The social impact on
Europe of the prolonged crisis
WE ARE PUBLISHING below the edited version of a report given by
Ernest Mandel at a meeting of the Political Bureaus of the European sections of the Fourth International some months ago.
In particular, this article analyzes the questions having to do with employment and unemployment, the consequences of the introduction of the new technologies on employment and the state of the reorganization of the labor process.
The overall political and social project of the bourgeoisie is dealt with, both as regards its ultimate objectives and as regards the progress it has made so far in achieving them.
Finally, the article looks at the various elements of recomposition in the workers' movement and the resistance of the workers' movement to the attacks mounted by the bourgeoisie.
ERNEST MANDEL, evennesses among countries and from year to year. But if there is a general trend, it is rather in the opposite direction - toward a slight upturn in Europe's share of commodity exports and a very clear increase in capital exports. The latter development could even be called sensational, but of course what it means is open to argument.
In Great Britain, there has been a real reorientation of finance capital toward financial operations, operations by the City, [London's financial center], and particularly, capital exports, which have reached record levels. This is not in itself positive for the British bourgeoisie, since, unlike the countries on the continent, this movement has been accompanied by an actual deindustrialization, at least for the moment.
Roughly speaking, the United States' share of the total capital invested abroad is now less than 40%. You would have to go back before World War II to find such a figure. The Japanese and the European shares have been continually growing. As for world exports of industrial goods, the West German share is about on the line of the mid1970s, that is a bit over 15% of the world market. That, moreover, represents a slight rise over the level of the first years of the 1980s, when it fell to around 14%. The US share, on the other hand, is below the level of the 1970s. And for Japan there is a sharp rise.
Today, West Germany is the leading world exporter of industrial goods (15% of the world market, as against 14% for Japan, and 13.4% for the United States). This is not exactly a picture of European decline.
What is spectacular is the rise of the semi-industrialized countries as exporters of industrial goods. These countries' share of the world market has practically doubled in the past ten years. It has risen from 6.3% in 1975 to 11.2% or 11.3% today.
There is another myth that should be exploded. The industrial-goods exports of Third World countries are not essentially exports by US, Japanese or European multinationals relocated in these countries. This category of exports represents 20% to 25% of the total. The rest are exports by industrial firms whose capital is in local hands, either in the form of state ownership, mixed owners or "joint ventures.
Let us take one of the most portant high-tech industries, teleco munications. Today, Europe's exp of telecommunications materia the largest in the world. They am to 6,500 million dollars a year against 3,200 million for the U
International Viewpoint 7 April 194
ERNEST MANDEL
The long phase of economic depression in which the capitalist economy finds itself offers no sign of recovery. This depression is characterized by a structural rise in unemployment, which can be summed up by the following formula: The rate of in crease in the level of unemployment is equal to the rate of increase in the productivity of labor. To that we have to add the rate of population growth and subtract the rate of economic growth. On the average, the productivity of labor continues to increase by 2.5% to 3% annually. Since the rate of economic growth is less than that figure, we see already, without even taking into consideration population trends, an increase in unemployment. West Europe's place in the world crisis
Obviously, this depression is not progressing in a linear way. The industrial cycle continues to operate. So, within the framework of this long-term depression there are successive phases of recession and recovery. At the moment, we are in an upturn in almost all the countries of capitalist Europe. But a new phase of recession is inevitable in 1986 or 1987, even if no one can predict the date exactly.
The scope of these conjunctural movements differs, depending on the 14 case. The place of Europe in the world market, the relative buoyancy of exports, plays an important role in this respect. Unlike what happened in the latter half of the 1970s, capitalist Europe is now benefitting to various degrees from all the structural weaknesses of the American economy - the high exchange rate for the dollar, the low productivity of American industry, the huge budget deficit and a higher rate of inflation in the United States than in some countries of Western Europe.
The opposite also threatens to occur. Once the recession phase starts in the United States, there could be a sharp drop in European exports to the United States. As a result, the new recession may be worse in Europe than the one in 1980-82.
It is important to clear away a myth, the idea of a decline of Europe in the world. This notion is very widespread, and it has a clear political function, that is to encourage class collaboration and acceptance of an austerity policy. For the moment, without speculating about what the future might hold, this view of things • remains a myth.
The share of the European imperialist countries in the world market, both in exports of industrial commodities -and capital exports, has not declined. It is hard to establish a general trend, because there are un-
States, and 5,000 million for Japan.
What is still more important is that Europe's trade balance in mechanical instruments and telecommunications equipment is substantially positive, as is that of Japan. On the other hand, the United States' trade balance in this area shows a two-thirds deficit, that is, it imports twice as much as it exports.
In electronics for mass consumption - not high-tech, military and space electronics - there has been a spectacular turn around in the situation to the disadvantage of the United States. The latter is importing twice what it exports, in particular from Japan but also from some semiindustrialized countries. The pattern of unemployment
Before coming to conclusions about the overall employment and unemployment trends, let us look at the trends industry by industry. Roughly, they fall into three categories: those where there has been a clear, absolute decline in employment, those where there is an intermediary situation, and those where there has been an increase in employment.
Very schematically, in the first category, those industries hardest hit by unemployment, there is a coincidence between declining demand and the impact of introducing • the new technologies. Here there is a
International Viewpoint 7 April 1986 considerable drop in employment. Such industries include ship building. mining, steel, textiles, shoes and - to a certain extent - petrochemicals and oil refineries, although in this latter instance the situation is a bit better.
The second category is that where demand, and therefore production, continue to increase, but at a slower tempo than in the past, and where there is also a strong thrust of technological innovation. These are key industries, accounting for almost half the total volume of industrial employment - auto, electrical appliances, construction and public works.
Here, in the medium term, there is no decline in demand. Demand continues to increase. But it is being accompanied by increased productivity, hence by the application of the new technologies. Therefore, there is a combined effect on employment that is hard to measure exactly, because competition plays a big role and the trends are, therefore, different from country to country.
Some countries are losing their footing in the market, which means a definite decline in employment. Other countries, to the contrary, are increasing their shares of the market, and may stabilize or even increase their levels of employment in these industries. For the moment, the Spanish auto industry seems to be expanding, like the German auto industry. They are hiring, while the British and French auto industries are laying people off.
