required only a few years for the FTZs to become the principal component of the GNP. This has rapidly transformed the situation for the local labour movement - from a trade union movement traditionally centered on the sugar economy (cutting, processing, transport and docks) to a situation where it is necessary to find a new point of equilibrium, centered on industry, with a largely female workforce. The brutal transformation effected by capitalism combines with a slow and difficult reconstruction of the working class organizations.
The FTZs solve none of the problems of local development. The creation of jobs and the improvement of qualifications rapidly provokes an inevitable pressure on wages. They have to be increased to stabilize a part of the workforce and to avoid labour unrest. Then some of the employers look elsewhere, to another FTZ, to lower their costs of production. After ten years of existence, the FTZs in Mauritius are experiencing this and employers speak of "delocalizing" some of the factories and production to Madagascar.
The British magazine International Labour Reports has reported on the long saga of the Californian firm Mattel, which produces Barbie dolls; installing themselves first in Mexico at the end of the 1960s, they moved to South Korea, after two victorious strikes. In the middle of the 1970s, the same process took place in Korea and Mattel moved production to the FTZ of Bataan in the Philippines! Such is the inevitable contradiction of a "delocalized" and segmented production, in search
FREE TRADE ZONES of low wages.The FTZs have mainly involved assembly factories with a particular emphasis on textiles and clothing. Subcontracting and partial displacements of production allow lowering of costs, without coming up against the protectionism of the big buyer countries.