thecommoner

a web journal for other values :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

Value Strata, Migration

and “Other Values”
In the beginning there is the doing, the social flow of human
interaction and creativity, and the doing is imprisoned by the
deed, and the deed wants to dominate the doing and life, and the
doing is turned into work, and people into things. Thus the world is
crazy, and revolts are also practices of hope.

This journal is about living in a world in which the doing is

separated from the deed, in which this separation is extended in
an increasing numbers of spheres of life, in which the revolt about
this separation is ubiquitous. It is not easy to keep deed and doing
separated. Struggles are everywhere, because everywhere is the
realm of the commoner, and the commoners have just a simple
idea in mind: end the enclosures, end the separation between the
deeds and the doers, the means of existence must be free for all!

The Commoner
Issue 12
Summer 2007

Editor: Massimo De Angelis

Print Design: James Lindenschmidt
Web Design: Gioacchino Toni

www.thecommoner.org
visit the editor's blog: www.thecommoner.org/blog
 Table of Contents

1 Introduction: Value Strata, Migration and “Other Values”

Massimo De Angelis

9 Offshore Outsourcing and Migrations: The South-Eastern

and Central Eastern European Case
Devi Sacchetto

23 Differentials of Surplus-Value in the Contemporary Forms

of Exploitation
Massimiliano Tomba

39 A Critique of Fordism and the Regulation School

Ferruccio Gambino

63 Notes on the Edu-Factory and Cognitive Capitalism

Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis

71 Measure, Excess, and Translation: Some Notes on

"Cognitive Capitalism"
Massimo De Angelis

79 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico: The

Sixth Declaration of the EZLN and the "Other Campaign"
Patrick Cuninghame

111 Reruralizing the World

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

119 "Two Baskets For Change"

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

129 Food As Common and Community

Mariarosa Dalla Costa
 Introduction

Massimo De Angelis

This issue proposes some lines of enquiry around three interrelated

themes: the migratory flows of people in today global factory, the
dynamics and hierarchies underpinning the production of value for
capital, and the production of values other than those for capital. The
search for the connection among these themes is what allows us to
weave together these papers so much different in style and subject
matter.
Devi Sacchetto’s article focuses on people and capital flows in the
case on the South-Eastern and Central Eastern Europe. Here migration
is understood as a flow of social subjects between areas of different
values. The production of these value differences is brought about by
wars, migrations, direct investment and the patterns and direction of
enlargement of the EU. As a result of economic disparities and cultural
differences, social actors from Maghreb to the Ural Mountains have
different degrees of freedom of movement and of political initiative.
Migrants, investors, professional people in charge of humanitarian aid,
smugglers of undocumented migrants, traders, mercenaries, seamen
define and play out their strategies within this value-segmented
context. Furthermore, from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU has set a
trend in social and economic policies, not only for members states, but
also for some countries of the Mediterranean southern rim. The EU
norms and policies have promoted trends of migration and flows of
commodities and information that rise or fall for different regions,
depending on the institutional and economic changes in the peripheral
countries. These trends on the other hand, are associated to patterns of
international economic and humanitarian cooperation as some of the

1
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

main instruments assuring the hegemony of transnational elites. Here

Sacchetto draws a crucial link between EU’s policies of immigration and
asylum and the foreign policy and the international cooperation through
NGOs of member countries. The EU elites have today the increasing
opportunity to act freely in both European and non-European territories
where they operate. A neo colonial freedom emerging from the
submission of the sovereignty of local states to request by new local and
transnational power breakers seeking to rewrite and re-interpret
legislation according to their will. Thus export-processing areas are
established in which labour has few rights and environmental legislation
are laxer, giving raise to a re-stratification of value areas and the
formulation of new disciplinary instruments to face persistent threats to
their articulation. Finally, the new power breakers overseeing these
dynamics who flow back and forth from the home countries to the “neo-
colonial” posts  whether business investors, EU officials or
humanitarian agencies  develop a new colonial mentality based on the
stigmatization of the local populace for the molecular resistance they
are putting against this new form of capitalist neo colonialism. How this
stigmatization contribute to the development of racism in the home
country is an open question.
Massimiliano Tomba addresses the question of value segmentation
along global production networks by re-reading Marx’s theory of
absolute and relative surplus value. The starting point of the article is
the critique of Marxist stage theory that sees the evolution of capitalism
as moving from lower to higher levels of developments. In different
ways this “stage” stance has plaid a role in both mainstream XXth
Century Marxism and some of its critiques, such as Italian post-
operaismo. Echoing a problematic raised by other interventions in
previous issues of The Commoner, Tomba instead argues that “the
first, second and third worlds” are levels that are reciprocally
interpenetrated giving rise to the co-existence – even in spatial
proximity – of high tech and absolute forms of extraction of surplus
value. This way we cannot talk about a tendency of the “old” forms of
labour and exploitation to develop into new form, say of “mass workers”
to develop into “immaterial labourers”. To avoid the problems
associated to these historicists stance, Tomba finds it necessary to “re-
descend” with Marx of Capital into the “laboratories of production”,
showing how absolute and relative surplus-value should not be
conceived in a diachronic succession, “but synchronically in an
historical-temporal multiversum”. We can follow the chains of
valorization that crosses the boundaries of the factory gates and of the
national frontiers. A chain that gives rise to the wage hierarchy. This
mapping of delocalisation is than read through the vivid colours of the

2
 Introduction

subjects of living labour, the migrant workers who in affirming their

freedom of movement, clash with the capitalist interest to construct and
preserve wage hierarchy within and outside Europe.
The uncritical reliance on social “tendencies”, is also Ferruccio
Gambino’s object of critique in this 1990s article on fordism and post-
fordism. Gambino contribution expose to historical scrutiny the very
early literature that has coined the concept of “post-fordism” in the
1980s, that one associated to the regulation school. Today this term is
often taken for granted and used to capture all sort of transformations
that the literature posit as element of novelty in relation to “fordism”:
an atomised, fexiblised and non union worker, a state that no longer
guarantee the material cost of reproduction of labour power. In its
Toyotist variant post-fordism is seen as the result of a “tendency” to
new forms of rationalization as well as of new and more advanced
relations of production, giving rise to new sociality that might well
prefigure new forms of democracy. To a certain extent, the
contemporary conceptions of cognitive capitalism and immaterial
labour have perhaps their roots in these early post-fordist constructs.
Gambino argues that this approach does not really analyze social
relations of production, but rather the economic/state institutions that
oversee them. In this way, the regulation school “stresses the
permanence of structures, and tend to overlook human subjects, their
changes and what is happening to them with the disorganization and
reorganization of social relations.” For Gambino, not only the very
formation and dynamic of “preunion fordism”, “fordism” and global
“post-fordism” is centered on struggles of concrete waged and
unwaged workers. Also, what is seen as a passage from one “ism” to
another is the effect of changing capital’s strategies at a rhythm
imposed by the constraints and ruptures of various struggles. For the
Regulation School instead, fordism and post-fordism appear both as
stable tendencies waiting to be fulfilled. Against the appearance of
stable structure and predictable social “tendencies”, the experience of
fordism in the 1950s and 1960s shows that what appeared as a stable
system began soon to fall apart ripped from the inside. At the end of
the 1960s the class struggle, “overturned capital’s solid certainties as
regards the wage, the organization of the labour process, the
relationship between development and underdevelopment, and
patriarchy”. Without understanding the radicality of this challenge and,
we would add, the ways this radicalism has been outflanked by capital
planetary re-organisation, what is called today “post-fordism” assumes
the character of “a crystal ball, in which . . .it is possible to read some
signs of the future”. Such a chrystal-ball approach makes it impossible
to grasp the elements of crisis and uncertainty in capital’s domination,

3
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

with the political consequence of being unable to problematise the

issue of class political re-composition.
This is a point also stressed in the two articles that follow, one a
join work by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis, and the other by
Massimo De Angelis. Both articles were recently circulated in the the
“edu-factory” list (www.edu-factory.org) as part of a debate on
“cognitive capitalism”. We invite the reader to explore the many
contributions in this important forum to follow this debate and that on
other related themes. There are two main lines of Silvia Federici and
George Caffentzis argument against theoretically de-centering the
problematic of class hierarchy and dynamics of stratification. First, an
empirical/theoretical one, in which they claim that the history of
capitalism demonstrates that capital’s subsumption of all forms of
production is not predicated on the extension of the “highest” level of
science and technology to all workers contributing to the accumulation
process. Cases such as the capitalist organization of the plantation
system and of housework suggests that work can be organized for
capitalist accumulation with the laborer working at a level of
technological/scientific knowledge below the average applied in the
highest points of capitalist production. This also suggests that the “inner
logic” of capitalist development can only be grasped if we look at the
totality of its relations rather than only at the highest points of its
scientific/technological achievements. Looking at this totality reveals
that capitalism has always produced disparities along the international
and sexual/racial division of labor. These disparities are both the
product of its inner workings and of clear strategies which give rise to
the “underdevelopment“ of particular sectors and are amplified by the
increasing integration of science and technology in the production
process. From this theoretical/empirical point follows, second, their
political argument. There is in fact a political consequence in using
constructs such as “cognitive capitalism” and “cognitive labor” in such a
way as to overshadow the continuing importance of other forms of work
as contributors to the accumulation process. And this is the
development of a discourse that precludes class recomposition. There is
in fact the danger that by privileging one kind of capital (and therefore
one kind of worker) as being the most “exemplary of the contemporary
paradigm” we contribute to create a new hierarchy of struggles, thus
engaging in forms of activism that “precludes a re-composition of the
working class.” To become possible, this political re-composition must
be predicated on the awareness of the continuity of our struggle across
the international division of labor and wage hierarchy, which mean that
we need to “articulate our demands and strategies in accordance to
these differences and the need to overcome them.”

4
 Introduction

Massimo De Angelis contribution builds on this twofold argument

around the problematic of the wage hierarchy and articulates it to other
themes debated in the edu-factory forum such as “labour abstraction”,
“translation” and “excess”. The processes responsible for the ongoing
creation of value stratification can be grasped theoretically and
empirically though Marx's classic texts reinterpreted in lights of the
issues raised by the struggles of those subjects that in that text were
mostly invisible and yet are and have always been so fundamental to
capitalism (women, the unwaged reproduction workers, the slaves, the
peasants). The two main coordinates of these processes are the
systematic and continuous “enclosure” strategies and the process going
on “behind the back of the producers”, the process of the formation of
“socially necessary labour time”. The former continuously re-stratify the
hierarchy with a variety of violent means, but also through the use of
technology and knowledge products developed at the highest levels as
instrument of these enclosures. The latter is what Marx labels the
process going on “behind the back of the producers”, the process of the
formation of “socially necessary labour time” which is referred here as
“disciplinary integration”, since market processes act as disciplinary
mechanisms that allocate rewards and punishments and hence
contribute again to produce hierarchy. This “inner logic” of capitalism is
predicated on a way of measuring life activity which subordinates
concrete specific humans to the quantitative imperative of balance
sheets. This subordination means that the sensuous and cognitive
features of concrete labouring are subordinated to the drive for making
money. It also implies that “an excess” which is not put to value by
capital always exist. This “excess” is the outcome of the struggles of
situated workers facing the frontline and contesting the reduction of
their life-activity to abstract labour. Yet, we must be cautious that the
dynamism of capitalism is based on the ongoing attempt to recuperate
and subsume these excesses and turn them into moments of capital
accumulation. Thus, in contrast with the view that sees cognitive labour
as commons across a stratified class, here the argument is that in so far
as capital production is concerned what is really common across the
“multitude“ is that social production occurs through the subjection of
multiplicity to a common alien measure of doing, of giving value to
things, of ranking and dividing the social body on the basis of this
measure. Through this valorisation process, human powers are
transmuted into commodities, and social doing is transmutated into
work, into abstract labour. In this sense, abstract labour is not so much
the result of a “translation“ as some claim, although processes of
translation are always occurring. It is the result of a real abstraction, i.e.
a transmutation, as a transmutation of one species into another, one

5
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

species of humans into another one. Hence, despite being a crucial

issue, the central question for political recomposition is not
“translation”, but the transformation of our interconnected lives. And
this transformation cannot avoid positing the question of the
overcoming of existing divisions as the central problematic of our
organisational efforts.
The problematic, difficulties and contradictions of political
recomposition across value chains and constitution of political
subjectivity founded on “other” values is faced up by Patrick
Cunninghame paper on the Zapatista’s “Other Campaign” (so-called in
mock reference to the 2006 presidential electoral campaigns). This
was catalysed by the Zapatistas call for a renewed anti-capitalist
resistance movement “from below and to the left” against neoliberal
capitalism in Mexico and internationally, in the Sixth Declaration of the
Lacandona Jungle (the Sixth) in July 2005 and in the broader socio-
political context is framed by the events surrounding the July 2006
presidential elections, which proved to be particularly “dirty” and
fraudulent. Here attempts have been made of “horizontal coordination
of autonomists, anarchists, Zapatistas, socialists, indigenous and
peasant movements” as well as independent trade unions and the
more radical NGO campaigns. The paper also discusses the problems
faced by the organisation and mobilization of the Other Campaign in
the trans-border region of Chihuahua-Texas-New Mexico in Northern
Mexico-Southern USA. The mobilisations were against “the femicide of
some 450 working class women and girls in Ciudad Juarez since 1993,
as well as other issues based around migration, the US-Mexico border,
the hegemonic maquiladora (corporate assembly plant for export)
hyper-exploitation model and the social violence and urban
degradation produced by “savage capitalism”.” This “other”
organizational paradigm, also include the “Other on the other side” (of
the border), and therefore ettempts to connected with the May Day
Latino boycott movement in the US against the criminalisation of
undocumented migrants.
Finally, there are three interrelated short contributions by
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, linking the making and remaking of the
planetary value hierarchy through enclosures (which systematically re-
produce its lower layers), with the political problematic of the
production of food as common, and of new relations to land and
agriculture. In “Renaturalising the world” she begins reflecting on the
continuing expulsion of populations from the land accompanying
development projects and the new enclosures. This is the eradication
of a population that derived from the land the possibility for nutrition
and settlement, and that instead adds to urban slums or takes the

6
 Introduction

route of migration. The outcome, similar to those following patterns of

enclosures which occurred five centuries ago at the injection of
capitalism, is the “expropriation from, and the accumulation of, land
on the one hand, and the accumulation of immiserated individuals who
could no longer reproduce themselves because they had been
deprived of the fundamental means of production and reproduction,
above all the land itself, on the other.” But crucially, this continuous
replenishing the ranks of the eradicated and expropriated, “functional
to a further expansion of capitalist relations and to the re-stratification
of labour on a global level.”
This ongoing re-stratification of the “conditions of labour and of
life of men and women across the world, regardless of where they
live,” is based upon the expulsion from the land. It is here that “the
condition for class is re-founded and labour within the global economy
is re-stratified.” And there are really no solutions within the traditional
remedies. On one hand, “it is unthinkable that jobs will multiply” in
accordance with the number of those expelled. On the other hand, “nor
is possible to fool oneself into hoping for a global guaranteed income of
such vast proportions. Yet even if it arrived one day, replacing the
bombs perhaps, could we really delimit the matter to one of money,
money sufficient for the purchase of a farming product which, in its
industrial and neoliberal formulation, increasingly pollutes our bodies,
destroys small economies and their jobs, and devastates the
environment? And, beyond this, how much freedom would we have
when all of the earth’s inhabitants depended only and exclusively on
money for they survival?”
This is the context in which Dalla Costa builds her analysis of the
struggles around land, farming and nutrition by self-organising
networks of the global movement of farmers that developed in the
nineties. This analysis is furthered in her second piece, “Two Baskets”,
in which she moves from the need of what she calls the “great
reawakening”: “one that is being enacted by farmers and citizens (who
are challenging their role as merely “producers” or “consumers”)
against the great machine of industrial agriculture and the politics that
bolster its delivery of noxious foods, environmental devastation.” Here
she discusses the coordinates of a political project that aims at “re-
localise development” and “re-ruralize the world”. An argument that
fully open to the last paper on food as common, in which she argues
that “food is only regained as a fundamental right in its fullest sense
when it is regained as a common. It is regained as a common if, along
the way, all its conditions are also regained as commons. This is what
is already apparent from the ways in which networks of farmers,

7
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

fisherpeople, and citizens who are not only consumers organize

themselves.”

8
 Offshore Outsourcing and Migrations

The South-Eastern and Central-Eastern European Case

Devi Sacchetto1

In the last fifteen years the European and Mediterranean area has
been marked by a series of changes concerning in particular the
mobility of persons, capitals and commodities. These changes appear
to be associated with a strong asymmetry of opportunities. Wars,
migrations, direct investments abroad and the enlargement of the EU
point to new scenarios with social actors such as migrants, investors,
professional people in charge of humanitarian aid, smugglers of
undocumented migrants, traders, mercenaries, seamen.
These actors are endowed with different degrees of freedom of
movement and of political skills in an area extending from Maghreb to
the Ural mountains. These differences are the result of wide economic
disparities, and even more of cultural peculiarities. In the last fifteen
years in South-Eastern and Central Eastern Europe a new social and
geopolitical readjustment has made room for more autonomy in the
individuals’ way of living than in the past.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU seems to have changed
from a facilitator of trade to a sophisticated trendsetter in social and
economic policies, not only for all its present members and for those
who are waiting for admission, but also for some countries of the
Mediterranean southern rim. The norms that the EU has established
have stimulated a circulation of people, commodities and information
1 This paper is a revised version of the paper “The change in the relations
between the actors of EU countries and the Euro-Mediterranean societies”
that was presented at the Elise Meeting in Genoa, April 8, 2005.

9
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

that rises and falls according to the institutional and economic changes
in the peripheral countries. On the other hand, the promotion of
international economic and humanitarian cooperation is one of the
main instruments assuring the hegemony of transnational elites. Both
the foreign policy and the international cooperation through NGOs of
member countries of the European Union are linked to the EU’s policies
of immigration and asylum.
A basic characteristic of the new relations between the actors of
the EU and the societies of the Euro-Mediterranean area is the
opportunity to act freely in the various European non-Eu territories
where the former find themselves to operate. This freedom is not so
much the armed colonialism of the past as the imposition of political
and economic behaviour. The sovereignty of the State is submitted to
the requests being advanced by new holders of power and of
international elites, who are looking for areas where legislation can be
easily rewritten or reinterpreted according to their will. During the last
twenty years these areas have grown economically, in particular with
the establishment of the so-called zones of export, where labour has
few rights (Icftu 2004) or is deprived of legal frame. In this case they
have became non-persons (Dal Lago 1999). The characteristic trait of
these zones is the pre-arrangement of special legislations aiming to
make the asymmetry of power and of freedom of action easier
between dominant and inferior areas. In such redefinitions of the
norms, new disciplinary instruments are formulated on the base of
persistent threats. It is an updating of the old procedures pointing to
ethnicization. Such process corresponds to the varied, discontinuous
and irregular segmentation of the economic and political spheres.

I Barriers and Landscapes

Borders in Europe have been modified several times in the last 100
years. While borders in the North American continent have been
stable, they have been moving again in Europe. In spite of the
commonplace of “Old Europe”, Europe appears to be unable to
stabilize its frontiers. While the North American continent had already
defined its borders at the middle of the XIXth century (Zaccaria 2004),
in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and after the concomitant
institutional changes a deep economic and cultural inversion has
involved not only the so-called former socialist countries, but also the
Western ones.
Inequalities in the freedom to migrate have largely increased in
Europe. A case in point is the fate of the inhabitants of former

10
 Offshore Outsourcing and Migrations

Yugoslavia. In fact their ability to migrate has been widely

differentiated: the Slovenians, nowadays members of EU, can move
freely, while others suddenly have been degraded to the status of
citizens of States or quasi-states that are not members of the EU. They
cannot even cross the borders of the adjoining countries unless they
have visas. This is the case of Bosnians and of Macedonians. It is on
the ruins and on the building or rebuilding of new enclosures in
Yugoslavia that the strategies of the unification of European States, of
the enlargement of the EU and of the relations with the countries of
Mediterranean southern rim are played. Now the heavy costs of
political non-alignment, such as Yugoslavia pursued between 1948 and
the early 1990’s, appear clearly to all. In fact the Yugoslavia conflict
has characterized the way and timing of the enlargement of the EU, as
well as the planning of new systems of mobility and employment in
most European and Mediterranean countries.
The expansion of the EU is a factor of strong correction of the
economic policies of the candidate States and of the long-range and
short-range mobility of people. The redefinition of the right of crossing
borders shapes new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. The process
of extension produces new borders both visible, such as the one
between Ukraine and Poland, and invisible, such as the ones resulting
from new and long procedures to move from country to country
(Ruspini 2004). The borders between Western and Eastern Europe
have been repeatedly altered. This is the most evident case. However
the procedures to move from Maghreb to Europe, have also changed
substantially.
The new borders of the EU are heavily guarded not to prevent
military aggression but to limit and control migrations and petty trade
along the frontiers with non EU-countries. The new control system at
EU borders tends to become a technologically equipped police
surveillance on the informal economy and on migrations (Dietrich
2003), although, both phenomena may survive through daring and
risky strategies.
As to the process of enlargement, candidate countries are
requested to preliminarily enter into new relations with the adjoining
countries; they must especially set more rigid norms of entrance for
the non-EU citizens.2 Central and Eastern Europe countries have to
establish new frontiers that becomes the new border of EU: to build a
border in order to move more easily inside, here’s one of the main
2 Since 2000, Poland has demanded visas for the citizens of some republics of
the Community of IndependentStates (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kurdistan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan). Since July 1, 2003, Russians, Belarussians, and
Ukrainians must carry proper visas with them when crossing Poland (Chomette
2003). Similar requirements are compulsory in countries such as Tunisia,
Morocco, Libya that are even not candidates to EU membership.

