Review of Beverly Silver's "Forces of Labor"
Review by Martin Thomas of Beverly J Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870, Cambridge University Press.
Beverly Silver's Forces of Labor squarely addresses a question central to real socialist politics today, yet not tackled systematically in any other extended study to date: what are the long-term trends of working-class combativity, what are the reasons for the worldwide dip in struggle since the 1980s, and where should we look for revival?
Official strike statistics exist continuously over a long period for only one country in the world (the UK), and anyway their counting is often seriously incomplete and inconsistent between countries. To get substantial long-term statistics, therefore, Silver and her co-researchers turned to the major newspapers of the hegemonic powers.
They tabulated every mention of labour unrest in the London Times and the New York Times between 1870 and 1996, discounting London Times reports on British disputes and New York Times reports on US disputes. By counting "mentions" rather than disputes, they gave greater weighting to bigger or longer struggles. They tested their findings against official strike statistics where they exist, and found that the newspaper count gave a workable measure.
The broad long-term trend is for a slow increase in labour unrest. However, three anomalies stand out.
The first, unsurprisingly, is that labour unrest dipped sharply during the two world wars, and then rose to all-time highs after them.
The second, oddly, is that Silver's figures show no peak at all around the late 1960s and the early 1970s. That period appears as one of fairly high but slowly declining militancy.
This is a puzzle. Silver's comment seems inadequate. "If we disaggregate the date by country, there are indeed waves [i.e. peaks] where and when we would expect them, e.g. France in 1968, Italy in 1969-70. The fact that it does not show up in the aggregate time series is probably due to several factors. First, the explosions were not simultaneous in all European countries, thus, they tend to average each other out in the aggregate time series.
"Second, the wave, while intense, was relatively short-lived. Thirdly, much of the social unrest of the period... was not classifiable as labour unrest".
The third anomaly is a sharp downturn in struggle, in metropolitan countries from the early 1980s, in ex-colonial countries from the end of the 1980s.
In 2005, we know that downturn has continued and worsened since 1996, the end of Silver's database. Developments which around 1996 plausibly seemed to point to a general revival - the French strikes of 1995, the South Korean strikes of 1996, the shifts in the US trade union movement around that time, Seattle in 1998 - have not done so.
Working-class struggle has far from vanished, but the current dip in the graph is without precedent except for a smaller dip in the 1890s - or, perhaps, outside Silver's time frame, the long slump in British working-class activity between the defeat of the Chartists in 1848 and the rise of New Unionism in 1888-9.
Silver starts her book by refuting the idea that geographical restructuring can abolish working-class struggle. A chapter on the car industry shows that industry bosses have been "relocating" from the start - Detroit was chosen as a site because it was an "open shop" city - but their "relocations" have consistently been followed by a "relocation" of working-class struggle.
"The epicentre of auto worker militancy [shifts] from North America in the 1930s and 1940s to northwestern (and then southern) Europe in the 1960s and 1970s and to a group of rapidly industrialising [ex-colonial] countries in the 1980s and 1990s".
Silver plausibly predicts new surges of worker militancy in China in the coming years. But if that were the whole story, then the global trend of workers' struggles would be unambiguously upwards, with at most short setbacks, as industries and thus strong working-class concentrations spread across the world.
Silver introduces three main ideas to explain why the actual pattern is more complicated.
First, she argues that in the later stages of the "product cycle" - the evolution of an industry from cutting-edge, high-tech sector concentrated in a few richer countries to global routine staple - workers' position tends to be weaker because the bosses have less windfall pioneers' profit from which to make concessions, and competition is sharper.
Second, she invokes several other "fixes" with which bosses can respond to worker militancy other than the "spatial fix" (moving to another country or region). The critical one, for her, is the "financial fix", i.e. capital moving out of production altogether and into financial manipulations.
Third, she distinguishes between two distinct types of worker struggle: "Marx-type", driven by workers feeling strong, and "Polyani-type", driven by workers feeling weak and threatened by market pressures. In the course of the book, she tacitly drifts towards seeing the "Polyani type" as primary, so that "world labour unrest in the 20th century has been embedded in a pendulum swing between crises of profitability [in which established capitalist concessions to workers prove too expensive] and crises of social legitimacy [in which capitalist measures to recover profits provoke "Polyani-type" struggles]".