Agence Nationale Pour I Emploi
In the dole queue in France (DR)
Finally, there is the third category - that of industries that are enjoying a greater than average growth in demand and production. Paradoxically, in these high-tech industries, the new technologies are having far less impact on employment than in the others. The most important are the engineering industry, the entire machine and producers goods industry, electronics, scientific instruments, medical and pharmaceutical products. Electronics has an organic composition of capital (share of wages in production costs) below the average in other industries.
If we put all these data together, the first thing that emerges is that there is an increase in the numbers of unemployed and the rate of unemployment. But, except for Spain, Portugal and Ireland - and Ireland can be left aside because in reality it is a nonimperialist and nonindustrialized country - the unemployment rate is around 10%. In Britain, in the last four years the rate has gone from 10.2% to 10.9%. But in Spain, the rate of unemployment is double that. In that country, since 1977, job losses in industry have amounted to more than a fourth of the total, some 27%, which is quite exceptional in Europe.
Of course, these unemployment rates are based on the total economically active population, and therefore say little about the volume of employment. The unemployment rate can increase at the same time as the volume of employment. Everythirg depends, therefore, on the population trends. Overall, fluctuations
15
employment are still weak.
Here there is another myth to be refuted - the idea that we are seeing full-fledged deindustrialization or "dewaging" in Europe and North America. The figures on the trends in the volume of employment in capitalist Europe are the following: a drop of 0.5% in 1983, stabilization in 1984, a slight rise of 0.2% in 1985. Over a longer term, it is the same, or about the same. For ten years, we have seen fluctuations on the order of +1.2% to -1.1%.
These are quite minimal fluctuations. If you compare them with those in the period 1930-38, the difference is striking. Then, there were nose dives in employment, on the order of 30%. The present drops are marginal ones. This does not mean that they are not grave or without social consequences.
The drop in industry properly speaking has been sharper. But the shift is not so extensive as it is felt to be in some cireles.
The figures for France are quite representative. Between December 31, 1979, and December 31, 1984, the totally economically active population declined by 2.5%. The number of "self-employed" dropped by 280,000 persons, that of wage earners by 250,000 persons, or by 1.4%. In industry, the decline in the number of wage earners was on the order of 10%. But if we add telecommunications and the nontrading "tertiary" sectors, the decline is reduced to less than 1%. Employment in commerce and in the financial services has stagnated. Employment in the public sector has increased.
Nonetheless, some particular remarks have to be made about youth and female unemployment. Since the onset of the crisis, female employment has been rising, and this has even been rather marked. Male employment has been declining. The rates of the increase in female employment differ according to country.
In Denmark, the level of employment for women rose from 63% in 1975 to 72% in 1983, that is, by 15%, which is enormous for a period of crisis. In Sweden, the rate rose from 67% to 77%, an increase of nearly 15%. In Belgium the rate of employment for women rose from 44% to 50%, in France from 49% to 51%, in Germany from 49% to 49.6%, and in Italy from 34.5% to 40%.
The biggest rise has been in Norway, where the rate rose from 53.3% to 67%, which is an increase of 25% over ten years.
This observation of the rising rate of female employment has to be qualified immediately by taking into consideration the scope of unsteady 16 jobs. Most of the increase in female employment is accounted for by the increase in part-time jobs. Household incomes have declined because of the crisis, and women are trying to work to compensate for these losses.
Moreover, because of the crisis, less full-time jobs are available, especially for women.
But there is also a socio-cultural factor operating here, owing to the double workload of women - unpaid work in the home on top of work on the job — which results in working days of 13, 14, 15 and 16 hours when women have full-time jobs.
So, a section of women workers, at least in the northern European countries, are also opting deliberately for part-time work.
The increase in part-time work overall is very different from one country to another. Between 1973 and 1983, in ten years, part-time jobs rose to 25% of the total in Sweden, from 21% to 24% in Denmark, from 16% to 19% in Britain and from 8.7% to 21% in the Netherlands, which is the sharpest increase, if the statistics are correct.
Fo part-time jobs has risen from 4% to 8%, for France from 7% to 10%, and for West Germany from 10% to 12%. Italy is the only country that has shown a drop, from 6.4% to 4.6%, but here again there is a question about the statistics. In Italy, a large part of the part-time work is unregistered jobs, which therefore remain outside the official statistics.
The share of women in part-time jobs is enormous. In Europe, they hold more than 80% of the part-time jobs. In West Germany, the rate is even 92%, while in the other European countries, it is around 80%. to 85%. Sweden comes after Germany, with 89,6% of part-time jobs held by women. In Britain, the proportion is lower, 70% women as against 30% for men.
Unemployment of young people between 16 and 25 is rising sharply. Long-term unemployment, in which Belgium holds the disreputable record, is also increasing sharply. In West Germany, the rate of youth joblessness went from 3.9% of total unemployment to 10% at the beginning of the 1980s, from 15% to 26% in France, from 14% to 22% in Britain, from 25% to 34% in Italy, and so on.
Only in Sweden has the youth unemployment rate remained practically stable, rising only from 5.1% to 6%. Among youth under 25 in Spain, the rate has gone from 28.5% in 1980 to 44.5% now. This is the highest rate in all of Europe. And what is more serious for all these countries is that in this mass of unemployment, there is a growing number of young people who have never worked, who have never held any job since they left school. This phenomenon has obvious social and political implications, which represent grave threats for the workers' movement.
Long-term unemployment reflects the same trend of deterioration. Between 1980 and 1984, those unemployed two years or more have increased from 12% to 22% of all unemployed in France, from 8% to 15% in West Germany, from 8% to 32% in Spain, from 13% to 20% in Italy and from 39% to 49% in Belgium. Skills and the new technologies
Let us move on to the most delicate and also the most controversial question, the structure of employment as regards skills. We are clearly in the midst of a process that presents a complex and composite picture. It is impossible to know for the moment which of the trends operating is going to predominate. Any extrapolation of one of the trends at work in this complex process can lead to grave errors of prognosis.
We are still in an initial stage of complete automation. We are still largely in what is called the phase of semi-automation. There is no question of manual jobs or wage labor being radically eliminated from industry. In these conditions, the recomposition of the working class, the relations between laborers and skilled workers, old and new skills, fluctuate greatly according to industries and from plant to plant, depending on whether the new technologies are applied to a large extent, partially, or only marginally.
