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2nd Intercontinental Encounter of Peoples against Neo-liberalism
 

Report of Madrid Mesa 1a, "Work and the Means of Production", and 1b, "Creating Conditions for a Life with Dignity".


 

I. Introduction

We came together to help make a world of dignity and justice and
well-being for all humanity. This should include the dignified,
democratic participation of us all, women and men, in producing the
material things we need, redistributing the wealth, raising our
children, and taking care of each other. But neoliberal capitalism
offers us misery and exploitation so that to work is to create the
chains of poverty and subservience for most of us and wealth for a
few. The system of capitalist work is a system of divisions and
hierarchies: isolated individuals competing with each other through
competing national economies, hierarchies between women and men,
between north and south and within them, by race and national
origin, by wage and kind of work. So our struggles against work
must also overcome these divisions if they are to be successful.
Changes in the nature of work under neoliberalism are inherently
contradictory. On one hand, employment is more necessary than ever
in order to survive. But employment is less and less available and
rewarding. This creates the conditions for increasing conflict
against capitalist waged work. So we meet in this mesa to share our
understanding of work under capitalism and to develop the ideas,
strategies, demands and networks of communication and struggle that
will enslave us to go beyond capitalism and create a diverse and just
world, to dare to invent our future.

II. Work

1. Changing North/South/East Relations

Relations between north and south and within both north and south
are changing, in work and production, and in all social spheres. 
Today, there are similarities and differences in the forms of
exploitation between north and south. The similarities are
increasing, but there remain old forms of imperialism which are now
being renewed by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism stimulates both
development and underdevelopment in both north and south, so that we
find the north in the south and the south in the north.

Additionally, the workers in the east are now being prepared for
various forms of exploitation by northern corporations. Workers in
the north do not fundamentally benefit from imperialism -- it is the
ruling class and the transnational corporations, and particularly
speculative financial capital, that benefit -- but there is a lot of
complexity and inequality in relations between the working class in
the north and the working class in the south. Workers in every part
of the world lose under neoliberalism, but the workers in the south
lose more.

The structures, organization and relations of work in both north and
south are changing. One reason is migration, especially from south
to north and from the land to the cities as people are forced off the
land, and neoliberal policies of austerity and opening of markets
create massive poverty. Capitalist investment meanwhile moves some
kinds of jobs from north to south in search of cheaper labor and no
environmental or social regulations.

Those who hold economic and political power have central
organizations th= at organize structural adjustment, force the payment
of external debts, impose so- called free trade and privatization, and
plan the reorganization of work and investment. These include the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), Work Bank, World Trade
Organization (WTO), Asian Pacific Economic Council (APEC), MERCOSUR,
and the NAFTA and Maastricht treaties. Social democratic
institutions and the so-called socialist parties of Africa, Europe,
the Americas, Asia and Oceania, and many trade union bureaucracies
have all accepted neoliberalism and collaborate with global
agencies, transnational corporations and governments to impose the
neoliberal agenda. We oppose all these groups and institutions and
their plans for our exploitation and death.

2. Many Faces of Work

Capitalists try to reduce all of human life to work and consumption
in the market.

Capitalist work is thus exploitation, so that the demand for
capitalist work is the demand to be exploited. Many ways are used to
force us into this exploitation. However, to work as humans is to
produce and reproduce our conditions of life and means to relate with
each other. The human way to work is not of competing atomistic
individuals, but of social individuals working in cooperative,
dignified, and democratic arrangements.

The question of human work therefore opens the political question of
direct democracy from below to determine the production and
reproduction of our lives. However, we must all live, and to live
today it often requires that we participate in one of the many forms
of capitalist work.

Today, neoliberal capital uses every kind of work in its efforts to
suck profit out of the lives of people. Much of the work in the
world, perhaps that of half the people of the world, is done in ways
that are not directly or immediately part of the market. This
comprises mostly forms of agricultrual work and life, but also
includes the many areas of the informal economy. The rule of money
finds ways to exploit this work, make profit from it, and to bring
it under market control.

