class struggle

Labour-Centred Development in Latin America: Two cases of alternative development

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The_hand_that_will_rule_the_worldIn todays post, Adam Fishwick offers an overview of the main arguments and highlight some of the key empirical findings of research published recently in Geoforum. Co-authored with Ben Selwyn, the article discusses alternative models of development that go beyond the neoliberal and statist paradigms that dominate debate, and is based on two cases– the cordones industriales in 1970s Chile and empresas recuperadas in Argentina today – of “labour-centred development”.

The rise of the ‘Pink Tide’ of progressive left and left-of-centre governments in Latin America briefly offered us a set of seemingly new alternative models – from buen vivir in Ecuador to ‘Socialism in the 21st Century’ in Venezuela to ‘growth with equity’ in Argentina.

Yet with the stagnation and apparent collapse of these models, critics on the Left have begun to highlight the many underlying contradictions that the Pink Tide failed to address.

Whilst the ‘neo-developmentalist’ strategies adopted throughout the region have seen a growing level of state intervention favouring increased growth in domestic industrial sectors and some social welfare improvements, they have embedded deepening relations of exploitation, blocked and co-opted social movements that brought these governments to power, and sustained a socio-economic order over-written by neoliberal macroeconomics.

Put simply, the statist strategies of the last decade have – despite limited gains in distribution, welfare, and industrial restructuring – made little progress in overcoming many of the regressive features of the neoliberal development strategies of the 1980s and 1990s.

From this starting point, then, we offer a critique of Elite Development Theory (EDT) as it informs the neoliberal and statist political economy paradigms in Latin America (see Selwyn 2015, 2016 for a wider critique of EDT in development studies). Second, we present two cases of what we term labour-centred development (LCD) in its nascent forms.

Regarding the first, elite development theory can be identified with two dominant trends that run parallel to and have to some extent informed the last three decades of Latin American development.

The emergence of the Washington Consensus formalised in the 1980s and 1990s much of the emerging practice of development across Latin America, bringing with it a firm commitment to reducing states’ welfare spending and the removal of ‘labour market inflexibilities’. The result was a sharp reduction in redistribution towards the labouring classes and the direct and indirect repression of their capabilities to mobilise collectively across Latin America.

The response of Statist Political Economists to this position offered a stark challenge to the Washington Consensus that, for many, offered a real alternative model for development.

But the progressive claims of these statist approaches are problematic. Alice Amsden (1990), for example, describes how South Korean state-led development relied on ‘the world’s longest working week’ and ‘cheap labour’, also noting how ‘labour repression is the basis of late industrialization everywhere’. And, in his comparison of Brazil, South Korea, India, and Nigeria, Atul Kohli (2004) notes the significance of strict workplace discipline.

Recent state-led development in Latin America can also be seen in this light. Although led by left and left-of-centre governments, it often remains reliant on the restriction of workers’ mobilisation in the service of a state-led national development strategy.

Alternatively, then, we propose a view on development that directly privileges the agency of labour in pursuing and constructing what we term labour-centred development:

‘the core concerns for LCD analysis are not those of capital (how to secure accumulation), but those of labouring classes. These include workers’ ability to reproduce their wage labour outside work (i.e. to earn enough wages and have enough time to secure the basic necessities of life and to engage in culturally-enhancing activities such as socialising and education), extending to more free time (shorter working days) and more decision-making ability within the workplace (to reduce the burden of work)’ (Fishwick & Selwyn 2016)

We distinguish our perspective from the two strands of EDT inasmuch as we perceive the interests of the labouring classes as the starting point for alternative strategies of development. We highlight the often invisible and obfuscated dynamics of labour’s collective action and its role in producing unique developmental dynamics from within what Michael Lebowitz (1992, 2001) has termed ‘the political economy of the working class’.

