Confronting exploitation: What labour movement for the 21st century?

Abstract

Against a background of global economic crisis and heightened geo-political confrontations, the international labour movement has remained as important as ever for the defence of working people and wider society. And yet international organised labour is also in crisis. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) was established in 2006 as the result of a merger between the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the Christian World Confederation of Labour (WCL) (see https://www.ituc-csi.org/; 16/07/2023). And yet, even after the merger, the ITUC and its various Global Union Federations organise with about 190 million workers in 167 countries only a small part of the global workforce, estimated to be around 3 billion workers. As Marcel van der Linden reports, the global unionisation degree in free trade unions in 2014 was about 7 percent and has most likely declined further to around 6 per cent by now (van der Linden 2021: 378). Maurizio Atzeni in an important intervention points out that if we want to explore working people’s contestation of capitalist exploitation, formal trade union organisations may not be the best startingpoint. Instead, we need to focus on all the different types of struggles, in which capitalist exploitation is being resisted. ‘This shift would force researchers going beyond the study of the organization per se to actively document how labour processes, geography of production, gender, race, and ethnic differences and dominant patterns of governance impact upon collective labour identities’ (Atzeni 2021: 1353). In this article, I will argue that we need to define labour movement broadly including trade unions, but also informal workers’ organisations, social movements, citizens’ committees, environmental groups and human rights NGOs. In turn, this will allow us to identify a broader, more diverse future role of organised labour too. As Karl Marx had already pointed out, humans make history, but not in the conditions of their own choosing (Marx 1852/1984: 10). Hence, in order to identify the key capitalist structuring conditions affecting human class agency I will first discuss the capitalist social relations of production in the next section. In a second step, I will then discuss an expanded understanding of capitalist accumulation, which does not only rely on the extraction of surplus value in the production of commodities in the workplace, but equally on the expropriation of unpaid labour in the spheres of social reproduction. In the Conclusion, I will summarise the conceptual findings of the article and explore the implications for the future of labour movements in the struggles to come. Understanding capitalist accumulation The defining, distinctive characteristic of capitalism is the way production is organised around wage labour and the private ownership or control of the means of production. This results in a set of structuring conditions, which shapes the environment within which agency takes place (Bieler and Morton 2018: 38-41). First, capitalism is an enormously dynamic mode of production, because it is not only workers who compete with each other for jobs, but employers too are in a relentless struggle with each other for higher market share. The resulting pressure on competitiveness instils incentives to move ahead through the use of novel technology. However, any advance, any superiority gained can always only be of temporary nature, as other capitalists catch up or even overtake the first mover. Companies which do not succeed in this struggle are in danger of being taken over or going bankrupt. This dynamic of the capitalist mode of production, however, also implies that capitalism is inevitably crisis prone. If an ever increasing number of goods are produced based on novel technology and with less living labour, the outcome is a crisis of overproduction, in which more goods are produced than can be sold. It is in the production of commodities that surplus value is created by living labour. Nevertheless, the created surplus value still needs to be realised in the sphere of circulation and if the latter does not occur, capitalism enters crisis. This does not automatically result in the collapse of capitalism. There are always strategies available to capitalism in order to counter crisis tendencies. Most importantly, there is the structuring condition of relentless outward expansion into novel areas and geographical regions of profit-making along lines of uneven and combined development. Ultimately, it is these structuring conditions, which explain why capitalism in its dynamism and crisis proneness has expanded into every corner of the world and every aspect of humans’ daily life. The way capitalist production is organised does not, however, only produce a set of structuring conditions. It equally engenders social class forces as the main collective agency (Bieler and Morton 2018: 41-6). Based on wage labour and the private ownership or control of the means of production, two main classes confront each other. Capital, which owns the means of production, and labour, which owns only its labour power to sell. Class is therefore a relation characterised by contradictions and confrontation. In order to accumulate surplus value, capital pays labour not for the whole working day, Against