thomas ferguson, from normalcy to new deal

(45): importance of looking not just at labor policy, but also foreign economic policy (which was "so spectacularly" a hallmark of the later new Deal)

(46): important--what stands out is the novel type of 'political coalition' built by Roosevelt: a 'historical bloc' of capital-intensive industries, investment banks, and internationally oriented commerical banks. this piece is a "formal theory" of industrial partisan preference as the "joint consequence" of class conflict and the differential impact of the world economy" [this last part is key--without class conflict, none of this applies]

(47-48): a theory of class coalitions in two parts

1. a static theory: two axes--first (49), the overarching question is the exact 'price' that businesses have to pay to obtain support from the workforce. again, this will vary, he's arguing, by the nature of your industry (two extreme example--robot workforce or machinery-less labor process); second (53), another question has to concern the position of various firms within the world economy (internationalists vs. nationalists).
   
2. a dynamic theory: the system of '96 bloc was premised on an old, protectionist and labor-intensive bloc. but there was a transition to the capital-intensive, internationalist bloc (the two ideal transitions are via boom and via crisis (56-57)), leading up to the new deal. much of the piece concerns itself with the specifics of this transition.

(58-59): in event of depression--if world trade contracts, 'economic nationalism', at first, is likely to grow. but it will also lead to secondary crises, most notably over money supply--many industries (and most people, in fact) will want lower interest rates, eventually, since deflation is seen as determinental (especially for capital-intensive industries). yet this is not in the interests of big international banks, insurance companies and bond holders.

(62): historically, the system of '96 collapsed in three stages

1. period immediately following WWI, and the boom--an emergent multinational bloc and the weakening of the old coalition (see pg 70)
   
2. after great crash of 1929, division on the question of the gold standard
3. slowly emerged the american political world as is currently known

(64): Banks needed Europeans to export surpluses, to pay back loans, so they had an interest in lowering tarriffs (presumably this is counteracted to the extent that they have given loans to companies who depend on tarriffs)

(83): as i am understanding this, abandonment of the gold standard was an attempt to kickstart 'inflation'--to seek their independence from the 'money market', in effect (French and British threatened a run on gold)

(85): first new deal coalition--initially the NRA (1933) pleased the economic nationalists, but began to self-destruct from the moment in came into operation

(87): second new deal coalition--first successful capital-intensive led political coalition (here is where we get NLRB and Wagner and whatnot, in 1935)

(89): the opposition to all this was a bloc of protectionist and labor-intensive industries

(93-94): four conclusions

1. by 1938, a 'system of '36' was in place--social welfare, oil price regulation, free trade, even 'keynesianism'
2. we need to specify the role that labor played in shaping the new deal, integrating it into the differential cost-benefit framework specified here.
   
3. note the inadequacy of traditional ways of conceptualizing business (big vs. small, monopoly vs. competitive)
4. this study has implications for contemporary politics--how much we don't know about events we've studied (noting the archival material he waded through)
   

Jason stanley, "comrades or competitors?"

(12): challenges to solidarity in global market, for three reasons

1. inequality is greater in global market
2. cross-border immobility--capital mobility increases price elasticity for labor, from perspective of capital [but would they not still be competing, for jobs, even if there were mobility?]
3. an appreciating currency increases the price of labor; workers have no control over appreciation/depreciation, yet it will provoke cross-border hostility

(23-24): in the aftermath of the Auto Pact--because of appreciation in the US dollar beginning in the mid-70's, real wage costs were lower in Canada till the mid-80's. this made the crisis of the late 70's less severe, and the recovery of the early 80's stronger. [in this narrative, currency appreciation is at the forefront -- but not clear how labor immobility is working to undermine solidarity? isn't it more like divergent skill?]

(30-31): since cabotage routes were not part of the liberalization agreement and since freight was a small part of the IBT for american workers, there was muted response, on their part. canadians were more up-in-arms after liberalization of their half in the late 80's--in '86, a nationalist proposal was defeated; but in '89, it passed. importance of political economy ftw!

Has anyone considered the possibility that labor has been doing it all wrong? That rather than going after the Democrats all this time, they should have been going after the Republicans? The argument can be made that organized labor should have used that $400 million to buy off their enemies instead of using it to grease the palms of their nominal friends—friends who, alas, can’t (or won’t) get the job done.

sharon smith, "the 1930s"

(...) By 1932 it was estimated that 75 percent of the population was living in poverty, and fully one-third was unemployed. And in many places, Black unemployment rates were two, three, or even four times those of white workers.

(...) In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt granted workers the right to organize into unions in Section 7(a) of the National Recovery Act, and workers rushed to join unions.

(...) By the 1930s, objective conditions were overripe for mass industrial unionism in the United States. Industrial productivity had risen by less than 10 percent between 1899 and 1914, but between 1920 and 1930 productivity increased by 7 percent each year. By 1926, the Ford Motor Company announced that 43 percent of its jobs required only one day’s training. Most importantly, the working class was no longer segregated along racial lines. The slowdown in immigration after 1914 brought with it a corresponding increase in internal migration. A half-million Southern Blacks moved north during World War I. By 1930, more than 25 percent of Black men were employed in industrial jobs, compared with only 7 percent in 1890. By the mid—1930s, Black workers made up 20 percent of the laborers and 6 percent of the operatives in the steel industry nationally. And one-fifth of the workforce in Chicago’s slaughterhouses was Black. White workers couldn’t hope to win unless they united with Black workers–and that wouldn’t happen unless they organized on the basis of equality.

(...) Moreover, Lewis had supported Republican Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. He was woven of the same cloth as the rest of the AFL leadership. But unlike the others, he recognized that if the AFL didn’t open its doors to the unskilled, another rival union organization would develop and grow from the mass organizing drives which were already taking place. As Lewis’ biographer, Saul Alinsky, concluded, Lewis merely "read the revolutionary handwriting on the walls of American industry," when he pushed to organize an industrial union federation.

(...) When the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) formally opened its doors as a section of the AFL in 1935, industrial workers flooded in. And those groups of workers who were already at the forefront of struggle, such as the auto and rubber workers, quickly affiliated their unions with the CIO. In 1938, when the AFL finally expelled the CIO and its million members, the CIO changed its name to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and emerged as a rival union federation.

(...) As the level of working-class struggle grew, and the economy began to stabilize, big business began to desert Roosevelt. As Mike Davis argues, "It was this mass desertion of business from the administration in 1935 that drove a reluctant Roosevelt temporarily into the arms of Lewis and the CIO insurgents."27 Roosevelt needed the working class vote in order to win the 1936 election, and he shrewdly tailored his campaign to win the hearts and minds of workers. He put on quite a convincing show, declaring at one point during the campaign that if big business hated him, "I welcome their hatred," and if he were given the chance to serve a second term they will have "met their master." It was toward this end that in 1935 Roosevelt made two far-reaching concessions to workers.

(...) He pushed through the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act), which finally made it illegal for employers to refuse to bargain with unions. And he secured passage of a Social Security program, by which the U.S. government agreed to provide a minimal standard of living for the poorest families in society and for the elderly. These two concessions proved to be the biggest gains workers won from the government during the Depression decade–gains which earned Roosevelt his legendary status as a friend to the working class. But although Roosevelt promised workers that "we have only begun to fight," these were to be the last significant reforms he would grant to working class people.

(...) Although Roosevelt remained popular, many workers–especially those who were most active in building the new industrial unions–began to turn away from the Democratic Party as the Depression decade wore on. Indeed, Democratic politicians were proving in practice that they stood firmly on the side of the bosses, while the compassionate New Deal rhetoric went out the window as soon as the class struggle intensified. In 1935 alone, 20 state militias–most controlled by Democratic governors–were called out against strikers in 73 disputes. A 1937 Gallup poll showed that at least 21 percent of the population supported the formation of a national farmer-labor party as an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.

(...) [UAW 1935 Congress -- first no support for Roosevelt, then threat from leadership]

(...) Thus, despite the significant shift leftward in working class consciousness by the mid—1930s, the pressure to support Roosevelt was tremendous, even among many socialists. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party fell into step behind the New Deal coalition, its politics virtually indistinguishable from Roosevelt’s by that time. Many long-standing members of the Socialist Party as well succumbed to the pressure to campaign for Roosevelt in 1936.

(...) The Great Depression was the most significant period of class struggle that has ever taken place in the United States. The sheer intensity of the struggle led ever broader sections of the working class to become radicalized and to begin to generalize politically. For a very short period of time as the working class movement advanced–between 1935 and 1937–the level of radicalization was such that on a fairly large scale workers began to realize that if they were to have a chance at winning, they had to confront all the bosses’ attempts to divide and weaken the working-class movement. Workers had to break down racial barriers and build genuine unity and solidarity; they had to prepare themselves to confront the violence of the bosses, which grew in ferocity during this period; they had to fight against anti-communism; and they had to break with the Democrats and the Republicans and form an independent working-class party. Thus, the Depression decade marked the key turning point for the working class movement in the United States: For the first time, the potential existed to build a genuine mass revolutionary workers party. But such a revolutionary alternative would have required a forceful revolutionary leadership inside the working class movement. Instead, there was the Communist Party.

(...) There was one reason in particular why the Communist Party was the organization which played the decisive role in the labor movement of the 1930s: its comparatively large size. Even at the very beginning of the Depression, the Communist Party claimed a membership of 7,500, compared with the Communist League of America’s 131 members in 1931. At the end of 1938, the CP had grown to 82,000, while the membership of the Trotskyists, by then in the Socialist Workers Party, peaked at 2,500. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party continued its process of decline. Subsumed by inner turmoil as its right and left wings continued to do battle, SP membership actually declined in 1935–a pivotal year of growth for the class struggle. [oh but come on! this is not an 'exogenous' factor!!!]

(...) As American CP leader Earl Browder argued in the mid—1930s, "If one is not interested in directives from Moscow, that only means he is not interested in building socialism at all."

(...) But for all the weaknesses of the American Communist Party, its commitment to fighting racism was exemplary. In fact, the CP in the 1930s provides an extraordinary example for socialists on how to go about building a working-class movement that makes fighting racism an integral part of the class struggle. This was true despite the CP’s bizarre "Black Belt" theory. As part of Stalin’s left turn during the Third Period, he argued that the American CP should advocate "self-determination for the Black Belt." This meant calling for a separate Black republic in the Southern states, where a majority of Blacks still lived–even though no demand for such a republic had ever been raised by Blacks themselves. Perhaps for this reason, the Black Belt theory’s call for a Black republic had virtually no influence on the party’s practice, and was rarely even mentioned in its literature.