11
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

paradox of our time (Diminescu 2003, p. 23). So the freedom of

movement in the EU corresponds to an enclosure that have been built
in order to keep out the people who do not belong to one of the
included states. Ironically a new iron curtain arises a little to the East
of the borders where the first one arose: it controls the peoples who
continue to be strongly limited in their international mobility to the
west.
Borders assign people to different social, political and legal
spaces inside and outside national territories; and borders promote the
proliferation of several kinds of activities that become illegal and
subversive merely by moving from country to country by a few miles
(Donnan, Wilson 1999). The transit of undocumented migrants is
considered as a threat of subversion to sovereign states. As a matter of
fact, migrants and smugglers do not aim neither to subvert the State,
nor to eliminate borders. On the contrary, their roles and their lives are
strictly connected to the very existence of a State and of its borders,
without which it would be impossible for them to make a living out of
those activities that are symbiotic with trade at borders. Migrants as
well as investors abroad are such just thanks to zones that are
differently valued (Sacchetto 2004); the existence of different values
for different areas can partially explain migration and offshore
outsourcing. The regulation of people’s movements through borders is
constantly selective, as borders are never rigidly closed or totally open.
They remain usually porous. They are invisible lines dividing what they
join, because they are the most militarised and racialized land strips in
contemporary political maps (Papastergiadis 2000).
The Europeanization of the national legislations of the new
member States and of the candidate ones such as Romania and
Bulgaria3 involves the introduction of new legal institutions, in
particular the administrative detention of undocumented foreigners
and more rigid controls of people’s mobility. The enlargement of EU is
becoming a main question on the international political arena because
it redesigns the maps of international mobility. Nevertheless, the
government of the non-EU Euro-Mediterranean area seem to have
been quick in learning the ideological structure of the EU and its
institutional practices of hospitality. The so-called centres of
identification and detention of undocumented migrants is one of these
practices.

3 The enlargement of the EU with the candidate countries that entered the Eu in
May 2004 (Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,Malta, Poland, Czech Republic,
Slovakia Republic, Slovenia, Hungary) has required their adjustment to 80
thousand pages of European legislation. This has provoked a very strong
metamorphosis in their legal systems and in their administrative structures.

12
 Offshore Outsourcing and Migrations

In spite of the relentless militarization of the borders of EU

against irregular immigration and of restrictive policies on the visas,
undocumented mobility of migrants without paper is far from being
controlled. These measures increase both the migrants’ expenses and
the selection of those who can afford a travel. To some extent they
restrain migrations. The mobility of people can be encouraged or
discouraged in various ways. From the financial point of view, the
imposition of expensive visas reduces migrants’ resource and
complicates their travelling trajectories (Stalker 2000; Düvell 2004). On
the other hand, as it has been pointed out (Cohen 1987), some zones
have been deliberately kept in underdevelopment by the so-called
international community in order to increase the propensity of labour
to migrate.
In June 2004, the introduction of a new tax for the citizens of 8
newly admitted countries who want to work in Great Britain is a new
start in migration policies (Salt 2004, p.4). Both for the international
elites and for the migrants borders are surmountable if they are
prepared to pay more or less heavy admission taxes. Consequently the
admission taxes systems must be considered as important components
of the new European strategy, which aims to redirect the mobility of
capitals and of migrants rather than reducing them. This strategy
marks a shift from the control to the management of migrations and
investments abroad.4
To the travellers who cross the countries of South-eastern Europe
the EU borders are permeable places where the cases of bribery
abound. The difference between the exasperating slowness of the
practices of legal crossing and the speed of the transit of the migrants
without documents is evident, as it is evident that elite investors can
cross borders easily. While border inspectors probably try to defend
their power, the smugglers of migrants exploit the differences in value,
which are intrinsic to a border, by minimizing (or curtail) the time for
its crossing: for the hullers who cross the channel of Otranto, or for the
boats that arrive in Sicily from Libya, success in terms of profit and
safety is connected to the speed of their operations. Among the
migrants it is clear that travel documents, passports and visas are their
basic elements in the case of both regular and irregular migration.
However, for many of them only money is important, because “money
is the documents”. Trust in money and regular or counter-feited
documents show the arbitrariness of the power that is exerted at the
borders. The powerful passports and visas of the international elites
put them on the fast track, while the documents of people coming from

4 Regarding the management of migrations see among other Stalker 2002;

Martin 2003; Düvell 2004.

13
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

countries with scarce power are easily stopped. Borders mark the
different zones to which people can have access with ”valid”
documents.
In recent years, in particular after September 11the 2001, the
issue of borders has become central and consequently the
governments of many countries have hurried to prove that their
borders are safe. In Europe too, as an aftermath of political changes
that were introduced after 1989 and of the expansion of EU to other
countries, the debate about borders has revived. For each year fom
1998 to 2002 between 50 and 60 million euros have been allocated to
build the new Eastern Polish curtain and to prevent illegal immigration.
It is a 1200 kilometre long border through which in 2001 about 27
million of individual crossings have been recorded. This flow is much
lower than the one at the border between the U.S. and Mexico, which
records approximately 300 million of people a year (Pascucci 2003;
Andreas 2003). As to the United States, Peter Andreas (2003, pp. 1-2)
asserts that “North American relations are driven by the politics of
border control… Rather than simply being dismantled in the face of
intensifying pressures of economic integration, border controls are
being re-tooled and redesigned as part of a new and expanding ‘war on
terrorism’’’(Andreas 2003, p.1).
Although there are differences between the European Union and
the US in their approaches to “war terrorism”, a new Atlantic
cooperation concerning home security has proven to be quite active
(Bunyan 2002). The new model of mobility has led to significant
changes in bilateral agreements and to a renewed focus on the
concept of borders. In particular, since September 11th, 2001 controls
and selections at the borders have been increasingly linked to
security.5 Institutionalised fear contributes to develop processes of
hierarchization and of a new isolation in urban spaces; some areas
become inaccessible for security’s sake. In fact, the war on terrorism is
far from being fought just against "rogue states"; a person who does
not travel in business class is potentially dangerous.

II The New Actors of the EU

Both locally and globally the new actors, who move from the EU to the
countries of South-Eastern Europe and to the countries of the
Mediterranean southern rim, are deeply inserted in to differentiated
relations, as far as workplaces and social and political milieu are
concerned. Their presence in the countries of South-Eastern Europe

5 See Bigo (1998, 2004), Dal Lago (2003), Palidda (2000, 2003).

14
 Offshore Outsourcing and Migrations

gives rise to a continuous imitation of Western patterns of life. This

Westernisation can take place in a way both rigid especially inside
factories and mild in everyday socialisation. The absorption of Western
models are linked to the acceptance of new social hierarchies.
The mobility of social actors with a fair level of political skills
produces a different mobility, the one of the transnational elites. This
mobility holds a relatively important position in contemporary social
sciences. Such cosmopolitan elites are able to sustain the processes of
globalization and to develop new cultural and social practices (Sassen
1994; Hannerz 1996; Beaverstock and Boardwell 2000). Castells (2002)
has pointed out the importance of such transnational elites for the
attainment of globalization. To that effect these elites can rely on
personal milieus existing through out the global metropolises.
Of less importance have been the research projects concerning
social profiles such as small entrepreneurs or professional people and
volunteers of humanitarian aid, who have predictably assumed
behaviours both of pragmatic adaptation and of vigorous reform of
local situations (Sacchetto 2004). In fact, in the shade of such elites
some profiles persist, such as the new international entrepreneurs,
who represent the main actors of the mobilization of cultural practices
in large areas of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of
Mediterranean southern rim (mainly Tunisia and Morocco). It is obvious
that these processes of mobility often but not always produce
hegemonic policies of cultural and symbolic mimesis (Dezalay 2004,
p.8).
The international elites represent a new political class which acts
in European areas, from the Ural mountains to Maghreb. These elites
are the bearers of a political and social power that was previously
unknown. Local power-brokers, who are co-opted inside different
political and productive strategies, very often co-operate with these
actors. They are those who are already in charge of political and
economic activities and who are expeditions, since they know their
turf.
The mobility of elites represents the attempt to affirm their role in
political and social contexts where they want to impose a new order in
production as well as in society. It goes without saying that
international elites, which move from the countries of EU to Eastern
and to Southern Europe impose their culture and way of governing
through their political and economic power.
These elites in their moving to the East or to the Mediterranean
area need basic services that their backlines are supposed to provide.
These backlines are social, industrial and political agencies that must
build frameworks for transfers of resources and are of basic

15
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

importance in the mid-term; the backlines are constituted by services

for enterprise and people, like restaurant, shops, tradesman.
In some Eastern European and Maghreb countries, local political
parties have been financed by political organizations of the EU and
international organizations. Some EU politicians are also working as
advisors for local politicians6. In recent years, new strategies for
transforming the social and political systems, with some international
organizations supporting human rights and democracy have been
launched by the NGOs. The Georgian “Rose Revolution” in 2003, the
Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” in 2004 and the Lebanese “Spring
Revolution” in 2005 are starting points for a non-violent shift towards
market economies (Genté, Rouy 2005). The long-term policies that
have been built by such international (mainly USA) and European
organizations seem to offer an alternative to war intervention policies
that were previously adopted in former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and
Iraq.
The ability to alter the course of events becomes increasingly
crucial, since in some countries the State lacks the power to thoroughly
apply its national legislation. Those in charge of local administration
are therefore more and more subject to the influence of investors and
second-range officers working for powerful agencies. In addition to
what happens in the world of business and politics, the role played by
these new power-brokers in the above mentioned cultural domains has
to be taken into consideration.
Thus the trend has been set to ignore the basic laws and social
norms that were long established at a local level, because the political
and economic forces boosted by the transformations that were
undergone by institutions in the last 15 years cannot be constrained
within a strict framework of prescriptions. Widespread attitudes and
ways of thinking that have been expressed by some supporters of
offshore outsourcing and professionals in the humanitarian field
involve a relentless stigmatisation of the Other, according to what
Sayad (2002) has called “State Thought”.
The spreading of this colonial mentality is also affecting European
countries, because colonizers return to EU countries too: consequently,
such stigmatisation is a continuous process. On the other hand, a
significant cultural influence is being exerted by the migrants who
have moved the other way round.

6 For instance, one political co-founder of the Italian political party Forza Italia
and deputy minister of Italian Home Affairs during the first Berlusconi
administration, is also as an advisor for the president of the Romanian Great
Romania Party (PRM). An Italian businessman, worked as a consultant for the
president of the Romanian New Generation Party (PNG) during the electoral
campaign in 2004.

16
 Offshore Outsourcing and Migrations

III Variable selection criteria

In the 1990’s years Western European countries faced a new kind of

migration flow: people from Eastern Europe could move freely. In
recent years migrants have found a progressive regimentation that
involves both the creation of an institutional framework for
administrative aspects and the imposition of regulations of behaviour.
On the other hand, the Western European countries promote just-in-
time migration: migrants should arrive only on the basis of the needs
of production system and should go back when they are unemployed
(Düvell 2004).
In addition to “autonomous migrations”, then, regulations aimed
at a planned management of migration flows are set forth, though
each of the strategies mentioned above involves factors of both
constraint and freedom. In the last decade the development of
recruiting systems in several Eastern European countries that are
based on practices usually adopted in South-East Asia offers major
evidence of the view of a totalitarian management of the migration
flow. Therefore, sectors of production that cannot be easily relocated
(such as building, agriculture, health and education) should benefit
from these groups of workers temporarily moving from peripheral
countries to the EU, since industries can gain high profits while offering
low wages and poor guarantees.
The countries of Eastern Europe and those on the South rim of
the Mediterranean Sea, which once promoted open-door policies
towards citizens from brother countries, are now turning out to be the
fiercest opponents of illegal immigration. For example, as a result of
the influence of IOM and UNHCR, since its independence Ukraine has
developed a new legislation on migration creating a migration service,
by strengthening its own national laws through the signing of several
treaties, and by promoting a certain degree of international co-
operation within the context of migration and refugee policies. On the
other hand, after years of open-door policies towards immigrants from
West and Sub-Saharan Africa, Libya has recently showed a clearly
stricter attitude by deporting and imprisoning hundreds of migrants
who have been merely guilty of not possessing regular papers. Both
the Ukrainian and the Libyan strategies are aimed to proving their
efficiency in migration management in accordance with the EU
institutions, in exchange for favourable economic agreements.
The countries on the South rim of the Mediterranean Sea and
those on the Eastern borders of the EU, both of which are passageways
for migrants, are turning into “trash zones”7 since they work as a filter

7 Cf. the interview made by Longo V., Sacchetto D., Vianello F. with the

17
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

on the migration flow, by blocking the persons allegedly unsuitable for

their entry into the Schengen area. Migration and transit in these
countries may last a few days to several years8: for citizens of the
Eastern areas and of the Southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea,
mobility is a never-ending conquest.
One in a variety of strategies adopted by migrants is to stay in
belt countries for some years, where waiting for the right time and
trying to earn enough money to make their European dream come true
at last. Sometimes migrants also apply for asylum and then for
nationality in countries just outside the EU, which is just another way to
prepare themselves for an easier entry into the Schengen area. As a
matter of fact, applying for a visa to Poland is definitely easier if one
has a Ukrainian passport rather than an Afghan one9.
Conditions of legality or illegality may change quite quickly. In
1998, a staff of IOM experts was sent to Ukraine in order to formulate a
set of rules aimed at controlling the illegal migrations through the
country to the EU, but found out a surprising predicament made their
task even harder: Seventy per cent of the transit migrants were
absolutely legal. As a result of this situation, a new legislation
regarding visa policies and procedures had to be set forth10. Today,
international institutions working for the management of migrants and
refugees are legion on the political scene (Düvell 2004). Among these
organizations, the tasks of the IOM are by far wider than those of other
agencies, in that IOM co-operates with the governments of the
countries bordering the EU, providing by them with an extensive
training in migration control and management. On their turn, state
officers from border countries are sent to the EU in order to study the
different law systems and the ways they are applied.

Conclusions

The establishment of the EU exerts a major influence on mobility and

on political and economic development both in member countries and
in border ones. In countries issued from the socialist block, the

philosopher and writer Irina Magdysh, for the magazine “Ji”, Lviv (Ukraine),
May 2004.
8 Migrants from West African countries are used to long stays in countries such
as Libya, where 1-1,5 million migrants (many of whom do not have regular
papers) are now being given shelter (Trentin 2004). On Morocco as a migration
and transit country for migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, cf. Barros et al.
2002. An exhaustive overview can be found in Palidda 2003a, who estimates
Libya to have 2,5 millions migrants.
9 In Ukraine one can also buy counterfeit passports for 2.000-3.000 US$.
10 Anonymous (2004), “From Arming the Borders to Recruitment of
Labour”, September 9, www.thistuesday.org

18
 Offshore Outsourcing and Migrations

communitarian system does not seem to be strong enough to confront

the action of international élites, whereas in countries characterized
by a different tradition, such as Turkey and Morocco, local societies
tenaciously oppose such “intrusions”.
The EU has incorporated ten new countries, while assuming the
responsibility for doing the dirty work both within and outside their
national borders. Being part of the EU may be an advantage for new
members, even if the status they have obtained is not necessarily the
same for all of them. Slovenia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic
and the Slovak Republic can afford manufacturing production at mid-
low-to-middle level wages, thus reaching leading industrial positions in
Europe, while Romania, Bulgaria and, in the longer run, Ukraine should
be limited to the lowest wage range of the manufacturing industry. The
broadening of the EU seems to cause a gradual marginalization of the
Southern Mediterranean countries: this shift is already quite clear to
the Moroccan and Tunisian agricultural workers of Spain, Italy and
France, who have already been replaced by Polish and Romanian
workers.
The building of a “Fortress Europe” is constantly forging new
social hierarchies, both inside and outside the EU. Purely repressive
immigration policies are now confronting the request for full operating
freedom from European power-brokers: this request shows the striking
difference between these two different actors (migrant and elite) who
play the major roles on the current scenario. On the other hand, poor
wages that foreign investors pay in non-EU countries often push wage
earners to choose emigration. The rhetoric of human rights and
democracy seems to leave little room for individual freedom of
movement and for really equal opportunities in the broad Euro-
Mediterranean area.

Bibliography

Andreas P. (2003), “A Tale of Two Borders: The U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-

Canada Lines After 9/11” Working Paper n. 977, University of
California, San Diego.
Barros L., Lahlou M., Escoffier C., Pumares P. Ruspini P. (2002),
L’immigration irrégulière subsaharienne à travers et vers le
Maroc, Bit, Geneve
Beaverstock J. V., Boardwell J. T. (2000), “Negotiation globalization,
transnational corporations and global city financial centres in
transient migration studies”, Applied Geography, 20, pp. 227-304.
Bigo D., (a cura di) (1998), Sicurezza e Immigrazione, “Cultures &
Conflits”, n°32-34

19
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

Bigo D., Guild E. (2004), “Schengen e la politica dei visti”, in Bonaiuti

G. Simoncini A., La catastrofe e il parassita, Mimesis, Milano, pp.
313-345.
Bunyan T. (2002) “The War on Freedom and Democracy”, Statewatch
News Online, no. 13 (September).
Castells M. (2002), La nascita della società in rete, Milano, Università
Bocconi.
Chomette G. P. (2003), “Alle frontiere orientali dell’Unione europea”,
Le Monde diplomatique/Il Manifesto (marzo), pp. 4-5.
Cohen R. (1987), The New Helots: Migrants in the International
Divisione of Labour, Gower, London.
Dal Lago A. (1999), Non-persone. L’esclusione dei migranti in una
società globale, Milano, Feltrinelli.
Dal Lago A. (2003), Polizia globale. Guerra e conflitti dopo l'11
settembre, Ombrecorte, Verona
Dezalay Y. (2004), “Les courtiers de l’international”, Actes de la
recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 151-2 (mars), pp. 5-36.
Dietrich H. (2003), “The New Regime at the Bug River. The East of
Poland and the Phare Programmes”, Statewatch vol. 13 (January-
February).
Diminescu D. (2003), “Introduction”, in Diminescu D. (sld.), Visibles,
mais peu nombreux, Maison des Sciences de l’homme, Paris, pp.
1-24.
Donnan H., Wilson T.M. (1999), Borders. Frontiers of Identity, Nation
and State, Oxford, UK.
Düvell F. (2004), La globalizzazione del controllo delle migrazioni in
Mezzadra S. (a cura di), I confini della libertà, Roma.
DeriveApprodi, pp. 23-50.
Genté R., Rouy L. (2005), “Nell’ombra delle ‘rivoluzioni spontanee’”, Le
Monde diplomatique, gennaio 2005, p. 6.
Hannerz U. (1996), Transnational Connections, Routledge, London.
Icftu (2004) (ed.), Behind the Brand Names. Working Conditions and
Labour Rights in Export Processing Zones, Icftu, London.
Martin P. L. (2003), Managing Labor Migration: Temporary Worker
Programs for the 21st Century, Ilo, Geneva.
Palidda S. (2000), Polizia postmoderna. Etnografia del nuovo controllo
sociale, Feltrinelli, Milano
Palidda S. (2003), Migrants, étrangers, criminels. Comment sortir du
cercle des nouvelles peurs collectives et des nouveaux sujets
dangereux?, Relazione al Forum "Cohésion sociale ou sécurité
publique", Consiglio d'Europa, 23-24 ottobre
Palidda (2003a), “Le nuove migrazioni verso i paesi del nord-Africa e
verso l’Europa”, in Ismu (a cura del), IX Rapporto sulle
migrazioni¸Franco Angeli, Milano.
Papastergiadis N. (2000), The Turbolence of Migration, Polity Press,
Cambridge.
Pascucci A. (2003), “L’ultima cortina dell’Europa” Il Manifesto (23
febbraio), p. 8
Ruspini (2004), The New Emigration Space, Paper presented at 2nd
Conference of the EAPS Working Group on International Migration
in Europe, Rome (25-27 November).
Sacchetto D. (2004), Il Nordest e il suo Oriente, Verona, Ombre Corte.
Salt J. (2004), Managing New Migrations in Europe: Concept and
Reality, Paper presented at the Conference “International

20
 Offshore Outsourcing and Migrations

Migration in Europe: New Trends, New Methods of Analysis, Rome

(25-27 November).
Sassen S. (1994), Cities in a World Economy, Thousands Oaks, Pine
Forge Press
Sayad A. (2002), La doppia assenza, Cortina, Milano.
Stalker (2000), Workers Without Frontiers, Geneva, Ilo.
Stalker P. (2002), “Migration Trends and Migration Policy in Europe”,
International Migration, Vol. 40 (5), pp. 151-179.
Trentin M. (2004), La politica economica della Libia. 1992-2004,
Working Paper, Istituto Affari Internazionali, Roma.
Zaccaria P. (2004) “Border Studies” in Coglitore R., Mazzara F.,
Dizionario degli studi culturali, Meltemi, Roma, pp. 86-96.