At this most recent phase of world capitalist development, in both
north and south slavery increases, as well as many forms of work that
are semi- slavery, such as debt bondage, child labor, forced
prostitution, prison labor and workfare. In free trade zones and the
maquiladora factories, workers labor in near-slavery conditions.

Neoliberalism depends on increased exploitation of the unwaged and
more unpaid work from everyone. Unpaid work includes all the work
traditionally done by women in the home to raise children, make men
ready for work outside the home, nurse the sick, care for the
elderly, and reproduce the entire domestic sphere. It includes
unpaid forced overtime, time spent looking for work, and labor
obligations for landlords and local political bosses. Neoliberalism
also blurs the distinction between waged work and semi-slavery by
imposing flex-time, on-call labor, self-employment, working at
home -- all ways in which the whole life is, like in slavery, reduced
to work for capital.

Without a fundamental redistribution of work time to make it equal,
there will also be more service labor in which the low-waged workers
work for the higher paid workers.

Today we see women migrating from the south to work in the homes of
the wealthy in the north as they have done for generations in the
south, while often the men are gardeners and take care of the
property of the wealthy.

The neoliberal offensive removes labor protection laws relating to
limits on hours of work, security of labor contracts, and the minimum
wage. It imposes workfare in which capitalist work is made a
requirement for receiving state unemployment and welfare benefits. 
New, superexploited and insecure forms of work are imposed especially
on women and increase the exploitation of the family. These policies
are imposed in both north and south, and they make conditions in the
north more similar to those in the south.

There are also many socially destructive areas of work including the
military and the police, prisons, social welfare bureaucracies, and
the capitalist mass me= dia apparatus.

These forms of work destroy the dignity of those who do that work
while even more destroying the dignity and often the very lives of
those against whom they work. There are also many forms of socially
useless work, such as in banking, insurance, trading and keeping
track of who owns what piece of capital, as well as forms of work
that only exist because of the overwork others of us are forced to
do: such as fast food restaurants.

The workers in these sectors must be helped to find other forms of
employment. We also need to carefully consider technology, to
determine what technology is humanly useful and what is humanly
destructive, what makes less work and what makes more work, what is
environmentally sound and what is not. Neoliberalism uses
technology not as a tool to liberate humanity from tedious and
unnecessary work, but as weapon in the competitive battle, as a means
to control and impose work. So we must also consider the forms of
technology, modifying technology as necessary to use for human ends.

Finally, capitalist work and the search for jobs creates competition
among us. Neoliberal strategies try to reduce us to isolated
individuals and destroy our communities and solidarity in order to
make us unable to resist capitalist work. Having to live under such
conditions is a form of emotional and social work as we try to
recover from these abuses. More, capitalist work involves the
destruction of the environment and having to live with the
consequences.

In response to slavery, semi-slavery, wage slavery and all forms of
exploitation through work for capitalism, we assert the need for
democratic, participatory control of production so that we all can
live a life of dignity, including life at work, while eliminating
useless and destructive work.

3. Consumption

Capitalist work and capitalist consumption are closely related, but
they are mediated by the market, so that consumption requires money. 
Only those with money are free to consume in the free market. Here
there is great inequality in both north and south and between north
and south.

A society geared towards the production for profit creates
superfluous consumption and lives devoted to consumption. Some forms
of consumption are not ecologically sustainable or socially positive,
and these must be reduced or eliminated. Neoliberalism also
manipulates production to create new needs and new markets, and it
imposes such forms of production as monocrop agriculture for export
while destroying production of food for subsistence. There is also
the use of enormous areas of land to produce meat, which is not
globally sustainable. Meanwhile, billions of humans live on the
edge of starvation or live with minimal subsistence. Their need must
be met, but in ways that are dignified, and socially and ecologically
sustainable.