(...) All literature, whether communist or union, had to be secretly distributed–smuggled inside baskets of laundry by Black women posing as laundresses or at the local barbershop, where communists would drop in for a "trim" and pick up their leaflets. The communists issued their own leaflet in response to the Klan, which read, "KKK! The workers are watching you!" And in 1933, the CP held a demonstration in front of the Birmingham courthouse, which demanded that the KKK and other white supremacists be outlawed, and the right to vote without the racist restrictions that prevented a majority of Blacks from voting throughout the South.

(...) All over the U.S., communist youth circulated petitions against segregation in baseball and other sports, in a campaign which featured white and Black ball players calling for integration in sports. When communists traveled to Washington, D.C. for a demonstration to free the Scottsboro Boys, they stopped off on the way and sat in at restaurants that refused to serve Blacks–a tactic adopted decades later by the civil rights movement.

(...) By 1934 the party claimed 1,000 members in Birmingham, mostly Black. After three members of the Sharecroppers Union were shot and killed by police in 1932, 3,000 people marched in a funeral procession for six miles, following caskets that were draped in banners with the communist hammer and sickle, while 1,000 stood along the route in tribute.

(...) This meant that, after spending the previous seven years denouncing as social fascists not just Roosevelt and the Democrats, but also liberals and reform socialists, the CP was instructed to become virtually indistinguishable from them. And as the 1936 presidential election approached, the Popular Front meant that the CP was instructed to do everything in its power to help ensure Roosevelt’s victory. Communists were to become loyal–if uninvited–members of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. [this is distinct, really, from Davis' explanation -- important, then, to think through the argument more carefully]

(...) As late as January 1935, the Daily Worker described Roosevelt as "the leading organizer and inspirer of fascism in this country." But by the end of 1936, the CP formally entered the Democratic Party. While it didn’t formally support Roosevelt in the election (voicing fear that open communist support might hurt his campaign), the CP made it clear that it hoped he would win.

(...) Some left-wing historians–those who wish to downplay the problems of Stalinism, along with those who wish to apologize for reformism–argue that the Popular Front was a major step forward for the CP, because it ended its self-imposed isolation of the Third Period. They point to the fact that the party more than tripled in size during the Popular Front period, from 26,000 members in 1934 to 82,000 members in 1938, as evidence of success. But that line of reasoning ignores the fact that the CP’s membership also tripled in size during the Third Period years between 1930 and 1934, when it grew from 7,500 to 26,000.

(...) The fact remains that from 1928 on, the CP never decided its strategy based upon what was needed to move the labor movement forward. Because it was tied to Stalin’s coattails, the American CP could not aim to build an independent revolutionary movement inside the working class–either during the Third Period or the Popular Front. In shifting from the Third Period to the Popular Front, the Party merely traded one disastrous policy for another, shifting from outlandish sectarianism to the adoption of equally outlandish patriotism.

(...) Because of the Popular Front, the communist shop floor leaders were instructed to help the CIO leadership in delivering the working-class vote to the Democrats. Despite the fact that many of the most militant workers were already willing to break with the Democratic Party in 1936, Roosevelt was reelected in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history. [if only -- not sure if this claim is tenable, though]

(...) During the course of the Flint sit-down strike, which began on December 30, 1936 and lasted until February 11, 1937, 140,000 out of a total of GM’s 150,000 production workers either sat down or went out on strike. But the strike’s importance was more than just economic. The attention of the entire nation was riveted on the Flint auto workers, as they took matters into their own hands and stood up to the bosses, the CIO leaders, the National Guard, and even Roosevelt–and won.

(...) The Flint victory had an impact nationally, raising working-class confidence still higher. By the end of 1937, nearly a half-million workers all over the U.S. had taken part in a sit-down strike. The number of all strikes more than doubled between 1936 and 1937, from 2,172 to 4,740, involving nearly two million workers overall.

(...) Outwardly, Lewis appeared to defend the communists from conservatives within the CIO. "I do not turn my organizers or CIO members upside down and shake them to see what kind of literature falls out of their pockets," he told red-baiters. But privately Lewis made it quite clear that he was merely using the communists. He argued, "Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?" And later, once the union had finally gained a foothold in the steel industry and he no longer needed them, he fired all the communists from the union’s payroll.

(...) But the CP leaders’ newfound aversion to wildcat strikes did not immediately filter down to communists on the shop floor–many of whom continued to lead the wildcats and sitdowns which erupted during the course of 1937. Not only was confidence still rising among the rank and file, but that confidence enabled workers to begin to try and assert some control over the pace of production and other working conditions. [this is critical]

(...) [November Pontiac strike] The Communist Party finally broke the stalemate–by condemning a strike led by its own members, which it had publicly supported only days earlier. After an article appeared in the New York Times blaming the strike on the Communist Party, the CP leadership immediately switched sides, fearing it might alienate its New Deal allies. Earl Browder personally ordered the party’s Pontiac auto workers fraction to end the occupation.

(...) The Pontiac strike effectively marked the end of the CIO strike wave of the 1930s. The dynamic of class struggle is such that, if it does not continue to move forward, it very quickly begins to backslide. The monthly average of strikes fell by more than half between 1937—39, while the CIO added only 400,000 new members–compared with nearly 4 million in its first two years. By late 1937, recession had once again set in. Between August and November of 1937, the industrial production index dropped by 27 percent, once again throwing millions of workers into unemployment. Between November 1937 and January 1938, U.S. car production fell from 295,000 to 155,000. Employment in the auto industry dropped from 517,000 in 1937 to 305,000 in 1938.

(...) Once the 1936 presidential election was out of the way, Roosevelt was free to show his true class loyalties. Moreover, with a new war on the horizon, as Mike Davis argues, "FDR’s overriding desire to win support for an increasingly interventionist foreign policy, pre-empted further reform initiatives or new concessions to labor."93 As Roosevelt began his war buildup, he looked to reestablish his ties with big business. Thus, Roosevelt slashed relief and works programs for the poor and unemployed in 1938 and again in 1939, even though unemployment was rising sharply. And he made a pronounced turn against the labor movement, beginning in 1937.

(...) [thesis:] It was to be expected that Roosevelt would turn his back on workers, and that the CIO leadership would not lead a fight against Roosevelt. But by the time workers learned this bitter lesson, the greatest upsurge in U.S. working-class history was over. And the Communist Party had played a decisive role. The CP had an impact inside the labor movement which reached far beyond its own membership. Not only did the Communist Party have a substantial base among industrial workers, but by 1937, CP members held top leadership posts in 40 percent of CIO unions. There was a decisive missing element in the working-class movement of the 1930s: an organization of revolutionaries that was large enough to influence the course of the struggle. The Communist Party was large enough, but it had long ceased to be a revolutionary organization. So instead of leading workers toward revolution, the CP left thousands of workers without a way forward. Most workers who’d joined the CP during the course of the 1930s left by the end of the decade, undoubtedly confused and demoralized by the experience, with a grossly distorted vision of socialism. In the eyes of the most militant workers, the Communist Party discredited itself when it turned its back on the class struggle at its turning point in 1937. [too easy, one thinks]

stepan-norris and zeitlin, left out (2003)

Chapter One

(1): long 'Red Decade', early 30s to late 40s (bookended by 1933 and 1950, really)

(2): CIO originated in 1935, to 'organize the unorganized'-- broke, after charges of dual unionism, to become officially independent in November 1938

(3): by 1947, its international unions represented 80% of the country's industrial workers!

(4): Communists were best organized political group, within the CIO

(4-5): C Wright Mills as classic 'left' position on CP in unions--dictatorial, undemocratic, slavish to Moscow, etc.

(14-15): Communist Camp--stalwarts were UE, the ILWU, the MM; 'uncertain and shifting' were UAW, ACW, UPWA; anti-communist camp were USWA (especially powerful, of course), TWIA, URW.

(16): degeneration really begins in 1947 and 1948, they're arguing, as they are disoriented by Truman and the Marshall Plan, and their own failed and "uneven" support for Wallace in 1948

(17): in 1949-1950, when the CIO expelled 11 'communist-dominated' internationals, one estimate was that it lost up to a million members! (CIO's total memership in 1948, at its height, was 4.3 million). at their height, in 1946, they represented some 27% of the CIO's membership.

(20): key--the guiding thread of this book, then, is the importance of the 'intraclass struggle within the class struggle' [it is difficult, though, to speak about a 'relative autonomy'--for what is sometimes missing, I think, is the way in which the larger 'class struggle' redounds on this intraclass struggle. and, of course, the willingness to set this in the perspective of the longue duree. but these are only partial criticisms.]

(22-23): absolutely--their denials/ignorance of Stalin's terror, etc. should not obscure the critical democratic achievements of the rank-and-file of Communist trade unionists.

Chapter Two

(24-25): organizing 'The Rouge' in 1941--the last citadel to fall to the CIO

(26-30): key argument--Communists not in power, they're arguing, due to their 'organizational discipline'/monolithic activism, etc., but because of their actual, effective organizing. there is an element of contingency that we can admit, but we have to understand it as socially determined contingency--there are "indelible connections" between the 'insurgent practices' and whether a union was communist, or not.

(32): CIO, remember, is product of two phases of class struggle.

1. 1920s, industrial unionism against AFL craft
2. after early 1930s, in response to labor upsurge

(32-33): key--thus, we can think of 'four insurgent political practices'

1. earlier Red organizing
2. whether the union seceded from the AFL 'from below', or whether it was an officers' revolt
3. whether the union was organized independently, or whether it was done by a CIO organizing committee
4. whether it was formed through amalgamation, or as a unitary organization

(33): earlier phase of organizing was carried by the TUEL (within the AFL, boring holes) and then, in 1929, the TUUL (new industrial unions, outside the AFL), after the demise of the Wobblies

(37): key premise, which needs to be at the heart of our interrogation of their thesis--"objective conditions do not create organizations."