21
 Differentials of Surplus-Value In The
Contemporary Forms of Exploitation

Massimiliano Tomba1

In order to comprehend the contemporary forms of exploitation we

need to free ourselves from a certain idea of historicism that has
influenced Marxism. The crisis of Marxism, announced by Althusser as
having finally arrived 30 years ago, or its contemporary death,
announced by many after the fall of actually existing socialism, are the
occasion for taking the opportunity to reckon accounts with that
tradition. Not only with dogmatic Marxism seeking ineluctable historical
laws, but also with more critical versions of Marxism, when they
employ categories like ‘pre-capitalist’ or ‘pre-political’ in order to
characterise cases that are certainly contemporary, but not yet
completely capitalist or adequate to the political form of the modern
state.
If there is a way of comprehending that which today goes under
the name of globalisation, this certainly passes by way of the
assumption of the overcoming of the distinction between the first,
second and third worlds. These levels are reciprocally interpenetrated,

1 This essay is the modified version of a paper presented in the section ‘The
Differential of Surplus-value: an indispensable feature of contemporary
accumulation’ (Il differenziale di plusvalore: un tratto indispensabile
dell'accumulazione contemporanea) during the conference of ‘Altreragioni’,
held in Bologna on the 1st and 2nd of May, 1998. After many years during
which this article remained in the drawer, certain circumstances – above all,
the intention to revivify a collective project on questions regarding
contemporary forms of exploitation and the rethinking of a notion of historicity
adequate to the problems of globalisation – have encouraged me to work on
this old study again. I presented this text at the Conference of Historical
Materialism “New Directions In Marxist Theory” held on 9 December 2006 in
London. This text is the shorter and partial modified version of an essay that
will be published in the next number of HM.

23
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

giving rise to the co-existence, in a striking spatial proximity, of high

technological levels and absolute forms of extortion of surplus-value.
The error would be to consider these forms of exploitation today as
residual, or regressions to the 19th century. Rather, they must be
understood as the forms most adequate to the current complex of
capitalist relations of production. The inadequacy of a whole way of
reasoning in terms of tendency and residue is now so obvious that one
cannot disagree with the severe judgement of Chakrabarty when he
affirms that to speak of a ‘survival of an earlier mode of production’
means to reason with ‘stagist and elitist conceptions of history’, and, in
polemic with theories of ‘uneven development’, maintains that it is
historicist to consider ‘Marx’s distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘real’
subsumption of labour […] as a question of historical transition’.2 But
the same critique is also valid for a part of one of the most intelligent
theoretical and political traditions of European Marxism: l’operaismo
(workerism). Sooner or later it will be necessary to write the history of
this tradition ‘against the grain’. This tradition, after having begun from
the perspective of the political centrality of the mass worker (operaio
massa), went on to consider industrial labour as secondary and
residual in as much, according to what Negri writes today, we live ‘in a
society characterised ever more strongly by the hegemony of
immaterial labour’.3 Before conducting any theoretical reflection it
would be necessary to ask: to which fragment of the planet do these
analyses refer? And why are material labour and the most brutal forms
of extortion of absolute surplus-value not residual in four-fifths of the
planet? It is certainly not a case of a lack of information regarding the
global phenomenology of labour. The problem regards the unrigorous
categories adopted in order to read and intervene in the social
relations. The problems seem to arise when the workerist gesture
chases after the subject of antagonism in the historical process, whose
tendency is carved out by looking at a postage stamp of the world.
Beginning from this, a historical-philosophical rhythm is then ascribed
to the rest of the planet.
In order to avoid surrendering to these historicist equations,
according to which the industrial working-class today would stand in
the same relation to immaterial labour as the peasants did to the
industrial working-class in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to re-
descend into the laboratories of production. It is necessary to follow
the chains of valorisation that, with delocalisation, exit not only from
the factory but which also cross national frontiers, and thus also the
salary differentials from which capital profits. But a mapping of

2 Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 12-14 and note 37 on p. 261.

3 Negri 1998, p. 8.

24
 Differentials of Surplus-Value In The Contemporary Forms of Exploitation

delocalisation would be only a faded photograph in black and white

without the vivid colours of living labour, of the migrant workers who,
affirming their freedom of movement, clash with the capitalist interest
to construct and preserve salary differentials within and outside
Europe.

I In Marx's Laboratory

It is necessary to rethink the conceptual structure that makes it

possible for us to comprehend the contemporary capitalist forms of
exploitation, to retrace Marx’s movement from the abstract to the
concrete. It is not a case of giving merely an objective representation
of the processes currently underway. We have to understand the
subjective insurgencies that disarticulate the process, because the
political task is their rearticulation on new foundations.
In the celebrated ‘Preface’ of 1859 Marx delineates the
progressive process of universal history according to definite stages.
The Asiatic, classical, feudal and bourgeois modes of production are
qualified as ‘progressive epochs’, with respect to which the bourgeois
is ‘the last antagonistic form of the process of production’. Marx
liberated himself with difficulty from this historical-philosophical
(geschichtsphilosophisch) legacy, perhaps only during the maturation
of the conceptual structure of Capital. Directly confronting the Asiatic
modes of production and the Russian populists4, he understood that
there are not predetermined stages of capitalist development. In a
letter at the end of 1877 to the Editor of Otecestvennye Zapiski, he
wrote that his sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe
could not be transformed ‘into a historical-philosophical theory of
universal development, predetermined by fate, for all peoples,
regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find
themselves’. He had learnt that one could never understand historical
phenomena ‘with the passe-partout of a philosophy of history whose
supreme virtue is to be suprahistorical’.5 Marx arrived at this
acquisition by making an idea of the development of the forces of
production interact with the concrete replies of history, that is to say,
the histories of the struggles that, interacting with the atemporal
historicity of capital, co-determine its history.
The hasty liquidation of the notion of value has not helped us to
comprehend Marx’s rethinking of this conceptual structure during the

4 Marx overcomes his own Eurocentrism towards the end of the 60s, opening
himself to the problematic of ‘peripheral’ Russia: cf. Dussel 1990, ch. VII.
5 Cf. Marx’s reply to N.K. Michajlovskij in a letter to the editor of Otecestvennye
Zapiski at the end of 1877 in Marx Engels Collected Works (MECW) 24, 201.

25
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

years of writing Capital.6 For Marx, the notion of value constituted a

problem. It was for this reason that he continually returned to it. In
1858, he still considered Ricardo’s theory of value to be correct. 7 Four
years later, however, it is presented as a bearer of a confusion
between values and prices.8 The year is significant, because, even if it
does not signal the exact moment in which Marx completely
abandoned the Ricardian theory, it at least indicates the context: the
entire period between 1861 and 1863, during which Marx compiles a
good 23 notebooks of economic writings. The problem troubles him not
only during the preparation of Capital, but also after, forcing him to
revise the diverse editions and even further, to intervene in the French
translation. Marxian philology provides us today an enormous quantity
of material for comprehending the sense of this work in progress. It is
probably useful to seek, not some solution of Marx’s to the question of
value, but rather, to retrace Marx’s gesture, that is, to pose once again
the problem that is inside the question of value.
Continuing to reflect on the value-form, Marx emphasises always
more forcefully both the social nature of the relation of value, and its
historically determinate character. ‘First, that which should be noted
straight away: the general or abstract character of labour is, in the
production of commodities, its social (gesellschaftlich] character,
because it is the character of the equality (Gleichheit] of the labours
incorporated in the different labour products. This determinant form of
social labour (Diese bestimmte Form der gesellschaftlichen Arbeit]
distinguishes commodity production from other modes of production’.9
The abstract character of labour refers to the social character of the
labour of the production of commodities, which is characterised as a
form of production specifically capitalist and distinct from any other
mode of production.

6 The overvaluation of the Grundrisse, set against Capital, has also not helped,
at least in Italy. Negri still invites us today to re-read the Grundrisse as a
theoretical anticipation of the mature capitalist society, written by a Marx who
‘tells us that capitalist development leads to a society in which industrial
labour (in as much as it is immediate labour) is now only a secondary element
in the organisation of capitalism’. (my italics) (Negri 1998: 7-8). Tronti,
however, had already presented the Grundrisse as a ‘more advanced book’ in
regard both to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and to
Capital (Tronti 1966: 210). In the attempt to seek the action of the
revolutionary subjectivity imprisoned, according to Negri, in the categorical
objectivisation of Capital, Marx’s rethinking of that conceptual structure has
been entirely disregarded. However, it was a rethinking whose vital substance
was instead constituted by the concreteness of class conflicts.
7 Marx to Lassalle, 11th March 1858: ‘You yourself will have found in your
economic studies that in the development of profit Ricardo falls into
contradiction with his (correct) determination of value’: MECW 40, 286-7.
8 Marx to Engels, 2nd August 1862 in MECW 41, 394-398.
9 K. Marx, Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des «Kapitals»
(Dezember 1871-Januar 1872), in MEGA2, II/6, pp. 28-9.

26
 Differentials of Surplus-Value In The Contemporary Forms of Exploitation

This passage is fully intelligible when reading the seventh chapter

(‘The Labour Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value’) as
simultaneously presupposed by and the result of that which precedes
it10. Due to a ‘will to a system’, Marx developed abstract labour and
value before the process of valorisation. This order has generated the
illusion of being able to historicise simple commodity production,
distinguishing it from capitalist production in the strict sense.11 A
reading of this type gives rise to a metahistorical theory of value. At
the same time, it develops diachronically conceptual determinations
that should instead be understood synchronically. This way of seeing
has generated, as we will soon see, the misunderstanding of the
paradigm in two stages and the extension of the commodity form to
non-capitalist modes of production. For Marx, on the other hand, the
commodity exists only in a specifically capitalist constellation of the
mode and relations of production: ‘What I proceed from is the simplest
social form in which the product of labour presents itself in
contemporary society, and this is the “commodity”’.12 This acquisition
allows us to understand the constitutive categories of capital as
entirely operative from the origin of the capitalist mode of production.
That means that when we speak of capital it is necessary to assume as
given the entire conceptual constellation.
It was an error to read the development of capital in evolutionist
terms: politically, this view has coincided with that of progress. Thus
not only is any society denied the possibility of leaping over the
‘natural phases’ of its development, but forms of exploitation are laid
out diachronically, when they are instead completely complementary.
This is the case of absolute and relative surplus-value, that is, of the
extortion of surplus-value by means of a lengthening of the working
day and the intensification of labour through the introduction of
machines. The passage from formal subsumption to real subsumption,
from the extortion of absolute surplus-value to relative surplus-value,
is not marked according to a paradigm of stages13 in which the first

10 Cf. Bellofiore 2004, pp. 170-210; Finelli 2005, pp. 211-23.

11 It was Engels who linked the category of ‘‘simple mercantile production’ to the
part on the commodity in Capital, thus giving an historicist interpretationof
capitalist development: cf. Hecker 1997, pp. 119-126: ‘Engels’s explanation of
simple commodity production as feudal production represents the attempt of
the historicisation of social relations’ (ibid, p. 122).
12 K. Marx, ‘Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der Politischer
Oekonomie’ (1881-82), in MEW, Bd. 19, p. 369; MECW 24, 531-562.
13 It should be remember that the term ‘subsumption’, regularlyused until the
end of the 1860s, became less frequent in Capital, even though never
disappearing completely. Badaloni noted something significant in this regard,
emphasising how the term ‘Unterwerfung’ (submission) takes the place of
‘subsumption’, ‘with an analogous meaning to that of real subsumption and
nevertheless without the historical reference to two stages that to a certain
extent entagle the concept of subsumption’ (Badaloni 1984, pp. 20-1). The

27
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

gives way to the second. 14 The passage from the third part (‘The
Production of Absolute Surplus-Value’) to the fourth (‘The Production of
Relative Surplus-Value’) is marked by the final lines of chapter ten,
where the workers, ‘as a class’, succeeded in establishing a state law
on the duration of the working day. If in fact ‘the creation of a normal
working-day is […] the product of a protracted civil war, more or less
dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working-class’15,
capital responds to the war with an augmentation of the productive
force of labour by means of machines. ‘Progress’ is measured by this
intensification of exploitation. For this reason, it is unrealistic, even
when not in bad faith, to prophesise the liberation of labour by means
of machines within capitalist relations of production, when the use-
value of labour remains intrinsically capitalist. Innovation is a response
to the insurgency of living labour. That means that capital introduces
new machinery because it is compelled to, both by the unruliness of
the workers and the physiological limit reached in the exploitation of
labour power.
Absolute and relative surplus-value are not to be thought in a
diachronic succession, but synchronically in an historical-temporal
multiversum. Relative surplus-value is such only in relation to absolute
surplus-value: relative surplus-value not only does not replace absolute
surplus-value, but necessitates, for its own realisation, an increase of
the quantity of socially produced absolute surplus-value. The use of
machines in production allows the exploitation of labour with a greater
intensity with respect to the social average of exploitation, and it is
precisely this differential quota that constitutes relative surplus-value.
As we will see, this gap must necessarily be covered by a production of
absolute surplus-value, which thus, far from being an archaic form of
capitalist exploitation or a residue of the nineteenth century, is the
form of extortion of surplus-value most adequate to our times.
The existence of conditions of labour where the working day is
notably longer than 8 hours and the wages are below the conditions of
survival - that is, high absolute surplus-value - is not to be attributed to
past capitalist forms that live on only in economically depressed zones.
Rather, it is a case of the result and the presupposition of the

paradigm of two stages is still present in the so-called unedited sixth chapter,
with respect to which, however, it should be noted that whenMarx
commenced the writing of the definitive text of the first book of Capital, in
1866, he eliminated the part of the manuscripts containingthe sixth chapter,
of which he left only a summary in thefirst edition. He eliminated eventhat in
the second edition. Cf. Antonowa 1982, pp. 63-72.
14 This ‘historicising’ formulation is found in the writings of Negri from the 1970s
to Negri and Hardt 2000, pp. 254-55: ‘At a certain point, as capitalist
expansion reaches its limit, the processes of formal subsumption can no longer
play the central role’.
15 MECW 35, 305.

28
 Differentials of Surplus-Value In The Contemporary Forms of Exploitation

‘progress’ of capital. The more capital uses technology and thus

machines, the more elevated therefore the mass of surplus-values that
is produced, so much the more must the direct extortion of absolute
surplus-value increase.

II In the Laboratory of Production. On the Reciprocal

Implication of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value

Let us stay for a moment in Marx’s laboratory. Here we discover that

the distinction between value and exchange-value is a late acquisition
of Marx. After the confusion of the Grundrisse follows the attempt to
find a conceptual rigour in the writings of the 60s, until the formulation
of the ‘Randglossen zu Adolph Wagners Lehrbuch der politischen
Ökonomie’. It is important to understand exchange-value, beyond
some logical-conceptual shifts present even in the writings of the
mature Marx, not as the objectification of labour immediately spent in
the production of a determinate commodity, but as an expression of
the quantity of social labour objectified in the commodity: ‘that which
determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of
labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its
production’.16 It is in Capital that we find the highest level of
conceptual determination of social labour, and it is this determination
that needs to be assumed in order to test Marx’s entire theoretical
edifice. That which needs to be clear, and which also contains a
moment of real difficulty, is that the labour objectified in the
exchange-value of a commodity does not correspond to the quantity of
labour immediately spent in its production. Instead, it is the fruit of a
mediation with socially allocated labour. In this sense, the expression
individual value (individueller Wert) is a contradiction in itself: not only
because, as Marx emphases in the Marginal Notes on Wagner in 1881-
82 – the dates are important in this case – ‘exchange-value in the
singular does not exist’17, but because it presupposes a value
determined quantitatively by labour individually employed in the
production of this commodity, and not by social labour. This, on the
other hand, is not a definite size once and for all. Rather, it is variable
and its variability retroacts on the determination of the quantity of
social labour contained in a commodity. If the general conditions inside
which a certain quantity of commodities are produced change, then –
Marx affirms – a reverse effect (Rückwirkung) takes place on them.18 It

16 MECW 35, 48.

17 K. Marx, ‘Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der Politischer
Oekonomie’ (1881-82), MECW 24, 531-562.
18 Cf. Ökonomisches Manuskript 1861-1863, Teil 1, in MEW, Bd. 43, p. 75.

29
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

is possible that a determinate quantity of labour time already

objectified in a commodity changes due to a change in the social
productivity of labour, which reacts on the exchange-value of the
commodity itself.
The notion of retroaction (Rückwirkung) allows Marx to explain a
change in value that has its origins ‘outside (außerhalb)’ of the process
of production, and specifically following a change of the cost of raw
materials or the introduction of a ‘new invention’.19 This important
Marxian understanding is possible only within a constellation that is
clear on the social character of the labour that valorises value: ‘The
value of a commodity is certainly determined by the quantity of labour
contained in it, but this quantity is itself socially (gesellschaftlich)
determined. If the amount of labour-time socially necessary for the
production of any commodity alters…this reacts back on all the old
commodities of the same type, because…their value at any given time
is measured by the labour socially necessary to produce them, i.e., by
the labour necessary under the social conditions existing at the
time.”20 In other words: the changes in the intensity of social labour
react back on the commodities already produced, causing a change in
the labour time objectified in them21.
If Capital represents the high point of categorical elaboration, it is
here that we must find the most mature consequences of this way of
understanding social labour and exchange-value. As already seen,
“The real value of a commodity, however, is not its individual, but its
social value; that is to say, its value is not measured by the labour-time
that the article costs the producer in each individual case, but by the
labour-time socially required for its production.”22 If therefore the value
of a commodity depends upon the labour time objectified in it, it
should be kept in mind that this labour time is not that effectively
employed for the production of a given use-object, but can be either
greater or smaller than that. The generic human labour time objectified
in the substance of value must be adjusted to the time that social
labour would need to carry out that same job. Surplus value is not a
quantifiable amount within the accounting of a single firm.
The idea, recurring in numerous places in Marx’s analysis and
taken up by Kautsky23, according to which surplus-value would be

19 MECW 35, p. 318.

20 MECW 35, p. 318.
21 See M. De Angelis, Value(s), Measure(s) andDisciplinary Markets, in «The
Commoner», n. 10 (2005), in http://www.commoner.org.uk/10deangelis.pdf.
22 MECW 35, p. 434.
23 In Kautsky the linear depiction of surplus-value is represented in the following
schema: A————C————B; where AC represents the ‘line of time of
necessary labour’ and CB the ‘time of excess labour’. According to this
schema, shortening the time of necessary labour (AC) gives an augmentation
of excess labour: this would be relative surplus-value. The lengthening of the

30
 Differentials of Surplus-Value In The Contemporary Forms of Exploitation

determined by the labour time that exceeds that which would be

necessary for the worker employed by an individual capital to produce
his own wages, is a simplification. Lets us suppose that the singular
commodity value  and from this, surplus-value  can be calculated
in a linear way, that is to say, based upon the time of labour that
exceeds that which is necessary to replenish the wage. On the other
hand, the value produced, which is an objectivation of social labour, is
not deductible from the labour actually expended in a single
productive process. If the productive force of the latter is below the
productivity of social labour, it can happen that, despite wages in this
particular sector are pushed downward and the labour time upward,
the production of surplus labour remains very low24.
The case that can happen is that an hour of work of high intensity
corresponds to two hours of social labour, in the places where the
society as a whole still does not use technological innovation. This
exchange, where one is equal to two, violates only the intellectual
principles of whomever holds to grade-school mathematics; the value
of commodities in general, and therefore also of those produced with
technological innovation, is its social value, that is, the quantity of
social labour objectified in it. This phenomenon imposes itself violently
in the world market, where an increase in the productive power of
labour through the introduction of a new machine counts as an
increase in the intensity of labour if the capitalist can sell the
commodities at a superior price, equivalent to the labour necessary to
produce the same commodity on the part of other capitalists who still
lack that technological innovation. The fact that the labour time
effectively expended is inferior to that which is socially necessary
changes nothing in the relationship, except that the capitalist, selling
the commodity at its value, appropriates social surplus value, and
therefore exchanges one hour of labour for two. “Hence the capitalist
who applies the improved method of production appropriates and
devotes to surplus labour a greater portion (Extramehrwert) of the
working day that the other capitalists in the same business.” 25 Beyond
numbers, the Extramehrwert that is appropriated by the capitalist
corresponds to the quantity of social surplus value that he can

working day (AB) constitutes instead absolute surplus-value. Cf. Kautsky 1972,
p. 102. Kautsky’s error consists substantially in understanding the time of
necessary labour as the time of labour necessary for the maintenance of the
worker (pp. 78-9).
24 The segment AC of the linear schema (see previous note) can be shortenedby
reducing wages, but the value of labour-power and, therefore, the quantity of
labour that this costs, must be calculated on the basis of the labour
productivity which is socially necessary and not on the basis of that individual
labour.
25 MECW 35, p. 436.