These problems ultimately cannot be solved within the capitalist
market. We must have participatory democratic control over production
in order to solve questions of consumption. To solve these problems,
we must be able to reorganize consumption on a more collective and
ecologically sustainable basis so that we do not have to consider
consumption in terms of more or less, but in terms of the quality it
brings to our lives.

Thus the political and ethical aspects of consumption could be taken
into account, such as the real costs of our consumption to producers,
other consumer, and the environment.

III. Struggles and Alternatives: Reducing Work Time and Creating Non-
Capitalist Work

Struggles to reduce capitalist work time, to control land and the
means of production, and to build alternative ways to produce and
reproduce our life can unite diverse people against the inhuman
vampire called neoliberal capital. We recognize that to survive we
engage in many particular struggles over immediate issues, but when
linked these struggles can open the door to wider and deeper
struggles.

We need therefore to develop principles with which we can analyze
our struggles to see if they put us in a better position to overcome
the inhuman way of life we are forced into, whether they reduce
hierarchies and create wider spaces of shared democratic
participants. Some of these principles include: to reduce the risk
of being co-opted by capital; to ensure that our struggles and
demands correspond to many sectors, needs and aspirations; and to
ensure they embody a principle of human liberation. We must
therefore be sure that reductions in work in one place are not at
the expense of work in another. We can also develop principles that
distinguish between projects imposed from the top or outside by
capitalism, and those from the bottom and inside, from the people.

The struggle to reduce capitalist work allows more time to struggle
against capital and more time to develop alternative was to produce,
live and redistribute domestic chores.

We simultaneously demand higher wages and equalization of wages,
between men and women, citizens and migrants, north and south,
different kinds of workers, and races.

The struggle to reduce work time for capital is a struggle not only
of the waged workers, but also of the unwaged workers, the millions
of farmers and peasants, students, unemployed, elderly, housewives
and indigenous of the world. For example, a well in a village could
mean the reduction of arduous work by men and women. When we reduce
work time, we must ensure the equal distribution of the work that we
decide needs to be done. While we reduce work time, me must insist
on conditions that ensure dignity and health for the work that
remains to be done.

A guaranteed income assuring life with dignity for all residents of
nation is also right.

We say residents because this right belongs to migrants as well as
citizens: we all have rights to inherit the wealth and knowledge that
are products of centuries of collective human activity. This right
is independent of requirement to work for capital. Income without
work can also be gained through various struggles such as occupying
houses or land, reappropriation, and refusing to pay for services.

In the south, and in some places of the north, rights to land,
water, and other means of agricultural production are essential to
life with dignity and the creation of just societies.

These rights must not be limited by requirements to produce for the
capitalist market.

Creating alternative spaces for production and social life is good
in itself because these spaces enable relations that are outside of
and beyond the market. They also can put limits to capitalist
expansion and support creation of spaces in which struggles can grow
and be protected. We can learn through this how to create many
visions of ways to organize our lives and production. The
satisfaction of needs outside of direct control of the capitalist
market enables us to fight capital on a terrain that is more
favorable to us.

These forms of alternatives can develop out of traditional forms of
work, but some traditional forms involve exploitation and also must
be abolished. Many forms of third sector work (supposedly
depending neither on the market nor the state) are not true
alternatives to capitalist work, but instead are a new form of
lower- waged capitalist work.

All these struggles -- to reduce work time, guarantee income, gain
control of means of production, and developing alternatives -- can be
raised in both south and north, but in different ways that respond to
the different particularities. These struggles can be contradictory,
so we need to pay careful attention to how they can support and
strengthen each other and not be used against each other. Our
struggles are much stronger when they are combined so that each
particular demand is not isolated or coopted. We need to create a
process of building on and enriching our struggles that includes
careful study and honest discussion. It is also important in this
process of work to transform the relations between women and men in
both personal and political lives. This means that men, not only 
women, assume the responsibility of this struggle.