(38): argument--earlier Red organizing makes it more likely that the international is Communist

(40-41, 43): argument--same goes from workers' insurgency (UAW) vs. officers' revolt (SWOC)

(46): argument--same goes for amalgamation (UE) vs. unitary

(48-49): in sum--their theoretical model, quite useful table/diagram

(51-52): in sum--these four insurgent political practices increased the odds of Communist victory. BUT they are careful to warn against voluntarism, because all of this was made possible by the Great Depression. Men are not 'corks on a river', but a river exists nonetheless? [certainly, as phrased here, this theoretical tack is hardly objectionable]

Chapter Three

(54-57): key--Michels' iron law of oligarchy cannot, at all, take into account the intraclass struggles that took place--the fact that democratic unions existed, and that oligarghic unions existed. It is therefore totally ahistorical. [of course, there is a limit to which we want to push the notion of 'contingency', here, but as a rejoinder this is very important. but let's probe, here]

(59): three features of a democratic union

1. democratic constitution
2. institutionalized opposition
3. active membership

(66): constitution as a 'real reflection' of the internal political dynamics--as them, congealed

(69-82): argument--the four insurgent political practices and the likelihood of being democratic--amalgamation and secession from AFL had significant impact (but there all bound up with each other, don't forget, so there are indirect effects)

(85): diffuse vs. narrow ideology--Communism as former, business unionism as latter

(87-89): argument--Communist-leadership and democracy positively correlated (this holds even when you control for insurgent practices, factions, etc.--even though they recognize that this is not favorable, because each is implicated in the other)

(93): in sum--a theoretical model; quite useful, again.

(94): in sum--oligarchy and democracy as "alternative possible paths"; the outcome as contingent, not determined [again, I think this works as a rejoinder, but it would be hard to stand on its own, as an insight. surely there is some need to take a longer perspective (remember that we are looking at variation within the long 'Red decade')]

Chapter Four

(96): contrast between Fordist hierarchy and industrial democracy

(97): turning point for the UAW Local 600 was 1952, when Ford moved to 'de-centralize' (here they track the figures: 58,000 in 1941 voted for CIO (fraction had voted instead for AFL); had about 60,00 dues-paying members in the late 40's; decline begins in 1952.)

(99-102): the coupling of activism and socialism explains Local 600's rich political life, they argue. the 'insurgent practices' gave rise to a 'colossal overproduction' of experienced organizers.

(103-104): key--a contingent, strategic decision to build radical democracy in a diverse workforce--a "double-edged realm of possibility" [the implication being, of course, that the other strategy was also 'open'. but can this satisfy us? we want to give credit where credit is due; but we don't want to abandon explanation.]

(108-109): progressive militance at Rouge

(112): Reuthers' only answer to 'Stalinism' at Rouge, was 'bureaucratic force'

(113): argument--the left-wing units, at Rouge, were the most contentious/democratic

(114-115): argument--it was the Communists who were most tolerant of political opposition in the unions

Chapter Five

(121): Reuther and the 5-year contracts, in 1950--this "class accord" marked the end, as Davis argues. From 'struggle' to negotiation.

(124): Local 600 files a suit against Ford and the long contract.

(125): 'decentralization', then, was just as much a 'political' decision, as an economic one

(127-129): key--here, positioning themselves against 'functionalist' Marxist and pluralist understandings of the labor agreement, which unanimously see it as a harbinger of 'accord.' here, instead, they stress the diversity amongst agreements--and thus, the importance of not acceding to a notion of structural 'predetermination' [i have a question, though, about whether their interlocutors are speaking at cross-purposes--Gramsci is speaking of the 'trade union', whereas Burawoy seems to be speaking about 'collective bargaining'/labor agreement. but ultimately this isn't as important as the issue at hand--again, the spectre of overstatement]

(131): Walt Disney at the HUAC--trying to make a communist out of Mickey Mouse!

(133): key--here we get into dangerous territory; they want to talk about the 'hegemony of capital' as relational, dynamic, etc. of course--and to some extent what they have done is important. but within limits. and the critical thing, also, is to decide where we will place those limits. their framing suggests something much more loose than seems legitimate.

(133-134): three provisions of the contract

1. prerogatives of management--labor or management?
   
2. union's freedom of action--right to resist and ability to impose sanctions
3. methods for handling disputes--what kind of grievance procedure?

(139-141): six indexes for measuring prolabor vs. procapital tendencies

1. management prerogatives--management or labor?
   
2. right to strike
3. contract term--long or short?
   
4. trade-off provision
5. grievance procedure--shop floor, or not?

(141-142): key argument--they find a 'sharp' difference between the Communist-led international unions and the others. this is incompatible with the 'functionalist' argument. [yes. but is not incompatible with a larger claim about structural determination]

(144): we want to control, also, across the four time periods:

1. immediate pre-WWII years of the Great Depression
2. the WWII years
3. immediate postwar offensive of organized labor, coupled with right-wing resurgence in Congress and Taft-Hartley in 1947
4. advent of the Cold War, attacks on Communist-led unions

(147): repression of communists--in January 1948, the CIO board votes to endorse Truman--this marks the beginning of the end for Communists within the CIO, in a sense. by late 1949 they vote to expel unions who follow Communist line. By late 1950, 11 miscreant unions are thrown out. 1954 is the coup de grace, when communist-infiltrated unions can be deprived of rights under the NLRB.

(149): KEY--nonetheless, even taking into account the official CP line during WWII, and all this--communists were more militant. this is remarkable, and very important.

(152-153): key--why is this? because unionists' were, and had to be, accountable to their rank-and-file. so it was the leadership of the CP that shifted, but the rank-and-file couldn't move, with them.

(156): further controls don't remove this 'stark' effect

(158): KEY--functionalist arguments must ignore the mechanisms by which 'structrual determination' happens--this, they're arguing, is to do violence to the notion of 'sociohistorical' causality. [i accept this as a critical intervention, with my earlier reservations noted. very useful.]

Chapter Six

(160-161): what difference does democracy make? perception that autocratic unions are more 'efficient'.

(162-163): important--they are arguing that democracy, actually, is critical to the forging of a coherent 'class identity' (which will, in turn, be critical to union power).

(165): argument--democracy gives you prolabor contracts.

(174, 179-180): argument--UE best, UAW second, and USWA a distant third on prolabor measures and wages, too.

(184): important--trade unionism is not, unlike some arguments, inherently depoliticizing. if it were so, how could you explain the breadth of political consciousness across trade unions?

(187): the Communists were least well-paid of all the organizers

(187-188): key--analysis shows that union democracy makes a real difference in the daily lives of workers. the larger theoretical claim, here, is that political relations within classes (given objective limits and possibilities') are relatively autonomous determinants of the relations between classes. [again, everything rests on the limits--but insofar as we agree to this, i have no real issue with this way of framing things. in the FN, also, they are acknowledging that they have abstracted away from employer's resistance, etc.--all of which would be one way into the question of 'objective conditions' and the State]

Other

(210): argument--communists and democratic unions fought for women's rights, as well

(225): UE was reluctant to fight for blacks' rights, for fear of opening a second front

(227-228): Local 600 and a thoroughgoing commitment to interracial community

(231): the Left-wing was central to interracial solidarity

(234-235): for most of its two decades of existence, CIO was a tremendous force for interracial solidarity (though it was hardly monolithically good, in this regard)

(254-255): CP and the racial question--it is critical to distinguish between what the leaders were saying, and what the activists were doing (the latter were the most consistent and principled in fighting for the rights of black workers)

(256): Operation Dixie, 1946--faded soon after it started, precisely because the CIO leadership was anxious to ban political agitation. it fell in on itself, more-or-less, as a result.

(264-265): overtly anti-Communist phase in CIO history begins from 1946 (this is also the date that Truman begins the government's loyalty program, under pressure from right-wing Congress). After the defeat of Henry Wallace, these escalate (Wallace had held massive interracial meetings in the South)

Conclusion

(266-269): summary of the book's findings

(271): Harry Bridges on 1949 explusion of the UE

(273): key--the 'difference' it could have made, had the Communists cohered [the analytical trouble, though, is when you treat this, as is implied, as simple contingency. Davis' formulation is more attractive, for this reason--you want to be able to explain this. without losing the sense of possibility and contingency, certainly. there is also, here, little discussion of the CP's own follies--very different discussion of their support of Wallace, for example]

(274): after the purges, in 1950 AFL was twice the size of the CIO

(275): without the Reds, 'Jim-crowism' in the CIO

(276-277): CIO's self-immolation left it powerless as industry, then, relocated [but here we have the spectre of the structural--could a powerful CIO have stopped this slide? how do we make sense of 'capital''s dominance, while accepting a partially contingent reading of this conjuncture?]

(278-287): "The Great Purge" of American Working Life

(286): one out of every five working people was put through screening, required to take an oath

(287288): key--argument, here, is that repression did not determine the fate of the CP. it was their incapacity in the face of this repression; their inability come up with a new strategy. specifically, a "corrupted internationalism" from 1945-1956--here focusing on two things: (1) reverse backing of Roosevelt-Wallace to back a third party ticket for Wallace, that destroyed the 'center-left alliance'; (2) going back into the mainstream [after ten pages of documenting repression, this is odd. and more importantly, it is unclear that these were the strategic blunders. entirely inverts Davis' argument, to an extent--but he also dates the fall much earlier. ]

(293): why the CP did an about-face in December 1947 and supported Wallace as a third party candidate, when they knew it would split the CIO? [clearly they have started the narrative of decline far too late--but let's think about this more, viz-a-viz the Davis]

(294): Cominform founded in October 1947--"united fronts from below"

Epilogue

(309-316): the debate over the 'Third Trade Union Federation' -- Foster saying the CP must stay within the trade union movement, and not make the mistake of the late 20's (shift to TUEL, from TUUL). an 'exquisite irony', because there he listened to the Comintern; had he listened to the same advice, he would have pushed for the 3rd Federation. implication, in this book, is that there was support amongst the trade unionists; moreover, that the communists could only have worked within their own trade union (election in Local 600 very close, in 1951) [anyway--all this has the character of guesswork, as they admit. not much use in pursuing this, right now]

---

TUEL: 1922-1929
TUUL: 1929-1935

James Matles
John Lewis
Walter Reuther--comes to be UAW president in 1946; by 1947, he wins a majority of the executive board.

two logics of collective action, offie and wiezenthal

(171): against liberal vision, we assert that the 'freedoms' of the bourgeois world actually produce and reproduce "factual inequality on the largest scale." [this mode of proceeding is unclear, to me--why not simply term the liberal commitment incomplete, since it was never meant to apply across the board? or as negative vs. positive commitment?]

(172): sociological critique shows that inequality prevails even where we have political and economic equality [but equality in what sense, here? no guilds, full commodification?]. and surely you can have a philosophical critique of bourgeois society? all this is a bit odd.

