antipopper

Back on the labour movement video trail: I’m currently watching an old documentary entitled “The Destruction of the Industrial West”, which is all about protectionism and the threat of “cheap Third World labour”. The only real arguments against protectionism are made by Third World bosses. Even when poverty and exploitation are presented via “Third World” union organisers in the film, it is contextualised as an intrinsic Third World pathology, a gangrene on the body of proper industrial relations. Meanwhile, the option of militant internationalism is made completely invisible, its possibility utterly erased. Sure, that’s to be expected in the context of a mainstream TV documentary, but it’s interesting that the film focuses quite strongly on militant clothing workers in the First World, including Belgian women who were occupying their factories and repurposing them into cooperatives. The slogan “VIVE L’OCCUPATION!” is plastered over a repurposed factory. And yet the spectre of nationalism is unrelenting. Unions are presented by their members as a technique of the nation to look after its own, and as a marker of geopolitical superiority. The question of everyday economic survival in the here and now — no small issue when you’re discussing the globalisation of wage labour — is constantly linked to national competitiveness, even by the direct-actionist exponents of radical “self-management”. Wow.

[ tags: unions, labour-movement, nationalism, labour, industrial-relations, protectionism, internationalism ]