To make successful struggles and to win a new world, we need many
forms of organization. We insist on the right of all people to
organize and defend themselves from attack by states, corporations,
paramilitary and fascist groups.

IV. Strategies and Actions

To win our demands along the way toward a new world that contains
many worlds, we must develop strategies and analyze them in light of
our goals and principles. We must also understand the institutions
and process of neoliberalism in their military, financial, political,
ideological and cultural forms, as well as neoliberal forms of
production and consumption. We understand that the neoliberal
capitalist system is only one of many expressions of exploitative
power that exist, some of which pre-date capitalism, including
patriarchy, racism, and caste distinctions. We are committed to
fight against exploitative power and oppression in all their multiple
forms and guises.

We have agreed to create networks as a fundamental form of
organization, rather than parties or other forms of organization. We
see these networks as horizontal and participatory, as ways of living
in part the future we are struggling to make, though we recognize
that the construction of the networks as such will not solve the
problems of power and democracy in the ways we organize ourselves. 
But we have many questions about the best ways to proceed: --how can
we build upon existing networks? --should we set up our own network
and undertake struggles specific to our own network so that people
will take the Encuentro even more seriously? --how should we begin
networks - locally, regionally, nationally, globally, or by subject
or some combination? --how can we include struggles not represented
by participants in the network? --how can we create new ways to link
struggles and networks and support each other? --how can we best use
a mix of electronics and print media to reach people? --are there
limits to networks as a form of struggle, and if so, what more do we
need to create?

Actions coordinated across national boundaries by a network for
practical struggle can take many forms including: --civil
disobedience --boycotts of specific transnational corporations,
against their labor practices, their attacks on indigenous peoples
and their ecologically destructive actions --campaigns against
payment of taxes for destructive ends, such as the military
--political and solidarity strikes --mass public actions against
austerity, structural adjustment and the institutions which impose
them, and all neoliberal practices; and --self-defense by any means
necessary.

Using these methods and more, we can take actions against the
institutions and practices that attack us. Mesa 1A and 1B recognize
that there are many actions worthy of support, but we here explicitly
state our general support for the following: --support for the
Declaration of Alcobenda

--counter-summit to protest the WTO meeting in Geneva in May 1998

--actions against Maastricht, NAFTA, and other continental of 
subcontinental strategies of strangulation on humanity

--actions against the arms trade; and

--campaigns against external debt.

V. Conclusion

We come together to help make a world of dignity and humanity. The
richness of our discussions, the warmth of our exchanges, and the
humanity of our experiences and struggles have demonstrated to us
that we are dignified subjects. But this dignity is taken away from
us when the capitalist work machine uses us for its purposes. We
have outlined the general elements that could give voice to a strong
collective NO! to this inhuman way of life. But we also know that
there are many YESES! , many different but compatible visions of
ways to exercise power on our lives as dignified human beings.

The creation for the flowering of these YESES!

On these foundations we must now develop, discuss and debate
strategies that we can use in our different circumstances to create a
world of justice, direct democracy from below, and dignity. We
expect that the next Encuentro will focus on the question of
strategies and build on the work we do between now and then.

One NO! many YESES!

31 August 1997, Madrid, Spanish State, Third Planet from Sol.

P.S. Finally, we want to thank the companeras and compeneros who have
organized this Encuetro for the enormous work they have done. This
silent effort has made it possible for us to get together and create,
within the brutal capitalist world that surrounds us, what one member
of our group call this precious communist bubble.

[Editor's note: Mesas 1a and b in Madrid involved 80-100 people from
prob= ably 15-20 nations (I do not have a count).]

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Unit
Dept of Sociology
University of the Witwatersrand
Private Bag 3
PO Wits 2050
Johannesburg
South Africa
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Fax (++27 11) 716.3781
E-Mail 029frb@cosmos.wits.ac.za
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html
http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/direct.htm

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