Any conclusion drawn by generalizing examples from high-tech industries, where robots are often used, assumes something that has not been proven, that is, that in the coming ten years all of industry is going to be reorganized on this model. No one can say that, because no one knows that, and, for the moment, it seems extremely improbable.
When a radically new technology is introduced, that brings on a reorganization of the whole labor process. But there are also a whole series of burdens that go along with this changeover, and it cannot be predicted in advance how long they will have to be borne. Learning and trying out the new technology and reorganizing the work process require a lot of labor power. Likewise, plants have to be re-equipped in a snomballing pattern as subsequent stages of the production process have to brought into line with the new
International Viewpoint 7 April 1986
nology, which is no small matter. This requires building new plants and new machines, with corresponding effects on employment, effects that are very different than they would be if the technology were already in place.
The bourgeoisie, the bosses, the trade-union bureaucracy and obviously the bourgeois state and governments are deliberately using all this talk about robotization to frighten the workers. You can always make predictions about what the situation is going to be in ten years, but with respect to the present, such talk clearly has a manipulative function.
For example, the figures do not prove any deskilling of labor in France. Between 1975 and 1983, the number of skilled workers in industry rose from 2.8 million to 2.9 million. It is nossible that this is a nurely It is possible that this is a purely temporary thing, but that is what the figures are. In the same period, the number of unskilled workers declined from 4 million to 3.5 million. The percentage of skilled workers rose from 39% to 45% of workers in industry as a whole.
These figures do not give any idea of the relation between old skills and new ones. Obviously, employment of workers with the old skills has declined. The total number of new jobs has only gone up by 100,000 and there are a lot of people with the new skills. Thus, the conclusion is obvious - there has been a reduction in the number of employed workers with the old skills.
So, where is the real problem of assessment? It is that in most of the projections about the number of robots and the trend to robotization, the question of markets, that is, the volume of production and sales, is left entirely out of the picture. The argument is built up as if the new technologies were introduced and applied solely in accordance with the criteria of technical efficiency and reducing wage costs, without taking account of the fact that these new technologies involve an enormous increase in the volume of production and, therefore, require a big expansion of the market in order to be employed profitably.
In the production of the motor for the Fiat-Uno for example, the productivity of labor has more than doubled as a result of the use of computers and robots. Before, it took 250 minutes to make a motor, and now it can be done in no more than 107 minutes. The assembly line is organized so that a motor can be assembled every 20 seconds.
But the production apparatus is utilized only to 30% of capacity. Why? Because in order to run it at 100% of capacity, the company would have
International Viewpoint 7 April 1986 to sell two or three times more cars than it does today. And where is it going to sell two or three times more cars? Today, auto sales are increasing on the order of 2.5% to 3% a year.
Obviously, there is competition within the industry. Fiat can hope to increase its share of the market at the expense of the other automobile manufacturers, but only a little. This is what places limits on the introduction of the new technologies.
Overall economic growth, outlets, markets, buying power, overall sales figures have to be taken into account. The industrialists' own projections and perspectives are pinned on that. At an international conference of robotics industrialists a year ago, the figures advanced were quite modest. It was predicted that from now to 1990, 1%, 1.5% or 2% of the industrial labor would be robotized. This is an overall figure. It does not mean that in certain industries, the figure may not be much higher. But in general the trend to robotization remains quite marginal.
In the famous high-tech workshop at Fiat that I referred to before, in which there are 103 computers and 56 robots, the total number of workers employed dropped from 3,100 to 2,670, that is, a drop of 13% in employment. Even with the introduction of the new technologies, the factory is far from having been totally automated. Employment in industry compared with in the services
Generally over the last ten years a decline has been registered - although it is much less pronounced than usually thought - in employment in industry, and a net increase in employment in the so-called service
Talbot-Poissy workers on strike (DR) sector.
For all of capitalist Europe, employment in industry declined annually by 1.2% between 1973 and 1975, by 0.6% annually between 1975 and 1979, by 2.9% for the period 198082 and by 2.6% in 1983, which amounts to a cumulative decline of 17% over 11 years. At the same time, employment in the services increased annually by 1.8% between 1973 and 1975, by 1.9% between 1975 and 1979, by 1.2% between 1980 and 1982, and by 0.9% in 1983.
These averages conceal very sharp differences among countries. For example, in Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway and Sweden, industrial employment continued to increase between 1973 and 1975. In Greece, Iceland and Portugal, it even kept going up until 1982. In Italy, the decline was relatively gentle until 1984. It has been much more pronounced in Britain, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and West Germany.
Conversely, the increase in employment in the services is under the average in Belgium, West Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Spain and
Y1T211 It is slightly stronger in France, Sweden, and the Netherlands. It is quite pronounced in Austria, Luxembourg and Italy.
Nonetheless, these statistics have to be re-examined critically if we want to interpret them from a Marxist point of view. In fact, a number of enterprises that the official statistics put under the service sector actually belong under industry from the standpoint of production of value and therefore of surplus value. This is the case notably of the transportation sector; gas, electricity and water; the telecommunications industry and the electronics/ software industry.
Once you make this reclassification,
17
the picture changes drastically. You realize that there is no question of any "deindustrialization." Late capitalism is rather characterized by a more pronounced industrialization of the whole of economic life, which is reflected notably by stepped-up mechanization (and therefore a tendency to declining employment) in the commercial and the financial sectors, service industries par excellence.
It is only in the public sector that we are seeing a net expansion of nonindustrial employment, one that is continuing. But here also we have to avoid extrapolation. The more-andmore pronounced crisis of public finances and the cutbacks this is leading to in all countries could rapidly reverse this trend.
These sectoral shifts in employment are undeniably bringing about a recomposition of the working class. Do they inevitably mean a weakening of the organized workers' movement? Here again we have to beware of extrapolations. The only constant that seems to emerge is that there is a relative increase in the weight of wage earners, and therefore of unions, in the public sector by comparison with the traditional sectors. But this does not automatically mean a weakening of working-class militancy or of the trade-union movement's striking power.
Today, paralyzing the telecommunications centers, the big transportation companies, the electricity generators, or even the banks can hit a capitalist economy just as hard as shutting down the mines, steel or even the auto industry could have in the past. In more than a few countries, some public workers' unions are today the spearhead of working-class combativity. There is no reason beforehand to exclude the possibility that this trend may grow.
