Neoliberalism, Labor, and Global Politics Post 1970s

Neoliberal Policy Program

• Insulation of markets from political threats and democracies.
• Analysis of postwar mixed economies impinging too much on markets, creating economic, social, and political instability.
• Monetary policy, privatization, deregulation, and deunionization to insulate markets from democratic pressures.
• A new economic and political regime allowing new growth for capital and a new order of political stability.
• Implemented in countries worldwide in the 1970s-1990s (Chile, UK, US, Soviet Union, China).
• Opens new areas to investment and reorganizes global labor positions.
• Reintroduces the idea that economic development happens best when the division of labor is well-defined, with specialization of countries, people, firms.
• Integration of world markets, following the principle of global division of labor.
• Significant increase in world trade due to new countries entering world markets.

Legal Institutions and Trade Agreements

• Regional trade agreements and customs unions like the European Union facilitating free trade and migration.
• NAFTA signed into law in 1993, creating a North American free trade area.
• The World Trade Organization (WTO) plays a prominent role alongside the IMF and World Bank in supervising structural adjustment.
• WTO allows countries to make claims against each other for unfair trade practices.
• China's accession to the WTO in the 1990s significantly changed the rules of international trade.

Shock Therapy in the Post-Soviet World

• Complete conversion to a market price system all at once.
• Large-scale, rapid privatization of state assets.
• Public corporations sold off at very low prices.
• Origin of the Russian oligarchs who acquired ownership of corporations due to political positioning.
• Privatization and shredding of the socialist welfare state led to a steep decline in the standard of living.
• $Life Expectancy$ decreased in post-Soviet states compared to France due to shock therapy.

Export Processing Zones

• Regions specializing in export-oriented factory production (e.g., Shenzhen in China).
• Foreign investors benefit from lower taxes or financial incentives in designated zones.
• Carved out of tariff and trade agreements or environmental regulations.
• Similar to 19th-century treaty ports where foreign powers had special privileges.
• Used by governments to proactively seek investment.
• Factories along the northern border of Mexico (Maquiladoras) import materials, manufacture products, and export to the United States.
• Common in Eastern Europe (e.g., Poland) for exporting to the Western European market.

Labor and Migration

• A new wave of proletarianization, geographically specific.
• Young women enter export processing manufacturing as households seek new income sources.
• Workplaces often rife with sexual harassment.
• Export of labor as a strategy due to destabilization of earlier development models.
• Intensified competition for jobs creates a push factor driving labor from emerging markets to wealthier economies.
• Remittance economy: migrant workers send money back home.
• Examples: Filipino workers in Dubai or the United States.
• Gulf States described as slave states due to repressive conditions for migrant labor: passports held by employers, lack of rights.
• Home health aides in the US, often immigrants with limited legal rights, send remittances to their home countries.

Global Chains of Care

• Migration of women for work leads to global chains of care.
• Children left behind are cared for by hired help, often from rural areas.
• Globalized version of the adjustment to the service economy.
• Similar to deindustrialization in the global North where women enter service sectors.

Decline in Manufacturing

• Countries at their peak share of manufacturing employment: Great Britain, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Japan, US, France in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Later entrants (Nigeria, Ghana, India) max out at a much lower level.
• Possible reasons include increasing productivity in manufacturing and saturation of global markets.
• China's advantages have led to the deindustrialization of Mexico, Brazil, and India.

Informal Economy

• Includes approximately one-quarter of humanity (2 billion people).
• Small-scale manufacturing, personal services, and care labor.
• Little investment and no formalization.
• Pronounced in the global South.
• Peasantries empty out under the pressure of structural adjustment.
• Enormous urbanization with mega-cities in the global South: Cairo, Lagos, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Mexico City.
• Driven by push factors (non-viable rural survival) rather than pull factors (jobs in the city).
• Predominant for women, compatible with traditional duties.
• Informal employment becomes compatible with women's other economic and social obligations.

Political Shifts

• Globalization and structural adjustment generate huge political shifts.
• Legacy parties of the workers' movement move to the political center.
• Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and the ANC in South Africa exemplify this shift.
• Parties aim to attract capital by lowering regulation, taxes, weakening the welfare state and unions.
• This sets in motion a vicious cycle for traditional parties of the working class.
• Parties appear to sell out their constituency, communicating that working classes can't be represented politically.
• This eroded the credibility of working-class solidarity, dependent on mediating institutions.
• As these parties engage in neoliberal moves, they thin out and corrode institutions that have made solidarity mean something more than an abstraction.
• There is a decline of support for working-class parties at the ballot box pretty steadily, pretty much everywhere in the world.
• Steep increase in economic inequality and emergence of the global ultra-elite.
• Gains to growth are extremely unevenly distributed.

Resistance and Social Movements

• China: discontinuous but very frequent strike action.
• Arab Spring: labor involved in uprisings, especially in Egypt, triggered by the global financial crisis of 2008.
• Persistent strike activity in export processing zones (e.g., Bangladesh).
• Massacre at a platinum mine in South Africa exemplifies the dynamic of prioritizing investment over workers' rights.
• Alter-globalization movement: rooted in the global North, aligned with labor in the global South and indigenous communities.
• Occupy Wall Street: critique of inequality with limited success.
• Public sector resistance to austerity: teachers, students, healthcare workers, transit workers.
• Chicago Teachers Strike in 2012: against school closures.

Failures of Neoliberalism and the Left

• The financial crisis of 2008 did not reverse neoliberalism because there was no organized left to present a viable alternative.
• Legacy parties had weakened labor movements and embraced globalization.
• Movements of the 2010s (e.g., Chicago Teachers Union) attempted to rebuild organizational resources.
• Anarchist approaches (occupying public spaces) had limited success, leading to experiments with traditional democratic socialist politics.

Latin America and the Pink Tide

• Left-wing populist governments emerged in reaction to the Washington Consensus.
• Economies depended on commodity exports, requiring high prices.
• Chinese demand initially supported the pink tide, but its softening led to economic crisis.
• Bolivia: success in uniting labor and indigenous movements under Evo Morales.
• Decolonization and a plurination concept of the country.

The Future of Class and Labor

• Expulsion of labor from productive processes and accumulation of surplus population.
• Shift from workplace struggles to control of public space and rioting.
• Climate change will displace populations and increase surplus labor, leading to social control through police and imprisonment.
• Is there is an fascist future that we're facing?
• The socialization of labor (cooperation) increases over time despite private ownership.
• State expenditure as a percentage of GDP grows mechanically over the history of capitalism.
• Is the story of class epiphenomenal to the rise and fall of industrial employment?
• Informal economy and global migration create a more proletariatized world than ever.
• The transformation of women's economic role is a crucial factor.
• There's always been a sense, as Mark himself puts it, Marx Engels in the comment manifesto, there's always a possibility of, as they put it, the mutual ruin of the contending classes.