Second, the two cases of LCD we discuss are drawn from distinct contexts – the revolutionary moment of the Allende government from 1970 to 1973 in Chile and the deep crisis and recovery of the Argentinian economy from 2001 to present – but both are demonstrative of the capability of labouring classes to construct real alternatives from below.

In assessing these cases, we highlight four factors: (1) growth and productivity (2) employment data (3) workplace organisation (4) production priorities. In each of these we analyse the contributions made by workers themselves, as well as the limitations that derive not from the internal failings of these cases of LCD, but from capital mobilising against them.

The cordones industriales in Chile were a powerful example of LCD that emerged under the socialist government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. Comprised of a small occupied factories and large plants incorporated into the state-led nationalisation programme – the ‘Area of Social Property’ – they saw workers organise against a growing employer boycott to establish new forms of control over process of production and distribution.

Mobilising under the Communist Party-inspired ‘battle for production’ slogan, they revitalised output and productivity levels in a range of leading industrial sectors, transforming work, the workplace, and the priorities of production in the process.

Drawing on examples from the textile sector with data gathered from a range of trade union publications and political pamphlets from the time, we show how large and small plants saw increased levels of output under workers’ control, raised employment and wage levels, and even the establishment of facilities aimed to support workers and their families.

Strict Taylorist and paternalist management hierarchies were rapidly replaced by participatory forms of organisation, with workplace assemblies and councils building on the participation programmes promoted by Allende to produce genuine worker participation and control over decisions ranging from output to supply and credit to production priorities. Factories even transformed their produce in direct service of the poor communities and neighbourhoods from which their workers came and which surrounded these workplaces.

Nevertheless, despite these embryonic forms of LCD, pressures both from the socialist government of Allende and pressures from outside restricted the expansion of these strategies. And, on 11 September 1973, they were directly targeted as nascent ‘Soviets’ by the military as it violently reversed many of the gains that had been achieved in these years.

The empresas recuperadas in Argentina are a crucial contemporary example of LCD, in which several hundred workplaces have been transformed into legal and semi-legal cooperatives by workers pushed to the brink of unemployment. Often established following a long period of struggle with first the original owner and later the state, these enterprises first emerged en masse in the aftermath of the 2001 financial crisis in the country.

Typically involving workers with little or no political experience or affiliation, the transformations to work and the workplace have been profound – from the introduction of equitable pay to cooperative networks of financing and supply to the transformation of work.

Drawing on a range of sources and data gathered by the Open Faculty Programme in Buenos Aires, we show how, in recent years, there have been some significant improvements in productivity and output under workers’ control, how wages and employment have improved in most these workplaces, and how, most importantly, workplaces have been transformed.

There has been an increase in democratisation on the factory floor, whilst the introduction of job rotation and new divisions between labour processes and the organisation of the working day have ‘humanised’ these workplaces. Links established between the factories and the neighbourhoods, moreover, have had a tangible impact on the lives of the labouring classes across these communities, as well as contributing to the defence of factory occupations.

Nevertheless, despite these important gains, pressures on the initial formation of the empresas recuperadas, as well as the ongoing influence of their relationship with the wider capitalist marketplace points to the limitations of these examples of LCD. There have been attempts to overcome these through new networks and institutions, but they remain in their early stages.

To conclude, then, in our paper we show that the paradigmatic perspectives on development fail to capture these important dynamics that can – and, as we show, often do – provide fertile ground for genuine alternative development strategies favouring the labouring classes.

To identify these processes, and to correctly situate and overcome their limitations, we argue for the need to look beneath both the regressive logics of neoliberal development and the ostensibly progressive strategies pursued by states. By identifying the independent practices of workers in seeking to shape their own world around them, we can begin to identify how a real ‘political economy of the working class’ can emerge in theory and in practice.

Adam Fishwick is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies and Public Policy in the Department of Politics and Public Policy and a core member of CURA at De Montfort University.

This post was originally published on the ‘Progress in Political Economy’ Blog and has been re-published here with their permission.