31
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

withdraw from the society to the extent that he is an extractor of

relative surplus value.
In this way a greater number of hours of work concretely
performed pass through the hands of the capitalist who utilizes a
greater productive power of work without violating the law of
equivalence. The difference between capitalists who exploit work of
different productivity is therefore necessary so that it will be possible
to extract relative surplus value from the advantage that springs from
the technological innovation. This can be seen not only on a worldwide
scale, where capital in continually in search of masses of absolute
surplus value, but also within the western metropolises and even
within the same corporation, broken up into apparently independent
productive segments and in competition with each other: capital is in
any case searching for the maximum gap possible between the
intensity of labour in phases that, even if they are part of the same
cycle, are recomposed through circulation.
The differential quota between a given intensity of labour and
social labour is concretely realised through a transfer of value from
production spheres in which the intensity of labour is lower relative to
those in which capital exploits labour at an intensity that is higher than
the social average. The immediate repercussion of a technological
innovation is a prolonging of labour time wherever the innovation is
not yet employed: “One of the first consequences of the introduction of
new machinery, before it has become dominant in its branch of
production, is the prolongation of the labour-time of the labourers who
continue to work with the old and unimproved means of production.” 26
The introduction of a new machine generates an increase in relative
surplus value, an increase that, in order to be realised, must be
sustained by a proportional increase in the extraction of absolute
surplus value, where the innovation has not yet been employed. The
relative surplus value is relative in this sense, because it, to be real,
must be placed in relation to absolute surplus value. To the extent to
which the capitalist that takes advantage of a technological innovation
realises at least a part of the relative surplus value that is potentially
his, this surplus value takes form through a social transfer of value
from productive areas of high absolute surplus value towards those of
high relative surplus value. The relative increase in the labour
productivity and of the surplus value in some sectors of production
leads to a de-valorisation of labour-power that could also manifest
itself as growth of the exploitation of reproduction work  whether
waged or unwaged. Indeed, we should always keep into consideration

26 K. Marx, Oekonomisches Manuskript 1861-1863, Teil 1, in MEW 43, Berlin,

1990, p. 323.

32
 Differentials of Surplus-Value In The Contemporary Forms of Exploitation

the quantity of labour that is indirectly commanded by capital through

a wage.
Only when Marx clarified further the nature of exchange-value, he
was able to show that the machine not only does not create value, but
it also does not produce surplus value: “As machinery comes into
general use in a particular branch of production, the social value of the
machine’s product sinks down to its individual value, and the following
law asserts itself: surplus value does not arise from the labour-power
that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power
actually employed in working with the machinery.”27 When a
technological innovation becomes widespread, the growing intensity of
labour obtained through its employment becomes socially dominant
and there is less chance of extracting quotas of social surplus value
from the means of production of relative surplus value.
The production of surplus value make use of machines in two
ways: one, indirectly, through the devalorisation of labour-power
following the expulsion of workers replaced by machines; second,
relative surplus value stricto sensu, exploiting the sporadic introduction
of machines. The latter circumstance is that which allows the
exploitation of labour of a greater intensity than the social average,
such that the individual labour objectified in this commodity is less
than the quantity of socially average labour. 28 And we know by now
that only the latter determines exchange-value.
When the intensity of labour obtained by a technical innovation
becomes socially dominant, it unleashes “the most ruthless and
excessive prolongation of the working day, in order that he may secure
compensation for the decrease in the relative number of workers
exploited by increasing not only relative but also absolute surplus
labour.”29 The extraction of relative surplus value generates, in those
parts of the world where workers’ resistance is lower, a great mass of
absolute exploitation. This means that the introduction of new
machinery is not a pre-determined route in the history of all countries,
but on the contrary different capitals in head-to-head competition with
each other in the world market must seek out or create geographic
areas with different labour powers having different wages and
productive powers.30 If the reciprocal implication of the various forms
of surplus value are grasped, then it is only out of faith in some
progressive and Eurocentric philosophy of history that it is possible to
consider some forms of production as backward and wage labour,
extended to the whole world, as residual.

27 MECW 35, p. 530.

28 MECW 35, p. 530.
29 MECW 35, p. 531.
30 Interesting is the argument of Marini 1991, p. 8-10.

33
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

Formal subsumtion is the basis of capitalist production as the

production of surplus value in a process whose end is the production of
commodities for the market; real subsumtion presents itself instead as
a specifically capitalist form because it doesn’t allow the previous
social relations to remain, but revolutionises the technical processes of
production and the formation of social groups (gesellschaftliche
Gruppierungen). 31 To these two forms should also be added a third
form, rarely studied: that of the hybrid or intermediate forms
(Zwitterformen) of subsumption.32 Marx speaks of them for the first
time in Capital. They are forms in which surplus labour is extracted by
means of direct coercion (direkter Zwang), without there being formal
subsumption of labour to capital. Marx observes how these forms can
indeed be understood as forms of transition, but can also be
reproduced in the background of large scale industry. The hybrid
forms, though they are not formally subsumed to capital and though
labour is not given in the form of wage labour, fall under the command
of capital. That allows us to comprehend the contemporaneity of
apparently anachronistic forms like slavery, which are not mere
residues of past epochs, but forms that, though with an altered
physionomy, are produced and reproduced in the background of the
current capitalist mode of production.
The exploitation of child labour in Asian countries and hours of
work up to eighteen a day33 are not cases of capitalist
underdevelopment, but express the current levels of production of
social surplus value.34 If we assume all the way through the reciprocal
co-penetration between absolute and relative surplus value, the
distinction between North and South of the world, between first,
second and third world, or if one prefers, between core, semi-periphery
and periphery with ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ capitalisms, lose a great
part of their significance. It is no longer possible to reason in terms of
tendencies and residues: the various forms of exploitation are to be
understood in a historical-temporal multiversum, in which they interact
within the contemporaneity of the present. This interlinking should be
followed materially along the lines of the differences between national
salaries. Analysis and practical intervention here should succeed in
fusing together.

31 MEW Bd. 23, p. 533, transl. MECW 35, p. 645.

32 A happy exception is the work of P. Murray,who recalled my attention to
hybrid subsumption: Murray 2004; Murray 2000, p. 122.
33 On the conditions of labour in China see Chan and Xiaoyang 2003, pp. 559-
584.
34 Globalization makes political command capitalistically productive that asserts
itself along the borders to conserve the valorizing potential of wage
differentials. See the work of Sacchetto 2004. See also Gambino 2003. On the
non-residual character of forced labour and the processes of enslavement of
contemporary labour-power, see Zanin 2002.

34
 Differentials of Surplus-Value In The Contemporary Forms of Exploitation

Globalisation renders the political command that it exercises

along the borders capitalistically productive in order to conserve the
valorising potential of differential wages. This command is manifested
over migrant workers without any niceties. Sovereignty, rights of
citizenship and control of the borders operate economically in order to
delineate different wage areas that can be preserved only by reducing
to a minimum the movements of labour power from one area to the
other.35 The chains of valorisation cross a multiplicity of wage areas,
national and intranational, using those differentials profitably.
Delocalisation makes the difference of the intensity of labour and of
wage levels capitalistically productive: that would not be possible
without a political command over the migrant flows. These migrant
flows therefore justly rank highly among the forms of workers’
resistance to control and the forms of self-determination of the wage
against capital. The migrant workers are not bare life but labour power
that, violating the borders, tends to disrupt the division of labour and
national differentials of wages. The policies of regulation of the migrant
flows, on the other hand, are economic policies of segmentation of the
labour market and of the demarcation of wage differentials. All the
contemporary forms of the removal of wage differentials should thus
be investigated as subjective insurgencies in tension with wage labour.
As if the assembly lines had exited from the factory in order to
undertake a long world tour, the chains of valorisation cross the
borders of states, profiting from the national differentials of wages. In
this context, political command over the borders and capitalist
command over labour power are fused. The spectral nature of this
interweaving is manifested in the policies against migrants and in the
detention centres for migrants, the so-called ‘Centres of temporary
stay’ (Centri di Permanenza Temporanea). In order to comprehend
these processes it is urgently necessary to go back down into the
laboratories of production, in order to be able to comprehend the
production process of valorisation in a snap shot. We must also,
however, free ourselves from the comfort-blanket of a teleological
philosophy of history not yet deactivated in the notion of ‘tendency’.
There aren’t any short cuts.

Translated by Peter Thomas and Steven Colatrella

35 There have been attempts of practical intervention in this direction in recent

years. An element of these can be seen in Raimondi and Ricciardi 2004.

35
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

References

Antonowa, I. 1982. Der Platz des sechsten Kapitels Resultate des

unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses in der Struktur des Kapitals,
in «Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung», n. 11.
Bellofiore, R. 2004. Marx and the Macro-monetary Foundation of
Microeconomics, in R. Bellofiore and N. Taylor (Eds), The
Constitution of Capital. Essay on Volume I of Marx’s Capital,
Chippenham and Eastbourne, Palgrave.
Badaloni, N. 1984. Prefazione, in K. Marx, Risultati del processo di
produzione immediato, Roma.
Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University
Press.
Chan, A. and Xiaoyang, Z. 2003. “Disciplinary Labour Regimes in
Chinese Factory” in Critical Asian Studies, vol. 35, n.4.
De Angelis, M. 2005. Value(s), Measure(s) and Disciplinary Markets, in
«The Commoner», n. 10, in
http://www.commoner.org.uk/10deangelis.pdf.
Dussel, E. 1990. El ultimo Marx (1863-1882) y la liberacion latino
americana, México, Siglo XXI.
Finelli, R. 2005. La scienza del Capitale come “circolo del presupposto-
posto”, in M. Musto (Ed.), Sulle tracce di un fantasma. L’opera di
Karl Marx tra filologia e filosofia, Roma, manifestolibri.
Gambino, F. 2003. Migranti nella tempesta. Avvistamenti per l’inizio
del nuovo millennio, Verona, Ombre Corte.
Hecker, R. 1997. Einfache Warenproduktion, in W.-F. Haug (ed.),
Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus Bd. 3, Hamburg,
Argument.
Kautsky, K. 1972. K. Marx’ ökonomische Lehre, Stuttgart, 18924, Italian
translation by G. Backhaus, Introduzione al pensiero economico
di Marx, Bari.
Marini, R.M. 1991. Dialéctica de la dependencia, Ediciones Era,
México.
Marx, K. and F. Engels, Collected Works, London, Lawrence & Wishart,
1975-2005 (MECW).
Marx, K./F. Engels, Gesamtausgabe, hrsg. von Institut für Marxismus-
Leninismus, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1975 ss. (MEGA2).
Marx, K. – F. Engels, Werke, 43 Bde, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1984-90
(MEW).
Murray, P. 2000. Marx's 'Truly Social' Labor Theory of Value: Part II,
How is Labour that Is Under the Sway of Capital Actually
Abstract?, in «Historical Materialism», No. 7 (2000), pp. 243-73.
Murray, P. 2004. “The Social and Material Transformation of Production
by Capital: Formal and Real Subsumption in Capital, Volume 1,” in
Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor (edited by), Capital, The
Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital”,
Basingstoke-Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan.
Negri, A. 1998. Introduzione alla nuova edizione, in A. Negri, Marx oltre
Marx, Roma, manifestolibri.
Negri, A. and Hardt M. 2000. Empire, Harvard University Press.

36
 Differentials of Surplus-Value In The Contemporary Forms of Exploitation

Raimondi, F. and Ricciardi, M. (eds.). 2004. Lavoro migrante.

Esperienza e prospettiva, Roma, DeriveApprodi.
Sacchetto, D. 2004. Il Nordest e il suo Oriente. Migranti, capitali e
azioni umanitarie, Verona, Ombre Corte.
Tronti, M. 1966. Operai e capitale, Torino, Einaudi.
Zanin, V. 2002. Studi sul lavoro coatto contemporaneo, Padova, CLEUP.

37
 A Critique of the Fordism
of the Regulation School

Ferruccio Gambino1

Introduction

Some of the categories that people have used in recent years to

describe the changes taking place in the world of production, such as
Fordism, post-Fordism and immaterial production, have shown
themselves to be rather blunt instruments.2 Here I intend to deal with
the use of the concepts “Fordism” and “post-Fordism” by the
regulation school, which has given a particular twist to the former
term, and which coined ex novo the latter. The aim of my article is to
help break the conflict-excluding spell under which the regulation
school has succeeded in casting Fordism and post-Fordism.
From midway through the 1970s, as a result of the writings of
Michel Aglietta3 and then of other exponents of the regulation school,

1 The English version of this paper appeared in 1996 in Common Sense no. 19
and was subsequently published as a chapter in Werner Bonefeld (ed),
Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays In Post-Political Politics Writing,
New York, Autonomedia, 2003.
2 For a timely critique of the term “immaterial production”, see Sergio Bologna,
“Problematiche del lavoro autonomo in Italia” (Part I), Altreragioni, no. 1
(1992), pp. 10-27.
3 Michel Aglietta, (1974), Accumulation et régulation du capitalisme en longue
période. L’exemple des Etats Unis (1870-1970), Paris, INSEE, 1974; the second
French edition has the title Régulation et crises du capitalisme, Paris, Calmann-
Lévy, 1976; English translation, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the US
Experience, London and New York, Verso, 1979; in 1987 there followed a
second English edition from the same publisher. The link between the category

39
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

including Boyer, Coriat and Lipietz, Fordism began to take on a neutral

meaning, due in part to a degree of slipshod historiography, but also to
the reduction of movements of social classes into mere abstraction.4
When they use the term Fordism, the regulation school are
referring essentially to a system of production based on the assembly
line, which is capable of relatively high industrial productivity.5 The
regulationists’ attention is directed not so much to the well-
documented inflexibility of the Fordist process of production, to the
necessary deskilling of the workforce, to the rigidity of Fordism’s
structure of command and its productive and social hierarchy, nor to
the forms and contents of industrial conflict generated within it, but to
the regulation of relations of production by the state, operating as a
locus of mediation and institutional reconciliation between social
forces. I shall call this interpretation “regulationist Fordism”, and shall
use “pre-trade union Fordism” to refer to the sense in which Fordism

of Fordism and that of post-Fordism may be considered the term “neo-

Fordism”, proposed by Christian Palloix two years after the publication of the
first edition of Aglietta’s book. Cf. Christian Palloix, “Le procés du travail. Du
fordisme au neo-fordisme”, La Pensée no. 185 (February 1976), pp. 37-60,
according to whom neo-Fordism refersto the new capitalist practice of job
enrichment and job recomposition as a response to new requirements in the
management of workforces.
4 For the regulationist interpretation of Fordism prior to 1991, see the
fundamental volume edited by Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, Post-
Fordism and Social Form: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State, London,
Macmillan, 1991, which contains the principal bibliographical references for
the debate. For the regulation school see, among others, the following works:
Robert Boyer, La théorie de la régulation: une analyse critique, Paris, La
Découverte, 1986; Robert Boyer (ed.), Capitalismes fin de siécle, Paris, Presses
Universitaires de France, 1986; Alain Lipietz, “Towards Global Fordism?”, New
Left Review no. 132 (March-April 1982), pp. 33-47; Alain Lipietz, “Imperialism
as the Beast of the Apocalypse”, Capital and Class, no. 22 (Spring 1984), pp.
81-109; Alain Lipietz, “Behind the Crisis: the Exhaustion of a Regime of
Accumulation. A ‘Regulation School Perspective’ on Some French Empirical
Works”, Review of Radical Political Economy, vol. 18, no. 1-2 (1986), pp. 13-32;
Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: the Crisis of Global Fordism, London, Verso,
1987; Alain Lipietz, “Fordism and post-Fordism” in W. Outhwaite and Tom
Bottomore (eds.), The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social
Thought, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, pp. 230-31; Benjamin Coriat, Penser á
l’envers. Travail et organisation dans l’entreprise japonaise, Paris, Christian
Bourgois, 1991; Italian translation, Ripensare l’organizzazione del lavoro.
Concetti e prassi del modello giapponese, Bari, Dedalo, 1991, with introduction
and translation by Mirella Giannini.
5 I say “relatively high productivity” because the assembly line has not always
produced results. For example, the Soviet Fordism of the first two five-year
plans (1928-32, 1933-37) was the object of some experimentation, particularly
on the assembly lines of the Gorki auto factory (thanks in part to the technical
support of Ford technicians), but productivity turned out to be about 50 per
cent lower than that of Ford’s US factory. Cf. John P. Hardt and George D.
Holliday, “Technology Transfer and Change in the Soviet Economic System”, in
Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., Technology and Communist Culture:the Socio-Cultural
Impact of Technology under Socialism, New York and London, Praeger,1977,
pp. 183-223.

40
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

was generally understood in Europe from the early 1920s to the

1960s.6

Regulationist Fordism

In what follows I shall outline briefly the periodisation which the

inventors of the regulationist notion of Fordism have given their idea,
because this is crucial if we are to understand the ways in which it is
semantically distinct from pre-trade union Fordism; I shall then sketch
the basic characteristics of the latter.
According to the regulation school, Fordism penetrated the vital
ganglia of the US engineering industry and became its catalysing force
in a period that is undefined, but presumably in the 1920s, delivering
high wages and acting as the cutting edge of the mass consumption of
consumer durables. Having passed through the mill of the Great
Depression and the Second World War, Fordism then provided the
basis for the expansion of Keynesian effective demand in the United
States, where it provided the underpinning for a “welfare” regime, and
thus for a stable global social reproduction, presumably from the end

6 In his “Fordism and post-Fordism”, op. cit., p. 230, Lipietz maintains incorrectly
that the term “Fordism” “was coined in the 1930s by the Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci and by the Belgian socialist Henri de Man”. Lipietz is
obviously referring to “Americanismo e fordismo” (1934) in Antonio Gramsci,
Quaderni del carcere, vol. 3. ed. Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi, 1975,
pp. 2137-81, a series of notes in which Gramsci takes account, among other
things, of a book by de Man which does not directly discuss Fordism. The first
edition of de Man’s work appeared in Germany in 1926: Hendrik de Man, Zur
psychologie des Sozialismus, Jena, E. Diederichs, 1926 and, after a partial
French translation which appeared in Brussels in 1927, a complete translation
was published under the title of Au delá du Marxisme, Paris, Alcan, 1929,
based on the second German edition published by Diederichs (1927). For his
prison notes on “Americanism and Fordism”, Gramsci had the Italian
translation of the French edition published by Alcan: Henri de Man, Il
superamento del marxismo, Bari, Laterza, 1929. In Europe the term “Fordism”
pre-dates de Man and Gramsci, and was already in use in the early 1920s; cf.
in particular Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, Fordismus? Paraphrasen über das
Verhältnis von Wirtschaft und Technischer Vernunft bei Henry Ford und
Frederick W. Taylor, Jena, Gustav Fischer, 1924; H. Sinzheimer, “L’Europa e
l’idea di democrazia economica” (1925), Quaderni di azione sociale XXXIX, no.
2 (1994), pp. 71-4, edited and translated by Sandro Mezzadra, whom I thank
for this reference. In his article cited above, Lipietz states equally erroneously
that “in the 1960s the term was rediscovered by a number of Italian Marxists
(R. Panzieri, M. Tronti, A. Negri)”. In Italy the discussion of Fordism was
addressed, taking a critical distance from Gramsci, in the volume of Romano
Alquati’s writings, Sulla FIAT e altri scritti, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1975, which
brought together texts from the period 1961-1967, and in the volume by
Sergio Bologna, George P. Rawick, Mauro Gobbini, Antonio Negri, Luciano
Ferrari-Bravo and Ferruccio Gambino, Operai e Stato: Lotte operaie e riforma
dello stato capitalistico tra rivoluzione d’Ottobre e New Deal, Milano, Feltrinelli,
1972, which contained the proceedings of a conference held in Padova in
1967.