(173): key--four properties of labor-power:

1. cannot be physically separated from its owner
2. does not exist because of the expectation of its saleability
3. it is of no use-value to its owner (outside of exchange)
4. the owner is compelled, therefore, to enter into a wage-contract

(174): political science and the 'interest group'

(176-194): distinguishing labor and capital on three counts:

1. input factors (176-184)--insuperable individuality of labour (178); atomized form of living labour vs. integrated form of 'dead' labor (178); multitude of needs, for labour, vs. just one for capital (179); capital can introduce technical change and lessen its dependence on labor, while labor has no such option (180)--the costs of being unemployed, for labor, are much higher than the costs of not employing labor, for capital; thus:L= three possibilities of resistance (182-183)--(1) individual (lose); (2) collective (lose, because individual interests remain unchanged); (3) collective, interest-changing (now you're talking--have to convince 'relatively powerless' workers that the costs of organization, are low--"redefinition of collective interests").
   
2. internal processes (184-191)--unions need "conscious and coordinated active paritipation of their members" (not individuals, not bureaucracy) (185); danger of size or organization decreasing potential power (due to bureaucratization) (186); bureaucracy/democracy balance (187); unions are forced to represent a 'totality of interests', whereas business associations deal with limited and specific goals (190).
   
3. outputs (191-194)--the State is much kinder to capital, than labor, because it depends on the former (191); the State is dependent on capitalists to a degree that capitalists are not dependent on the State (192) [questionable?].
   

(193): summary dichotomies (not that helpful, but can consult)

(194-195): liberal vision rests on 'practical positivism'--an individual's interests are exactly what they say they are (this gives you Carl Schmitt--dictatorships can only have democratic means)

(196-197): claim, here, is that likelihood of interest misrecognition is not evenly distributed amongst the classes.

(198-199): five reasons that it is easy for capitalism to recognize its interests:

1. in capitalist society, pursuit of capitalist interests is considered just/normal; this is not the case for workers
   
2. supported by the state apparatus, which depends on capitalists
3. has a 'monological' interest, insofar as individual capitalists can pursue their 'true' interests without consulting others (whereas workers require a 'dialogical' process)
   
4. a false notion, for capitalists, will be immediately corrected by the market
5. because of bourgeois hegemony, it is more difficult for the workers to shape their interests autonomous from capitalist influence; for the capitalists, of course, bourgeois hegemony is hardly a problem [question is, of course, whether this is what we're trying to explain]

(199): in sum--"in order to achieve an equal amount of accuracy in awareness of the respective interests, vastly different efforts are required on both sides of the major dividing line of social class."

(200): important-- the inherent ambiguity of interest explicit in the workers' position (they are objects and partners in the labor contract, object and subject of exchange)--all ambiguities follow from this basic one:

• between individualistic and collective improvement
• between political and economic interest
• between identity as consumer and identity as producer
• between higher wages and better working conditions/secure employment
• between individual competitiveness and class solidarity

(202): liberal political forms rely on interests that are already enlightened; they don't provide the means for individuals to discover their 'enlightened' interests (because of the encouragement of individualistic choice and of representation, they're arguing)

(204): liberal political theory cannot accept the second level of collective action (the 'dialogical'); the 'monological' is encouraged.

(206-207): three theoretical alternatives for unions, then:

1. an expansion of the 'dialogical' logic--this requires nothing less than a model of socialist transformation.
   
2. expansion of the 'monological' logic--this is a 'corporatist' formula, presuming imposition from the outside
   
3. the uneasy and temporary coexistence of 'dialogical' and 'monological' logics--this is a result of some internal dynamic, within the working-class organization, and will result--eventually--in decline (though, they will say, this is temporarily rational, nonetheless). it is this they endeavor to make sense of.
   

(209-213): three institutional ways in which all this has unfolded, within liberal political forms

1. limitations of demands made by unions
2. institutionalization of alternative interest representation (works councils, etc)--this dissocioates representation from struggle, they argue.
3. statuatory increases of diversity and conflict within unions--in other words, the strategic attempt to bring forward elements that have been coopted

(214-215): Rosa Luxemburg on "opportunism"; the notion is summarized, here, by three elements

1. inversion of means-end, elevation of institutionalized means
   
2. priority given to short-term accomplishments
3. emphasis upon quantitative criteria (recruitment) rather than qualitative (formation and expression of collective identities

(215): opportunism appears, in sum, as a "rational and unstable" solution to the dilemma of working-class organizations. it unfolds in five stages.

1. small-scale and militant conflict
2. here, the dilemma between dialogical and monological forms emerges--it has to recruit and activate members; but it also has to hold these members in check. it will, from here, go to Stage 3 absent mass class struggle outside of itself.
   
3. opportunist resolution--maximizing independence of functionaries, from its base (again, this is rational--it needs to secure success and escape threats to its survival [in what sense is this the case, though?])
   
4. it now loses all capacity to act, due to the separation from its base
5. the option of going back to stage I (reversal of institutionalization), or more-or-less decomposing (I think)

(219-220): in sum, opportunist strategies are ultimately 'self-defeating' and thus are limited in their rationality. they're ultimately degenerative (which means that leftists shouldn't worry as much as they do; and that liberals are flat out stupid--both of these people fear that 'opportunism' is self-regenerating). 'transitory rationality' of opportunism. [we ought to think more about the contingency, here--what variables explain or don't explain mass class struggle?]

mike, nothing to lose but their chains

(3): thesis--"Instead, I consider the inverse question: historically, how did welfare policies condition a working-class party’s success or failure in winning votes? In doing so, this project hypothesizes that private social provisions pushed industrial working-class political history in a radically different direction in the US than in Europe and Australasia."

(6): "The relationship between business and the government in the US, however, was unlike that found in other countries, whose states played a more directive role in providing welfare. The response to the upsurge in labor militancy in the US moved in a sharply different direction. While reformers in the American Association for Labor Legislation sought to establish workingmen’s insurance along the lines of the European model, few of their policies were taken up by the state. Unlike the legislative profiles of nascent welfare states in Europe and Australasia, the US was exemplified by its lack of nationwide public protections for male workers and the elderly."

(7): "But, while European workers found legislative pursuits increasingly rewarding between the 1870s and the 1910s, American workers encountered effective retrenchment. During the 1880s and the early 1890s, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor and other trade unions won some legislative victories in areas such as legal hour’s limits, prohibitions on sweated labor, prohibitions on company stores, and union protections. But these gains were not sustained, often paltry and too often unenforced. By 1920, the courts struck down roughly three hundred labor laws (Skocpol 1992:227)." [if i read this with skeptical eyes, though, i want more -- i need convincing that this wasn't the same in other countries--proving that there was a serious, qualitative difference, rather than a difference in degree]

(7): key--"Major industrialists, eager to check and repel labor militancy and a short-lived tide of government regulation, proffered welfare capitalism as an alternative to the welfare statism they saw taking form abroad."

(9-10): "Ultimately, the US developed a welfare regime with three main features: a network of minimal direct social spending programs, a constellation of indirect or “hidden” state interventions through tax breaks and regulations, and, most importantly for this project, the domination of private social protections in large firms (Hacker 2002:11)."

(11): I hypothesize:

1. Firm intervention into social policy in the US was sufficient to obstruct the consolidation and expansion of industrial working-class votes for the Socialist Party in national elections.
2. State intervention into social policy in non-American industrializing countries did not inhibit the political mobilization of workers support for working-class parties.
3. Private welfare measures were abandoned at different rates across firms (Moriguchi 2005), and it was precisely their disparate rate of adoption in the US that helps explain the uneven development of industrial working-class based politics at the municipal level.
   

(12): three ways in which private social insurance obstructs w-class party formation:

1. "Wider income disparity generated by private social benefits act to disincentivize the formation of class-based politics by widening inequality and exposure to risk between working people."
2. "serves to secure employee allegiance to particular firms. In more extreme cases, it disincentivizes unionization and independent political action by allowing the firm to only award those employees willing to reject such strategies for maximizing their income and benefits."
3. "they isolate employee grievances at the level of the firm or plant. If an employee wants to negotiate the conditions of their benefits, the individual firm is the natural object of contestation. On the other hand, public social benefits constitute the state as the key arena for employee voice over the conditions of their benefits."

(14-15): "The potential for industrial working-class support for working-class parties across all industrializing contexts was driven by two interconnected economic and social factors:

1. Industrialization of key economic sectors that were previously under the control of skilled artisans and craftsmen resulted in intense deskilling and restructuring after 1870; the workers in these firms became the main supporters of working-class parties in all advanced capitalist countries.
2. Economic dislocation, a series of crises in the late 1800s, drove people to seek alternative strategies for securing their economic livelihood in labor militancy and political action."

(16-?): introducing five positions in the literature that try and explain this

1. "Institutionalists are dominant in the American exceptionalism debate. They view state structures and state policies as independent and determinative forces on party formation and success." [electoral system, early suffrage stopped party formation] (16-17)
   
2. "Repressionists argue that in America, there was much more repression of working-class movements than elsewhere, which made potential working-class political activists skeptical about the effectiveness of building parties." (17)
3. "Culturalists, on the other hand, argue from a large range of different vantage points. But, what unites their claims is the notion that unique systems of self-understanding in the US, either by the entire population or critical sections of it, precluded the support of working-class parties. A dominant position here is that since the US lacked a feudal past, the liberal tradition that emerged undermined the class-based grievances found elsewhere that gave working people a reason to support working-class parties." [feudal shackles...] (17-18)
4. "Another set of explanations suggest that the tactical decisions of both influential labor leaders and the leaders of the Socialist Party can explain the failure of working-class politics." (18-19)
5. "Finally, economic arguments share a common failing with the rest of the literature in that they make broad claims that cannot account for internal variation. A frequently cited explanation rests on the claim that American workers simply had fewer economic grievances than their counterparts." (20) ["Others demonstrate that a surge in Socialist Party votes in both Europe and America corresponded with an increase in working-class income and living standards (Sturmthal 1973; Fetscher 1973). And critically, from my perspective, it is unable to account for internal variation within the US context."]

(29): "However, it also lays a theoretical groundwork for subsequent explanations for the more general weakness of class-based politics throughout America’s history since the turn of the 20th century. So, while this project offers a historically conditional theory of the failures and successes of the American Socialist Party in industrial working-class communities, in the end it aims to provide theoretical concepts useful for the study of present controversies concerning working-class political behavior and business unionism." [how much will you focus on this?]