Workshop: Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity

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Adam Fishwick and Heather Connolly report back on a workshop they convened for CURA on Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity.

On 18th May CURA hosted our one day workshop on ‘Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity’ engaging with a range of distinctive – and innovative – strategies that have emerged in Europe and Latin America that are challenging the dominant turn to austerity. Papers delivered during the panel sessions were grouped around three key themes on workplace occupations, migrant workers’ protest, and alternative ‘grassroots’ mobilisation. The day ended with keynote presentations from Lisa McKenzie and Phoebe Moore that illustrated the sheer range of opposition that the workshop presenters touched upon – from working class neighbourhoods in the UK to the tensions over technology in the workplace.

The panels generated lively debate from participants and speakers (some of which was broadcast on social media via #CURAresistance) with debates centring on the viability of bottom-up forms of resistance, on the role of institutional actors and the state, and the possibilities for developing new subjectivities and forms of agency.

In the first panel, David Bailey and Saori Shibata presented findings from their research in ‘low-resistance’ societies of the UK and Japan and argued that only with what they termed ‘militant refusal’ were austerity measures successfully challenged and reversed. Lucia Pradella discussed the centrality of new migrants in resistance within and against the traditional trade unions in the logistics sector in Italy – highlighting the dynamism of new actors in a sector crucial to global capitalism. Nick Kiersey, finally, drawing on his research into anti-austerity protests in Ireland challenged us to think about the possibilities of developing a ‘left governmentality’ in the ‘slow exit’ from neoliberalism and austerity.

In the second panel, Heather Connolly returned to the theme of migrant workers within and against traditional trade unions in France, presenting her research on the Sans Papiers movement in France and the innovative models of resistance it adopted. Adam Fishwick argued that, despite the return of a bleak period of austerity in Argentina, resistance could still be found in what Ana Dinerstein has termed the ‘concrete utopias’ in the country. Focusing on the recuperated factories, he showed how they offered a distinct alternative beyond the constraints of state. To close the panels, Stuart Price presented some of his findings of a workplace occupation in Spain, discussing tensions between the closing of space for protest and the potential/limitations of new, seemingly spontaneous forms of resistance.

Lisa McKenzie – alongside Stuart Price – brought a powerful visual component to the day, combining images collected in the course of her fieldwork and everyday life in Nottingham and London with ethnographic narratives on working class life under austerity. Her keynote presentation demonstrated the lived realities of austerity from navigating unemployment, to homelessness, to the pervasive class stigmatisation that, in her words, ‘does the work of the policies of austerity’. Running through her talk was a sense of the need to think concretely about the impacts of austerity in order to confront it – to engage directly with the lived, everyday impacts of the assault on the most marginalised and stigmatised communities and individuals. Closing her presentation, two resonant images of young working class men on top of the roof of an elite private school in Nottingham during the 2011 riots and a homeless man under a new luxury development in London neatly captured this sentiment.

Phoebe Moore took us in a different, but related, direction with a vision of the new workplace and the role of technology in reinforcing the lived conditions of austerity, but also in potentially offering ways to confront and resist in uniquely innovative ways. In her presentation, the new techniques in the measurement and management of working life – from worn technologies to new monitoring and surveillance devices – were shown to be a central component of the micro-level practices overseeing workplaces across a range of sectors. But her work also highlighted the means by which this key component of the new discipline of austerity can be confronted. Technology – as much as it represents a mechanism of control in the workplace – was also shown to provide mechanisms for overcoming that control. From the everyday challenging of its use in the workplace, to re-purposing it in practice, to the development of more organised forms of resistance, the potential for subversion was clear.

Overall, the presentations and discussions throughout the day made clear that if austerity is to proceed, it will not continue unchallenged. Drawing on research and expertise in a variety of settings and contexts, the speakers and participants offered a clear sense that the precarious, impoverished futures proposed and practiced by advocates of austerity are not the only future available. Moving forward, the plan from this workshop is to develop a published collection of the papers that consolidates these themes of resistance to the increasingly pervasive practices of resistance, with the aim of continuing collaboration in to resisting austerity.

