Editorial

Last Issue - Looking back in anger

This will be the last issue of the actual prol-posi­tion newsletter, but we will keep putting new stuff on the website. The decision to stop publish­ing is mostly out of logistic reasons, but also some sense of the limitations of the project itself (more below).

We continue working on other projects, for exam­ple with Wildcat (www.wildcat-www.de), with gongchao (www.gongchao.org), which is reporting especially on the situation in China, and the newsletter about the developments in the city of Gurgaon, Northern India (http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com).

Since we published the first issue or prol-posi­tion news in March 2005 the world-wide transfor­mation of the conditions of exploitation contin­ued, factories and call centers kept on moving around the globe, workers followed them or went ahead, markets boomed and slumped, laws were made and broken, assembly-lines and offices got re-shuffled and re-connected to the world wide web of transport and divided labor. The newslet­ters reflected these changes, ranging from reports about working-conditions in modern Western-Eu­ropean assembly plants or middle-class homes, migration experiences of Polish work gangs and Spanish olive pickers, occupations of houses, fac­tories or university departments, proletarian self-management in Argentina, workfare in Israel or riots in China. Writing or translating these reports we tried to go beyond eclecticism, we tried to cap­ture the relation between these material changes of exploitation and workers' unrest, we tried to highlight the potential of a real proletarian inter­nationalism based on the international character of social production.

The reports remained isolated glimpses of reali­ty, anything which would go beyond that – an ac­tual research and practical intervention – would require more collective efforts. The newsletter did not end up being the spark for an organized and coherent collective debate, although we love all the correspondence we have got, and all the feedback, and playing our role in providing some empirical reports which we hope have been useful.

The newsletter did not manage to organize a collective debate, in that way its short-comings mirror the current condition of the radical left: an "autonomous" political movement which operates self-organized within a social vacuum. Without any real roots in proletarian reality, which inevitably leaves us as observers and critics, rather than part of the mix. The age-old problem of the political ghetto that we all bemoan, but rarely act on.

Some of the common pitfalls are: some remi­nisces of 1970s work-place based groups, which barricaded themselves on their shop-floor or with­in their sector-boundaries; a party- and syndicalist left which relates to workers' reality mainly through their organizational requirements or cam­paigns; last, but not least, the better wing of academia, which manages to come up with in­sightful analysis of certain sections or develop­ments of class relations, but which remain on an individual and "scientific" level.

We feel that in this situation better "networking" won't do the job. We rather think that an actual re-composition of the radical left is required. It will mainly depend on the next cycle of class up­heavals to materially re-organize and politically re-orientate the radical left, our collectivity – this cycle is in the making, simmering under the sur­face of international crisis and sped-up re-struc­turing.

Never mind - Looking forward in anger

The challenge will be to relate the political "world view" on capitalist development, e.g. analytical works like "Forces of Labor" (Beverly Silver) back to the nitty-gritty proletarian reality and our col­lective intervention in it. The challenge is not tak­ing place in our head-space, but in front of our eyes: industrial conditions in China or South-East Asia enter workers' reality in the global North, not merely on the level of media-hype threatening with low wages or promising cheap consumer goods, but on a practical level, e.g. through migra­tion or cooperation within the production process, like the reports on Romania and Eastern Germany in this newsletter demonstrate. The international crisis is rooted in the industrial profit-squeeze and will return to it, affecting millions of workers at the same time and across borders.

We can do our share to help demonstrate that we are not only victims of lay-offs or personal bankruptcy, but a global class of producers feed­ing the frenzy. We are looking forward to more trouble, we will keep on translating reports about it, and we will publish these reports as single arti­cles on the prol-position website.

Stay tuned - Love and Rage

Some Prols - October 2008

This edition's articles

Right after this editorial we document some preliminary thoughts on the current crisis: Stop looking into the headlights. Right after that you will find three articles translated from the China-supple­ment of wildcat #80 (winter 2007/8). The first arti­cle, Faces of migration, deals with the formation of a new working class in China, the migrant workers, who leave the countryside to find work in the cities and by now stage strikes in factories, construction sites etc. The second one, The Genera­tion of Unhappy Workers, concerns the old working class, the urban state workers, who where attacked by the economic restructuring during the reforms. Many of them were laid-off and fought back. The third article, Female Work­ers under Maoist Patriarchy, is about the urban women workers born in the 1950s and 1960s in China. Following a book based on interviews with this generation of women workers it describes how under Maoism there was a particular form of patriarchal repression and exploitation.¹

The second part of the newsletter is all about struggles in Romania. It is the result of an ongoing research project into the social changes and con­flicts there. More Noise, Self-Respect and Daring is a report from the picket-line during the strike at the Dacia-Renault plant in Pitesti, Romania, in March 2008. It was "the most significant struggle in the Romanian private sector since 1989". Eu­rope's Eastern Gateway Blocked is another report from a picket-line, this time from the port of Con­stanta, where the workers of a container terminal fought for a wage-increase.

The following two articles describe the fate of Asian migrant workers in Romania. With young Romanian workers moving to the West to find better incomes, there is a labor shortage in most parts of Romania. The textile industry is hit hard because the wages are even lower than in other industries in Romania. Without local skilled workers some bosses started experimeting with getting migrant labor from Asia. "We have to work like horses!" is an account of the experience of about 100 female textile workers from the Philippines in Sibiu, Romania. Hired in Manila they discovered that their employer, the Romani­an company Mondostar, did not pay them the promised wage and overtime bonus, so they staged an overtime boycott. Factory or Prison fol­lows the experience of 500 male textile workers from Bangladesh, working for the Italian company Wear in Bacau, Romania. Again the company did not pay the promised wages, locked up the workers so they could not escape, and did not give them enough food.²

A workplace report from a machine plant in Brandenburg, Germany, entitled Bad vibrations, and an interview and critique on an experience with an organizing-campaign of precarious ser­vice workers, "New Labor – New Unions", rounds up this edition.³