It is another question whether what have been the traditional bastions of the workers' movement, owing to the concentrations of workers and the traditions of militancy they represented, can be replaced by new bastions. I will come back to that point. Let me note only that the concentration of wage earners in rail, the post office and telecommunications centers, the airports and the electronic industry is considerable. New bastions of the trade-union movement may well develop in such places.
What have been the long-term effects of the crisis on the level of direct real wages, social benefits, and on the problematic of pauperization? In this area, there has been a nearly universal decline in workers' buying power, except perhaps in the case of Norway. But this decline once again differs considerably from 18 country to country. Here again, the most pronounced decline has been in Spain and Portugal. It is also marked in Belgium, where the buying power of the average wage dropped by 16% in the space of seven years, which is quite a lot. Attacks on social benefits
In Britain and West Germany, this drop has been a little less steep. In Italy and in France, it has been still less sharp. In Britain, since 1979 a drop of 7.6% in the buying power of the average wage has been registered. For manual workers over the past ten years, the drop has been 10%. This means an annual decline of 1% to 1.5%.
In Italy, the decline seems to be on the same order of magnitude, with annual drops of 1.2% to 1.5%. In West Germany, it is similar, with annual declines of 1.2% to 1.3% since 1979.
What is harder to calculate is the decline in social security benefits. In this respect, two trends cross. First of all, there is the decline in individual benefits; but benefits overall are increasing, if only as a result of the increase in unemployment. In general, it can be said that social benefits have declined in terms of buying power, but less than wages.
There are two reasons for this. First of all, the bourgeoisie has estimated rightly that frontal attacks against social security would provoke sharper reactions than attacks against wages. For example, if they touched sick benefits, the response could be a general one rather than just from a limited group. The bourgeoisie wants to fragment the working-class fightback. So, it has an interest in moving more slowly to attack social security than in attacking wages.
Furthermore, the bourgeoisie obviously has a genuine and general interest in reducing real wages. It is more divided on the question of social security. Even Margaret Thatcher's cabinet in Britain is divided on this question. It is in fact thanks to the protective net of social security that the socio-political effects of the crisis have been more limited up till now than they were in the 1930s. In these conditions, tearing this net abruptly would obviously be playing with fire.
This does not mean that there will not be attacks against the social security system, quite the contrary. As the crisis drags on, the deficits in the social security system are growing. In these conditions, the system of social protection is going to be strongly challenged in the future, even though the bourgeoisie will try as much as possible to cushion its blows and to apportion them.
As regards cuts in social benefits, once again the Spanish state is bearing the brunt of it, with a concentrated attack, on unemployment benefits hitting the more vulnerable minority of the working class that cannot defend itself. In this country, three-quarters of the unemployed get virtually no benefits. It has not yet reached this level in the rest of Europe, but the attacks on unemployment benefits are going to increase.
The result of all this is that even if overall social security spending is on the rise, the number of persons and households below the poverty line is markedly on the rise. There is a major debate over the definition of poverty. It is normal for us as Marxists not to accept the criteria of the bourgeoisie and its experts. But the real debate is not over the definition but the trend. However you define poverty, when the number of needy people increases, pauperization becomes worse.
Today, in most European capitalist countries, about 15% of the population are living in poverty. In Spain, Portugal and southern Italy, obviously this percentage is much higher.
In West Germany, the number of persons living on public benefits has practically doubled, rising from 1.4 to 2.5 million persons. The number of unemployed getting no benefits has risen from 800,000 to 2 million. If you add these two figures, they show that almost 5 million people today are clearly in circumstances of pronounced poverty.
In Britain the number of people who can be considered poor has also almost doubled, rising from 4.5 million in 1975 to 8.5 million in 1984. The number who get what is called the basic social benefit (payments given to the needy amounting to about 100 pounds a month has risen from 3.7 to 5.4 million. And the number who get 10% more than the "social benefit," which is still miserable, has risen from 1 million to 1.7 million. Those who get less than this public assistance cushion have risen from 1.8 million to 3.2 million persons. This adds up to a total that has increased from 6.5 to 10.4 million persons for a country of million inhabitants.
In the Scandinavian countries, th situation is much better. Belgium the Netherlands and France are an intermediate situation Italy, Britain, Spain and Portugal are much worse off. In Italy, moreover, them are regional differences, in particula between the north, where there more or less the same percenta
International Viewpoint 7 Aprl 1986
of needy people as in the rest of Europe; and the south, where the situation is close to that of Spain and Portugal.
There is an intermediate phenomenon between purely material impoverishment and the impact of the new technologies, which is wiping out the old skills, with all the implications this has in terms of moral destitution, uneasiness, fear, desperation, feelings of social uselessness and demoralization. Structural weakening of the workers' movement?
The impact of the new technologies on the organization of labor provides the bridge between descriptive analysis and the problematic of the relationship of forces among the classes.
In the history of capitalism, every time there has been a long depression, there has been a reorganization of the labor process, which is not only, or even primarily, technological. It is difficult to quantify the thing, but the essential part of what has happened in the plants in this regard is the result of rationalization without new technology.
This involves, among other things, the bourgeoisie taking advantage of unemployment and the fear of unemployment to take its revenge on the workers who were in the forefront of the fight in the preceding period. There have been, and will continue to be, selective layoffs of the more militant trade-union activists.
Obviously, it is necessary to fight such moves, not just let them happen. But quite often, the bosses know that in such attacks they can count on the complicity of the trade-union bureaucracy.
Reorganizing the work process obviously has precise objectives from an economic point of view. Stepped-up intensity of labor is a general characteristic of a period of prolonged depression. It is the clearest way of increasing the production of surplus value. This is the purpose of a lot of the measures that are being talked about today in terms of flexible hours, more continuous use of the instruments of labor and the generalization of around-the-clock shifts.
There is dismantling of the gains made by the unions as regards control over the assembly lines, which has gone hand in hand with a revival of Taylorism (1) to use a term that is coming back into fashion.
Once again, this is not a purely technological phenomenon, but an evolution that also has a social dimension. It involves increasing the control of capital over labor, increasing the pressure on the workers, dismantling
International Viewpoint 7 April 1986 the gains of the past.
In the preceding phase, elements of workers' and trade-union control had been introduced with regard to the speed of the line or the tempos of work. We are now seeing a major regression in this regard.