-----

questions:

1. possibility that you are pushing back the causal chain -- i.e., you have identified something that will itself need to be explained. in fact, it could be that the five explanations you identify might work through this mechanism, that you are identifying. this does not compromise the research, of course, but raises questions about the scope of the conclusions you will be able to make.
2. in other words, when you switch from asking how w-class activism forced welfare provision, to asking how the type of welfare provision influenced w-class activism, there is a way in which you're framing makes the whole thing too neat. how do we explain the difference in the type of welfare provision, systematically? otherwise it becomes a kind of exogenous variable.

lecture 6, "workshop and factory"
john merriman

-----

today: large-scale industrialization and workers

two general points: (1) everywhere, the industrial revolution was first and foremost a continuation of previous forms of production (the "break" is overemphasized); traditional ways of producing things (domestic industry, etc.) were critical. the second industrial revolution (circa 1850), with electricty, steel, large-scale units of production, is more like the popular understanding. (2) people who did economic history tended to see britain as a classical case of industrialization, and tended to see france as a "retarded" case--the reason was that if you added up the numbers of factories or steam engines, france lagged behind, of course. (but until the mid-19th century, of course, france is the second largest industrial economy in the world). one of the reasons that economic historians argue that france couldn't become a major industrial leader was because capital formation was more difficult (banking and insurance less developed), and disadvantaged also because of geography (in england, 1819, you had railroads carrying coal to important sites quickly; in france, however, mining sites are far from points of production). prof is arguing, though, that industrialization still proceeds in quite significant way at this time, but not "conventionally" -- i.e., it involves domestic industry, rural industry, "putting-out work" done largely by women. in 1871, in paris, the average industrial workshop in paris had only 7 people working in it (very different from manchester and sheffield). BUT: of course, over the long run, large-scale industrialization does develop more and more (story of 1850s/1860s)--in order to have this kind of investment/transformation, you need a surplus of capital and an increase in food production (agricultural revolution).

until 10 years ago, people still talked about the "long depression" (1873-1890s), characterized by low prices, and particulalry hurts rural people (percentage of people in industry is 27.6% in 1876, 29.2% in 1896), though. so we musn't overstate these transformations? (unclear what point is here)

number of people that are "urban": 1872, 21.1%; in 1901, 40.9%. but prof arguing that this can also overstate, because the level of urbanization is still not comparable to the US, prussian empire before 1871--this is primarily the urbanization of very small places, of market-towns.

so we are dealing with a society in which production is overwhelmingly rural, even if the country is becoming a major kind of industrial-producing country.

-----

urbanization is happening, of course, largely due to the "great departure"--people leaving rural areas for cities. you have huge growth in the industrial north, prof is noting. diseases and crises severly devastate rural industries (prof is not supplying a very coherent narrative, however).

flows of this sort, though, began earlier (in 16th centuries, huge migrations from the south all the way to paris, on foot(!), to work on construction industries in the cities).

"depopulation", again, is one of the most salient processes in rural areas throughout this period (new jobs, industry in urban areas, the story of this time)

-----

where is industry?

62.1% of the people in the "nord" are workers--the purest of the proletarian departments. cities growing into each other near lille (mining and textile industries). in the paris regions, of course--but here more high-quality goods being produced, not the mass-produced rubbish of england (products of quality, not victorian junk). fine clothes still being made, put together by individual men and women at home, that are part of the industrial structure of paris. outside, in the hinterland, the suburbs, you have the "dirty production" (soap, chemicals, etc.). and then, though, you have lyon in the south, which becomes a big industrial center--soap, silk production of france. and you still have merchant capital going into rural areas to look for cheap labor in the form of rural females, of course.

in sum, though not gifted with primary waterways, etc., you still have industrial production of some kind in every part of france.

-----

one of the things that hurts french industry, says prof, is that french capitalists start investing abroad in railroads (in italy, spain, etc.). so you have brits saying that the french will never catch up, because french capital is going abroad, and peasants are hiding their savings under their bed.

-----

what about the role of women?

obviously crucial in france, as elsewhere in industrial revolutions ("extremely important and persistent").

again, the story is more continuities than dramatic change (women had always worked in industrial production--and they still do!). we've exaggerated the separation of work and home, and thus underestimated the role of women in all of this.

if you look at industrial production of these fine garments and handbags, many of them are made by single women working by themselves on the very top floors (working for merchant capitalists)--just as their predecessors had done two centuries before. to be sure, they gradually moved into factory production.

at the same time, what does not change is the women's management of the household--women's role in the household economy is always extraordinarly important.

furthermore, aspects of women's work that is not industrial does not change: in england, in 1850 and 1880, the largest two female occupations are textile operatives and domestics (many women come to cities and place themselves in domestic service, of course--and you see, at this time, attempts to combat infanticide committed by these single women in cities, so there are organized foundling homes. though, through the 1870s, in these homes, 1/3 of all the babies die!) this is also the road to prostitution, tragically.

women are the "last hired" and the "first fired," always.

you see socialists, at this time, very concerned about women's wages and unions, but don't support the right of women to go to vote (because they're perceived as church-going and loyal to the priest). don't get the right until after WWII.

-----

in sum: gradually, then, domestic industry implodes into factories on the edge of french cities, big and small--the organization of production, in this sense, is changing. but what women do, doesn't change, they're still doing textile industry work, but in factories. (so, in this sense: the classic picture of industrialization ends up being right, but more gradually and less uniformly than the modernizers might like us to think. the question, of course, remains: is it ok to think in these generalities, when they're being confirmed to be largely correct?)

-----

child labor, too, is of course critical.

-----

how workers viewed what was happening to them?

three things: (1) and (2) proletarianization is both an objective and subjective concept; (3) how workers viewed their bosses and their factories? 1896-1907 has been called the heroic age of syndicalism/unions/strikes.

in america, "you work hard you'll make it"--obviously that's not the case. similarly, there is social mobility in france, but it was, as always, extremely limited for people born into the working-class. in 1968, one of the big issues that students and professors had was that you could work your ass of and your chances of getting into universities weren't very high (and even if you got through there, you would be unlikely to get a great job). people born into a life of hard work, and you would get those jobs.

the more you read about 1890s, the more you learn about how terrible working-lives were. so there's an objective status of being oppressed.

and the subjective aspect, of course, is "class consciousness" (even as people, of course, have multiple identities). one of the reasons there are so many strikes: has to do with people coming to a sense of being conscious of themselves as a working-class, who view the state and the wealthy as conflicting interests. this really begins in the 1830s, in france (socialism first used in 1834).

it's at this point where artisans begin to see themselves as working-class (even though there's always a tension with the uneducated working-class) -- and they create the strike (even though theyr'e well-dressed, etc.). why? why do artisans start targeting capitalism and the state? (1) because of the french revolution, guild protections are gone--anyone can be any trade you want. the old protections are gone. there's serious competition, artisans are making less and less money. (2) industrialization, mechanized production--undercutting the work of crafstmen, by dumping cheaper goods on the market. some comes with capital and employs these craftsmen to make parts of clothing--integrating them into chains of production, etc. (prof's narrative is weak, alas--not coherent...)

gradually, artisans began to ally themselves with ordinary, unskilled workers.

------

how do workers see this?

the organization was "impressive", the factory's response was "depressing", says prof.

during strikes, what was the image that workers had of their bosses? in 1820s and 1830s, when artisans went on strike, they knew the boss, but were kind of mad at him--"you ought to be the guy you can be". fairly good relations, so he may help them out. a paternalistic relation. in 1850s and 1860s, very different--the vocabulary of the people on strike is transformed. personal characterizations that are much more antagonistic. and in the 1890s and 1900s, it has changed dramatically--something has changed in the way people view their own work ("industrial discipline"). now the boss is often in paris, telling the foremen how to deal with the workers. he has become a symbol of capitalism, backed by the state and its army. he's the symbol of a large-scale, oppressive system. the foreman represents the attempt to impose "industrial discipline"--fine for chattering, fired for doing X, etc., etc. ("the three ages of industrial discipline")

so the attempt to create this kind of perfect workforce helps explain this mobilization and calcification of consciousness/identity.

notes on capital
chapters 26-33: primitive accumulation

(873-874): worth flagging this page, as it outlines the contrast between Marxist and liberal positions on force/conflict within capitalist production.

(874-875): "so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production."

(875): Marx making explicit the normative consequences of the transition toward the "double freedom" of the proletariat: at once free from serfdom and the "fetters of the guilds" ["and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians"], and at the same time "robbed of all of their own means of production." Quite clearly, here, we are speaking of the dialectics and contradictions of historical progress.

(876): The last sentence contains all that is regrettable about Marx's "universalizing" of the British experience--by making Britain the "classic form" of expropriation of rural areas, he, quite unwittingly and against his more explicit instructions, inspired failed attempts to read quite different histories through this classic, universal lens.

(877): Feudalism finished by the fourteenth century--the vast majority of the population as "small peasants."

(878): FN #3, fascinating. reflections on Japan and liberal attitudes toward the Middle Ages, possibly hinting at a contempt for Whiggish interpretations of history's march that ought to dampen the spirits of crude Marxist modernizers.

(879): here Marx, in the manner of this entire book, leaves the question of the state-society interface open to history, without compromising the thrust of his class analysis.

(880): implicit in this is an appraisal of legislation's utility in the face of history's march. and, to be honest, marx is not very generous, especially if we're speaking of big sweeps. what this implies for agency, i think, is less clear, since these are cosmetic laws authored and implemented largely by kings at the behest of tradition. (see also 885). at the same time, it is important to stress that the identity between legislation and ruling class interests is not trivially true, in that--as one sees with the reports on proletariat health after the corn laws--a class can be economically ascendant but politically (and temporarily) relatively impotent. yet of course these are exceptions that can be assimilated into the rule.

(884): the theft of state assets at "ridiculous" prices--where have we heard that before?

(886): "the identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people" -- a not-so-indirect rejoinder to liberal triumphalism.

(887-888): "'Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse.'" it should be clear, then, that we are not speaking of the Marx of the modernizers' imagination. or, at least, he does not share their totalizing fixation with the future, even if they would agree on policy forward. there is room, in other words, for a recognition of place.

(888): again, the non-identity between the "nation" and the "people" -- the bourgeois becomes the torch bearer for the "nation", a move which allows him to speak in the name of the people he dispossesses.