To my mind, none of these three arguments holds together. Whatever the reason for US carmakers, for example, giving concessions to US car workers in the 1930s, it was not that they were making big windfall profits. The car industry was already decades old, highly competitive, and facing a slump. Contrariwise, the relative gains won by Korean car workers in the 1980s were not smaller than those won by US carworkers in the 1930s.
The "financial fix"? Capitalists cannot live just by lending money to each other, any more than they can live just by taking each other out to lunch. And who says that finance workers can't strike?
The "pendulum" theory would imply either that today we should have a big rise of "Polyani-type" struggles (in response to sharp market pressures), or that the bosses should be easing off (because, in many countries, profits are well up on what they were in the 1970s and early 1980s). Neither has happened.
Silver's approach is skewed by her theoretical framework. She is avowedly "Third-Worldist", emphasising "Third World" versus "First World" as a struggle as or more important for progress than workers versus capital.
Taking a cue from Italian operaista theory, she tends to present all capital's moves ("fixes") as defensive reflex responses to worker militancy. Simultaneously and incongruously, following a different cue from French regulationist theory, she presents workers' struggles as iron-cased by successive capitalist "regimes", shaped by the functional needs of capital. For her 1945-70s was a period of a global "labour-friendly" regime ("social compact" or "developmentalist") in which workers' struggles may have been large but had little subversive dynamic.
With one eye, so to speak, she sees the working class as the only active force (but being such more or less irrespective of politics) and capital only having defensive reflex responses. With the other eye, she sees worker struggles as reflex responses whose import is decided not by their own dynamic but by the capitalist-designed "regime" in which they are embedded.
Consequently, and also because of Silver's own Stalinistic sympathies, the effects of Stalinism in shaping workers' organisations, limiting the import of workers' struggles, and dragging much worker organisation down with it when it collapsed, are missing from the story.
So are politics generally, apart from a chapter largely given over to the effect of world wars on workers' struggle. But how is the long ebb of the British working-class movement from 1848 until 1888-9 to be explained, if not by reference to politics and to the tremendous force of inertia that certain "shaping" or "generational" victories and defeats can have?
Silver also gives insufficient weight to technical and organisational restructuring of capital. I don't think the word "privatisation" even appears in the book. She nowhere discusses the effects of the large reduction in the size (measured by number of workers) of manufacturing workplaces in recent decades.
While she mentions the increased intensity of global capitalist competition since the 1970s, I don't think she gives it enough weight as a factor operating in combination with the drastic technical-organisational restructurings of capital in the same period.
But this is a study with a vastly greater weight of empirical research behind it, a much longer historical view, and much more searching in argument, than the other books of recent years covering something like the same issue: Ellen Wood's collection Rising from the Ashes? (Monthly Review Press, 1998) and Leo Panitch's and Colin Leys's Working Classes, Global Realities (Merlin, 2001).
Both Wood and Panitch-Leys contain many valuable articles. Their general political and theoretical standpoint is much more congenial to ours than Silver's. But Silver's is the book that presents the greatest challenge, and the most material for thought.
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Profits and the Product Cycle
"First, she argues that in the later stages of the "product cycle" - the evolution of an industry from cutting-edge, high-tech sector concentrated in a few richer countries to global routine staple - workers' position tends to be weaker because the bosses have less windfall pioneers' profit from which to make concessions, and competition is sharper."
Product Cycle Theory was basically developed by Harvard Business School. As Martin says above it basically begins with the idea of a new product being produced in relatively small quantities, by probably one producer (with perhaps a patent), whose cost structure is skewed towards R&D, skilled labour etc., and whose pricing structure is based on the need for high margins (because of low volumes and the need to recoup setup costs) and the ability (provided the product is actually succesful) to charge higher prices because of their first mover advantage/patent etc., and also because pricing and marketing is directed initially at early adopters i.e. those people who just have to have the latest gizmo. As demand for the product rises and at the same time, new production techniques reduce costs through scale economies and the substitution of machinery and unskilled labour for the skilled labour originally required the cost and price structure changes. The cost structure reflects what Marx would call a higher organic composition of capital i.e. More machinery, and raw material used relative to labour, whilst the pricing structure sees an increase in the value of output (due to a large increase in production) alongside a lower unit price, and correspondingly lower margings.
However, this does not support Silver's contention, for the following reasons.
