[Fresh Ink] Workers of the World Unite! A New Message for Labour Day 2009?

[Richard Menec]

http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/251.php

(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))

A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 251 .... September 7, 2009

Workers of the World Unite!
A New Message for Labour Day 2009?

Leo Panitch

What is the significance of the way not only Keynes but even Marx has been 
brought back into fashion amidst the global economic crisis? This is a 
question well worth pondering on the day that is officially designated to 
celebrate the class that Marx saw as carrying the promise - and the 
responsibility - of creating a better world.

Twenty years ago, many cast Marx's ideas into the dustbin of history along 
with the statist Communist regimes that collapsed in 1989. Yet Marx, who 
more than any 19th century liberal economist or philosopher insisted that 
the state was an imposition on society, and looked forward to it 'withering 
away' after a proletarian revolution, would have been the severest critic of 
those regimes. As Schumpeter once said, there was as little in common 
between Marx and Stalinism as there was Jesus and the Inquisition.

In any case, as the globalization of capitalism quickened through the 1990s, 
it actually became more fashionable than ever to quote Marx, especially on 
how "the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the 
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe," creating in the process "a 
world in its own image." But what was usually left out when the Communist 
Manifesto was quoted in this way in the 1990s was Marx's prescience on 
capitalist globalization "paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive 
crises."

It has been this aspect of Marx's profound understanding of capitalist 
dynamics that has come to the fore in the current crisis. It does indeed 
seem to confirm that capitalism is like "the sorcerer who is no longer able 
to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his 
spells." But what is especially important to bear in mind on Labour Day is 
that Marx, unlike many of those Marxist economists who make it their 
business to predict economic crises, would had no illusions that the purely 
economic contradictions of capitalism would themselves bring about a better 
world.

Marx knew very well that capitalism, by its nature, fosters social 
isolation, leaving "no other nexus between man and man than naked 
self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'." This creates passivity in the 
face of personal crises, from factory layoffs to home foreclosures. So, too, 
does this isolation impede communities of active, informed citizens from 
coming together to advance radical alternatives.

Marx would look at this crisis from the perspective of what it would take 
for workers to overcome this all-consuming social passivity. He saw the 
trade unions developing in his own time as a step forward in relation to the 
"immediate aim" of "the organization of the proletarians into a class" whose 
"first task" would be "to win the battle for democracy." And Marx would 
today encourage the formation of those types of collective identities, 
associations and institutions through which people could redefine their 
needs and develop their ambitions and capacities to fulfil them by winning 
the battle for economic democracy. This is something no capitalist society 
can ever become.

No such vision for enacting change has arisen from the labour movement in 
this crisis, at least not so far. Nor is it likely to emerge from the 
primarily defensive way trade unions are currently constituted. They do need 
to resist employer pressures to make workers bear the burden of the crisis 
in the public as well as private sectors. But their lack of ambition to 
organize and represent all workers in all facets of their lives, not only in 
terms of a narrow orientation to collective bargaining, is proving 
increasingly debilitating.

It is significant that the Labour Day we celebrate today, legally 
established in 1895 to occur on the first Monday of September, involved 
Canada abjectly following what the U.S. government had done to avoid workers 
there joining in the celebration of May Day as the international workers 
holiday. This practice had been established in 1889 when the first congress 
of the Second International (the successor to the First International 
organized by Marx in 1860s) called on workers everywhere to join in an 
annual one-day strike on May 1st. This date was chosen to coincide with the 
timing of international protests against the bloody repression of workers in 
Chicago in 1886 who had been campaigning for an eight-hour working day.

Unions in Canada, like those in the U.S., went along with politicians who 
sought to replace the May Day that symbolizing labours' insurgent history 
and revolutionary potential with a state-sponsored 'official' Labour Day 
holiday in September that symbolized the recognition of labour's search for 
respectability.

This was epitomized by the free admission to the Canadian National 
Exhibition at the end of the Toronto's annual Labour Day parade. But the 
global economic crisis once again points to why labour needs to move in the 
other direction. If the fashionability of quoting Marx today is going to 
amount to much, labour will need to "recover the spirit of revolution," as 
Marx himself once put it, rather than "to set its ghost walking about 
 again." .


Leo Panitch is Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at 
York University. His most recent books are American Empire and the Political 
Economy of International Finance and Renewing Socialism: Transforming 
Democracy, Strategy and Imagination.