‘The Liberation of Time from Work’ PETER WATERMAN

From ‘Decent Work’ to
‘The Liberation of Time from Work’
Reflections on Work, Emancipation, Utopia and
the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement
Peter Waterman

http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/03/24/

"Utopian ideas have always been central to or lain beneath emancipatory movements, particular labour and socialist ones in their emancipatory moments (Beilharz 1992, Bayerlein 1999)."

Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work,' we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system.' It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organised, not only for everyday struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organising industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
(Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World,
USA, 1905)

social movements carry an emancipatory agenda? the spread of prefigurative politics emphasises this...

SO A CHAPTER ON THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND EARLY TRADE UNIONS??

A common oppositon to privatised public space and leisure time as consumption

"What 'decent work' looks like, in a brochure of the World Confederation of Labour that I found at WSF 2002, is the kind of job that workers in industrialised capitalist countries had – or were convinced by society that they had – before neo-liberal globalisation. 'Decent work' has apparently to do with 'rights' and 'dignity' and being 'free from exploitation'. It allows a worker to be an actor in an economy 'at the service of mankind' ('mankind' evidently here embraces womankind). This, it seems to me, is a Social-Christian doctrine that takes us back less to the 20th than to the late-19th century and the Papal Encyclical on human labour. (Waterman
2002)."



‘New Social Movements,’ NGOs: New Forms of Representation of ‘Labour’ on a
Worldwide Scale?
Peter Newell (Brighton), ‘Managing Multinationals: Lessons from the Environmental
Movement.’

"Liberation from work is the strategy of André Gorz. Gorz has produced a challenging
critique of the ideology of work that dominates the international trade-union
movement as much as it does the capitalist (or statist) media. This ideology holds that
1) the more each works, the better off all will be; 2) that those who do little or no
work are acting against the interests of the community; 3) that those who work hard
achieve success and those who don't have only themselves to blame. He points out
that today the connection between more and better has been broken and that the
problem now is one of producing differently, producing other things, working less.
Gorz distinguishes between work for economic ends (the definition of work under
capitalism/statism), domestic labour, work for ‘oneself’ (primarily the additional task
of women – for whom ‘self’ customarily means ‘the family’), and autonomous
activity (artistic, relational, educational, mutual-aid, etc)."

"The invention of new concepts – the ‘precariat’,
‘flexploitation’, ‘flexicurity’, ‘Neuropa’ – is a condition for social transformation
insofar as they oblige us to re-think both old practices and old modes of thinking.
Furthermore, intimate connections are here suggested between this new working class
and the old one, between old strategies and new."

problem of assigning the vanguard role to this section of the class as socialists have done..



"Another caveat might be raised in relation to precarious workers at the capitalist
periphery. Precarity here is nothing new, nor a minority phenomenon. On the contrary, it
is both old and general. Thus, Gandhi and Shah (2002), considering women ‘contingent
workers’ in Mumbai, India, seem to see no particular hope of these acting effectively on
the basis of their precarity. Rather do these feminist and activist authors see the best hope
of these women in terms of income security, incorporation into regular waged work,
woman-friendly unions, and state welfare legislation. Perhaps, in the light of the new
theories and strategies related to precarity, the authors, and their subjects, might come to
think differently, but this must remain speculation."


Barchiesi, Franco. 2004. ‘Social Citizenship, the Decline of Waged Labour and Changing Worker Strategies’. http://spip.red.m2014.net/article.php3?id_article= 30 [m2014.net]

Euro Mayday. 2004. ‘MAYDAY, MAYDAY!! Why precari@s, intermittents, cognitari/e are rebelling across NEUROPA...’, http://www.euromayday.org/lang_eng.html [euromayday.org]

Huws, Ursula. 2000. ‘The Making of a Cybertariat? Virtual Work in a Real World’, in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2001: Working Classes: Global Realities. London: Merlin, New York: Monthly Review. Pp. 1-24

Hyman, Richard. 1999. ‘Imagined Solidarities: Can Trade Unions Resist Globalisation?’, in Peter Leisink (ed), Globalisation and Labour Relations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Pp. 94-115.
Hyman, Richard. 2005. 'Marxist Thought and the Analysis of Work' in Paul Edwards, Marek Korcynski and Randy Hodson, eds, Social Theory at Work, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Waterman, Peter. 1988. ‘Needed: A New Communications Model for a New Working-Class Internationalism’, in Southall, Roger (ed), Trade Unions and the New Industrialisation of the Third World. London: Zed: pp. 351 378

Waterman, Peter. 2002. ‘The Still Unconsummated Marriage Of International Unionism and The Global Justice Movement: A Labour Report On The World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, January 31-February 5, 2002. http://groups/yahoo.com/groups/GloSoDia [groups], http://www.commoner.org.uk/01-5groundzero.htm [commoner.org.uk]


P. Waterman: Emancipating Labor Internationalism (from the C20th working class, unions and socialism)

P. Waterman: The Agony of Union Internationalism 2001