Life, Love, and Liberty

LabourStart informed me of two important things today.

And I quote:

ZIMBABWE: UNION LEADERS ARRESTED

Unions around the world are condemning the arrests yesterday of Lovemore Motombo and Wellington Chibebe, respectively President and General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). The two trade union leaders were charged with “inciting people to rise against the government and reporting falsehoods about people being killed” in speeches given on May Day.

The International Trade Union Confederation’s statement is here:

http://www.ituc-csi.org/spip.php?article2107

The IUF is calling for messages of protest to be sent to the Mugabe regime:

http://www.iuf.org/den5018

And the Education International is concerned about rising violence directed against teachers in Zimbabwe, noting that many teachers in rural areas are being killed, maimed, tortured and abused. Read more here:

http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=771&theme=rights&country=zimbabwe

I haven’t been following the recent events in Zimbabwe, but I know a repressive action when I see one. And these arrests are most definitely a cause for concern. I urge people to investigate the incidents.

You should also consider this message:

BURMA: UNIONS APPEAL FOR HELP FOLLOWING CYCLONE

Unions have begun to raise money to support the Burmese people following the catastrophic cyclone which hit the country several days ago. Here are links you can follow to donate in your country.

USA:
http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/05/06/help-provide-relief-to-burmese-workers/

UK:
http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/tuc-14740-f0.cfm

Australia:
http://www.apheda.org.au/news/1210217214_29405.html

If your national trade union center is raising money, let us know and we’ll publish the link on LabourStart.

Show these folks that mutual aid can work!

(A person interested in Kevin Carson’s book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, can view it online at this link. It’s the source for my quotation below)

Bravo! For Brad Spangler’s attempt at innovation and subsequent libertarian reconciliation with the left in the controversial realm of the nature of wage work. I try to paint myself as a guy whose been influenced by the dialectical way of looking at things, so I hope to prove my credentials on that score by pointing out that Brad’s analysis is a dialectical one. If we employ the definition of dialectics as “the art of context keeping”, for which the New Yawker Chris Matthew Sciabarra is to be forever thanked for bringing to my attention, then the dialectical nature of Brad’s take becomes ever more clear. The point of Brad’s post was to point out the conflation of context with casualty. A leftist will typically assert that the “market” is to blame for the phenomenon of individuals having little choice in their place of employment, while the libertarian will say “Silly leftist! There is no need to complain because you are still choosing between a number of employment options, even if said opportunities are not so great”.

Well, I thought I was a wordy guy, but Brad makes a bid for the top spot of wordiness by making use of the word oligopsony which describes a situation where there are few buyers but loads of sellers. This is the word that he believes provides an accurate description of the current U.S. labor market. He makes a plea to libertarians and leftists alike to recognize the current labor market is artificially tight; due to regulatory cartelization on the part of the state that makes it harder to start a money-making business or productive endeavor. A dialectical thinker would be keen to keep this state tainted context in mind when examining these issues, and thus see that the current marketplace is not as conducive to choice as alleged orthodox “free market” thinkers might have you believe.

I wish to extend Brad’s analysis beyond the context of the limited number of opportunities of employment by others due to state intervention in the economy and focus on the limitations on the ability to be self-employed due to an artificial shortage of capital. The contemporary mutualist anarchist, Kevin Carson, has written on this issue and thus is worth quoting here:

In every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production in order to extract tribute from labor. The landlord monopoly, which we examined in the last section, is one example of this principle. And until the nineteenth century, the control of land was probably the single most important form of privilege by which labor was forced to accept less than its product as a wage. But in industrial capitalism, arguably, the importance of landlordism has been surpassed in importance by the money monopoly. Under that latter form of privilege, the state’s licensing of banks, capitalization requirements, and other market entry barriers enable banks to charge a monopoly price for loans in the form of usurious interest rates. Thus, labor’s access to capital is restricted, and labor is forced to pay tribute in the form of artificially high interest rates.

If you are forced to pay high rates of interest when seeking to obtain capital for which to go into business for yourself than the likelihood of being able to do so is drastically decreased. Furthermore; a smaller number of individuals will have the ability to work for themselves and thus self-employment will not be as realistic of an alternative to being employed by someone else. This context is also a creation of the state and must be overcome; if people are ever to have a more reasonable ability to be self-employed.

An awareness of these two state created contexts should be kept in mind when reading leftist literature that is replete with the loaded term “wage slavery”. It may not be the apex of intellectual preciseness to identify the term wages — since you can receive wages without being in the bondage of slavery — with the horror of slavery, yet it does capture the rotten emotional state that many individuals may feel when they are faced with one drudgery after another, as a means of making a living. It’s a term suited for people who want to express passionate outrage; if there ever was one.

The Carnival of Anarchy brings you a discussion of all things related to labor and anarchism. It began on Sept. 4th and will be continuing until the 9th.

A recent example of the state threatening to distort the free market in the realm of labor relations:

The US Army is considering measures to force striking workers back to their jobs at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in Kansas in the face of a looming shortage of tyres for Humvee trucks and other military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan. A strike involving 17,000 members of the United Steelworkers union has crippled 16 Goodyear plants in the US and Canada since October 5. The main issues in dispute are the company’s plans to close a unionised plant in Texas, and a proposal for workers to shoulder future increases in healthcare costs.

Via To the Barricades.

Hat tip to Charles Johnson.

The strike has ended but anyone interested in following the union behind it can do so at this link.