1. New startup businesses by their nature are small, and the weight of workers within them is correspondingly small.
2. New startup businesses will tend to be established by "vigorous entrepreneurs". It is precisely amongst such people that anti union attitudes are likely to be more pronounced, and given their requirement for a smaller workforce they are more likely to be able to put this into practice in selecting employees.
3. Although, a start-up may make windfall profits they may also face severe problems. Something like two-thirds of all new businesses fail.
4. Even assuming a succesful start-up the high unit profits (margins) hides a low absolute level of profits. The high volumne output typical of products in their mature phase generates a volume of profits way in excess of that in the early phase, moreover, it masks another feature of profitablity, which is
5. Because of the way profits are calculated the actual rate of profit is understated. With products in the early stage of the product cycle turnover tends to be lower i.e. it takes longer for the product to be produced, sold, and the value embodied in the labour, raw materials etc. to flow back, than when the product is mature and being mass produced and marketed. The quicker these values are returned the less capital has to be outlayed. In reality the capital to purchase the labour and raw material is used over and over again during the year, but in looking at the firm's accounts one would see the expenditures as being the total paid out in wages, and materials for the year. As Marx explains in Capital III it is necessary to extrapolate this data, and to multiply the surplus value (profit) by the number of turnovers during the year in order to obtain the real rate of profit.
Arthur Bough
Trade Unionism and Politics
Martin is absolutely correct to draw the comparison with the decline in militancy after the defeat of Chartism. It is possible to look at the defeats of workers in Britian during the 1980's, and in the US at the same time in this light. I would, however, make another comparison and that is in relation to politics.
The Chartists in the main did not advocate socialism (their left-wing did which joined the First International), and with the defeat of the agitation for the Charter the working class were demobilised. A considerable amount of Trade Union militancy that had grown up around the Chartist organisation also became demoralised and dissipated. Lacking any clear analysis of what had happened, how to respond etc. various schemes such as the Emigration Societies were set up. It is only when the workers movement begins to develop a clearly class conscious strategy and politics that the workers movement begins to recover.
I would argue that the workers movement suffered a similar situation during the period of the 60's to the 80's. On the one hand the Stalinists and other Left reformists imbued a politics of reformism into the Labour Movement. Everything was seen in terms of winning higher wages, better condiitons, electing a Labour Government (in Britain, Socialist or even Communist Party government in France or Italy) to be pushed to the left, and this was also seen in typically bureuacratic fashion - any kind of manouvre was acceptable if it secured the election of some Stalinist shop steward or other official. The workers are seen as muscle to be called on to apply pressure. Such a politics is necessarily limiting, and ultimately demobilising. It is destructive of independent working-class politics, and imbues not a class conscious socilaist politics in the working class, an understabnding of the need to create a new different kind of society, and to enagage themselves in that project, but a Trade Union economistic consciousness in which the only struggle is for higher wages, better conditions, rather than to begin undermining the very foundations on which the wages system is based, on demanding greater control over the work process itself, and greater control over all aspects of life i.e. a political response.
At the same time, the other major Left-wing current during the period, the SWP mirrored this strategy with a politics which although based on the idea of independent working class action, on developing rank and file organisation as opposed to the bureaucratic manouvres of the Stalinists and fellow travellers, was based on a narrow anarcho-syndicalism, and rejection of political struggle, particulalry the most important political struggle that was going on at the time i.e. that within the Labour Party.
There seems to be a large disconnect. The alternative is not reform or revolution, Trade Union struggle or political struggle but the neceesary fusion of the two. Workers can never gain strength unless they fight for reforms here and now, and that struggle has to be a combination of direct trade union struggle, and political struggle. For example, take Gate Gourmet. The issue is not one simply about Trade Union solidarity that was required during the immediate dispute, but of political struggle to make such action legal. How is such political struggle to occur unless it takes place within the workers own party? The scope for such struggle - and the educating role it can have on the workers class conscious enought to have joined that party - is clear from the fact that even Trade Union bureaucrats like Tony Woodley, and old right-wing Labourites like Roy Hattersely have come out in favour of the need for making secondary action legal.
But it is also only through such education and the development of an independent working class politics that the effects of particular battles can be minimised. If the immediate battle is always seen as the most important one to be fought, it is inevitable that defeat leads to demoralisation.
Arthur Bough