(889): dating enclosures: late 1400s to late 1700s

(892): hinting at the perpetual nature of primitive accumulation, much like harvey's position

(893): an interesting side-note to Marx on nature: here, in this portrayal of expropriation, the small farmer simply forms another part of the natural backdrop. he is dead to the bourgeois' history, precisely he--like all else that is "natural," precedes it. an alternative, very literal embedding of the "social" in the "natural."

(896): important passage, for two reasons: (a) prefigures the problems of the third world, in that the peasantry is being thrown onto a market that cannot properly absorb it (b) prefigures Foucault, in that the peasantry has to be disciplined into accepting an entirely new routine and set of values (cf. the listed punishments for vagabondage)--has to be "modernized." Lumpen activity is theorized in this context, and has to be done so in the contemporary Third World, as well (gangsterism, terrorism, etc.)

(899): "Even at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, the Ordinance of 13 July 1977 provided that every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practising a trade, should be sent to the galleys."

(899-900): here Marx clearly seems to overstate his case, making normal a state of affairs that is highly idealized. against this passage, it is important to re-assert Harvey's reminder that primitive accumulation and the State are always important tools for the ruling class--in that sense, Marx's account is far too kind; the notion that this violence is transitional and particular to a specific epoch needs refutation.

(902): the first minimum wage, where before there were only maximum wages being proposed.

(903): the sordid history of bourgeois positions on trade unions, including the French Revolution's banning of them in 1791! liberty means, as it always has for the bourgeois, the liberty of a particular class. the timelessness of the worker's oppression, then, is here made clear.

(910): Marx's suggestion here, that observers are too ready to see the large-scale capitalist without also appreciating his dependence on a plethora of networks of smaller-scale production, resembles Arrighi's critique of the Euro-centrism of theories of the Big Corporation. We do have to ask what this means for theories of centralization/concentration--and it is not sufficient to say that it "opens them up to history", even if that is true and important.

(910-911): a further important point--expropriation is not simply important to the reconfiguration of structures of production, but it also is critical to reconfiguring consumption. it is only once the workers are divested from the right to produce their own means of subsistence that they become dependent on a market. (to this one can append Marx's Foucaultian moments--they have to be "taught" how to consume).

(915): "the author should have reminded himself that revolutions are not made with laws."

(916): Marx on violence, implicitly: "Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."

(916-917): Marx on the colonies, hardly an apologist for empire.

(918): Marx here makes a critical chronological intervention, in stressing that colonialism (as commercial supremacy) is coeval with manufacture, and that it helps mature industry. In other words, colonialism was critical for industrial predominance. By the late 19th century, this has changed--one can only sustain commercial supremacy if industrial forces are already sufficiently matured. This is important in better understanding the changing nature of colonialism, itself.

(920): Arrighi's narrative is here being prefigured, as Marx recounts the shifting centers of the international credit system. But, I think, there is a clear need to make it more systematic than what is presented here, as Arrighi does.

(920): Capital as "the capitalized blood of children"--unforgiving, and absolutely correct.

(921-922): These passages are key to any comprehensive Marxist theory of the state. Especially if we are going to argue that primitive accumulation is a continuous feature of life in modern capitalism, then the State--as provider of "original" capital--has a continuous, protective role to play (in other words, the bailouts can be represented as a kind of primitive accumulation).

(923): Marx's re-telling of the historical crimes of capitalism makes for important reading. Why do liberals never have to "own up" to these crimes when endorsing this system of production, the way that commies in the case of their own beliefs? There is something to be said here about Walter Benjamin and the stealthy cloaking of past crimes in the narrative of present progress.

(924): "Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade"

(926): "...capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt"

(928): Though my own obsession with the normative implications of Marx's dialectics is important, it is also moot. Because Marx is, of course, not suggesting that we stop (or try to stop) history at any given stage of its advance. It is not a case of deliberating on the principles we find superior, and working to embody them in a world of our making. Rather, history advances quite in spite of our best efforts. We can observe dialectics, amidst all this (and the implications of that attentiveness for the bourgeois historians are important), but we cannot intervene.

(929): Why the proletariat? "...with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production." Might a close-reading of this passage be in order, especially concentrating on those three words, "trained, united, organized."

(929): This is important (and was argued on preceding pages, as well): when Capital mobilizes to argue that it defends the cause of private property, it falls to us to remind the ideologues that this is one kind of private property--or, rather, the private property of one class, in particular. what's more, in the process of primitive accumulation, this system has little problem in obliterating the private property of millions of small producers and peasants. (see also 931)

(932): speaking of the colonial imperative to transform structures of production in the colony, Marx invokes the schematics of uneven development: "In the interest of the so-called wealth of the nation, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people."

(932): absolutely foundational to this entire process is this point that Capital is not simply a wad of cash ready to be deployed, but a wad of cash ready to be deployed in a particular social relation: "property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing the wage-laborer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will... capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.

(938-939): excellent passages against which to develop a history of emigration--again, as always, this speaks of a Marx for whom theory is open to history, even if the framework's contours are established, as well.

The auto workers and their union did not cause the crisis of the auto industry -- after all, they had no control over the corporations' policies. True, the union in its heyday fought for and won higher wages and benefits, gains which between the 1940s and the 1970s spread throughout the economy to other unions and workers, raising living standards for us all. But workers and the UAW did not "price themselves out of the market" or "kill the goose that laid the golden egg" -- no, they challenged employers for a greater share of the profits and won. We all owe auto workers of that era for the living standards that workers achieved in this country. What the union failed to do, however, was develop a broader vision of workers' power. When confronted with other corporations competing in the market by using more modern plants and lower wages, the union had no plan. The UAW, like other unions, failed to build a genuine international labor movement to raise auto workers' wages in other countries. Nor did the union build a political movement in the United States to challenge the power of capital and to restrain competition. Nor did the UAW join with other unions to organize the great majority of unorganized U.S. workers.

why iraqis oppose u.s.-backed oil law:
Iraq has a long labor history. Union activists, banned and jailed under the British and their puppet monarchy, organized a labor movement that was the admiration of the Arab world when Iraq became independent after the revolution of 1958. When Saddam Hussein came to power, though, he drove its leaders underground, killing or imprisoning the ones he could catch.
(...) The al-Maliki government has seized all union funds and turned its back on a wave of assassinations of union leaders. After the June strike, Iraq's oil minister ordered oil industry officials to refuse to recognize or bargain with the oil worker unions. Iraq's oil industry was nationalized in the 1960s, like that of every other country in the Middle East. The Iraqi oil union became, and remains, the industry's most zealous guardian.
(...) The unions have vowed to strike if the law is implemented. At the occupation's end, the government in Baghdad will need control of the oil wealth to rebuild a devastated country. That gives Iraqis a big reason to fight to protect public ownership and control of the oil industry.

choices for black labor:
As we enter the 21st century, Black labor is in disarray. Within the ranks of organized labor, the various institutions that have often spoken on its behalf have ossified. Black caucuses in various unions have stepped back from challenging and pushing the union leaderships and instead have in all too many cases degenerated into social clubs or step-ladders for individuals to get positions in the union structure.
(...) Suffice to say that the economic crisis affecting Black America, a crisis that became very evident in the mid-1970s, cut the ground underneath a major portion of the Black working class. Combined with political attacks on Black America by the Right, we went on the defensive. In organized labor, the declining percentage of workers organized in unions, along with the brutal climate built up during the Ronald Reagan years, worsened the conditions under which struggle could take place.
(...) Yet in my humble opinion what was particularly lost by Black labor leaders was vision. The vision that was articulated beginning in the 1930s with the growth of the National Negro Congress and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and advanced in the 1950s with the National Negro Labor Council and, later, by the A. Philip Randolph-led Negro American Labor Council, and in the 1970s with the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, justifiably emphasized the inclusion of Black workers at all levels of the union movement.
(...) Nationally, the prevailing emphasis, even among many younger activists, is on individual solutions to problems that are mainly collective. Within the Black working class there is a less of a sense that unions are the instruments to deal with the larger problems facing Black America. This does not mean that unions are disregarded, but it does mean that there is little sense that they can or do have an expansive role.
(...) Gaining considerable attention over the last few years has been the growth of anti-immigrant sentiment within Black America, including within the Black working class. The fact that much of this sentiment has been actively fueled by white, right-wing anti-immigrant groups is secondary to the fact that the fear of competition and displacement on the part of the Black working class has made it susceptible to ‘nativist’ arguments. Black labor leadership has, for the most part, failed to engage and rigorously challenge this sentiment with much more than platitudes. As the Black working class faces continued battering, the immigrant—documented and/or undocumented—becomes, for many, the target of convenience for our anger. Rather than understanding the nature of the problem we face as lying within capitalism itself and the search by business for cheaper and more vulnerable workforces, the immigrant becomes the safe and convenient enemy of the moment.
(...) Black labor has historically played an interesting role, something akin to the irritant in the oyster that brings forward a pearl. Whether we organized independent unions when we were refused entry into the American Federation of Labor, or when we and Chicanos became decisive supporters of a new labor movement, as in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s and 1940s, Black labor has little history of passivity. The time has come for Black labor to step back into that role of irritant to the oyster, but with a 21st century frame of reference.
(...) To this should be added that the Black Freedom Movement has nearly always been an essential ally for other efforts to expand democracy and oppose injustice and inequality. This core—the fight for consistent democracy/opposition to injustice and inequality—must remain the guiding principles for Black labor and its challenge to organized labor today. The implications are quite profound in that what is being asked of Black labor—as a contingent of both organized labor and the Black Freedom Movement—is to push for a reconstructed and redefined labor movement that is emphasizing social transformation.
(...) Jobs do not necessarily begin high-wage. They can, however, become high wage through worker organization. This means that organized labor must have a program to organize economically depressed regions—such as our central cities—to transform the jobs. This, again, becomes a community affair.

the thinning of the welfare state:
Some 47 million Americans have no health insurance, and the number grows daily. Health insurance is rapidly becoming unaffordable. Premiums rose an average of 73 percent in just five years (2000-2005.)
(...) Social Security replaces, on average, 41 percent of workers' pre-retirement income. Most experts agree that, to maintain something close to the lifestyle you lived in your working years, you need retirement resources that replace 75 to 90 percent of your wages.
(...) The employer attack on pensions has been highly successful. There were 95,000 such plans in 1980; it was down to 85,000 in 1993, and fell to less than 27,000 in 2005. Today only 21 percent of the workforce is covered by defined benefit pensions-the most secure type of employment-based retirement plan.