This question is bound up intimately with two other problems. Is there a deconcentration of industry? Is there a collapse, or at least an erosion, of the big working-class and trade-union bastions, the high points of working-class militancy that have dominated the class struggle in Europe for 20 to 25 years? The answer to these questions has to be a qualified one.
First of all, as regards deconcentration. This is a very marginal phenomenon. According to the statistics of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the percentage of total employment represented by enterprises of more than 500 wage earners increased I in Sweden between 1975 and 1983. It decreased by less than 2% in Belgium in the same period, and by 3% in France. The percentage of total employment represented by workplaces with more than 100 wage earners increased in the Netherlands, but decreased by 2% in Denmark.
In Great Britain in manufacturing industry, the percentage of employment represented by workplaces with more than 500 wage earners declined from 70% in 1977 to 68% in 1982, which is after all only a minimal variation. In Italy, the often cited figure is 46.4% of all wage earners in the manufacturing industry working in 1981 in establishments with more than 500 wage earners.
If you take account of the increase in the number of enterprises the service sector, where the average size is less than in manutacturing, you get a still stronger impression of near stability.
The reduction in the number of workers in very big enterprises is an important phenomenon that should be noted. But the difficulty in assessing this evolution lies in the fact that, even after this decline, these enterprises remain very large.
For the sake of comparison, let us take a figure for auto plants. If a very large plant is cut down from 80,000 to 60,000 workers, you can say that there has been a very sharp decrease in th concentration of workers. But a plant of 60,000 workers remains a very large enterprise.
Of course, some industries have gone into a nose dive, such as ship building and steel. But where industries have held up in general or grown, the enterprises that predominate continue to be very large ones. This is the case notably in auto, aviation, electronics and chemicals in most countries. We have Fiat, Volkswagen, Ford, General Motors, Daimler-Benz, Seat, Renault, Volvo, Citroen-Peugeot, Siemens, Philips, GEC, Plessey, the "big three' in the German chemical industry, the "big three" in the Swiss chemical industry, Rhone-Poulenc, ICI, Montedison, and so forth.
But here is where a qualification comes in. There is no mechanical link between the size of the enterprise, the strength of the union and working-class militancy. It is quite possible in the short or medium term for a big enterprise to remain but for the rate of unionization to decline and for working-class militancy to decline even more. So, we have to make distinetions about these trends country by country.
Undeniably, some working-class bastions have fallen - British Leyland, the printing industry, steel and the shipyards in Britain; steel and the shipyards in Spain; the Walloon steel industry; and the steel industry in France. Others have been weakened but have not fallen, such as steel in the Ruhr and the Saar in West Germany.
Many bastions, nonetheless, still stand. In Britain, West Germany, in the Scandinavian countries and in most of the Benelux countries and Austria, there has been no weakening of the trade-union movement as a whole. There has been a decline in the rate of unionization, but it is less than the drop in employment, which is an exceptional fact, because it has to be remembered that in the comparable period of crisis, the 1930s the unions were terribly weakened. The British unions, like those in most of the European countries, sometimes lost as much as half their membership. This time in the countries mentioned above, the weakening of the trade unions is marginal.
There are the intermediate cases of Greece and Portugal, where there is a real deunionization but one that is not yet very pronounced. On the other hand, we have to take note of the nose dives in the rate of unionization, in particular in Spain and France. There you can talk about a disastrous contraction of the trade-union move. ment. The phenomenon is more marked than in the 1930s.
Nonetheless, there is no automatic and mechanical correlation between the survival of the traditional bastions of the workers' movement in terms of numbers and the economic weight of the enterprises, on the one side and the strength of the trade-union movement on the other. Nor is there any automatic correlation between the
1. Techniques for increasing the intensity of labor.
rate of unionization and working-class and worker militancy. Anomalies can appear on both sides.
For example, a drop in trade-union membership can be accompanied by a lesser decline in worker militancy, or even a rise. In Spain, the strike curve has been rather upward for two years, at least it was up between 1983 and 1984. In Britain, we see rather the opposite case. There, the rate of unionization remains high, but worker militancy is clearly on the wane.
The effects of the defeat of the British miners should not be underestimated. They are very serious. This was more than a symbolic battle. It affected the overall relationship of forces between the classes. The miners fought bravely but they remained isolated. An isolated struggle like that against a whole government and all the bosses is a very difficult one. Since the battle was very prolonged, it meant very onerous sacrifices for the workers. So, the effect of the defeat is quite palpable.
What is happening now among the miners - the split in the National Union of Miners (NUM) and the emergence of a new right-wing union that threatens to divide other sectors of the working class, if not the trade-union movement as a whole - has unleashed a very dangerous dynamic. The implications of this for the workers' movement as a whole should not be underestimated. Chances for a fightback
There is no reason, under any pretext, to belittle struggles for individual, local, limited demands. On the contrary, any working-class victory, any victorious defensive strug gle, even on the smallest question, is more important today than long speeches on general questions.
The working class has to relearn through experience that it can achieve successes, even in a period of depression and unemployment. It can achieve successes, but not in the immediate future on general objectives. If that has been understood, workers will fight doggedly even for limited objectives, when victory and success are SO important. The pedagogy of success, demonstration in deed that struggle can pay, is the most important thing today.
The workers' skepticism about their chances of winning is much less in the case of small demands that are within their reach in the plants than in the case of big problems. No one thinks that unemployment can be fought in a single plant. 20
But stopping a change in wage scales or job classifications in one factory is actually within the reach of the workers in the factory concerned at a given time. And if in such struggles the workers gain satisfaction several times, that can begin to have positive effects on a larger scale.
Everything that I have been saying here is purely conjunctural. I do not in any way rule out a turnaround in the situation. The present situation has to be compared with analogous ones that the workers movement went through in the early 1930s and early 1960s. Such a study needs to be made in each country, so as to determine how workers' struggles took off again after a long decline.
In general, the resumption of struggles did not come over spectacular questions, nor in all the plants at once nor even in whole industries. It started with small successes that began mounting up.
Obviously the political climate was very different then. Extra-economic factors such as the problem of fascism in the 1930s played a role. In the 1960s, with full employment, the social climate overall was much more favorable.
However, we are a bit quick to forget, for example, that after the putsch of the generals in Algiers, some activists in France were preparing to go underground. It should not be forgotten either how quickly the mood of the workers changed. In 1962-63 in France the atmosphere was hardly conducive to optimism, to say nothing of the one that existed in West Germany.