Dr. Adam Fishwick is Lecturer in Urban Studies and Public Policy and Dr. Heather Connolly Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at De Montfort University, both are core members of CURA.

Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Review by Jonathan Davies

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Professor Jonathan Davies continues our second installment of CURA’s book debates by share’s his thoughts on Tim Weaver’s recent book ‘Blazing the Neoliberal Trail‘. This post will be followed by a final reply from Tim int he forthcoming weeks.

It was a great honour to debate Tim’s new book at the annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association earlier this year.  The book announces Tim as an important new thinker in the field or urban political economy.  It was a pleasure to read a deeply learned piece of work presented with erudition and lightness of touch.  Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned from the book concerns the dynamics and temporalities of policy transfer.  We tend to assume that because the UK likes to borrow (ever more right wing) policies from the USA, that the USA was the main trailblazer in neo-liberal urban policy.  In fact, Tim shows that the UK was able to outpace the USA, because its centralized and hierarchical political traditions made this easier to accomplish.  More broadly, these differentiations show why an urban focus is so important for getting to grips with the epidemiology, variegation, hybridity and contestation of neoliberalism.

The main question I have about the book concerns the way different disciplinary perspectives open up different temporal understandings of neoliberalism.  I pick up on a striking phrase in Tim’s conclusion in relation to the class politics of neoliberalism. He argues that the “bourgeoisie was not knocking on doors”, demanding enterprise zones and urban development corporations.  These initiatives were driven politically, and hence Marxist conceptions of capital and class do not really help us understand them.  Tim accordingly emphasizes the role of policy ideas and entrepreneurs, and the way in which different configurations of institutions and traditions were more or less open to change.  These factors undoubtedly matter a great deal, but I do not think they are incompatible with a Marxist analysis, rooted in the ideas circulating and gathering force during the emerging social and economic crises of the 1960s.

From a sociological perspective, Boltanski and Chiapello argued in The New Spirit of Capitalism, that by the 1960s, the bourgeoisie was indeed clamouring for change, hankering to be free from the stultifying command structures associated with Fordist development and the Weberian political order.  But, it is notable that similar ideas were also incubating in the British Labour Party and US Democrats, through Harold Wilson’s “white heat of the technological revolution”, and John. F. Kennedy’s “new frontiers”. So, from the standpoint of ideas, the break with the post-war order was implicit in the emerging political and economic zeitgeist of 1960s for both left and right.  Ultimately, for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, the neoliberals succeeded in appropriating this spirit and translating it into the policy agendas Tim discusses at length in the book.  Two points follow.

First, governments and corporations were both influenced by proto-neoliberal ideas and sentiments well before the 1970s and 80s and sought to organize around them.  It is here that we find the roots of the crisis of the post-war order and of neoliberal transformation.  Tim might respond, correctly, that neoliberal ideas did not fully grip on the terrain of politics and policy until much later – and after many brutal struggles.  However, the second and crucial point is that looking at the 1960s shows that neoliberalism was indeed a class project and why a sharp analytical distinction between state and capital is problematic. There is a tacit pluralism in Tim’s approach, which does not sit easily with his general political orientation. If instead we treat capitalist states as part of the capitalist system, it is easier to see why “progressive” political leaders would be dazzled by a “new spirit of capitalism” promising social and economic renaissance – and for reasons that have little to do with political pressure from the bourgeoisie.  Of course corporations try to influence governments, but the absence of such lobbying does not mean class power is not central. Class operates in many more-or-less subtle ways.  My argument is that an appreciation of how different classes responded to the burgeoning crises of the 1960s is critical for understanding the ideas and policies of later trailblazers of neoliberalism, so deftly analysed in this important volume.