prol-position news #5 | 2/2006

Editorial

Capitalist exploitation constantly changes, driven by the unrest of the exploited. Capital tries to thrive off their search for a better life by channeling it into controlled labor migration or new job schemes. It wants to re-assemble and re-divide proletarians on the open labor market as well as its hidden undersides by encircling proletarian strong-holds in industry with mass-unemployment and international supply-chains. Capital undermines workers' inflexibility with new technologies. More...

The Heart of the Beast - An Unknown Entity. Worker's Power and the Future of Operaism

Today, talking about the future of Operaism for many people means to start with Hardt and Negri's "Multitude" or John Holloway's fetish-critique. In comparison Beverly Silver's historical analysis of the tendencies of worker's power seem politically colorless and sociological.1 No doubt, "Forces of Labor" is an academic book, not a political manifesto, and it avoids all revolutionary vocabulary. But in all its understatement, "Forces of Labor" contains sharper theoretical tools to grasp capitalism theoretically and practically than what the rather philosophically oriented renewal of Marxism offers us. More...

Gender, Migration and Domestic labor

There are huge armies of people, mostly women, doing low paid domestic work in foreign countries. They are the ones that look after the old people, cook the food and clean the homes and offices in those cities where capital is concentrated and professionals are working longer hours on the back of this work. These immigrant workers send huge amounts of money back home, sometimes making up the largest source of foreign currency for the sending countries. But they also leave behind broken families and a 'care deficit'. More...

China in Revolt. Social Struggles in the Chinese Modernization Process

One of the most serious problems in China is still the peasant question. In just about 20 years rapid urbanization has reduced the agrarian population by 20 percent, but 60 percent of Chinese still live on the country-side. In other words: Nearly one third of the world's villagers are Chinese! The peasants though are less and less able to make a living in agriculture. That is why nearly all young women and men from outlying provinces migrate to cities to work and just return home for the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year. The British historian Hobsbawn called the proletarianization of millions and millions of Chinese peasants in just a decade the greatest transformation of class relations since the New Stone Age. The number of migrant workers is estimated between 100 to 200 million. More...

Workers' struggle at Gate Gourmet is getting harder

The supporters gathered at 7 am, not at 1 pm as it was announced, at the strikers' tent to express their solidarity to the strikers. They did it practically through blocking the exits. In this way they stopped the catering deliveries to the airplanes, which where already waiting at the maneuvering area, for about two hours.1 Especially explosive on this morning was the airplanes were going to go on long-distance flights. Short-distance flights can leave without food, but it is not possible to let airplanes leave without catering to South Africa or the Caribbean. Later, you could see the success of the blockade at the schedules at the terminals. More...

Wild Ride - A Different Perspective on the Car Industry

From the working class viewpoint, the post-1989 transformation was so fundamental that it can be compared only with the industrialization of the second half of the 19th century or with the building of postwar Stalinism. The working class is changing profoundly, at least in its technical composition. We will not be able to identify any link between the technical and the political composition until some struggles arise and reveal such a link. More...

Struggles of Asian Workers in the Middle East and Oil-Producing Countries

In the last months there have been various struggles of Asian workers in the oil-producing countries, mainly in the construction sector. The construction and the domestic sector (see other article in this newsletter) are two of the main sectors of global proletarian migration, also due to the very nature of their product, which can not be re-located to the so-called low wage countries. The fact that workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka struck together during some of the conflicts shows their importance for a new class composition. Their struggles already had a noticeable impact on the labour relations in several countries of the Middle East, Arab Gulf and other oil-producing regions. More...

Wired - Temp-Work in the Rail-Industry, Germany

The work-force is international, only about the half of the workers were born in Germany. There are many Polish workers employed, most of them already for a long time and with permanent contracts. Most of these Polish workers are aged 45 and older, most of them arrived in Germany the early 1990s. Many of them worked in the Polish heavy industries and ship yards, some of them can tell stories from 1980/81, about the Lenin Shipyard in Danzig and its rock-bands, about Solidarnosc-banners being attached to chimneys after the concerts. Other people come from China, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, Romania, Russia, Ukraine. More...

"Now they call us heroes everywhere!" (Interview with a worker)

"During the struggle the quality of the washing machines we made was very high, it hasn’t been that high in a long time! The number of staff out sick was never that low; maybe it was because everybody was curious. And there wasn't any sabotage or anything like that. After it was clear the plant wasn't shutting, the number of blue-collar workers calling in sick rose to 17-18 percent and that’s where it remains. Temp workers had to be hired again. And they can’t motivate people anymore. The workers say: fuck it, sooner or later they're going to close down anyway." More...

The recent violence in the French suburbs is difficult to integrate into the general class combat

The events which followed the accidental death of two young people in Clichy-sous-Bois1 must not be underestimated. They have imposed themselves on both the dominant classes and on the proletariat as one of the principle subjects of discussion right now within each of their respective camps. That is why we must formalise some of our reflections on these facts2, all the more so today when the unrest is extinguished and the government seems satisfied. More...

France: What did happen after the riots?

Two months after the end of the "riots", one has the impression that nothing occurred in France. 80 percent of French people are convinced that the government has not taken any concrete measures to deal with the problems which caused the riots, and will not do it in the near future. And one can also add that the traditional Left and the radical Left seem to have already forgotten what happened, bemused as they are by 2007 presidential elections. More...