The bourgeoisie today, conservative and neoliberal - the adjectives do not matter - has an overall political and social project. It goes much further than simply gaining a few percentage points more of the national income at the expense of the working masses or increasing the rate of surplus value and getting the rate of profit back up. What is at stake
By taking advantage of the economic depression and the relative weakening of the workers' movement -which is a general phenomen, although uneven from country to country -the bourgeoisie is trying to achieve a lasting change in the relationship of forces among the classes and to institutionalize it. This means essentially dismantling the most important gains of the workers' movement over the preceding quarter of a century, if not over the past 50 years.
If we wanted to sum up these gains in a single formula, we could say that the workers' movement managed to achieve a quantitative rise in the objective level of class solidarity through a combination of trade-union power, control over the work process and political weight. This formula may seem "objectivist" and vague, but it is quite sound and eminently Marxist. The weight of the workers' movement has been a force in society for better protection of all the underprivileged strata. That is the most general meaning of everything that has taken place since the crisis of the 1930s.
This gain was very important. Revolutionary Marxists have to be aware of this, because it concerns what Marx regarded as the definition of the proletarian condition, that is, fundamental insecurity as regards the conditions of existence. This is what is involved in the economic need to continually sell your labor power, a sale that is never guaranteed and whose financial result is never certain.
All of these gains obviously did not eliminate the insecurity of the proletarian condition, but they considerably reduced the scope of it for certain strata of the working-class population. The objective fact that an unemployed worker is better compensated than before, that sick people or retirees get more benefits, that the less skilled and unorganized are protected by a minumum wage (the Smig in France), has an objective effect on the cohesiveness and striking power of the working class, regardless of the consciousness of those who fought to win these demands or who profit from them without having fought for them.
Once these gains are partially or totally dismantled, solidarity objectively declines. Different layers are hit to differing extents and more or less left to their own fates, especially the weaker ones - immigrants, women, youth, the handicapped, the old. But the cumulative effect of this change on the working class becomes palpable from the moment that this development reaches a certain quantitative level.
Obviously, there is a question of transformation of quantity into quality. If 5% of the proletarians are marginalized, the effects on the class as a whole will not be dramatic. But if 30% or 35% are hit, then the cumulative effect becomes grave. And this is what the bourgeoisie is looking for, at least in the major countries.
Moreover, the bourgeoisie is not trying to hide what it wants. Its project is to deal a lasting blow not just to the incomes but to the status of a third or 40% of the working class. This is why the term "two tier society" is justified as a characteri zation of the bourgeois project,
International Viewpoint 7 April 1986
because if it is achieved, if a third or 40% of the working class is deprived of minimum protection and collective solidarity, then, for countries such as Belgium, we will go back to a pre-1914 situation.
What is most of all paving the way for such an evolution is the irresponsible attitude of the trade-union bureaucracy and the bureaucracy in the workers' movement in general. It is an accomplice of this policy, unconscious at the beginning. Then it was drawn into capitulating to the capitalist offensive, out of electoralism, out of all sorts of considerations, including office holders' self-interest, defence of its privileges.
In fact, this attitude is stupid because these petty privileges will be in danger in the long term, if the workers' movement is structurally weakened.
Finally, we have to take into consideration the objective effects of the crisis, of the retreats and defeats. the prisis of the retreats and defeats A working class that sees that it has lost two, three, four battles and that unemployment is increasing will not react in the same way as a working class whose strength remains intact.
It has indeed to be noted that the class enemy has a much more determined political leadership, project, plan and orientation than the people at the top in the workers' movement, who unfortunately do not exhibit the same qualities.
Finally, I should add that the militant forces in the unions and the political far left, regardless of the fact that they are growing, do not enjoy the sort of credibility that would enable them immediately to counterbalance the growth of the other factors. Even though these forces are on the rise, they remain modest and cannot by themselves neutralize the negative effects of everything that has been cited above.
Thus, there is still no credible general political altemative, that is, not one credible for a significant fraction of the working class that would see it as a perspective it could mobilize for, with some chance for success in the short run. The absence of such a credible general alternative is itself a factor in the situation.
The only exception on this score may be Britain, but even that is not sure. Obviously, the left in the Labour Party and the trade-union movement represents a considerable force that exercises a weight on the situation. But it is not certain that it amounts to a credible alternative for the working class. There may be an analogous situation in Denmark.
So, in such conditions the bourgeoisie's project cannot be underestimated. It is pushing the entire workers' movement onto the defensive. Most of the forces in the traditional moder-
International Viewpoint 7 April 1986
Solidaritat istunsere
Starkr
During the 35-hour week strike in West Germany (DR)
ate workers' movement are evolving toward the right, but this does not mean that the bourgeoisie's project is automatically going to succeed. That depends on the present relationship of forces and not the relationship that the bourgeoisie would like to create five or ten years from now. At present, the relationship of forces is such that in most countries it creates major obstacles to the realization of the bourgeois project. In West Germany, in Italy, in Britain, in the Scandinavian countries, in the Benelux countries, the working class retains a sufficient capacity for fighting back so that when the provocations go beyond a certain limit, you can see that the bourgeoisie is obliged to retreat, to maneuver, to calm the protests. It cannot push through all its solutions day after day, month after month, in linear fashion. Divisions in the working class
Nonetheless, we have to be aware of the dangers and implications of its policy. All the bourgeoisie's projects aim at increasing and institutionalizing the divisions within the working class - divisions between native and foreign workers, between men and women, between young people and adults, between adults and retirees, between skilled and unskilled workers, between deelining industries and high-tech ones, between the public and private sectors and between the workers of different countries. In this lattter case, it is trying to accomplish this by getting the workers to drop international solidarity and instead accept wage cuts for purposes of international competition, supposedly to "protect jobs." This leads to lower real wages in all countries.
On all levels, the bourgeoisie's policy aims at provoking, broadening, and institutionalizing such divisions. It proposes different measures, suited to each case, to freeze such divisions and increase their weight in the relations between capital and labor as a whole. Some successes have already been achieved; it would be wrong to deny it. Despite the very positive reactions by young people against racism, in a whole series of European countries antiforeignism and racism have had real effects on the adult working class.
