Against the Logistics of Exploitation// Presentation (Stockholm Meeting, Nov 23-25)

Crowdfunding // Stockholm Meeting 2018, November 23-25
- Read the first program outline: https://www.transnational-strike.info/2018/10/26/against-the-logistics-of-exploitation-program-outline-stockholm-meeting-nov-23-25/
- Unions and collectives from Sweden, UK, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Spain, Norway, Slovenia, Slovakia and Czech Republic have confirmed their presence. Please in order to take part in the meeting fill in this registration form: https://goo.gl/forms/MKJnOiKzRZA3GqMI2
- Read the call out in several languages: https://www.transnational-strike.info/2018/05/24/against-the-logistics-of-exploitation-stockholm-november-23-24th-2018-tss-meeting-call-out-2/
- Check out the Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/342866613135963/
Presentation:
Against the Logistics of Exploitation: Notes from the TSS Platform
Over the weekend of November 23rd-25th,
2018, the Transnational Social Strike Platform (TSS) calls workers,
union members and activists from across Europe and beyond to meet in
Stockholm to discuss how to organize against logistical command over
labor. We call logistical command a set of transformations that
interests the whole world, changing economies, political geographies and
the functioning of society and institutions. As logistics is
one of the main forces that affects the capacity of workers and migrants
to organize and win, a new assessment of the situation in which we act
is needed in order to increase the capacity of our struggles: logistics is a battlefield we need to understand and practice if we want to reverse today’s power relations.
Logistics is first and foremost the
transnational organization of labor we need to confront. This
organization has produced in the last years new seedbeds of struggles:
sensible points to be disrupted, new concentration of labor force in
strategic nodes, new strike waves and connections between migrant and
native workers. At the same time, logistics responds to conflict
by isolating, fragmenting and weakening the possibility for a
collective rebellion against exploitation and its conditions.
We thus need to elaborate a clear picture of the ways in which the
logistical management of labor acts in order not to make our struggles
be just temporary, isolated and predictable setbacks in the gears of
this transnational engine. While struggles are too often confined to
single industrial categories and based at the national level, company
and bosses benefit from different national labor laws and wage
differentials and “delocalization” effects are played out in each
locality through outsourcing, the multiplication of employment forms and
the hiring of blackmailed precarious and migrant labor. At the same
time, an increasing mobility of workers across labor sectors and borders
reveals a workers’ use of this very mobility against the pretension of
logistical command.
We witness a reality of widespread but
scattered forms of insubordination to logistical command, which shows
the possibility of its rejection. But all this calls for new
forms of organization and requires overcoming the narrowness of
sectorial disputes and the limits of the present forms of union
organizing and activist solidarity, especially in terms of
transnational connections and efficacy of the strikes: while nationalist
discourses divide workers leaving capital’s rule undisturbed, we need
to surpass the idea that a national dimension of struggle can keep up
with the attack of logistical command. The case of this summer’s Amazon strike
launched from Spain and then taken up by warehouses across Europe, is a
concrete example of the necessity to build on existing insubordinations
to develop struggles that are transnational from their start.
But the impact of logistical command does not simply concern the way in which labor is organized across the borders. The
reorganization of production has been paired everywhere with reforms
and policies that cut welfare benefits, erase previous conquests, govern
the mobility of migrants from within and without the EU.
Reforms such as Hartz IV in Germany, the Jobs Act in Italy, the Loi
Travail and Ordonnances in France, regulations against the right to
strike and to cut welfare benefits are good examples in this regard.
Even the heralded “social” and “anti-European” measures taken up by
right-wing governments throughout Europe – as in the case of Italy – are
only apparently against this flow and both reinforce logistical
command, the conditions of subordination of workers and foster
fragmentation. Our hypothesis is that the logistical transformation only
works if it is supported by certain kinds of policies, by now
widespread throughout the globe, that have the general effect to
constrain workers to work at whatever condition, to fragment them and to
weaken their capacity to advance any collective claim.
