In Appreciation Of Immanuel Ness’ Book Organizing Insurgency: Workers’ Movements in the Global South

Dear friends, I thank the Pluto Press and Prof. Immanuel Ness for inviting me to speak on his book, Organizing Insurgency: Workers’ Movements in the Global South. I convey warmest greetings of solidarity to all participating in this event.

I congratulate Prof. Ness for making a major critique of the neoliberal dogma that the capitalist class is the creator of social wealth and that by all means the bourgeois state must enable the capitalist class to accelerate the accumulation and concentration of capital by: pressing down wages and maximizing the extraction of surplus value, undermining trade union and other democratic rights, eroding job security and social benefits hard won by the workers, increasing tax cutbacks for the benefit of corporations, privatizing profitable public assets, liberalizing trade and investments, deregulating the abuse of labor, children, women and the environment and denationalizing the economies of the global South.

By examining and analyzing the practice and consequences of neoliberal capitalism in the global South, Prof. Ness exposes the massive transfer of wealth from the workers to the capitalists, the super-exploitation of the urban and rural proletariat, the widening inequality between the capitalist class and the working people and the rapid impoverishment of the latter. He points out that the urban and rural workers of the global South carry the world on their shoulders.

He debunks completely the notion that under the neoliberal rule of unbridled greed the monopoly corporations can bring about the high tide that lifts both the big ships and small boats or the overflow of wealth at the tip of the pyramid would trickle down to the rest of society.

In his book Prof. Ness points out that the global North takes advantage of the less developed economies of the global South (which has 84 percent of the world’s population) and engages in super-exploitation by taking their export of cheap raw materials and cheap labor in exchange for higher-priced manufactured imports as well as by developing global supply chains whereby the value of the primary commodities and semi-manufactures is transferred to the global North.

But even then the monopoly bourgeoisie undermines itself in its own home grounds by outsourcing manufacturing, producing mainly the bigger items for higher profits and financializing the economy. The long term consequence for the working class in the global North is the reduction of employment and income and the increased frequency of rounds of the crisis of overproduction.

In general terms, the workers in the global North are better off than those in the South. But their respective levels of working and living conditions keep on going down and deteriorating. They are losing jobs and earning less. Even the middle class is decreasing significantly. The monopoly bourgeoisie notices that even the cheaper consumer goods from the global supply chains strung out in the South are no longer enough to compensate for the increasing loss of jobs in the North.

Organizing Insurgency: Workers’ Movements in the Global South is excellent at focusing on the working class in the global South and exposing the terrible consequences of neoliberal globalization. It debunks the notion that neoliberal globalization has resulted in the urbanization and development of the global South by simply pointing out that urban populations have indeed increased but the rural populations have also increased at a faster rate as the breeding ground for cheap labor, the reserve army of labor and the footloose workers commuting between the rural and urban areas. Moreover, urban poor settlements more squalid than the rural communities have arisen due to the migration of the semi-proletariat or seasonal odd jobbers from the rural areas.

The urban and rural workers of the global South suffer the main brunt of the worsened conditions of exploitation and oppression under the neoliberal policy of imperialist globalization. The multinational corporations do not care about the well-balanced development of any client-economy. They invest only in the projects or enterprises from which they can get the highest and quickest possible profits by using cheap raw materials and cheap labor and by simply trading what are produced abroad.

Prof. Ness presents three case studies to show how the multinational corporations and the local big compradors, landlords and bureaucrat capitalists engage in the super-exploitation and impoverishment of the working people in the global South, particularly the primitive steel manufacturing for the global consumer market in Wazirpur, India; the system of agricultural commodity production for the global North in Mindanao, Philippines and the corporate restructuring, labor brokering and working-class mobilization in post-apartheid South Africa.

Prof. Ness debunks the claim of certain Indian economists and Western observers that the Indian working class is well-trained and skilled in modern production techniques. He avers that, despite the fact that there are high-technology centers in India, the Indian workforce is predominantly semi-proletarian and agrarian. Most of the industrial activity is at a primitive or crude level under extreme conditions of poverty, both in the rural countryside and in the major urban centers. The working and living conditions of workers in Delhi’s Wazirpur Industrial Area are reminiscent of Dickensian nineteenth-century England.