We could argue about the scope of this phenomenon, it has now been confirmed by election results, such as those for Le Pen's National Front in France or those for the extreme right forces in Geneva, Lausanne or Brussels. These developments cannot be underestimated, and they do not involve just the petty bourgeoisie. This reflects the impact not only of the crisis, but of the crisis combined with all the political factors enumerated previously.
One of the big problems in this area is organizing the unemployed. When you compare the attitude of the workers' movement today with that of the communist movement at the beginning of the 1930s, which was very active among the unemployed and had considerable success in organizing them, the regression is striking. It is in Britain that this phenomenon is most prominent. If you study attentively what the bourgeois call "violence in the inner cities," if you study what is going on among the unemployed youth in the pauperized industrial neighborhoods, the least that can be said is that a qualified assessment has to be made of this
21
phenomenon. The radicalization of young Blacks is a positive fact, but the "radicalization," if one can use this term, of the young football hooligans is quite another thing.
If you listen to the explanations that the football hooligans themselves give on the radio and television, they are more reminiscent of a fascist mentality than anything else - the assertion of virility, the need for physical combat, the exaltation of violence for violence's sake. Those were themes that the fascists played on in the 1930s.
We have to be very attentive to everything that may happen among the demoralized youth who have never worked, who have been unemployed for four or five years, who have no prospects, for whom the workers' movement provides no perspective and to whom the revolutionary organizations only offer solutions within the limitations of their still very small size.
In general, for the moment we can see three kinds of reactions by the working class in capitalist Europe to this situation. There is a minority that is resigned to it. There is a minority that has radicalized. The majority may fight back in specific cases, but is hard to mobilize for general objectives. This is obviously very schematic, but it seems to represent the situation in most of the countries concerned.
The weakening of the hold of the bureaucratic apparatuses on the working class does not necessarily mean regression. This may have happened in France and Britain, but it is certainly not the case in Spain or Denmark.
Let us take for example the threats of repression and layoffs that hang over the most militant activists in a period of crisis. In the past, in the 1930s and even at the start of the 1950s, such activists were virtually defenceless. Today, for the union bureaucracy it is an adventure to come out openly in support of firings of union delegates by the bosses. They have to maneuver, since the relationship of forces has changed. You cannot say that this is exactly the same situation as in the 1930s.
The recomposition of the workers' movement, the weakening of the bureaucrats' control over the whole of the organized working class, is a very complex process. Of course, as long as this coincides with a defensive retreat of workers' struggles, this does not have the same impact and dynamic as when it coincides with a rise in struggles.
We are, therefore, in a difficult intermediate stage.To assess the dynamic country by country in harmony with the real situation and behavior of the working class, our organizations have to have roots and substantial knowledge of what is happening in the working class. In this regard, we cannot be satisfied with generalities, abstractions, and above all not with speculations.
The only general indications we have at the moment are big defensive mobilizations by the working class. In this respect, the balance sheet differs according to the countries. In the big Italian mobilization to defend the sliding scale, which was initiated by a "self-convened" assembly of factory delegates and led to a demonstration of a million workers in Rome, there was a loosening of the control of the bureaucratic apparatuses, although the bureaucracy subsequently partially regained its hold of the mobilization.
In the general strike of the public services in Belgium, as well as in the general strike in Denmark, a weakening of bureaucratic control was apparent at the same time as the close dependence of the movement on trade-union initiative.
In Spain, the general strike was also marked by a real reduction of the control of the trade-union bureaucracies. On the other hand, in West Germany, the big mobilization of the metal workers, first for the 35-hour week and then in defence of the right to strike, remained under tight trade-union control. The same is true of the long miners' strike in Britain and of the various mobilizations of workers in Portugal.
The mobilizations that have occurred over the last 18 months, moreover, confirm the very cautious definition I gave of the reaction of the body of workers. These struggles can hardly be characterized as reactions by radicalized minorities. They confirm that major sectors of the working class, if not its majority, are still prepared to wage militant fightbacks, but in every case this is in specific
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International Viewpoint 7 April 1986
A DGB-sponsored youth demonstration against unemployment (DR)
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cases and special circumstances. In this regard, France is the exception and not the rule. We have to follow the evolution in West Germany with special attentiveness. There, the capacity of the working class for fighting back is on the rise by comparison with the situation in the other major European countries.
For several years, there have been tendencies toward a recomposition of the organized workers' movement and a shift in the weights of the various political currents in it in several countries in capitalist Europe. Let me note some of the more striking phenomena - a spectacular decline in the electoral influence of the French Communist Party (PCF), while the decline of this party among workers in the plants is less pronounced; a no less spectacular decline of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE); the collapse of some small Communist parties (Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands); a spectacular rise of the left reformist and centrist organizations in Denmark; the rise of the Labour left in Britain; the rise of the Greens in West Germany. (2)
We are still at the beginning of this recomposition. Its general outlines remain fluid. It would, therefore, be at least premature to draw general conclusions about a universal decline of the CPs, a universal rise of the social democracy, a working-class radicalization within the social democracy, or a general drift of the workers' movement to the right.
To take a single example, the phenomenon of the Greens is very different from country to country. In Belgium, it is even palpably different between Flanders and the Walloon country. We cannot solve the problem of this political phenomenon by an abstract formula characterizing the Greens as a "petty-bourgeois current," or claiming that "they are not part of the organized workers' movement."
In West Germany, for example, it is impossible to explain what has happened by saying that the rise of the Greens reflects a rightward political evolution. Quite the contrary. Not only in the eyes of the broad masses but also objectively, the electoral and parliamentary breakthrough of the Greens has exercised a leftward pressure on political life, on the social democracy, and even partially on the unions.
The rise of the Greens has represented a recapturing on the electoral level of the elements of radicalization in the preceding decade, elements that the social democrats were unable to capture precisely because of their policy of class collaboration and shameful capitulation to the bourgeoisie on the questions of the antiwar struggle, defence of
International Viewpoint 7 April 1986 the environment, women's liberation demands, and so forth.
One may regret that these "new social movements" have developed outside the organized workers' movement, and often not even in a united front with it. But the fault lies with the traditional leaderships of the workers' movement. They proved unable to take up quite legitimate and progressive demands, which in fact are being perceived as such by growing sections of the working class itself.
The increasing impact of these questions on workers is confirmed by the peace movement and the anti-NATO movement in Spain, in West Germany, in Britain, in Italy, in the Netherlands and in Belgium, and by the influence of ecological questions in West Germany, Austria or Switzerland.