Sweden – where we decided to hold our next meeting – is emblematic in this regard: the recent law proposal intending to make most forms of strike illegal, cripples workers’ influence in a way that is unmatched in Swedish history. The
restriction of the right to strike is directly aimed against workers in
the logistics sector, crucial for a strongly internationalized economy
as the Swedish one. Even in a country where the social
democratic compromise seemed strong and stable, the impact of logistics
and neoliberal policies is hitting hard. In response to this attack, the
Strike Back movement
has successfully been launched, producing a strong convergence of
energies. While the law might be anyhow enforced, the challenge is now
to elaborate new strategies to counteract its effects. As already in the
movement against the loi travail in France, one of such
strategies is the recognition and establishment of transnational
connections and a re-centering of transnational solidarity and wider
political connections in the conflict practices of domestic workers.
Connected to this, we think that
the outburst of institutional racism and of the bloody legislations on
migration has only apparently the sole aim of keeping migrants outside
the borders of the EU or specific countries: on the contrary,
it is also aimed at setting up a space where workers can move regularly
only when they are required to and are available to work no matter how
and under the blackmail of institutional racism. The recent agreement in
Germany for a new selective immigration law is a stark example in this
regard. But institutional racism takes different forms across Europe,
from pro-European policies to violent nationalism : if the first follows
the logistical fantasy of a fully governed mobility, the latter
reinforces exploitation through the criminalization of migrants. It is
important to recognize that both options are violent answers to the
widespread rise of social insecurity and the forms of insubordination of
workers and migrants. Moreover, despite these attempts the
massive movements of migrants are what in principle puts the logistics
management of labor into crisis, because it is uncontrollable, it
doesn’t fit in the gears. The mass migrants’ caravan crossing
Mexico directed to the United States and the never ending strike against
the borders along the so called Balkan route are two visible examples
of the global struggle of migrants against logistical command. But this
struggle emerges everywhere migrants fight against institutional racism
and the attempt of making them politically silent, such as in the case
of the Afghans’ strike in Sweden.
Confronted with all of this we believe
that the possibility to reclaim national governments to fight against
logistical command on the side of workers is out of time. This
poses the crucial questions of what kind of political claims we can
fight for in this situation, and what kind of political dimension we
need to consider if we want to be effective. As TSS, we insist
that the transnational dimension is the only viable option. This has to
do both with the existence of global supply chains, and the existence of
global conditions in each and every place. We do not deny that positive
examples have been able to obtain partial victories. But we think the
times requires a radical reinvention of forms of organization,
discourses and aims in order to point towards a transformation of the
present. The question is in front of us of how do we build connections
that turn differences in a collective and transnational political force
against the fragmentation produced by logistical command.
Our meeting has thus a practical
political aim: to materialize connections both in spatial and political
terms. We want to overcome the idea that labor disputes, migrant
struggles and struggle over welfare and social benefits are separated
fields, and to imagine unprecedented connections recognizing the fact
that nationalism and racism against migrants are directly used by
logistics to produce hierarchies, organize labor and make higher
profits. For this reason, we seek to bring together those who have taken
part in disputes against logistical command across and beyond the
European space. We are aware of the profound imbalances on which
logistical networks feed: we see the difference of conditions between,
say, places such as Sweden or Georgia, Italy or Poland. However, inspired
by the global women’s strike that in the last two years has unleashed
the potential and the novelty of a global practice of the strike, we
want to focus on how to cope with these differences and how to lift the
obstacles we meet when imagining the possibility of connecting
existing struggles and organizing wider ones confronting the logistics
of exploitation.
We take up the challenge of rooting our
strategies from within these different landscapes of existing and
potential insubordination, in order to develop a political
infrastructure that does not privilege certain models of labor
organizing over others, eventually reproducing those same hierarchies we
seek to fight. For these reasons, our meeting proposes to be a space of
encounter of different realities from which to continue and enlarge a
process of confrontation and composition of demands and actions against
the logistics of exploitation. The meeting in Stockholm will be a
crucial step in the construction, independently from any kind of
connection with institutional politics, of the political infrastructure
we need.