Abstract
There is a normative gap in Global Labour Studies. Leading scholars in the field take a pro-worker stance, but provide little in the way of a justification for it. To avoid charges of arbitrary partisanship, it is necessary to establish a normative foundation for this stance. This can be achieved by combining a position in social philosophy called ‘qualified ethical naturalism’ with a Marxian understanding of class domination.
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Notes
- 1.
For the sake of transparency, I should mention that I have written this chapter as someone located in the field. I am a member of RC44 and an editor of the Global Labour Journal, and have worked as an instructor on two of the MA programmes of the Global Labour University. I would like to thank the editors and Maurizio Atzeni for commenting on draft versions of this chapter and Edward Webster for bringing to my attention the debate between Howard Becker and Alvin Gouldner. The usual disclaimers apply.
- 2.
Obviously, some scholars have studied labour from a transnational angle long before this point (see Van der Linden, 2005, pp. 227–8). But from today’s vantage point, it seems fair to say that these endeavours reached a new degree of institutionalisation only around forty years ago, and that this process roughly coincided with the rise of global labour production networks. Importantly, the moniker “Global Labour Studies” was not used from the start. There was a Newsletter of International Labour Studies from 1978 to 1990, which was edited by Peter Waterman (see Munck, 2009, p. 625), and a number of books and articles that also spoke of International rather than Global Labour Studies (Taylor, 2009, pp. 437–440). Taken together, the contributions to International Labour Studies can be seen as constituting the first phase of what was later called Global Labour Studies.
- 3.
At the time, Becker’s observation was directed at sociology in general, and he sought to emphasize the partisan nature of any research endeavour in the social sciences. According to him, “we cannot avoid taking sides” (1967, p. 239). He argued that it is unavoidable to prioritise certain perspectives on social settings over others because making sense of society means looking at it from a certain position (p. 245). For him, it followed that it is impossible “to do research that is uncontaminated by personal and political sympathies” (1967, p. 239).
- 4.
Economic liberals traditionally take issue with the idea that capitalism is marked by an asymmetric relationship between labour and capital. They emphasise individual freedom and the beneficial effects of ‘free’ markets for everyone and thus question the right of workers to unionise (see Friedman, 1962, p. 124; Hayek, 1960, p. 267; 1973–1977, p. 71). In contrast, post-Marxists do not deny this asymmetry, but emphasise the importance of collective struggles around issues other than work and question why the needs of workers should be prioritised politically over those of other social groups (see Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, pp. 167–8; Postone, 1993, p. 371).
- 5.
Of course, this is also a self-critique. The one author I know of who is an exception is Edward Webster, who discusses partisanship and its practical implications in a book chapter called ‘Choosing Sides: The Promise and Pitfalls of a Critically Engaged Sociology in Apartheid South Africa’ (2017), which was published in a German-language book. Webster is not so much concerned with the focus of this text, the normative justification of a pro-worker stance, but with a very practical ethical dilemma faced by partisan researchers: As scholars, they are committed to openly sharing knowledge and research findings, but through sharing, they may harm allies, be they individuals or organisations. Webster exemplifies this with reference to a research project that he was involved in on migrant labour and AIDS in mid-1980s South Africa. He and his colleagues were cooperating with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in their research. In the case of one particular research project, they found that the dependency of the mining industry on migrant labour gave rise to “[a] system of casual sex and prostitution” in mineworkers’ settlements that facilitated “the rapid spread of AIDS”. Representatives of the NUM reacted angrily when read the first draft of the research report. They feared that the results would create an opportunity for the Apartheid regime to further marginalise black mineworkers by fuelling discourses that portrayed “the black man (…) as diseased and promiscuous” (quotations from the original manuscript).
- 6.
In my understanding, a critical problem is an issue producing contradictions in one’s line of argument that cannot be addressed without changing one’s ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions.
- 7.
Silver’s terminology is a nod to Polanyi, who speaks of “unregulated competition” (Polanyi, 2001, p. 70) and the principle of a “self-regulating market” (Polanyi, 2001, chap. 6) that emerges with the commodification of “labor, land and money” (p. 72). One can question in this context whether it makes sense to use the attribute “unregulated”. If we follow Marx (1990, p. 178), durable economic arrangements in the capitalist mode of production only exist if there is a degree of formal or informal legal regulation enabling people to enter binding contracts.
- 8.
This is not an argument against the normative content of the Polanyian position. Indeed, there are good reasons to assume that a “right to live” exists. Social mechanisms ensuring the survival of people were “widely accepted” before the onset of liberalisation, as Silver points out (2003, p. 18), and a similar point can be made with reference to present-day welfare states. It appears that the existence of social support mechanisms that ensure people’s survival conforms with the normative intuitions of very many people, and there is a broad range of social and political forces in favour of them.
- 9.
There is a critical problem with this interpretation, whose discussion is beyond the scope of a book chapter. Notably, Marx takes great pain to demonstrate, in Capital vol. 1, that the capitalist mode of production is not based on unequal (and by implication, unjust) exchange (1990, pp. 270–80), which raises the question of whether capitalism can be “unjust”. In other words, it remains an open question whether the concept of “justice” can be applied to the line of argument developed in Capital. On the conceptual challenges surrounding this issue, see Wood (1972) and Lindner (2013, pp. 350–3).
