Struggling for a Social Europe: Neoliberal Globalisation and the Birth of a European Social Movement. By Andy Mathers. Ashgate.
Mathers begins his book with the claim that “15 June 1997 may prove to be a significant date in the development of the labour movement in Europe”. What, you will be asking, happened that day? Some 50,000 people demonstrated in Amsterdam at the EU Summit that was being held there, including a few hundred who had marched from various parts of Europe to demand “the right to work or a guaranteed basic income”. Nothing very new — or very significant — then. Except for Mathers who had chosen to study these marches for this PhD thesis, but as a “researcher-activist”, i.e. someone who sympathised with their aims but was at the same time studying them like an ethnologist studying a primitive tribe.
He writes as some sort of Trotskyist, so his conclusions are predictable: there is still some mileage to be got from making reform demands on the nation-state (as opposed to the EU), that the trade union movement ought to have involved itself more, etc. He criticises as “the new reformism” those theorists who have written off the working class as an agent for social change and who look instead to some other groups such as students, employed and unemployed graduates, and marginalised youth who make up the bulk of those involved in the so-called “New Social Movements” (NSMs).
This is in fact an interesting discussion since the “official” labour movement — trade unions and Labour and Social Democratic parties — have given up any idea of changing society, even gradually through a series of social reform measures voted by parliaments. They have abandoned this and now settle for getting the best they can out of the present social system, capitalism. This is a significant development that does need analysing.
The “Labour Movement” essentially only embraced a section of the working class properly so-called – only those who worked in industry and transport whereas the working class is comprised of all those who are forced by economic necessity to sell their ability to work in order to live, so including the so-called “middle class” too.
Mathers does in fact conclude that the non-industrial workers involved in the NSMs are workers, even if they don’t yet recognise it. But his criticism of the “new reformism” is not made from a revolutionary socialist standpoint, but from that of “old reformism”, as can be seen from his description and endorsement of the programme proposed by leading SWP theoretician, Alex Callinicos:
“In An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, Callinicos outlined a set of measures which he argued combined ‘immediate remedies’ to the consequences of neoliberal policies with a ‘different social logic’ (p. 132). These demands included those prominent in the European Marches such as the Tobin Tax, the universal basic income, the reduced working week, the defence of public services, and the redistribution of wealth and income. It also included those arising from the broader movement like the abolition of immigration controls and third world debt, the defence of civil liberties, and measures to ensure environmental protection (pp. 132-9).”
Some of these are not even palliatives led alone remedies, but they are all reforms to capitalism.
As it happens, I was myself present in Amsterdam on that 15 June (with my trade union) and witnessed one of the incidents mentioned by Mathers: the reception by the Dutch riot police of a group of masked demonstrators who had travelled from Italy by train (p. 62). Both groups were lined up outside the railway station facing each other, with ordinary passengers walking between then. Apparently, later there were some clashes as the police forced them back on to a train for Italy. What the point was I don’t know.
Adam Buick
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