This does not mean that I am making an optimistic prognosis for the dynamic of the Greens. The most likely prospect for West Germany is that they will evolve in a reformist direction, becoming transformed into a classical social democratic tendency, and this may happen in the form of governmental collaboration. In other countries, more rightwing tendencies may manifest themselves, as is the case in Austria. But such a transformation will provoke reactions and differentiations within these currents, to which revolutionists must be sensitive.
As for the antiwar and anti-imperialist mobilizations, youth protests, and all the autonomous movements, they are the result of a double desynchronization. On the one hand, there is an objective desynchronization, resulting from the fact that the various social layers are being hit in different ways by the crisis of bourgeois society.
On the other hand, there is a subjective desynchronization between the reactions of the organized workers' movement and various other strata of society. The workers' organizations were backward on these questions. It was inevitable that others would take them up. What happened in the youth radicalization should have prepared the workers' movement to understand what has happened in other spheres.
Now the question arises of reuniting all these components of a potential challenge to capitalism in crisis into a fighting bloc against bourgeois society. It is easy to make such a reunification on paper, but in practice the relationship of forces is decisive, and the revolutionary currents are still weak, while the bureaucratic apparatuses are still very strong. In these circumstances, reunification in deed will be long and arduous. This requires, moreover, that the socialist project, the socialist program, again gain credibility in the eyes of the broad masses.
Revolutionary Marxists must fight systematically for that. That is one of their principal tasks, even though they know that they cannot by themselves change the present relationship of forces. So, in relatively unfavorable conditions, this reunification of the forces fighting capitalism will not be achieved quickly. A trend in that direction may, however, develop, especially when there is a new rise of general mass struggles.
In all these conditions, the great risk is that all these social movements may take a reformist turn. But this cannot be a reason for breaking the united front or turning away from these movements. Quite the contrary. The reformist temptations of these "new social movements" open the way for revolutionary Marxists to strengthen themselves. Wherever the youth go into action, they do not spontaneously adopt reformist attitudes. They are often rebellious against reformism, unwilling to accept it.
If the leaderships of these big movements slip down the reformist slope, a political space opens up for the revolutionary Marxists. There is no contradiction in that, so long as you keep a sense of proportion. A mass movement of 100,000 people may evolve toward the right, at the same time we can win 500 to 1,000 people for our revolutionary project and our organizations, especially our youth organizations.
must, furthermore, arm themselves with a concrete and precise program for dialogue with these movements. We already have such a program for the antiwar, women's liberation and youth struggles, and the last congress of the Fourth International set the goal of formulating one on the ecology question.
More important than these "new social movements" and their political impact on the working class are the phenomena of recomposition in the organized workers' movement itself. Here it is necessary to reaffirm two constants in our analysis.
On the one hand, it is impossible in all the countries where the traditional organizations remain politically dominant within the working class for phenomena of mass radicalization to occur without having repercussions on these traditional organizations themselves.
On the other hand, predictions or speculations about what might
2. See the special issue of 'International Viewpoint' on the West Communist Parties (Issue No. 69, February European 11, 1985).
23
TIP.
Fiat workers gather to fight sackings - 1979 (DR)
happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow in these traditional organizations must not prevent us from seizing the opportunities for strengthening ourselves today from the no doubt smaller forces that radicalize outside these organizations or in breaking from them.
Not only is there no contradiction between these two analyses but from the standpoint of building the revolutionary party, the second to a large extent conditions the first. In fact, outside of Britain, the final result of such a future radicalization within the traditional parties depends to a large extent on the numerical, organizational relationship of forces between the revolutionary Marxists and the other political tendencies.
The more we gain today in organizational strength and autonomous political influence, the better will be the chances to prevent a future mass radicalization in the SPs and CPs from being diverted again to left reformism or centrism.
This only makes clearer the great, the decisive importance of trade-union work in a series of countries. Through demonstrating the usefulness of their organizations in the defensive struggles now underway, revolutionary Marxists will gain an opportunity to win militant worker activists in the unions and in the plants.
On the level of the trade-union movement as a whole, this seems to be beyond our strength, but in certain sectors and in certain enterprises it is quite feasible. This is also linked to our capacity to wage a 24 systematic fight for a long-term political line pivoting around a general program against the crisis. This is an essentially propagandistic fight, which will not lead in the short run to mass mobilizations.
Revolutionary Marxists are not on the point of organizing a general strike for a 35-hour or 32-hour week. But the propaganda battle is very important. The problem is not only to restore the confidence of the working class. It is also necessary to restore the confidence of the vanguard. The militant vanguard itself does not have a great deal of faith in the socialist project. That is the least that can be said. It is disoriented, it has lost its footing.
The fight to restore the confidence of the vanguard is, therefore, a very important propaganda battle, over a program, over how we can beat the crisis, how we can beat unemployment, how we can drive back the market economy, how we can fight division in the working class, if we have the political will to do so.
It is necessary, therefore, to top off this program for an overall anticapitalist orientation with a political objective that can be formulated precisley in a number of countries. This central political objective must not be kept in the background. Otherwise, we would fall into pure syndicalism, economism, and we would lose credibility both for the vanguard and for the masses.
No one really thinks that it is possible to oppose unemployment and the economic crisis sector by sector, plant by plant, industry by industry. Thus, the existence of a
OLIVETTIL political solution, even if it is not "realistic" in the short term, remains more than ever the precondition for the credibility of a general program against the crisis.
We can and must discuss the questions of timing, of tempos, the possibilities for battles intermediate between immediate defensive struggles at specific points and these big objectives in the light of the social, political and economic relationship of forces in each country, which are very different. I am not going to propose any specifc analysis in this respect for all of capitalist Europe.
I am not going to conclude on a common political slogan for all the countries of capitalist Europe, with a formula or a common model for the recomposition of the workers' movement for all Europe. This would be deeply wrong, because the real structure of the organized workers' movement is too different in all the various parts of Europe to allow for such a common model.
However, every one of the European sections of the Fourth International has to incorporate the conclusions of such an analysis in its action program. And every one of them has to be aware of the fact that the international dimension of the class struggle has been objectively increased rather than diminished by the crisis, regardless of how conscious the workers may be of that. The need for international coordination of the workers' resistance to the international offensive of capital is greater than ever. Growing sections of the working class will come progressively to realize that.
International Viewpoint 7 April 1986