- 10.
One may object here that workers voluntarily enter employment contracts. But Silver’s and Marx’s point is that workers in capitalism are in a far weaker bargaining position than capitalists unless they possess very rare skills or are able to form very strong coalition—or unless there are “labour shortages”. After all, capitalists tend to employ more than one person. It follows that the individual worker is usually far more dependent on being employed by an individual capitalist than vice-versa. Whereas capitalists can compensate the fact that a position remains vacant by ordering other employees to fill the gap or by hiring someone else, the worker does not have an income, which is a potential threat to their survival. Consequently, workers tend to be forced to accept working conditions and pay no matter whether they find them inacceptable and are not even able to sustain themselves through their wages. The injustice lies in being systemically disadvantaged in negotiations with their counterpart, so that one is forced to accept binding contracts with unfavourable conditions.
- 11.
Silver does not discuss the political implications of this observation, which is unsurprising given that she is not primarily concerned with questions of strategy in her book. It is worth mentioning that there are at least three practical challenges that need to be addressed if one argues for a worker-led global liberation effort: (1) how to deal with the possibility (of which there are many historical examples) that working classes enter compromises with capital at the national level that benefit core workforces on the “inside” but not outsiders; (2) how to build alliances across national boundaries under those circumstances; and (3) how to deal with the fact that there are many people inhabiting “contradictory locations within class relations” (Wright, 1978, p. 74) in capitalist societies and cannot be easily placed either on the side of labour or on the side of capital.
- 12.
Economic liberals may argue that a huge number of people in different countries around the world, among them many “emerging economies”, have benefited materially from the the push for economic liberalisation at the global level from 1970s onwards, and that the environmental record of authoritarian socialism was abysmal (see Wolf, 2004, 2014; Petersen & Hartmann, 2020). But in defence of Webster et al., one could retort to the first point that there has been a sustained rise of economic inequality, at least in the Global North, during the neoliberal age (see Alvaredo et al., 2018, pp. 8–13)—and that societies with highly developed economies are facing more social problems if they are more unequal, as epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have argued with reference to quantitative data (2009, 2014). Concerning the second point, it does not matter so much if past social formations with a high degree of regulation did badly in terms of environmental protection because the issue at stake here is not whether or not authoritarian-socialist regimes would be capable of addressing the climate crisis, but what the track record of present-day neoliberal capitalism is in this respect. In a recent statement signed by 11,000 scientists under the heading of “climate emergency”, the authors argue that “[d]espite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament” (Ripple et al., 2020, p. 9).
- 13.
- 14.
The book contains several references to Forces of Labor and to Webster’s work, which show that there is a direct link to the other authors discussed in this chapter. There are no references to Grounding Globalization, which is probably down to the fact that both Brinkmann et al.’s and Webster et al.’s book were published at roughly the same time.
- 15.
All quotations in languages other than English have been translated by the author.
- 16.
Following Lindner, the early Marx already has a similar understanding of human nature. Linder identifies three groups of needs in Marx’s writings, namely “bodily facilities, reflexivity as well as sociality” (2013, p. 349).
- 17.
Admittedly, the “changeability” of social arrangements is difficult to assess. Even if all social arrangements are produced by human beings and are, in principle, changeable, calls for transformation need to address a number of questions if they are supposed to gain political traction. Examples are: What is a plausible alternative to the status quo, and does it magnify human flourishing? Do the benefits in terms of human flourishing of transforming an arrangement outweigh the costs? And what kind of changes should be prioritised over others?
- 18.
Even if one acknowledges the “ecological dominance” (Jessop, 2000, pp. 328–9) of capital accumulation in present-day societies—and the fact that it entails the continuous reproduction of capitalist class relations—it does not follow that other relations of social domination are of lesser importance for understanding the character of those societies. In a nutshell, capital accumulation feeds off difference—both because it can only happen if unpaid reproductive work is carried out ensuring a constant supply of labour power and because a degree of socially produced heterogeneity among workers is functional for ensuring the constant extraction of surplus labour.
- 19.
Admittedly, this may result, from a pragmatic point of view, in researchers being overburdened with complexity (see Buckel, CitationRef CitationID="CR59">2015</CitationRef>, pp. 30–1). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss feasible research strategies that take on this challenge. At this point, it should suffice to point to existing studies of global labour scholars that examine the articulations of different relations of social domination (see, for, example Chun & Agarwala, 2016; Mezzadri, 2016; Kenny, 2018).
- 20.
On the day I finished writing this chapter, Süddeutsche Zeitung, a leading German quality paper, published an article (Hägler, 2021) about Bernd Osterloh, the trade unionist heading the works’ council of Volkswagen. According to the article, Osterloh has decided to resign his position to become an executive board member of Traton, a subsidiary of the carmaker. Apparently, his annual remuneration is in seven figures (in Euros). This random example illustrates how trade union leaders can become deeply entangled with business networks, in particular in corporatist settings like the German system of labour relations, which is based on principles such as “social partnership” and “co-management”.
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Gallas, A. (2022). Being on the Side of Workers: On the Normative Foundations of Global Labour Studies. In: Piva, A., Santella, A. (eds) Marxism, Social Movements and Collective Action. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12474-7_11
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