41
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

of the 1940s onwards. In the 1950s, this system of production is seen

as reaching out from the United States towards the countries of
Western Europe, and Japan. According to the regulationist
periodisation, therefore, the high season of Fordism actually turns out
to be rather brief, since it converges—albeit only on paper—with
Keynesianism at about the end of the 1930s; then it becomes a
concrete reality at the start of the 1950s, and lasts through to the end
of the 1960s, when it goes into irreversible crisis. In their view, that
point sees the opening of the period—through which we are still
passing—of post-Fordism.
The regulation school can justifiably claim credit for the
interpretation which associates transformations in the processes of
valorisation with changes taking place in the socio-political sphere, and
vice-versa. It was to make this position its own, and developed it with
contributions on the state apparatus and its relations with modern and
contemporary capital, in the writings of Hirsch and Roth in Germany
and Jessop in Britain.7 According to Jessop, the regulation school
comprises four principal directions of research.8
The first direction, initiated by Aglietta, studies regimes of
accumulation and models of growth according to their economic
determinations, and it applied its first interpretative schema to the
United States. Other studies looked at state economic formations—
sometimes to examine the spread of Fordism in a given context, and
sometimes to follow the particular circumstances of its development—
independently from the question of the insertion or otherwise of those
states within the international economic circuit.
The second direction concentrates on the international economic
dimensions of regulation. It studies the various particular models of
international regulation, as well as the form and extent of the
complementarity between different national models of growth. This
involves examining subjects such as the inclusion and/or exclusion of
state and regional formations from the economic order, and the
tendencies to autarchic closure and/or internationalistic openness of
given countries.
The third direction analyses the overall models of the social
structures of accumulation at national level. Reproduction of society
depends on an ensemble of institutionally mediated practices which

7 See in particular, in Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway (eds.) Post-Fordism

and Social Form, op. cit., the essay by Joachim Hirsch, “Fordism and post-
Fordism: The Present Social Crisis and its Consequences”, pp. 8-34, and the
two essays by Bob Jessop, “Regulation Theory, Post-Fordism and the State:
More than a Reply to Werner Bonefeld”, pp. 69-91; and” Polar Bears and Class
Struggle: Much Less than a Self-Criticism”, pp. 145-69, which contain further
bibliographical references.
8 Bob Jessop, “Regulation Theory, Post-Fordism and the State”, op. cit., pp. 87-8.

42
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

guarantee at least a degree of correspondence between different

structures and a balance of compromise between social forces. This
strand of regulationism devotes particular attention to the categories
of state and hegemony, which it considers to be central elements of
social regulation.
The fourth strand, the least developed of the four, studies the
interdependences of emerging international structures, and various
attempts to lay the basis of a world order through international
institutions (which the regulationists call “regimes”) aimed at
establishing or re-establishing an international order.
Now, even from this summary listing of the regulation school’s
principal themes it becomes obvious that the centre of gravity of its
interests lies in the analysis not so much of the social relations of
production, but rather of the economic/state institutions which oversee
them. In short, the regulation school stresses the permanence of
structures, and tends to overlook human subjects, their changes and
what is happening to them with the disorganisation and reorganisation
of social relations.
From the start regulationism has been fascinated by the staying
power of US capital post-1968, despite the United States’ defeat in
Vietnam. According to the regulationists, in the period after World War
II one has to grant the US “the dominant imperialist position”9: it
therefore becomes necessary to understand how, and thanks to what
institutions its structures and those of its allied industrial countries
maintained their stability. Within this hypothesis there is an underlying
assumption, in which Western institutions are seen as remaining solid
(extremely solid in the case of the US), while not only the institutions
of the labour movement, but also living labour power as a whole
appear as inescapably subjugated to the unstoppable march of
accumulation: in short, in the medium and long term capital’s stately
progress is destined to continue, while its aporias melt on the horizon.
Thus it becomes a question of studying the laws by which Western
capital has succeeded in perpetuating itself. It was from within this
framework that Michel Aglietta’s book10 emerged, in the year following
the first oil price shock, which was also the year of Washington’s
political and military defeat in Vietnam.

9 Joachim Hirsch, “Fordism and Post-Fordism: The Present Social Crisis and its
Consequences”, op. cit., p. 15.
10 Michel Aglietta (1974), Accumulation et régulation du capitalisme en longue
période. Exemple des Etats Unis (1870-1970), Paris, INSEE, 1974.

43
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

The Uncertain Contours of Regulationist Post-Fordism

For the regulation school, post-Fordism is like a crystal ball in which,

“leaving aside the still not completely foreseeable consequences of
molecular and genetic technology” it is possible to read some signs of
the future. Particularly in the new information technology, in
telecommunications and in data processing technologies, all of which
could become the basis for a “hyperindustrialisation”, they see a
potential for revolution in the world of production. Radically
transforming work and fragmenting the “Taylorist mass worker”, the
“electronic revolution” restratifies labour power and divides it into a
relatively restricted upper level of the super-skilled, and a massive
lower level of ordinary post-Fordist doers and executors. In short, it
separates and divides labour power hierarchically and spatially and
ends by breaking the framework of collective bargaining. 11 As a result
the rhythm of accumulation becomes more intense, and there opens a
perspective of a long period of capitalism without opposition—a turbo-
capitalism—with a political stability that is preserved intact. The post-
Fordist worker of the regulation school appears as an individual who is
atomised, flexibilised, increasingly non-union, kept on low wages and
inescapably in jobs that are always precarious. The state no longer
guarantees to cover the material costs of reproduction of labour power,
and oversees a contraction of workers’ consumption. In the opinion of
the regulation school it would be hard to imagine a more complete
overturning of so-called Fordist consumerism, within which, it is
claimed, the workforce was allegedly put into conditions of wage
employment which would enable them to buy the consumer durables
that they created.
If we then look at the discontinuity between Fordism and post-
Fordism, it seems to derive from the failure of two essential conditions:
the mode of capitalist accumulation and the failure to adjust mass
consumption to the increase in productivity generated by intense
accumulation.12 In the “golden years” following the Second World War,
these two conditions had been satisfied. Fordism mobilised industrial
capacities at both the extremes of high skilled and low skilled labour,
without the system being destabilised by this polarisation; satisfactory
profits were produced from mass consumption, which kept pace with
growing investments.13 As from the 1960s, these twin conditions were
no longer given, because investments in the commodity-producing

11 Joachim Hirsch, “Fordism and Post-Fordism: The Present Social Crisis and its
Consequences”, pp. 25-6.
12 Alain Lipietz, “Towards Global Fordism”, New Left Review, no. 132 (March-April
1982), pp. 33-47.
13 Ibid., pp. 35-6.

44
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

sector in the industrialised countries grew more than productivity,

generating a crisis which capital then attempted to resolve by seeking
out production options and market outlets in the Third World.
According to the regulationists the consequences at the social
level are enormous. The influence of the state is reduced in society;
the state is pared back; the majority sector of the non-privileged cuts
back on its standard of living in order to organise its own survival;
there is no sign of new aggregations arising out of the ashes of the old
organisations and capable of expressing a collective solidarity. For the
regulationists, strikes, campaigns and conflicts at the point of
production are seen in terms of a pre-political spectrum which ranges
between interesting curiosities (to which university research cannot be
expected to pay attention) and residual phenomena.

The Toyotophile Variant

The proponents of the advent of post-Fordism discovered Toyotism as

a variant of post-Fordism towards the end of the 1980s.14 In the 1960s,
the West began belatedly to take account of the expansion of Japanese
capitalism.15 At that time it was understood as a phenomenon which
combined shrewd commercial strategies with an endemic conformism
and inadequate social policies.16 On the Left there were some who—
correctly, and before their time—saw in Japanese expansion new
hegemonic temptations for Japan in East Asia.17 Some years later, an
admirer of the country’s rate of economic growth drew attention to the
regular increase in Japan’s standard of living and the way in which the
Japanese absorbed the oil price “shocks” of the 1960s.18 There were
also those who issued warnings about the regimentation of Japanese
society, and about its incipient refusal of the rules dictated by the
West.19 Meanwhile there was something of a fashion for Japanese

14 On this development, cf. the review by Giuseppe Bonazzi, “La scoperta del
modello giapponese nelle società occidentali”, Stato e Mercato, no. 39
(December 1993), pp. 437-66, which discusses the variously critical reception
of the Japanese model within Western sociology; more briefly and in more
general terms, cf. Pierre-François Souyri, “Un nouveau paradigme?”, Annales,
vol. 49, no. 3 (May-June 1994), pp. 503-10.
15 Robert Guillain, Japon, troisiéme grand, Paris, Seuil, 1969; Herman Kahn, The
Emerging Japanese Superstate,Minneapolis, Minn., Hudson Institute, 1970.
16 Robert Brochier, Le miracle économique japonais, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1970.
17 Jon Halliday and David McCormack, Japanese Imperialism Today: Co-prosperity
in Greater East Asia, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973.
18 Ezra Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, Cambridge, Mass.,
Harvard University Press, 1979.
19 Karel Van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power, New York, N.Y., Knopf,
1989.

45
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

authors who supplied the West with dubious but easy explanations of
the rise of Japan on the basis of its cultural and religious ways of life.20
In the 1980s the debate entered the public domain with the
publication of a number of important works on Japan’s economic
structures, despite the growing hostility of Western commercial
interests and subsequent gratuitous attacks on the Japanese industrial
system in the media.21 However, still in the 1980s, a number of studies
by Japanese economists and sociologists that had been translated into
English went almost unobserved.22 Even the book by the main inventor
and propagator of the word “Toyotism”, Tai’ichi Ohno,23 was only
translated and distributed in the West at the end of the 1980s, at a
point when the world of Japanese industry was becoming one of the
key focuses for discussions of industrial productivity.
In the early 1990s, thanks principally to the book by Coriat,24 in
continental Europe too the focus of the debate on Japanese industry
shifted from cultural motivations to business strategies; other earlier
and worthwhile contributions had aroused less interest. According to
Coriat, the lessons emanating from the Toyota factories introduced a
new paradigm of productivity, whose importance was comparable to
those of Taylorism and Fordism in their time. Thus Toyotism comes
into the limelight in the guise of a post-Fordism that is complete and
by now inevitable. Toyotism is seen as the fulfilment of a tendency to
a new form of rationalisation, a rationalisation which had certainly
dawned with the category of post-Fordism, but which, in the West, had
appeared vague, not yet taking concrete form in a specific form of
production and a consolidated social space. In Toyotism however, we
are told by Coriat, post-Fordism is realised not only as an ensemble of
attempts to rationalise and reduce production costs, but also as a
major experiment in new and more advanced relations of production—

20 Chie Nakane, Japanese Society, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970; Italian
translation, La societá giapponese, Milan, Cortina. Michio Morishima, Why Has
Japan “Succeeded”?, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Italian
translation, Cultura e technologia nel successo giapponese, Bologna, Il Mulino,
1984.
21 Jean-Loup Lesage, Les grands sociétés de commerce au Japon, les Shosha,
Paris, PUF; Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: the growth of
industrial policy, 1925-75, Tokyo, Tuttle, 1986.
22 Masahiko Aoki, The Economic Analysis of the Japanese Firm, Amsterdam,
Elsevier, 1984; Kazuo Koike, Understanding Industrial Relations in Modern
Japan, London, Macmillan, 1988.
23 Tai’ichi Ohno, Toyota Seisan Hoshiki [The Toyota Production Method], Diamond
Sha, 1978; English translation, The Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-
scale Production, Productivity Press, Cambridge, Mass.; French translation,
L’esprit Toyota, Paris, Masson, 1989; Italian translation, Lo spirito toyota,
Torino, Einaudi, 1993.
24 Benjamin Coriat, Penser á l’envers. Travail et organisation dans l’entreprise
japonaise, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1991; Italian tranlation, Ripensare
l’organizzazione del lavoro. Concetti e prassi del modello giapponese, Bari,
Dedalo, 1991.

46
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

in fact of a new sociality which might prefigure new forms of industrial

democracy. In Coriat’s book the West remains in the background, but if
we transferred our attention from the delicate balance of productivity
in Japan to its European variant, the diffuse factory, we would find an
informal Toyotism already operating there, based on individual work
contracts. For example, in the celebrated Italian industrial districts, we
would find the employers in the “diffuse factory” attempting to set up
individual relationships with their workers in order to break down
systems of collective bargaining.
According to the Toyotist vulgate, the new system of productivity
emerged principally as a result of endogenous demand factors during
and after the boom of the Korean War (1950-53), as “just-in-time”
production, and thus in large part as an attempt to reduce lead times
and cut the workforce.25
What is new about Toyotism is essentially the elements of “just-
in-time” production and prompt reaction to market requirements; the
imposition of multi-jobbing on workers employed on several machines,
either simultaneously or sequentially; quality control throughout the
entire flow of production; real-time information on the progress of
production in the factory; information which is both capillary and
filtered in an authoritarian sense, in such a way as to create social
embarrassment and drama in the event of incidents which are harmful
to production. Production can be interrupted at any moment, thus
calling to account a given work-team, or department, or even the
whole factory. Any worker who shows a waged-worker’s indifference to
the company’s productivity requirements, and therefore decides not to
join “quality control” groups etc, is stigmatised and encouraged to
leave. From Coriat we learn that in the interplay of “democracy” and
“ostracism”, the group may enjoy a measure of democracy, but the
person stigmatised will certainly enjoy ostracism. In the interests of
comprehensiveness, in his description of the wonders of Toyotism
Coriat26 devotes a laconic note to Satochi Kamata, the writer who went
to work in Toyota in 1972 and whose experiences were reflected in the
title of his book: Toyota, the Factory of Despair.27
Toyotism has a number of advantages for the regulation school
as regards Western managerial perspectives, even though the
Japanese advantage in productivity is showing itself to be tenuous,
despite the propagandistic aura that has surrounded it in the West. 28

25 Benjamin Coriat, Ripensare l’organizzazione del lavoro, op. cit., pp. 32-3.
26 Ibid., p. 85.
27 Satochi Kamata, Toyota, l’usine du désespoir, Paris, Editions Ouviriéres, 1976;
English translation, Japan in the Passing Lane: Insider’s Account of Life in a
Japanese Auto Factory, New York, N.Y., Unwin Hyman, 1984. By the same
author, L’envers du Miracle, Paris, Maspéro, 1980.
28 Ray and Cindelyn Eberts, The Myths of Japanese Quality,Upper Saddle, N.J.,

47
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

First of all, it is an experiment that is geographically remote and

commercially successful, inasmuch as it defines a route to
accumulation (albeit in conjunctures that are both pre-war and war-
based, and not at all in conditions of peace, as the enthusiasts of
Toyotism would like to have us believe). In the second place, Toyotist
methods seem to contradict the growing process of individualisation,
which is often given as the reason for the endemic resistance from
Western workforces to massification and regimentation. Thirdly,
Toyotism is the bearer of a programme of tertiarisation of the
workforce, the so-called “whitening” of the blue-collar worker, which,
while it actually only involves a rather limited minority of workers,
nonetheless converges with the prognosis for a dualistic restratification
of the workforce which the post-Fordists consider inevitable.

Pre-Trade Union Fordism

What was the reality of Fordism for those workers who experienced it
at first hand? Put briefly, Fordism is an authoritarian system of
production imposed “objectively” by the assembly line, operating on
wages and working conditions which the workforce is not in a position
to negotiate collectively. Pre-trade union Fordism, with its use of
speed-up, armed security guards, physical intimidation in the
workplace and external propaganda, in the 1920s and 1930s was one
of the key elements in the slow construction of the world of
concentration camps which put out its claws initially in Stalin’s Soviet
Union and which would soon put out claws in Nazi Germany too. By the
opposite token, even during the Depression, the US witnessed a
continued, and even strengthened, democratic grass-roots way of
doing things which aimed at the building of the industrial union, and
which laid siege to Fordism, and brought it down. In the twenty years
preceding the unionisation of Ford in 1941, the company’s managers
and goon squads conducted anti-worker repression, with beatings,
sackings and public relations operations. One day perhaps we will be
able to be more detailed than Irving Bernstein when, speaking of the
main Ford plant of that period, he wrote: “The River Rouge... was a
gigantic concentration camp founded on fear and physical assault”.29
The fact is that the Fordist mania for breaking down the rhythms of
human activity in order to crib and confine it within a rigid plan at the
worldwide level was defeated in the United States, but in the
meantime it had already made its way across to a Europe that was in
Prentice Hall, 1994.
29 Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker 1933-
1941, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1969, p. 737.

48
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

flames. One could argue that in the twentieth century the assembly
line is, together with totalitarian state systems and racist nationalism,
one of the originating structures which broadly explain the
concentration-camp crimes perpetrated on an industrial scale. By this
I mean that in pre-trade union Fordism, and in Taylorism before it,
there was not already contained in potentiality its opposite: not the
superiority of work “to capital” as in Abraham Lincoln; nor the
construction of the CIO industrial union; nor the fall of the racism and
male dominated division of labour; nor even less the right to strike.
Fascism and Nazism were not in their origins the losing versions of
Fordism, but were forced to become such thanks to the social and
working-class struggles of the 1930s in the United States—struggles
which had already stopped a ruling class that was set on a course of
corporatist solutions at the time of the formation of the first Roosevelt
government in 1932-33.
As we know, in the United States the assembly line dates from
way back. The process of series production of durable goods in the
twentieth century was built on the American System of Manufactures,
the method of production by interchangeable parts which was already
operating in US industry in the nineteenth century.30 Ford’s experiment
in his factories is a crucial moment in this series production, inasmuch
as it applies it to a consumer durable, the motor car, which had been a
luxury object in the early years of this century, even in the United
States. By so doing, Ford structured an increasingly broad-based and
pressing consumer demand, which in its turn legitimated among public
opinion the authoritarian measures so typical of the Ford factories in
the period stretching from the early part of the century to the eve of
World War II.
I use the word “authoritarian” advisedly to describe the Ford
experiment, because in its way it was both more authoritarian and—
especially—more grounded than the proposals that had been advanced
by F.W. Taylor twenty years previously. The worker who works for Ford
is an individual who produces the means for a multiplication of the
points of contact between individuals, 31 but paradoxically he produces
it precisely thanks to his own imprisonment for hours on end at the
point of production, where he is deprived of the right of movement to
an extent hitherto unheard of, just as the woman employed on his daily
reproduction is bound to the rhythms of industrial production while at
the same time confined to the social twilight of domestic labour. The
30 David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production (1800-
1932), Baltimore and London, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
31 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p. 265: “Society does not consist of
individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which
these individuals stand.”

49
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

worker is also deprived of the right of speech, because—in this respect

Fordist disciplining goes one stage further than Taylorism—the rhythm
of his working day is set not so much by direct verbal orders from a
superior, as by a pre-ordained tempo set by the factory’s machinery.
Communication and contact with his peers was minimised and the
worker was expected simply to respond automatically and
monotonously to the pace set by a totalitarian productive system. By
no means the least of these factors of isolation were the linguistic
barriers which immigrant workers brought as a gift to Ford, and which
the company maintained and deliberately exacerbated for four
decades on end, fomenting bitter incomprehensions and divisions.
These were lessened only with the passing of time, by daily contact
between workers, by the effects of the Depression, and by the
organisational efforts—apparently defeated from the start, but
nevertheless unstinting—of the minority who fought for industrial
unionism during the 1920s and 1930s.
As we know, right from its establishment in 1903, the Ford Motor
Company would not tolerate the presence of trade unions: not only the
craft unions or industrial unions, but even “yellow” or company unions.
Trade unions remained outside the gates of Ford-USA right up till 1941.
Wages became relatively high for a period with the famous “five-dollar
day” in January 1914, but only for those workers whom Ford’s
Sociological Department approved after a minute inspection of the
intimate details of their personal and family lives—and then only in
boom periods, when Ford was pressurised by the urgent need to
stabilise a workforce which was quitting its factories because of the
murderous levels of speed-up.32 The plan for total control of workers
and their families went into crisis after America’s entry into the war in
1917; thereupon surveillance began the more detailed use of spies on
the shop floor. In the recession following on World War I, the wages of
the other companies were tending to catch up with wages at Ford, and
Ford set about dismantling the forms of welfare adopted in the 1910s.
In February 1921, more than 30 per cent of Ford workers were sacked,
and those who remained had to be content with an inflation-hit six
dollars a day and further speed-ups.
Ford’s supremacy in the auto sector began to crack halfway
through the 1920s, when the managers at General Motors (in large
part refugees from Ford and its authoritarian methods), definitively
snatched primacy in the world of auto production. Rather than
pursuing undifferentiated production for the “multitudes”, as Henry
Ford called them, General Motors won the battle in the name of

32 Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control
in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921, Albany, N.Y., State University of New
York Press, 1981, in particular pp. 96-202.