harvard needs a living wage, testimony two:
I clean 8am to 4pm at MIT and then 6pm to 10pm at Harvard. I've been cleaning at Harvard about 5 years now. I came to Cambridge from Barbados in '83, and ever since I first come here, I was always working two full0time jobs. 80 hours a week. I always do cleaning. always liked cleaning. The thing lots of work places try to do now is they try to get away from paying a lot of full-time workers. They see if they can cut the staff in half and get the same quantity of work done. and then they want part-tie people, because then they don't have to pay the benefits. That's just like what Harvard do.
I leave my house at about 6:30 in the morning every weekday. and I don't get back until 10:30 at night, so that's a lot of time from home. Sometimes it's not enough sleep. Depends on how the body feels. In the morning, your body wants to sleep but your mind tells you, you got to go, you got to go. I have three kids - 4, 9, and 21. On the weekends, I do spend a lot of time with my kids. I try not ot give to myself, to improve my kids.
Harvard is great as far as school is concerned, but in our department, it's not great for working. We work for a company - Harvard is a company. Sometimes a name fools a lot of people. When you say Harvard or MIT, you have a great name, but when you see the environment and you seewhat's going on, you're not happy just to have a good name. When people hear you're working at Harvard, they think you get a ot of money because it's a big college. But as far as I'm concerned, the working environment is bad. Right now, one guy's out sick, nearly seven weeks and he didn't get a paycheck yet. Every day they tell him, it's in the mail. How long will it take a paycheck to go from one part of Cambridge to another? You have to work with the worker to make him happy in the environment he's working.
You have people who don't want to talk because they scared to lose their job, or scared the supervisor is going to put more work on them. And you get treated sometimes different depending on where you come from. The boss is no going to say, because you from Haiti, I don't like you. I give you more work, but his actions speak louder than words. The money here in Cambridge is better than in Barbados, but I didn't really come here from the money. I come here because my family lives in this country. My grandfather lived in this country from the time he was a boy, so he sent for my mother and she brought me here. I used to live in Cambridge with my grandfather, but now I live in Malden.
It's bettter at MIT, because MIT is a better environment than Harvard. Sometimes my supervisor here talks to me, live we were talking about how to clean this desk, and I tell him so and so and he said, If you don't like it, you can go home, meaning to quit. He just talk down to me, so sometimes I get so mad. MIT pays better than Harvard. Other placdes for part-time pay more money than Harvard. Harvard needs to pay a little bit more money, because they want the work done nice and clean. No specks. As I say, I don't mind that, but pay me something to do that.
I haven't gotten a good raise since I've been at Harvard. I still don't get $10/hour. They freeze our raises for three years. You never get enough money, but you try to live with that, and you try to make ends meet. I put my money togethter with my wife to pay the bills. But other guys whose wives don't work or who don't make a good salary at their other job, I know they have a hard time. Sometimes they don't have money to buy groceries. I know one individual that works here - sometimes he can't buy any meat because he's back on his rent. But we try to strive to be thankful. We can't do no more.
-- Neil, Law School Janitor

harvard needs a living wage, testimony one:
I work at Harvard from 7:00 'til 4:00. Then I go to the Supermarket - that's my second job, bagging groceries. I do that 'til 10:30pm. I'm home by 11:30pm. In bed by midnight. Yeah, I'm tired physically, and I;m tired up here, in the head. I'm at the point where things start to bug me that normally don't. Sometimes I just need to back off and cool down a little bit before it's too much. I don't need to be a 50k man. All I'm talking about is a living. Basic stuff - a roof over my head, a meal. Right now, I've got that, but only because I'm at the supermarket 'til 10:20 each night... Of course, sometimes you have a day that's not too bad. But boy, I'll tell you, there are a lot of days when you're walking around in a fog. You're just pooped out. You just can't think on it too much. You just go. You run like hell... See, managers always try to cut expenses, and they see wages as expenses. They're trained that way. They get trapped in that mindset, and they forget that it's people they're talking about. It's a person, a guy, trying to live on that.
--Lewis, Harvard Custodian

memorial day massacre in chicago:
"In several instances from two to four policemen are seen beating one man. One strikes him horizontally across the face, using his club as he would a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on top of his head and still another is whipping him across the back."

trade unionism in iraq:
Iraq’s largest oil workers’ trade union will strike tomorrow, in protest at the controversial oil law currently being considered by the Iraqi parliament. The move threatens to stop all oil exports from Iraq.
(...) The Union, representing 26,000 oil workers, has held three previous
strikes since 2003, each time stopping exports, for up to two days at a
time. The announcement of the strike has spurred negotiations with the
Ministry of Oil, which are ongoing.
(...) Federation President Hassan Jumaa Awad al Assadi said: ‘The oil law does
not represent the aspirations of the Iraqi people. It will let the
foreign oil companies into the oil sector and enact privatisation under
so called production sharing agreements. The federation calls for not
passing the oil law, because it does not serve the interests of the
Iraqi people.”
(...) The Union is not alone in its’ condemnation of the current oil law.
Opponents of the law also include all of Iraq’s other trade unions, a
number of political parties, and a group of over 60 senior Iraqi oil
experts.
(...) Hassan Jumaa went on to say: “The federation calls on all unions in the
world to support our demands and to put pressure on governments and the
oil companies not to enter the Iraqi oil fields.”