The industrial zone uses workers at extremely low wages and under dangerous conditions to produce the stainless steel kitchen utensils and tableware goods for the global commodity supply chains. Thus, it is no surprise that the steelworkers have engaged in continuous struggles for two decades. Despite tremendous odds, the informal sector workers engage persistently in mass actions against the employers, with the support of resolute and militant support of a political organization of the workers.

Prof. Ness correctly describes the Philippine economy as a country dependent on the extraction of mineral resources, agricultural commodities, and on migrant labor for the global supply chain. It is at the bottom of this chain. It has not developed an industrial sector capable of producing machine tools, basic metals and basic chemicals. The production of bananas, pineapples, mangoes, and other exotic tropical fruits is done in big plantations in Mindanao that are owned and operated by a combination of MNCs, big compradors, landlords and bureaucrat capitalists. Among the biggest agri-corporations are Dole, Del Monte, Fyffes, Sumitomo and Tadeco.

The plantation workers have no job tenure and are grossly underpaid. They are hired by labor contractors or brokers who are agents of the plantation owners, masquerade as leaders of rural workers’ cooperatives to which the plantation workers pay membership dues. These so-called cooperatives are mere replications of the old cabo system of recruiting farm workers for haciendas. The Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) has done excellent work in arousing, organizing and mobilizing the plantations workers to fight for their political and economic rights and interests.

Prof. Ness points out that in post-apartheid South Africa 90 percent of the people remain in poverty and destitution, suffering from economic and social inequality despite the grant of political equality in the abstract. Thus, in the 2010s workers in the mining industry carried out strikes and struggled against the corrupt National Union of Mineworkers and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and Tripartite Alliance which reinforced inequality. The April 2012 Marikana Massacre exposed the Tripartite Alliance Government as the instrument of the economic interests of the white minority, black compradors and multinational corporations at the expense of the South African black majority.

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) broke with the ANC and then was expelled from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). NUMSA represented the urban manufacturing workers and opposed the Tripartite Alliance and helped in the formation of the United Front of community organizations, the South African Federation of Trade Unions, and the South African Revolutionary Workers Party to mobilize the black working class.

While NUMSA has stood for political opposition, social transformation, nationalization of strategic industries, redistribution and collectivization of lands, and the end of economic imperialism by foreign multinationals, workers have engaged in autonomous struggles against employers who have pushed workers into the subcontracting system in the informal economy. The Casual Workers Advice Office (CWAO) established unions among the growing number of workers recruited by labor contractors and brokers, and the workers in small and dispersed factories.

I appreciate Prof. Ness’ calling attention to the growing significance of informal sector workers in urban settlements and agrarian regions to global supply chains, and to the need for labor mobilization and political struggles in these crucial geographic zones of the world. He stresses the significance of robust political organization in consolidating the gains of grass roots struggles and the practical potential in advancing effective struggles that may contribute to egalitarian social transformation.

I commend Prof. Ness for laying the basis and calling for organizing the insurgency of the workers. He gives due credit to the history and achievements of the proletarian revolutionary parties and socialist societies of the Soviet Union and China before they were undermined by modern revisionism and succumbed to capitalist restoration.

Definitely the workers must rise by building the trade unions, related social organizations, the workers’ party and the political movements of the working class. And may I stress that there ought to be a revolutionary party of the proletariat guided by the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and determined to carry out all possible and necessary forms of struggle towards national liberation, democracy and socialism.

The insurgency of the working class in the global South is of decisive importance to encouraging the workers of the global North to rise up and to make their contributions to the resurgence of the world proletarian-socialist revolution. All workers of the world and oppressed peoples and nations must unite and fight to reverse the setbacks of the socialist cause as a result of the concatenation and combinations of imperialist plunder, state terrorism, wars of aggression, anti-communism, social democratic reformism, neocolonialism, modern revisionism and neoliberalism.

Neoliberal capitalism has been dominant for more than four decades already but is definitely unraveling, especially since the financial crash of 2008 and the consequent protracted crisis and depression of global capitalism. This has sharpened inter-imperialist contradictions, especially between the US and China which were previously the main partners of neoliberal globalization. At the same time, the proletariat and people of the world are intensifying and expanding the anti-imperialist and democratic mass struggles of the proletariat and the oppressed people and nations. These struggles are the harbinger for the resurgence of the world proletarian-socialist revolution.