50
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

distinctiveness and individuation, broadening its range of products,

diversifying, and introducing new models on a yearly basis. From the
end of the 1920s, and up till unionisation in 1941, the Ford Motor
Company was to be notorious for its wages, which were lower even
than the already low wages in the auto sector in general.33
The fact of the company having been overtaken by General
Motors, and Ford’s financial difficulties, were not sufficient to break
pre-trade union Fordism in the United States: it took, first, the working-
class revolts and the factory sit-ins of the 1930s, and then the
unionisation of heavy industry, to bring about the political encirclement
of the other auto manufacturers, and, finally, of Ford, to the point
where it eventually capitulated to the United Auto Workers union
following the big strike in the Spring of 1941. Pre-trade union Fordism
dissolved at the point when, faced with attacks by the company’s
armed security guards, the picketing strikers instead of backing down
increased in numbers and saw them off. It was a moment worth
recalling with the words of Emil Mazey, one of the main UAW
organisers: “It was like seeing men who had been half-dead suddenly
come to life”.34
With the signing of the first union contract in 1941, not only did
Ford line up with the other two majors in the auto industry, General
Motors and Chrysler, but it even outdid them in concessions to the
UAW. Ford was then saved from bankruptcy a second time only thanks
to war orders from the government. Already in the course of the
Second World War it had been attempting to strengthen the trade
union apparatus in the factory, to bring it into line with the company’s
objectives. As from 1946, a new Ford management set about a long-
term strategy to coopt the UAW and turn it into an instrument of
company integration. Thus was Fordism buried. If, by Fordism, we
mean an authoritarian system of series production based on the
assembly line, with wages and conditions of work which the workforce
is not in a position to negotiate by trade union means—Fordism as it
was generally understood by labour sociologists in the 1920s and
1930s—then Fordism was eliminated thanks to the struggles for
industrial unionism in the United States in the 1930s, which were
crowned by the imposition of collective bargaining at Ford in 1941. As

33 Joyce Shaw Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 1900-1933, Albany, N.Y.,

State University of New York, 1987. As Samuel Romer wrote in “The Detroit
Strike”, The Nation (vol. 136, no. 3528), 15 February 1933, pp. 167-8: “The
automobile industry is a seasonal one. The factories slow down production
during the fall months in order to prepare the new yearly models; and the
automobilie worker has to stretch the ‘highwages’ of eight months to cover
the full twelve-month period.” Cf. also M.W. La Fever (1929), “Instability of
Employment in the Automobile Industry”, Monthly Labor Review, vol. XXVIII,
pp. 214-17.
34 Bernstein, Turbulent Years, op. cit., p. 744.

51
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

for the dictatorial tendency to deny the workforce discretionality in the

setting of work speeds, and the imposition of work speeds incorporated
into machinery, these were far from disappearing with the end of pre-
trade union Fordism; if anything, by the late 1990s they become more
pressing than ever, precisely in the face of the growth in the
productive power of labour and the advent of computer-controlled
machinery—but that now takes us a long way from pre-trade union
Fordism.
We may or may not choose to see these tendencies as a chapter
in a far broader movement of rationalisation which began with the
American System of Manufactures and which has not yet fully run its
course. In any event, the overall drive to command over worktimes
through the “objectivity” of machinery35 was incubated by other large
companies before Ford, explodes with the diffusion of the Fordist
assembly line, but is not at all extinguished with its temporary defeat
at the end of the 1930s. In fact it seems to impose itself with renewed
virulence even in the most remote corners where capitalism has
penetrated.

Global Post-Fordism and Toyotism

As for the category of post-Fordism, in its obscure formulation by the

regulation school, it then opened the way to a number of positions
which seemed to be grounded in two unproven axioms: the
technological determinism of small-series production which, since the
1960s, is supposed to represent a major break with large series
production in the manufacture of consumer durables; and the recent
discovery of the productivity of communication between what they
choose to call the “producers” in industry.36
The first axiom derives from the assertion that material
production in general (even in engineering—which is more
discontinuous than flow production) today proceeds by small series,
because, thanks to the increasing flexibility of machine tools,
beginning with the numerical control machinery of the 1950s, it has
become easier to diversify products, in particular in the production of
consumer durables. This diversification makes it possible to meet the
needs of consumers seeking individuality, but also to mould people’s

35 David Noble, “Social Choice in Machine Design”, in Andrew Zimbalist, Case

Studies on the Labor Process, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1979, pp. 18-
50.
36 An updated synthesis of these positions is to be found in Marco Revelli’s essay,
“Economia a modello sociale nel passaggio tra fordismo e toyotismo” in Pietro
Ingrao and Rossana Rossanda, Appunti di fine secolo, Rome, Manifestolibri,
1995, pp. 161-224.

52
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

tastes and to offer them the little touches and personalising elements
that pass for expensive innovations. In short, this tendency is merely a
strengthening of the drive to diversification which General Motors had
attempted and promoted right from the 1920s, and which enabled it to
beat Ford at a time when Henry Ford was saying that his customers
could have any colour of car that they wanted as long as it was black.
Mass production had only in appearance moulded the mass-worker (a
term which is used, but also abused, in identifying changing historical
figures in class composition). In some departments of Ford’s biggest
factory, River Rouge, the Ford silence was broken by the “Ford
whisper”, or by “discourse by hand signals”, one of the elements of
working-class resistance up until the decisive confrontation of 1941. 37
Despite the fact that workers had to wear identical blue overalls, and
despite the fact that they were not given permission even to think, it
was plain that the “producers” had minds which aspired to
individuation, not to a universal levelling. We were reaching the end of
the levelling battle for an equality “which would have the permanence
of a fixed popular opinion”.38 Towards the end of the 1920, Henry Ford
found himself for the first time in serious financial difficulties, arising
out of his insistence on the single-colour Model T. It is worth noting that
in the Ford factories, even in the dark years of the 1930s, there were
workers willing to risk the sack by buying a General Motors car. 39 Thus,
within the auto industry, it was General Motors in the 1920s that
invented and brought about a flexible production that matched the
needs of the times.40 Its diversified vehicles were produced by means
of a “commonalisation” of machine tools and of the main components
of the finished auto. The basis of economies of range was economies of
scale. The advent of variety in production did not have to wait for
Toyotism, as C. Wright Mills was well aware in the early 1950s, when
he denounced the manipulating interplay between mass tastes and
“personal touches” in the products of his time.41
Furthermore, it is taken as real that Toyotism had already broken
with “Fordism” in the 1950s and 1960s, because it needed to be
flexible in order for its auto production to cope with a demand that was

37 Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years, op. cit., p. 740.

38 Karl Marx, Capital, vol.1, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, p. 152.
39 Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years, op. cit., p. 740.
40 While not belonging to the regulation school, there are two admirers of the
Italian industrial districts who presented flexible production as an innovation
typical of the 1970s. Here the reference was not to Japan, but to the eastern
part of the Po Valley plain: J. Michael Piore and Charles F. Sabel (1983), The
Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity, New York, N.Y., Basic
Books; Italian translation, Le due vie dello sviluppo industriale. Produzione di
massa e produzione flessibile, Torino, ISEDI, 1987.
41 Charles Wright Mills, “Commentary on OurCulture and Our Country”, Partisan
Review, vol. 19, no. 4 (July-August 1952), pp. 446-50, and in particular p. 447.

53
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

somewhat diversified. Even the prime advocate of Toyotism 42 makes

this clear, and a number of Western researchers, including Coriat, have
propagated its myth. The fact was that in the post-War period, Toyota,
as was the case with Nissan, was relatively inexperienced as a
producer of vehicles; it had begun production only in 1936, and had
quickly learned to build itself an oligopolistic position which contributed
to the dislodging of Ford and General Motors from Japan a bare three
years later. After 1945, with the Toyoda family still at the helm, the
company focused on large series production, which was exported, and
then also produced abroad. The continuity not with regulationist
Fordism but with the US auto sector turns out to be far stronger than
the Toyotophile vulgate would be willing to admit.
After a difficult period of post-War reconversion, Toyota tried the
path of the cheap run-about (the Toyotapet), and experienced major
strikes in 1949 and 1953. It was saved principally by the intransigence
of Nissan, when they destroyed the Zenji auto union, but also thanks to
United States orders arising out of the Korean War. Subsequently, and
for a further twenty years to come, Toyota’s range of products, and
those of the other Japanese auto companies, was restricted to a very
limited number of models. Up until the 1960s the defective quality of
these models meant that exports were not a great success. Faced with
this lack of success, there began a phase of experimentation based on
using multi-jobbing mobile workteams on machine tools with variable
programming, and on attention to quality with a view to exports.43 It
was the success of one single model (the Corolla runabout) in the
1970s that laid the basis for a diversification of production, and not
vice-versa; and it was a success that Toyota was able to build on
abroad as well as at home, where the market was far less buoyant. Up
until the 1980s, the variety of Toyota models was prudently limited,
and only in the 1980s, when the domestic market experienced a
standstill, did the company expand their range of production with a
view to winning new markets overseas. Thus it was not the need for a
variety of models, but the mobilisation of the workforce after a historic
working-class defeat that explains Mr Ohno’s experiments at Toyota.
The principal novelty of his experiments was that whereas General
Motors in the 1920s had been content to have several ranges of cars
built on separate lines, Toyota created work teams that could be
commanded where and when necessary, to multi-jobbed labour on the
production of a variety of models along the same assembly line.

42 Tai’ichi Ohno, Toyota Seisan Hoshiki [The Toyota Method of Production], op.
Cit.
43 Marie-Claude Belis Bourguignanand Yannick Lung (1994), “Le Mythe de la
variété originelle. L’internationalisation dans la trajectoire du modéle productif
japonais”, Annales, 49, 2 (May-June), pp. 541-67.

54
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

As for “just in time” production, this had already been

experimented with, in its own way, by the auto industry in the United
States in the 1920s, and even after the Depression. The layoffs without
pay, which were so frequent in the 1920s, and even more so during the
Depression, because of the seasonal nature of demand, was one of the
battlefields that was decisive in the creation of the auto union in the
United States.44 In the 1936-37 showdown between the UAW and
General Motors, the union was victorious on the planning of stocks and
on the elimination of seasonal unemployment. Perhaps those who sing
the praises of “just in time” production could take a page or two out of
the history of Detroit in the 1930s, or maybe a page from the history of
the recent recurring strikes in Europe and the US by the independent
car-transporter drivers operating within the cycle of the auto industry,
who are actually the extreme appendages of the big companies.
As regards the second thesis, the supporters of the notion of post-
Fordism claim that production now requires, and will continue to
require, ever-higher levels of communication between productive
subjects, and that these levels in turn offer spaces of discretionality to
the so-called “producers”, spaces which are relatively significant,
compared with a past of non-communicating labour, of “the silent
compulsion of economic relations”45 of the modern world. This
communication is supposed to create an increasingly intense
connectivity between subjects, in contrast with the isolation, the
separateness and the silence imposed on the worker by the first and
second industrial revolutions. While it is certainly true that processes of
learning in production (“learning by doing”) have required and still
require a substantial degree of interaction, including verbal interaction,
between individuals, it remains the case that from Taylorism onwards
the saving of worktime is achieved to a large extent through reducing
to a minimum contact and informal interaction between planners and
doers. Taylorism tried, with scant results, to impose a planning in order
to increase productivity, depriving foremen and workers of the time-
discretionality which they assumed by negotiating informally and
verbally on the shop floor. However, in the era of pre-trade union
Fordism it should be remembered that in the periods of restructuring of
the factory, of changes of models and of technological innovation, the
“whispering” of restructuration was not only productive, but was
actually essential to the successful outcome of the operation. Anyway,
the silence imposed by authority and the deafening noise of
development is what dominates the auto industry through to the mid-

44 M.W. La Fever, “Instability of Employment in the Automobile Industry”, op. cit.,

pp. 214-17. Cf. also note 31 above.
45 Karl Marx, Capital, op. cit., p. 899.

55
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

1930s.46 But the disciplining of silence and of the whisper within the
channels of capital’s productive communication—is this not perhaps
also a constitutive characteristic of the modern factory? On this point,
one might note that industrial sociology, as a discipline, was built on
the concealing of the communicative dimension and on the rejection of
any analysis of the processes of verbal interaction in the workplace. It
is not a mere distraction. Here we have only to remember the words of
Harold Garfinkel:

“There exists a locally-produced order of work things; [...]

They make up a massive domain of organizational
phenomena; [...] classic studies of work, without remedy or
alternative, depend upon the existence of these phenomena,
make use of the domain, and ignore it.”47

As for the tendency to impose speed-up in totalitarian fashion, this

certainly did not disappear with the demise of pre-union Fordism; if
anything it is even more in evidence in this tail-end of the twentieth
century, precisely in the face of the strengthening of the productive
powers of labour. In fact the tendency now assumes some of the
characteristics of the pre-union Fordism of the Roaring Twenties: a
precariousness of people’s jobs; the non-existence of health care
schemes and unemployment benefits; cuts not only in the real wage
but also in money wages; the shifting of lines of production to areas
well away from industrially “mature” regions. Also working hours are
becoming longer rather than shorter. In the whole of the West, and in
the East too, people are working longer hours than twenty years ago,
and in a social dimension from which the regulatory power of the state
has been eclipsed. The fact that people are working longer hours, and
more intensively, is also thanks to the allegedly obsolete Taylorist
chronometer and the “outmoded” Fordist assembly line. Ironically,
precisely for France, which is where the regulationist school first
emerged, precious data, non-existent elsewhere, show that work on
assembly lines and subject to the constraint of an automated pace of
production is on the increase, in both percentage terms and absolute
terms: 13.2 per cent of workers were subjected to it in 1984, and 16.7
per cent in 1991 (out of, respectively, 6,187,000 and 6,239,000
workers).48

46 Joyce Shaw Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 1900-1933, op. cit., pp.
54-6; Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years, op. cit., p. 740.
47 Harold Garfinkel (ed.), Ethnomethodological Studies of Work, London and New
York, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 7.
48 Anon., Alternatives Economiques, May 1994, on the DARES data: Enquétes
spécifiques Acemo: Enquétes sur l’activité et les conditions d’emploi de main
—d’oeuvre. My thanks to Alain Bihr for this reference.

56
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

In the 1950s and 1960s—the “golden years” of Fordism as Lipietz

calls them—the international economy under the leadership of the
United States pushed the demand for private investment, even more
than the consumption of wage goods. What had appeared to be a
stable system began to come apart from the inside, because at the
end of the 1960s the class struggle, in its many different forms,
overturned capital’s solid certainties as regards the wage, the
organisation of the labour process, the relationship between
development and underdevelopment, and patriarchy. If one does not
understand the radicality of this challenge, it becomes impossible to
grasp the elements of crisis and uncertainty which characterised the
prospects for capital’s dominion in the twenty years that followed.49
The dishomogeneity of the reactions—from the war of manoeuvre
against blue collar workers in the industrialised countries, through to
capitalism’s regionalisation into three large areas (NAFTA, European
Union and Japan) and to the Gulf War—denote not the transition to a
post-Fordist model, but a continuous recombination of old and new
elements of domination in order to decompose labour power politically
within a newly flexibilised system of production.

Conclusions

The regulation school looks at the implications of this recombination

from capital’s side, seeing capital as the centre and motor of the
overall movement of society. Hirsch and Roth speak in the name of
many when they state that “it is always capital itself and the structures
which it imposes ‘objectively’, on the backs of the protagonists, that
sets in motion the decisive conditions of class struggles and of
processes of crisis”.50 Thus it is not surprising that the conclusions that
the regulationists draw from their position tend to go in the only
direction which is not precluded for them: namely that conflict against
the laws of capitalist development has no future, and also that there is
no point in drawing attention to the cracks in the edifice of domination.
Paraphrasing Mark Twain, one might say that if the regulationists have
only a pan-Fordist hammer, they will see only post-Fordist nails to
bang.
In taking up this position, not only do the regulationists deny
themselves the possibility of analysis of conflictual processes both now

49 See the indispensable “Contributionby Riccardo Bellofiore: On Pietro Ingrao

and Rossana Rossands, Appunti di Fine Secolo”, pub. Associazione dei
Lavoratori e delle Lavoratrici Torinesi (ALLT), 24 November 1995.
50 Joachim Hirsch and Roland Roth, Das neue Gesicht des Kapitalismus, Hamburg,
VSA, 1986, p. 37

57
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

and in the future, but they also exclude themselves from the multi-
voiced debate which is today focussing on social subjects. 51 This is the
only way in which one can explain the regulationists’ reduction of the
working class in the United States to a mere Fordised object,52 even in
its moments of greatest antagonistic projectuality as it was expressed
between the Depression and the emergence of the Nazi-Fascist new
order in Europe. And given the limits of its position, regulationism is
then unable to understand how this working class contributed
decisively in the placing of that selfsame United States capitalism onto
a collision course with Nazism and fascism. Pre-union Fordism was
transient, but not in the banal (but nonetheless significant) sense of
Henry Ford financing Hitler on his route to power and decorating
himself with Nazi medals right up until 1938, but because what
overturned the silent compulsion of the Fordised workforce was the
workforce itself, in one of its social movements of self-emancipation—a
fact of which the regulationists are not structurally equipped to
understand the vast implications at the world level, and for many
years to come, well beyond the end of World War II.
As regards today’s conditions, what is important is not the
examination of the novelties following on the collapse of various
certainties in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the possibility
or otherwise of avoiding the inevitability of the passage to a “post-
Fordist” paradigm in which labour power figures once again as a mere
object and inert mass. As Peláez and Holloway note, the insistence with
which the regulationists invite their audience to look the future in the
face arouses a certain perplexity.53 After all, a belief in the marvels of
technology within the organisations of the labour movement has led to
epic defeats in the past. What is at stake here is not just the
inevitability or otherwise of a system—the capitalist system—which has
too many connotations of oppression and death to be acceptable, but
even the possibility of any initiative, however tentative, on the part of
social subjects. What is at stake here is the possibility of resisting a
preconstituted subordination of labour power to the inexorable New
Times that are imposed in part, certainly, by the computer chip, but
also by powerful intra-imperialist hostilities, which for the moment are
disguised behind slogans such as competition and free trade.

51 On this theme see Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “Production, Identity and
Democracy”, Theory and Society, vol. 24, no. 3 (June 1995), pp. 427-67.
52 During the first two five-year plans under Stalin, the workers on the assembly
lines of the Gorky auto factory were referred to as “the Fordised”
(fordirovannye) by the Soviet authorities.
53 Eloina Pelàez and John Holloway, “Learning to Bow: Post-Fordism and
Technological Determinism”, in Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway (eds.),
Post-Fordism and Social Form, op. cit., 1991, p. 137.

58
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

What the present leads us to defend is the indetermination of the

boundaries of conflictual action. We shall thus have to re-examine a
means or two, with a view to clearing the future at least of the more
lamentable bleatings.
Up until now the decomposition and anatomisation of labour-
power as a “human machine” has been a preparatory process of the
various stages of mechanisation; it is a process which capitalist
domination has constantly presented as necessary. The point is not
whether post-Fordism is in our midst, but whether the sacrifice of
“human machines” on the pyramids of accumulation can be halted.