oil and america:
One could date it back to 1980 when President Jimmy Carter -- before his Habitat for Humanity days -- declared that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to American national interests. So vital was it, he announced, that the U.S. would use "any means necessary, including military force" to sustain access to it"
(...) Or we could date it all the way back to World War II, when British officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination," and U.S. officials seconded the thought, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
(...) We know, for example, that, before and after he ascended to the Vice-Presidency, Dick Cheney has had his eye squarely on the prize. In 1999, for example, he told the Institute of Petroleum Engineers that, when it came to satisfying the exploding demand for oil, "the Middle East, with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." The mysterious Energy Task Force he headed on taking office in 2001 eschewed conservation or developing alternative sources as the main response to any impending energy crisis, preferring instead to make the Middle East "a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy." As part of this focus, the Task Force recommended that the administration put its energy, so to speak, into convincing Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment" -- in other words, into a policy of reversing 25 years of state control over the petroleum industry in the region.
(...) In 2002, just a year after Cheney's Task Force completed its work, and before the U.S. had officially decided to invade Iraq, the State Department "established a working group on oil and energy," as part of its "Future of Iraq" project. It brought together influential Iraqi exiles, U.S. government officials, and international consultants. Later, several Iraqi members of the group became part of the Iraqi government. The result of the project's work was a "draft framework for Iraq's oil policy" that would form the foundation for the energy policy now being considered by the Iraqi Parliament.
(...) Indeed, Iraq could someday become the most important source of petrochemical energy on the planet. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iraq possesses 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, third largest in the world (after Saudi Arabia and Iran). About two-thirds of its known oil reserves are located in Shia southern Iraq, and the final third in Kurdish northern Iraq. However, in energy terms, only about 10% of the country has actually been explored and there is good reason to believe that modern methods -- which have not been applied since the beginning of the Iraq-Iran War in 1980 -- might well uncover magnitudes more oil. Estimates of the possible new finds offered by officials of various interested governments range from 45 billion to 214 billion additional barrels, depending on the source; but some non-governmental experts see the final treasure exceeding 400 billion barrels. If the latter figure is correct, then Iraq would likely become the world's largest source of oil.
(...) Moreover, both its current fields and many of the potential new discoveries would be extremely cheap to access, if security weren't such a problem today in Iraq. James Paul of the international policy monitoring group, the Global Policy Forum, offers this positive view: "According to Oil and Gas Journal, Western oil companies estimate that they can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1.... This is similar to production costs in Saudi Arabia and lower than virtually any other country."
(...) Knowledge of this level of underproduction was certainly one factor in Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's pre-war prediction that the administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq would pay for itself; he hoped for a quick postwar increase in production to 3.5 million barrels per day or, at the $30 per barrel price of oil at that time, close to $40 billion per year in revenues. An expected expansion in production levels (once the oil giants were brought into the mix) to perhaps 6.5 million barrels, through the development of new oil fields or more efficient exploitation of existing fields, had the potential to more than cover the expected American short-term military costs and leave the new Iraqi government flush as well.
(...) Paul Bremer, the new head of the American occupation, promulgated a series of laws designed, among other things, to kick-start the development of Iraqi oil. In addition to attempting to transfer management of existing oil facilities (well heads, refineries, pipelines, and shipping) to multinational corporations, he also set about creating an oil-policy framework, unique in the region, that would allow the major companies to develop the country's proven reserves and even to begin drilling new wells.
(...) [resistance to these plans] All these plans were, however, quickly frustrated, both by the growing Sunni insurgency and by civil resistance. Iraq's oil workers quickly unionized -- even though Bremer extended Saddam's prohibition on unions in state-owned companies -- and effectively resisted the transfer of management duties to foreign companies. In one noteworthy moment, the oil workers actually refused to take orders from Bechtel officials in the oil hub of Basra, thus preserving their own jobs as well as the right of the Iraqi state-owned Southern Oil Company to continue to control the operation in that region. Bechtel's management contract was subsequently voided. At the same time, the growing insurgency, acting on a general Iraqi understanding that a major goal of the occupation was to "steal" Iraqi oil, systematically began to attack the oil pipelines that traveled through the Sunni areas of the country. Within a few months, all oil exports in the northern part of Iraq were interrupted -- and the northern export pipelines have remained generally unusable ever since.
(...) To resistance of various sorts must be added the "contribution" of the major American corporations involved in "reconstructing" Iraq, notably Halliburton and Bechtel. These crony corporations, with close ties to the Bush administration, accepted huge fees to rehabilitate dilapidated or damaged oil facilities. Almost without fail, they chose not to repair existing plants locally or to employ the raft of skilled Iraqi technicians who had used remarkable ingenuity in maintaining these facilities during a dozen years of UN sanctions. Working under cost-plus agreements that guaranteed a fixed profit rate no matter how much an operation ultimately cost, they preferred instead to install expensive new proprietary equipment. Then, in the absence of any outside oversight, they ran up huge expenses and frequently failed to complete their contracts, leaving the oil facilities they were servicing in states of disrepair or partial repair -- and equipped with technology that local technicians could not service.
(...) hen technical sovereignty was finally handed over to an appointed Iraqi government headed by the CIA's favorite Iraqi exile, Iyad Allawi, in June 2004, the new premier embraced Bremer's policy, but to no avail. The international oil companies were no more impressed with his future than they had been with Bremer's. Like Wolfowitz, they knew that Iraq "floats on a sea of oil"; unlike him, they were no dreamers. They weren't willing to risk their capital in the dangerous and legally ambiguous circumstances then prevailing. As a result, the first two years of Bush administration efforts to "access" Iraqi oil failed -- and dismally so at that. Average production never exceeded the bottom-of-the-barrel 2.5 million barrels Saddam's regime managed to extract on its worst days. By 2006, production had slipped below 2 million barrels per day.
(...) The State Department planners had concluded that Production Sharing Agreements -- a method that granted multinational oil companies effective control of oil fields without transferring permanent ownership to them -- would be the basic instrument through which a future "independent" Iraq would develop new oil fields. Wary by now of being seen as the chief advocate of this policy, which it so desperately wanted in place, the Bush administration concocted a strategy that would enlist the international community in pressuring Iraq to adopt its program. This was done by making the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a key player in Iraqi oil policy. Through loans in the 1980s and reparations imposed for his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam had accumulated $120 billion in external debt, the largest per capita debt in the world and a potentially insurmountable obstacle to economic recovery, even in oil-rich Iraq. One option available to the new government was to declare this debt "odious," a technical term in international law referring to debt accumulated by authoritarian rulers for their own personal or political aggrandizement.
(...) Saddam's expansionist war against Iran, his use of public funds to build ostentatious monuments and palaces, his transfer of billions to his personal accounts, and his failure to maintain the infrastructure of the country all were excellent evidence that the debt was indeed odious; and the U.S. claimed as much for almost $40 billion of it, held by 19 industrialized countries known as the Paris Club. Instead of seeking to cancel this debt (and the remaining $80 billion) entirely, however, the Bush administration sent James Baker, former Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush, to the Paris Club to negotiate conditional forgiveness. The resulting agreement immediately forgave $12 billion, but left $28 billion on the books. A second $12 billion would be abrogated when the Iraqi government signed onto "a standard International Monetary Fund program," and a further $8 billion three years later, after the IMF confirmed Iraqi compliance. Even if "successful," almost $8 billion would still be outstanding to the Paris Club -- together with $80 billion not covered by the agreement.
(...) The "standard International Monetary Fund program," not surprisingly, included the now familiar American policies regarding Iraqi oil, as well as the use of Profit Sharing Agreements and a host of other provisions that would open the Iraqi economy as a whole, and the oil sector in particular, to investment by multinational corporations. Among the most punitive of the provisions was a demand for an end to the economic breadbasket that guaranteed all Iraqi families low prices for fuel and food staples. In a country with, by 2005, somewhere between 30% and 70% unemployment, average wage levels under $100 per month, and escalating inflation, these Saddam-era subsidies meant the difference between basic subsistence and disaster for a large proportion of Iraqis.
(...) Zaid Al-Ali, an international lawyer working on development issues in Iraq, described the agreement as a "perfect illustration of how the industrialized world has used debt as a tool to force developing nations to surrender sovereignty over their economies."
(...) The newly elected Iraqi National Assembly promptly denounced this agreement as "a new crime committed by the creditors who financed Saddam's oppression." This forceful expression reflected the opinions of the Assembly's constituents. After all, 76% of Iraqis believed that the main reason for the Bush administration's invasion was "to control Iraqi oil."
(...) The U.S. then began pressuring the Iraqi government to draft a definitive petrochemical law that would conform to the IMF guidelines. Given the levels of resistance to the very idea, this work was conducted in secret and took until the end of 2006 to complete. As independent journalist Joshua Holland described the process: "Just months after the Iraqis elected their first constitutional government, USAID sent a BearingPoint adviser to provide the Iraqi Oil Ministry 'legal and regulatory advice in drafting the framework of petroleum and other energy-related legislation, including foreign investment'.... The Iraqi Parliament had not yet seen a draft of the oil law as of July [2006], but by that time... it had already been reviewed and commented on by U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, who also 'arranged for Dr. Al-Shahristani to meet with nine major oil companies -- including Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips -- for them to comment on the draft.'"
(...) When the "Draft Hydrocarbon Law" was finally delivered to the Iraqi Parliament on February 18, 2007, key provisions had already been leaked and immediately denounced by the full spectrum of the Iraqi opposition. Taking turns registering dismay were the majority of the Parliament, a wide range of government officials, the leadership of major Sunni political parties, the union of oil workers, the Sadrists -- the most powerful Shia grouping -- and the visible leadership of the insurgency. All this led to many changes in the law, including the removal of all mention of either privatization or Production Sharing Contracts, which would have given multinational oil companies 15-25 years of basically unregulated operational control over Iraqi oil facilities. The amended version in no way excluded the use of PSAs, but it removed the explosive designation from the actual wording of the law.
(...) [PSA´s]Production sharing agreements are generally applied in circumstances where there is a strong possibility that oil exploration will be extremely costly or even fail, and/or where extraction is likely to prove prohibitively expensive. To offset huge and risky investments, the contracting company is guaranteed a proportion of the profits, if and when oil is extracted and sold. In the most common of these agreements, the proportion remains very high until all development costs are amortized, allowing the investing company to recoup its investment expenditures (if oil is found), and then to be rewarded with a larger-than-normal profit margin for the remainder of the contract which, in the Iraqi case, could extend for up to 25 years. None of these conditions apply in Iraq: huge reservoirs of easily accessible oil are already proven to exist, with more equally accessible fields likely to be discovered with little expense. This is why none of Iraq's neighbors utilize PSAs. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates all pay the multinationals a fixed rate to explore and develop their fields; and all of the profits become state revenues.
(...)The advocates of PSAs in Iraq justify their use by arguing that $20 billion would be needed to develop the Iraqi fields fully and that favorable PSAs are the only way to attract such heavy doses of finance capital under the current highly dangerous circumstances. This assertion seems, however, to be little more than a smokescreen. No major oil companies are willing to invest in Iraq now, no matter how sweet the deal. If order is restored, on the other hand, Iraq would have no trouble attracting vast amounts of finance capital to develop reserves that could well be worth in excess of $10 trillion and hence would have no need whatsoever for PSAs.
(...) Based on leaked information, journalists reported that the PSAs envisioned by the Iraqi petrochemical law contained extremely favorable provisions for the oil companies, in which they would be entitled to 70% of profits until development expenses were amortized and 20% afterwards. This would have guaranteed them at least twice the typical profit margin over the long run and many times that figure during the initial years.
(...) There are other elements in the law (and the possible PSA contracts) that have also roused resistance inside Iraq. Among the most controversial:
· Insofar as PSAs or their legal equivalent were enacted, Iraq would lose control over what levels of oil the country produced with the potential to substantially weaken the grip of OPEC on the oil market.
· The law would allow the oil companies to fully repatriate all profits from oil sales, almost insuring that the proceeds would not be reinvested in the Iraqi economy.
· The Iraqi government would not have control over oil company operations inside Iraq. Any disputes would be referred instead to pro-industry international arbitration panels.
· Contacting companies would not be obliged to hire Iraqi workers, and could pursue the current policy of employing American technicians and South Asian manual laborers.
· No contracts would be public documents.
(...) Several African countries with vast mineral riches have been subjected to these sorts of conditions, with large multinational companies extracting both minerals and profits while returning only a tiny fraction of the proceeds to the local population. As the resources are taken out of the ground and the country, the local population actually becomes poorer, while the potential for future prosperity is drained.
(...) [prospects for resistance]The Parliament itself may be the first line of defense. It challenged the original IMF agreement and has refused to consider the bill for two months, already missing a March deadline for passage that American politicians of both parties had pronounced an important "benchmark" by which to judge the viability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.
(...) Rafiq Latta, a London-based oil analyst, told Nation reporter Christian Parenti, "The whole culture of the ministry opposes [the law].... Those guys ran the industry very well all through the years of sanctions. It was an impressive job, and they take pride in 'their' oil."
(...) Perhaps most formidable of all is the Federation of Oil Unions, with 26,000 members and allies throughout organized labor. The oil workers overturned contracts in 2003 and 2004 that would have placed substantial oil facilities under multinational corporate control; and they initiated a vigorous campaign against the U.S. sponsored oil program as early as June 2005 -- calling a conference to oppose privatization attended by "workers, academics, and international civil-society groups." In January 2006, they convened a convention composed of all major Iraqi union groups in Amman, Jordan, which issued a manifesto opposing the entire neo-liberal U.S. program for Iraq, including any compromise on national control of oil production.
(...) Iraq's trade unions, speaking in a single voice, declared that: "Iraqi public opinion strongly opposes the handing of authority and control over the oil to foreign companies, that aim to make big profits at the expense of the people. They aim to rob Iraq's national wealth by virtue of unfair, long term oil contracts that undermine the sovereignty of the State and the dignity of the Iraqi people."
(...) He [union leader] then called on the government to consult Iraqi oil experts (who had not participated in drafting the law) and "ask their opinion before sinking Iraq into an ocean of dark injustice."
(...) Finally -- and no small matter -- the armed resistance is also against the oil law. The Sunni insurgency underscored its opposition by assassinating Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a major advocate of the pending law, on the day the bill was made public. The significance of the opposition of the Sunni insurgency is amplified by the stance of the Sadrists, the most rebellious segment of the Shia majority. Sadr spokesman Sheikh Gahaith Al Temimi warned journalist Christian Parenti that while the Sadrists would "welcome" foreign investment in oil, they would do so only "under certain conditions. We want our oil to be developed, not stolen. If a bad law were to be passed, all people of Iraq would resist it."
(...) Active opposition by the Parliament alone, or by the unions alone, or by the Sunni insurgency alone, or by the Sadrists alone might be sufficient to defeat or disable the law. The possibility that such disparate groups might find unity around this issue, mobilizing both the government bureaucracy and overwhelming public opinion to their cause, holds a much greater threat: the possibility of creating a unified force that might push beyond the oil law to a more general opposition to the American occupation.
(...) he likelihood that any future Iraqi government which takes on a nationalist mantel will consider such an agreement in any way binding is nil. One day in perhaps the not so distant future, that "law," even if briefly the law of the land, is likely to find itself in the dustbin of history, along with Saddam's various oil deals. As a result, the Bush administration's "capture of new and existing oil and gas fields" is likely to end as a predictable fiasco.