Translated by Ed Emery

Bibliography

AGLIETTA, Michel (1974), Accumulation et régulation du capitalisme en

longue période. L’exemple des Etats-Unis (1870-1970), Paris,
Insee, 1974; Régulation et crises du Capitalisme, Paris, Calmann-
Lévy, 1976 (2nd edition); English translation, A Theory of
Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, London and New York,
New Left Books, 1979 (2nd edition, Verso, London and New York,
1987).
ALQUATI, Romano (1975), Sulla Fiat e altri scritti, Milan, Feltrinelli.
ALQUATI, Romano (1989), Dispense di sociologia industriale, vol. III,
parts 1 and 2, Torino, Il Segnalibro.
ANONIMO (1994), “Taylor n’est pas mort”, Alternatives Economiques,
(May), on DARES data, Enquetes spécifiques Acemo, Enquetes
sur l’activité et les conditions d’emploi de main-d’oeuvre, Table
I.2.1.
AOKI, Masahiko (1984), The Economic Analysis of the Japanese Firm,
Amsterdam, Elsevier.
BELIS-BOURGOUIGNAN, Marie-Claude and LUNG, Yannick (1994), “Le
Mythe de la variété originelle. L’internationalisation dans la
trajectoire du modéle productif japonais”, Annales, 49, 2.
BERNSTEIN, Irving (1969), Turbulent Years: A History of the American
Worker 1933-1941, Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
BOLOGNA, Sergio, RAWICK, George P.,GOBBINI, Mauro, NEGRI, Antonio,
FERRARI BRAVO, Luciano, GAMBINO, Ferruccio, Operai e stato:
Lotte operaie e riforma dello stato capitalistico tra rivoluzione
d’Ottobre e New Deal, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1972.
BOLOGNA, Sergio, “Problematiche del lavoro autonomo in Italia”,
Altreragioni, 1 (1992).
BONAZZI, Giuseppe (1993), “La scoperta del modello giapponese nella
sociologia occidentale”, Stato e mercato, No. 39.
BONEFELD, Werner and HOLLOWAY, John (eds.) (1991), Post-Fordism
and Social Form: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State,
Houndmills and London, MacMillan.
BOYER, Robert (1986), La théorie de la régulation: une analyse
critique, Paris, La Découverte.

59
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

BOYER, Robert (ed.) (1986), Capitalismes fin de siécle, Paris, Presses

Universitaires de France.
BROCHIER, Robert (1970), Le miracle économique japonais, Paris,
Calmann-Lévy.
CORIAT, Benjamin (1991), Penser á l’envers. Travail et organisation
dans l’entreprise japonaise, Paris, Christan Bourgois, 1991; Italian
translation, Ripensare l’organizzazione del lavoro. Concetti e
prassi del modello giapponese, Bari, Dedalo, 1991, with
introduction and translation by Mirella Giannini.
DAVIS, Mike (1978), “‘Fordism’ in Crisis: A Review of Michel Aglietta’s
Regulation et Crises: L’Expérience des Etats Unis”, Review, 2.
EBERTS, Ray and Cindelyn (1994), The Myths of Japanese Quality,
Upper Saddle, N.J., Prentice Hall.
FOX, R. M. (1927), “Fordism: A Critical Examination”, The Nineteenth
Century and After, CI, no. 2.
GAMBINO, Ferruccio (1972), Ford britannica. Formazione di una classe
operaia, in S. Bologna, L. Ferrari Bravo, F. Gambino, M. Gobbini,
A. Negri, G.P. Rawick, Operai e Stato, Milan, Feltrinelli.
GAMBINO, Ferruccio (1987), The Significance of Socialism in the Post-
War United States, in HEFER, Jean and ROVET, Jeanine, Why Is
There No Socialism in the United States, Paris, Editions de l’Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
GARFINKEL, Harold (ed.) (1986), Ethnomethodological Studies of Work,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London e New York.
GOTTL-OTTLILIENFELD, Friedrich von (1924), Fordismus? Paraphrasen
“uber das Verháltnis von Wirtschaft und Technischer Vernunft bei
Henry Ford und Frederick W. Taylor, Jena, Gustav Fischer.
GRAMSCI, Antonio (1975), “Americanismo e fordismo” (1934) in
Quaderni del carcere, vol. 3, ed. V. Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi.
GUILLAIN, Robert (1969), Japon troisiéme grand, Paris, Seuil.
HARDT, John P. & HOLLIDAY, George D. (1977), Technology Transfer
and Change in the Soviet Economic System, in Frederic J. Fleron,
Jr., Technology and Communist Culture: The Socio-Cultural
Impact of Technology under Socialism, New York and London,
Praeger.
HIRSCH, Joachim e ROTH, Roland (1986) Das neue Gesicht des
Kapitalismus, Hamburg, VSA.
HIRSCH, Joachim (1991), Fordism and Postfordism: The Present Social
Crisis and its Consequences, in BONEFELD, Werner and
HOLLOWAY, John (eds.) 1991.
HOLLOWAY, John (1991a), The Great Bear: Post-Fordism and Class
Struggle. A Comment on Bonefeld and Jessop, in BONEFELD,
Werner and HOLLOWAY John (eds.) 1991.
HOLLOWAY, John (1991b), Capital is Class Struggle (and Bears are not
Cuddly), in Bonefeld, Werner and HOLLOWAY John (eds.) 1991.
HALLIDAY, Jon and McCORMACK, David (1973), Japanese Imperialism
Today: Co-Prosperity in Greater East Asia, Harmondsworth,
England, Penguin.
HOUNSHELL, David A. (1984), From the American System to Mass
Production (1800-1932), Baltimora e London, The Johns Hopkins
Univesity Press.
JESSOP, Bob (1991a), Regulation Theory, Post-Fordism and the State:
More than a Reply to Werner Bonefeld, in BONEFELD, Werner and
HOLLOWAY, John (eds.) 1991.

60
 A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School

JESSOP, Bob (1991b), Polar Bears and Class Struggle: Much Less than a
Self-Criticism, in BONEFELD, Werner, and HOLLOWAY, John,
(eds.), 1991.
JOHNSON, Chalmers (1986), MITI and Japanese Miracle: the Growth of
Industrial Policy, 1925-1975, Tokyo, Tuttle.
KAHN, Herman (1970), The Emerging Japanese Superstate,
Minneapolis, Minn., Hudson Institute.
KAMATA, Satochi (1976), Toyota, l’usine du désespoir, Paris, Editions
Ouvriéres; English translation, Japan in the Passing Lane: Insider’s
Account of Life in a Japanese Auto Factory, New York, N.Y., Unwin
Hyman, 1984.
KAMATA, Satochi (1980), L’envers du miracle, Paris, Maspero.
KOIKE, Kazuo (1988), Understanding Industrial Relations in Modern
Japan, London, MacMillan.
LA FEVER, M. W (1929), “Instability of Employment in the Automobile
Industry”, Monthly Labor Review, vol. XXVIII.
LESAGE, Jean-Loup (1983), Les grandes société de commerce au
Japon, les Shosha, Paris, PUF.
LIPIETZ, Alain (1982), “Towards Global Fordism?”, New Left Review, No.
132.
LIPIETZ, Alain (1984), “Imperialism as the Beast of the Apocalypse”,
Capital and Class, No. 22.
LIPIETZ, Alain (1986), “Behind the Crisis: the Exhaustion of a Regime of
Accumulation. A ‘Regulation School Perspective’ on Some French
Empirical Works”, Review of Radical Political Economy, vol. 18,
No.1-2.
LIPIETZ, Alain (1987), Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis of Global
Fordism, London, Verso
LIPIETZ, Alain (1993), Fordism and post-Fordism in W. Outhwaite and
Tom Bottomore, The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century
Social Thought, Oxford, Blackwell.
MAN, Hendrik de (1926), Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus, Jena, E.
Diederichs, 1926; 2nd edition, 1927; English translation, The
Psychology of Socialism, London, Allen & Unwin, 1928.
MARX, Karl (1964), Il Capitale, vol. I, Rome, Editori Riuniti.
MARX, Karl (1968), Lineamenti fondamentali della critica dell’economia
politica, vol. I, tr. di Enzo Grillo, Firenze, La Nuova Italia.
MEYER, Stephen III (1981), The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management
and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921,
Albany, N.Y., State University of New York Press.
MEZZADRA, Sandro (1994), “La costituzione del lavoro. Hugo
Sinzheimer e il progetto weimariano di democrazia economica”,
Quaderni di azione sociale, 2.
MILLER, Peter and ROSE, Nikolas (1995) “Production, Identity, and
Democracy”, Theory and Society, vol. 24, No. 3.
MILLS, Charles Wright (1952), “Commentary on Our Culture and Our
Country”, Partisan Review, vol. 19, no. 4.
MORISHIMA, Michio (1982), Why Has Japan “Succeeded”?, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press; Italian translation, Cultura e
tecnologia nel successo giapponese, Bologna, Il Mulino 1984.
NAKANE, Chie (1970), Japanese Society, London, Weidenfeld &
Nicholson; Italian translation, La societá giapponese, Milan,
Cortina, 1992.
NOBLE, David (1979), Social Choice in Machine Design, in ZIMBALIST,

61
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

Andrew, Case Studies on the Labor Process, New York, Monthly

Review Press.
OHNO, Tai’ichi (1978), Toyota Seisan Hoshiki [The Toyota method of
production], Tokyo, Diamond; English translation, The Toyota
Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production, Productivity
Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1988; French translation, L’esprit
Toyota, Paris, Masson, 1989; Italian translation, Lo spirito toyota,
Torino, Einaudi, 1993.
PALLOIX, Christian (1976), “Le procés de travail. Du fordisme au
néofordisme”, La Pensée, no. 185.
PELáEZ, Eloina and HOLLOWAY, John (1991), Learning to Bow: Post-
Fordism and Technological Determinism, in BONEFELD, Werner
and HOLLOWAY, John (eds.) 1991.
PETERSON, Joyce Shaw (1987), American Automobile Workers, 1900-
1933, Albany, N.Y., State University of New York Press.
PIORE, J. Michael, and SABEL, Charles F. (1983), The Second Industrial
Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity, New York, N.Y., Basic Books;
Italian translation, Le due vie dello sviluppo industriale.
Produzione di massa e produzione flessibile, Torino, Isedi, 1987.
REVELLI, Marco (1995), Economia e modello sociale nel passaggio tra
fordismo e toyotismo, in INGRAO, Pietro e Rossana ROSSANDA,
Appuntamenti di fine secolo, Roma, Manifestolibri.
ROMER, Samuel (1933), “The Detroit Strike”, The Nation (vol. 136, no.
3528), 15 February 1933, pp. 167-168.
SINZHEIMER, Hugo (1925), Europa und die Idee der wirtschaftlichen
Demokratie, in Europas Volkswirtschaft in Wort und Bild. Beitrage
zur Wirtschaftserkennis, hrsg. von der “Frankfurter Zeitung”,
1925-26, pp. XVII-XVIII, now in SINZHEIMER Hugo, Arbeitsrecht
und Arbeitssoziologie. Gesammelte Aufsátze und Reden, ed. O.
Kahn-Freund and Th. Ramm, Frankfurt-Köln, Europáische
Verlaganstalt, 1976 (“Schriftenreihe der Otto Brenner Stiftung”,
4), 2 Bde., Bd. 1, pp. 221-225; L’Europa e l’idea di democrazia
economica, trans. Sandro Mezzadra, Quaderni di azione sociale,
XXXIX, No. 2 (1994), pp.71-74.
SOUYRI Pierre-Francois (1994), “Un nouveau paradigme?”, Annales,
vol. 49, No. 3.
VAN WOLFEREN, Karel, (1989), The Enigma of Japanese Power, New
York, N.Y., Knopf.
VOGEL, Ezra (1979), Japan as Number One: Lessons for America,
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

62
 Notes on the Edu-Factory
and Cognitive Capitalism

Silvia Federici
George Caffentzis1

Since February of 2007 we have been involved in discussions

concerning university education with many comrades around the world
on a list that dealt with the notion of the “edu-factory.” (For more on
this effort go to the edu-factory website: http://www.edu-factory.org.)
The following notes present some reflections on two concepts that
have been central to this discussion: the edu-factory and cognitive
capitalism.
First, we agree with the key point of the “edu-factory” discussion
prospectus:

As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the

factory was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers
and capitalists, so now the university is a key space of
conflict, where the ownership of knowledge, the reproduction
of the labour force, and the creation of social and cultural
stratifications are all at stake. This is to say the university is
not just another institution subject to sovereign and
governmental controls, but a crucial site in which wider social
struggles are won and lost.

We are coordinators of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa

(CAFA) and since 1991 our support for the struggles in African
universities followed from the same analysis and logic. Universities are
important places of class struggle, and not only in Europe and North

1 Silvia Federici may be contacted at dinavalli@aol.com. George Caffentzis may

be contacted at caffentz@usm.maine.edu.

63
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

America. We insisted on this point against the critics of the post-

colonial university, who looked down on any effort to defend
educational systems that they saw as modeled on colonial education.
We argued that university struggles in Africa express a refusal to let
international capital:

• decide the conditions of work;

• appropriate the wealth invested in these institutions
which people have paid for.
• suppress the democratization and politicization of
education that on African campuses had grown through
the 1980s and ‘90s.

More generally, in the same way as we would oppose the shutting

down of factories where workers have struggled to control work and
wages—especially if these workers were determined to fight against
the closure—so we agree that we should resist the dismantling of
public education, even though schools are also instruments of class
rule and alienation. This is a contradiction that we cannot wish away
and is present in all our struggles. Whether we are struggling around
education, health, housing, etc, it is illusory to think that we can place
ourselves outside of capitalist relations whenever we wish and from
there build a new society. As students’ movements across the planet
have shown, universities are not just nurseries for the leaders of a neo-
liberal elite, they are also a terrain for debate, contestation of
institutional politics, re-appropriation of resources.
It is through these debates, struggles and re-appropriations, and
by connecting the struggles in the campuses to the struggles in other
parts of the social factory, that we create alternative forms of
education and alternative educational practices. In Italy, for instance,
with the contract of 1974, metal-mechanic workers were able to win
150 hours of paid study leave per year in which, together with
teachers, mostly from the student movement, they organized curricula
that analyzed the capitalist organization of work, also in their own
workplaces. In the US, since the '60s, the campuses have been among
the centers of the anti-war movement, producing a wealth of analysis
about the military-industrial complex and the role of the universities in
its functioning and expansion. In Africa, the university campuses were
centers of resistance to structural adjustment and analysis of its
implications. This is certainly one of the reasons why the World Bank
was so eager to dismantle them.
The struggle in the edu-factory is especially important today
because of the strategic role of knowledge in the production system in

64
 Notes on the Edu-Factory and Cognitive Capitalism

a context in which the “enclosure” of knowledge (its privatization,

commodification, expropriation through the intellectual property
regimes) is a pillar of economic restructuring. We are concerned,
however, that we do not overestimate this importance, and/or use the
concept of the edu-factory to set up new hierarchies with respect to
labor and forms of capitalist accumulation.
This concern arises from our reading of the use that is made of
the concept of “cognitive capitalism” as found in the statement
circulated by Conricerca as well as in the work of some Italian
autonomists. True, we need to identify the leading forms of capitalist
accumulation in all its different phases, and recognize their “tendency”
to hegemonize (though not to homogenize) other forms of capitalist
production. But we should not dismiss the critiques of Marxian theory
developed by the anti-colonial movement and the feminist movement,
which have shown that capitalist accumulation has thrived precisely
through its capacity to simultaneously organize development and
underdevelopment, waged and un-waged labor, production at the
highest levels of technological know-how and production at the lowest
levels. In other words, we should not dismiss the argument that it is
precisely through these disparities, the divisions built in the working
class through them, and the capacity to transfer wealth/surplus from
one pole to the other that capitalist accumulation has expanded in the
face of so much struggle.
There are many issues involved that we can only touch upon in
these notes. We want, above all, to concentrate here on the political
implications of the use of the notion of “cognitive capitalism” But here
are a few points for discussion.
First, the history of capitalism should demonstrate that the
capitalist subsumption of all forms of production does not require the
extension of the level of science and technology achieved at any
particular point of capitalist development to all workers contributing to
the accumulation process. It is now acknowledged, for instance, that
the plantation system was organized along capitalist lines; in fact, it
was a model for the factory. However, the cotton picking plantation
slaves in the US South of 1850s were not working at the level of
technological know-how available to workers in the textile mills of the
US North of the time, though their product was a lifeline for these same
mills. Does that mean that the Southern slaves were industrial workers
or, vice versa, the Northern wageworkers were plantation workers?
Similarly, to this day, capitalism has not mechanized housework
despite the fact that the unpaid domestic work of women has been a
key source of accumulation for capital. Again, why at the peak of an
era of “cognitive capitalism” do we witness an expansion of labor in

65
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

slave-like conditions, at the lowest level of technological know-how—

child labor, labor in sweatshops, labor in the new agricultural
plantations and mining fields of Latin America, Africa, etc.? Can we say
that workers in these conditions are “cognitive workers”? Are they and
their struggles irrelevant to and/or outside the circuit of capitalist
accumulation? Why has wage labor, once considered the defining form
of capitalist work, still not been extended even to the majority of
workers in capitalist society?
This example and these questions suggest that work can be
organized for capitalist accumulation and along capitalist lines without
the laborer working at the average level of technological/scientific
knowledge applied in the highest points of capitalist production. They
also suggest that the logic of capitalism can only be grasped by looking
at the totality of its relations, and not only to the highest point of its
scientific/technological achievement. Capitalism has systematically
and strategically produced disparities through the international and
sexual/racial division of labor and through the “underdevelopment” of
particular sectors of its production, and these disparities have not been
erased, but in fact have been deepened by the increasing integration
of science and technology in the production process. For instance, in
the era of cognitive labor, the majority of Africans do not have access
to the Internet or for that matter even the telephone; even the
miniscule minority who does, has access to it only for limited periods of
time, because of the intermittent availability of electricity. Similarly,
illiteracy, especially among women, has grown exponentially from the
1970s to present. In other words, a leap forward for many workers, has
been accompanied by a leap backward by many others, who are now
even more excluded from the “global discourse,” and certainly not in
the position to participate in global cooperation networks based upon
the Internet.
Second and most important are the political implications of an
use of “cognitive capitalism” and “cognitive labor” that overshadows
the continuing importance of other forms of work as contributors to the
accumulation process.
There is the danger that by privileging one kind of capital (and
therefore one kind of worker) as being the most productive, the most
advanced, the most exemplary of the contemporary paradigm, etc., we
create a new hierarchy of struggle, and we engage in form of activism
that precludes a re-composition of the working class. Another danger is
that we fail to anticipate the strategic moves by which capitalism can
restructure the accumulation process by taking advantage of the
inequalities within the global workforce. How the last globalization
drive was achieved is exemplary in this case.

66
 Notes on the Edu-Factory and Cognitive Capitalism

Concerning the danger of confirming in our activism the

hierarchies of labor created by the extension of capitalist relations,
there is much we can learn from the past. As the history of class
struggle demonstrates, privileging one sector of the working class over
the others is the surest road to defeat. Undoubtedly, certain types of
workers have played a crucial role in certain historical phases of
capitalist development. But the working class has paid a very high
price to a revolutionary logic that established hierarchies of
revolutionary subjects, patterned on the hierarchies of the capitalist
organization of work. Marxist/socialist activists in Europe lost sight of
the revolutionary power of the world’s “peasantry.” More than that,
peasant movements have been destroyed (see the case of the ELAS in
Greece) by communists who considered only the factory worker as
organizable and “truly revolutionary.” Socialists/Marxists also lost sight
of the immense (house)work that was being done to produce and
reproduce industrial worker. The huge “iceberg” of labor in capitalism
(to use Maria Mies’ metaphor) was made invisible by the tendency to
look at the tip of the iceberg, industrial labor, while the labor involved
in the reproduction of labor-power went unseen, with the result that
the feminist movement was often fought against and seen as
something outside the class struggle.
Ironically, under the regime of industrial capitalism and factory
work, it was the peasant movements of Mexico, China, Cuba, Vietnam,
and to a great extent Russia who made the revolutions of the 20th
century. In the 1960s as well, the impetus for change at the global
level came from the anti-colonial struggle, including the struggle
against apartheid and for Black Power in the United States. Today, it is
the indigenous people, the campesino, the unemployed of Mexico
(Chiapas, Oaxaca), Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, the farmers of
India, the maquila workers of the US border, the immigrant workers of
the US, etc. who are conducting the most “advanced” struggles
against the global extension of capitalist relations.
Let us be very clear. We make these points not to minimize the
importance of the struggles in the edu-factory and the ways in which
the Internet has led to the creation of new kinds of commons that are
crucial to our struggle, but because we fear we may repeat mistakes
that may ultimately isolate those who work and struggle in these
networks. From this viewpoint, we think that “the no-global”
movement (for all its difficulties) was a step forward in its capacity to
articulate demands and forms of activism that projected the struggle in
a global way, creating a new type of internationalism, one bringing
together computer programmers, artists, and other edu-workers with

67
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

farmers and industrial workers in one movement, each making its

distinctive contribution.
For this political “re-composition” to become possible, however,
we need to see the continuity of our struggle through the difference of
our places in the international division of labor, and to articulate our
demands and strategies in accordance to these differences and the
need to overcome them. Assuming that a re-composition of the
workforce is already occurring because work is becoming homogenized
—through a process that some have defined as the “becoming
common of labor”—will not do. We cannot cast the “cognitive” net so
widely that almost every kind of work becomes “cognitive” labor, short
of making arbitrary social equations and obfuscating our
understanding of what is new about “cognitive labor” in the present
phase of capitalism.
It is an arbitrary move (for instance) to assimilate, under the
“cognitive” label, the work of a domestic worker—whether an
immigrant or not, whether s/he is a wife/mother/sister or a paid laborer
—to that of a computer programmer or computer artist and, on top of
it, suggest that the cognitive aspect of domestic work is something
new, owing to the dominance of a new type of capitalism.
Certainly domestic work, like every form of reproductive work,
does have a strong cognitive component. To know how to adjust the
pillows under the body of a sick person so that the skin does not blister
and the bones do not hurt is a science and an art that require much
attention, knowledge and experimentation. The same is true of the
care for a child, and of most other aspects of “housework” whoever
may be doing this work. But it is precisely when we look at the vast
universe of practices that constitute reproductive work, especially
when performed in the home, that we see the limits of the application
of the type of computer-based, technological know-how on which
“cognitive capitalism relies.” We see that the knowledge necessary for
reproductive work can certainly benefit from the use of the internet
(assuming there is time and money for it), but it is one type of
knowledge that human beings, mostly women, have developed over a
long period of time, in conformity with but also against the
requirements of the capitalist organization of work.
We should add that nothing is gained by admitting housework
into the new realm of cognitive labor, by redefining is as “affective
labor” or, as some have done, “immaterial labor,” or again “care
work.” For a start, we should avoid formulas that imply a body/mind,
reason/emotion separation in any type of work and its products.
Moreover, does replacing the notion of “reproductive work,” as
used by the feminist movement, with that of “affective labor” truly

68
 Notes on the Edu-Factory and Cognitive Capitalism

serve to assimilate, under the “cognitive” label, the work of a domestic

worker (whether immigrant or not, whether a wife/sister/mother or
paid laborer) or the work of a sex worker to that of a computer
programmer or computer artist? What is really “common” in their
labor, taking into account all the complex of social relations sustaining
their different forms of work? What is common, for instance, between a
male computer programmer or artist or teacher and a female domestic
worker who, in addition to having a paid job, must also spend many
hours doing unpaid labor taking care of her family members
(immigrant women too have often family members to care for also in
the countries where they migrate, or must send part of their salary
home to pay for those caring for their family members)?
Most crucial of all, if the labor involved in the reproduction of
human beings—still an immense part of the labor expended in
capitalist society—is “cognitive,” in the sense that it produces not
things but “states of being,” then, what is new about “cognitive labor”?
And, equally important, what is gained by assimilating all forms of work
—even as a tendency—under one label, except that some kinds of
work and the political problematic they generate again disappear?
Isn't it the case that by stating that domestic work is “cognitive
work” we fail, once again, to address the question of the devaluation
of this work in capitalist society—its largely unpaid status, the gender
hierarchies that are built upon it—through the wage relation?
Shouldn't we ask, instead, what kind of organizing can be done—so
that domestic workers and computer programmers can come together
—rather than assuming that we all becoming assimilated in the mare
magnum of “cognitive labor”?
Taking reproductive work as a standard also serves to question
the prevailing assumption that the cognitivization of work, in the sense
of its computerization/ reorganization through the Internet—has an
emancipatory effect. A voluminous feminist literature has challenged
the idea that the industrialization of many aspects of housework has
reduced housework time for women. In fact, many studies have shown
that industrialization has increased the range of what is considered as
socially necessary housework. The same is true with the infiltration of
science and technology in domestic work, including childcare and sex
work. For example, the spread of personal computers, for those
houseworkers who can afford them and have time to use them, can
help relieve the isolation and monotony of housework through chat
rooms and social networks. But the creation of virtual communities
does not alleviate the increasing problem of loneliness, nor does it help
the struggle against the destruction of community bonds and the
proliferation of “gated” worlds.

69
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

In conclusion, notions like “cognitive labor” and “cognitive

capitalism” should be used with the understanding that they represent
a part, though a leading one, of capitalist development and that
different forms of knowledge and cognitive work exist that cannot be
flattened under one label. Short of that, the very utility of such
concepts in identifying what is new in capitalist accumulation and the
struggle against it is lost. What is also lost is the fact that, far from
communalizing labor, every new turn in capitalist development tends
to deepen the divisions in the world proletariat, and that as long as
these divisions exist they can be used to reorganize capital on a
different basis and destroy the terrain on which movements have
grown.

70
 Measure, Excess and Translation:
Some Notes on “Cognitive Capitalism”

Massimo De Angelis

Since February of 2007 I have been involved in discussions concerning

contemporary forms of knowledge production, education and the
university as sites of struggle with many comrades around the world
on a list called “edu-factory” (http://www.edu-factory.org). The
following notes are a slightly edited version of one of my contributions
to this debate. They build on Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis
reflections published in this issue of The Commoner on two concepts
that have been central to this discussion (the edu-factory and cognitive
capitalism) and addresses three other concepts which have emerged in
the debate: measure, excess and translation.

***

I would like to follow up the contribution by Silvia Federici and George

Caffentzis and develop further some implications of their critical stance
on the question of “cognitive capitalism”. In doing so, I would like to
draw the attention on the political importance of the arguments raised
against the consequences of theoretically de-centering the problematic
of class hierarchy and dynamics of stratification. For the sake of
continuity and clarity my contribution will follow the two main lines of
their argument, and attempt to engage with issues which have not
been directly covered in their post, namely, the question of capital's
measure, excess, and translation.

71
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

I Wage Hierarchy, Measure, and Excess

The first argument proposed by Federici and Caffentzis is an

empirical/theoretical one, in which they argue that the history of
capitalism demonstrates that capital subsumption of all forms of
production is not predicated on the extension of the “highest” level of
science and technology to all workers contributing to the accumulation
process. Cases such as the capitalist organization of the plantation
system and of housework suggests that work can be organized for
capitalist accumulation with the laborer working at a level of
technological/scientific knowledge below the average applied in the
highest points of capitalist production. This also suggests that the
“inner logic” of capitalist development can only be grasped if we look
at the totality of its relations rather than only at the highest points of
its scientific/technological achievements. Looking at this totality
reveals that capitalism has always produced disparities along the
international and sexual/racial division of labor. These disparities are
both the product of its inner workings and of clear strategies which
give rise to the “underdevelopment“ of particular sectors and are
amplified by the increasing integration of science and technology in
the production process.
Now, it is important to underline two interrelated things on this
first point.
A) Enclosures and disciplinary integration. The wage
hierarchy here is certainly not a “hypothesis to be verified” and is
instead taken as a “paradigmatic” stand, made intelligible by a large
theoretical and empirical literature, as well as any common sense
observation of the modern horrors. There is a limit to the post-modern
flights of imagination and academic conjecturing that we can take on
this matter (and note, this does not take anything away to the
opportunity to have both within limits). The processes overseeing the
ongoing creation of this stratification can be grasped theoretically and
empirically though Marx's classic texts reinterpreted in lights of the
issues raised by the struggles of those subjects that in that text were
mostly invisible and yet are and have always been so fundamental to
capitalism (women, the unwaged reproduction workers, the slaves, the
peasants, and so on).
The production of the totality of social relations under capitalism
develops along two main co-ordinates (another one is what we can call
“governamentality”, or “the class deal” but I cannot talk about this
here). One is systematic and continuous “enclosure” strategies, as it
has been observed in other posts. These certainly affects all levels in
the hierarchy but they also have the effect of continuously re-

72
 Measure, Excess and Translation: Some Notes on “Cognitive Capitalism”

stratifying the hierarchy itself. This not only by hitting the bottom
layers the hardest (through land/water enclosures, relocation, urban
proletarisation and so on), but also through the use of technology and
knowledge products developed at the highest levels as instrument of
these enclosures (terminator seeds, GMOs, and of course, remember
the 1960s “green revolution”?).
The other one is what Marx labels the process going on “behind
the back of the producers”, the process of the formation of “socially
necessary labour time”, and that in order to appease any illusions that
our epoch has moved away from the imposition of discipline, we can
call “disciplinary integration.” The process of competitive markets —
despite all its impurities in relation to textbook models—act as
disciplinary mechanism that allocate rewards and punishments. They
give rise to concentration and centralisation tendencies, the latter
understood not as an asymptotic future outcome described by a crystal
ball, but as the emergent result of social processes rooted in struggle,
to the extent struggles are subsumed and pit one against another
within the process itself. And, finally, they contribute to ongoing the
planetary re-stratification of social labour.
B) Measure and excess. We would not go much to the bottom
of these two processes of enclosures and disciplinary integration—that
bottom that interests us because of its radical implications—if we were
not understanding that this “inner logic” of capitalism is predicated on
a way of measuring life activity which subordinates concrete specific
humans to the quantitative imperative of balance sheets, a process of
giving meaning to action, of acting on this meaning, and shaping
organisational forms suitable for this action that produces what capital
values the most: its own self-preservation as capital (even in spite of
the bankruptcy of individual capitals).
This subordination means that the sensuous and cognitive
features of concrete labouring are—precisely—subordinated to the
drive for making money. And the existence of this subordination
implies that there is always and has always been “an excess” which is
not put to value by capital, precisely because value for capital is
“abstract labour”, or “human labour power expended without regard to
the form of its expenditure”, as Marx put in the first chapter of Capital.
This “excess” emerges in the contradictory nature of what is of value
for capital and what is of value for waged and unwaged workers. This
“excess” with respect to what is required by profit-driven production in
given contexts, is often a way in which these “value struggles”
manifest themselves in given forms and degrees. We can find it cutting
through the noise of assembly lines in the jokes that workers shout to
each other; or in the whispers of children hiding from the eyes of

73
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

terribly serious Victorian schoolmasters; or emerging from the

regimented fields of slave plantations in the form of songs, chants and
rhythms allowing communications to flow in avoidance of the whip of
slave masters. In other words, the production of excess is not the
prerogative of “cognitive labour” and therefore of contemporary forms
of capitalism. The “excess” is the outcome of the struggle of situated
workers facing the frontline and contesting the reduction of their life-
activity to “human power expended without regard to the form of its
expenditure” because subordinated to the priority of balance sheets.
This excess is social form that is valued by the struggling subjects, it is
human power expended with regard to the form of its expenditure. But
let us not be fooled by these “excesses”. Capitalism is a dynamic
system. If in given contexts, times and situations, an intellectual,
artistic or “cognitive” product emerges as a means or result of
struggle, in a different situation and temporal framework, the same
“product” can act as a retro fashion item seeking valorisation in a
niche market, hence subject to capital’s measure. What was before the
result of the struggle at the frontline, it is now the condition from
drawing a new frontline, a new clash among value practices, among
modes of “measuring” life activity, out of which a new excess will
certainly emerge.
Capital captures struggle and excess to a variety of degrees
depending on contingent power relations. But the very fact that it does
it and continuously seeks to do it through the imposition of its measure
and hierarchy cannot be wished away: it is the condition we must face
up to and overcome through class recomposition. But class
recomposition is not a given. I disagree with the argument that
“cognitive labour“ points at what is common across the multitude. To
posit cognitive labour as a common is to indulge into idealising
commons in similar ways as those who romanticise the past. This
because it removes rupture and struggle the center of the problematic
of commons re-production.
“Cognitive labour“ is an idealised common because it is neither
what is common across the hierarchy, nor what tends to be common.
In the first case, it is simply not the case —as it has been argued by
Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis post. One cannot claim in any
meaningful sense that the different concrete labours across the global
factory have “cognitive labour” as common. The claim would be true
only if we maintain it as a general platitude, that is the fact that
subjects are engaged in processes of acquiring/formulating/producing
knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and sense.
This is obviously always the case in all modes of production, and in

74
 Measure, Excess and Translation: Some Notes on “Cognitive Capitalism”

capitalism—as pointed out by Silvia and George—in every layers of the

wage hierarchy.
And the second case simply cannot be made, since one thing that
the “tendencies“ within capitalism reveal is only that the class struggle
gets wider and richer in form, together with the associated deepening
of the hierarchisation of waged and unwaged labour. And this implies
that the problematic/puzzle of political recomposition ahead of us gets
more challenging at the same time as the potentials for liberation that
would be made possible by this recomposition get more plentiful.
What is really common across the “multitude“ is that in so far as
capital production is concerned, our production in common, occurs
through the subjection of multiplicity to a common alien measure of
doing, of giving value to things, of ranking and dividing the social body
on the basis of this measure. Thus, the strategic emphasis on
knowledge production that comes from various institutional bodies is
not the evidence of a “tendency“ to turn all work into “cognitive
labour“ announcing a new phase of capitalism (cognitive capitalism,
precisely). Rather, we are faced here with the strategic attempt to
launch a new wave of enclosures and disciplinary integration that
recreate the “fucked up” commons that capital attempts to impose on
all of us: that of its measure of life processes. The specific character of
this new wave has certainly to be critically studied in details. But it is
terribly dangerous to approach this study with the illusion that the
current emphasis on knowledge production by the institutional agents
of capital is anything else but to serve as instrument of
competitiveness, capitalist growth, new modes of enclosures and
commodification of life, and, therefore, planetary class stratification.

II Political Recomposition and Translation

From their first theoretical/empirical point, Silvia Federici and George

Caffentzis develop an important political argument. There is in fact a
political consequence in using constructs such as “cognitive
capitalism” and “cognitive labor” in such a way as to overshadow the
continuing importance of other forms of work as contributors to the
accumulation process. And this is the development of a discourse that
precludes class recomposition. There is in fact the danger that by
privileging one kind of capital (and therefore one kind of worker or one
kind of labouring) as being the most “exemplary of the contemporary
paradigm” we contribute to create a new hierarchy of struggles, thus
engaging in forms of activism that “precludes a re-composition of the
working class.” To become possible, this political re-composition must

75
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

be predicated on the awareness of the continuity of our struggle across

the international division of labor and wage hierarchy, which means
that we need to “articulate our demands and strategies in accordance
to these differences and the need to overcome them” (my emphasis).
Now, this articulation is certainly dependent on processes of
“translation”. But we would be fooling ourselves if this was the only
thing required. Translation is of paramount importance for two things.
First, in understanding the development of capital's strategies in
specific contexts. Hence in so far as the stratified class (“multitude”)
relation to capital is concerned, capital has indeed to codify “labour“ in
its own grammar and code, which rises for us the problem of—
precisely—translation of categories in terms relevant to us. And this
certainly happens at the level of what used to be called “bourgeoise“
discourses which apprehends social processes grounded on social
conflict with the discursive closure (but strategic focus) embedded in
its premises, methods, “policy implications“ and, nowadays,
“governance recommendations“. At this level of critical engagement,
translation is of paramount importance, as a way to map the “enemy“
stance vis-a'-vis struggles.
Second—and more in tune with the theme of this section—
“translation” is important in relation to communication among
rebellious subjects who—precisely because are divided across the
wage hierarchy—one way or another are actors in processes such as
those that reproduce racism and patriarchy, or relate to the world
moving from the life-worlds they inhabit, with their cultural norms,
“imaginaries“ and mythologies. Thus, we always need to engage in
processes of “translation“ so as not only to “talk“ to each other, but to
give meaning to words, speech-acts, texts. And this of course, with all
the caution we need in such exercises: who translates and who speak?
who hears and who listens, who holds the “dictionary”, so to say, what
meanings are left out? and so on. In this sense, ongoing processes of
translation are part and parcel of the constitution of commons.
A translation however is giving meanings to words, it is mapping
meanings from a code to another. It is not yet to act upon these
meanings, creating effects through these actions and giving meaning
to both these actions and their results. It is not yet, to value in the full
sense of the word, the sense in which to value becomes a social force
of transformation! Yet, this is precisely what capital does in its process
of labour abstraction. This is not—as claimed in some posts in the edu-
factory debate—simply a process of “translation“ of human labour—as
if the latter could exist in the form it does independently from the
meaning given to it by capital (perhaps echoing some illusions that are
circulating that today's cognitive labour has reached “communism”, a

76
 Measure, Excess and Translation: Some Notes on “Cognitive Capitalism”

form of labour cooperation that is largely independent from capital).

Capital does not simply gives meaning to words, does not only map
meanings from one code to another. It does so as moment of a process
of valorization that must be conceived as much more than translation.
The process of valorisation of capital is a process founded on giving
meaning to action in a context in which this meaning can be to a
variety of degrees enforced (through pervasive enclosures of various
forms backed by state monopoly of violence—even if this is a
“transnational” state—enforces a configuration of existing property
rights and various degrees of exclusion from the commons) and with
results that to a large extent give shape to social actions, and create
consequences.
Through this valorisation process, human powers are transmuted
into commodities, and social doing is transmutated into work, into
abstract labour. In this sense, abstract labour is not so much the result
of a “translation”. It is the result of a real abstraction, i.e. a
transmutation, as a transmutation of one species into another, one
species of humans into another one. A transmutation for example that
still is largely responsible to fill evening commuting trains with drained
bodies, whether of “cognitive labourers” or cleaners; one that
rhythmically and cyclically accumulates the detritus of capital's
measure into our competing and colliding bodies in the forms of fear,
stress, excessive antibiotics, and anxieties; one that also operates
linearly, for example when it turns farmers into reserve army of labour
due to, say, the detritus accumulated in their land by virtue of being
adjacent to an aquaculture pool producing shrimps for export; or one
also that creates the condition for turning local mothers into migrant
nannies, that transmutates the direction of their affects away from
their communities into the children of their busy employers, mainly
because, in given conditions within the planetary wage hierarchy, the
former are less socially valued than the latter; or finally one that turns
that brilliant team of creative workers that have come up with that
brilliant innovative idea, into the competitive means to de-value some
other cognitive labourers, threaten their livelihoods and push them to a
“life-learning” process to discover always new forms of undermining an
invisible “other”, to join a “friendly” team so as to organise a
competitive retribution.
The task of political recomposition ahead of us, cannot be faced
if we de-center the problematic of hierarchy and the measuring
process of life-activity connected to it which re-create hierarchy and
division. The task of recomposition passes certainly through the “one
no” to the “fucked up” commons of capital. At the same time, it passes
through the open problematic of how to produce other commons,

77
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

more meaningful to us, predicated on many “yesses”, that is on

“valorising” processes other than those posited by capital. Hence,
despite being a crucial issue, the central question is not “translation”,
but the transformation of our interconnected lives. And this
transformation cannot avoid to posit the question of the overcoming of
existing divisions as the central problematic of our organisational
efforts.

78
Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

The Sixth Declaration of the EZLN

and the “Other Campaign”

Patrick Cuninghame1

Well, then, in Mexico what we want to create is an agreement

with people and organizations that are decidedly of the left,
because we believe that it is on the political left where the
idea of resisting against neoliberal globalisation really lives,
and the struggle to make justice, democracy, and freedom in
any country wherever it would be, where there is only
freedom for big business and there is only democracy to put
up election campaign signs. And because we believe that only
the left can come up with a plan for struggle so that our
country, Mexico, does not die. And, then, what we believe is
that, with these people and organizations of the left, we will
chart a course to go to every corner of Mexico where there
are humble and simple people like ourselves.
(The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, 2005)

The struggles of dignity tear open the fabric of capitalist

domination.
(John Holloway, 2003)

1 Originally published in Werner Bonefeld (ed) Subverting The Present -

Imagining The Future: Insurrection, Movement, Commons, New York,
Autonomedia, 2007. The author is a sociology lecturer and researcher at the
Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Email:
pgcuninghame@yahoo.co.uk; Fax: (+52) 656-6883812.

79
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

Preface

This paper seeks to draw some lessons at a global level from the
ongoing “Other Campaign” (so-called in mock reference to the 2006
presidential electoral campaigns), catalysed by the Zapatistas with
their call for a renewed anti-capitalist resistance movement “from
below and to the left” against neoliberal capitalism in Mexico and
internationally, in the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle (the
Sixth) in July 2005. The paper also focuses on how the organization and
mobilization of the Other Campaign is evolving in the trans-border
region of Chihuahua-Texas-New Mexico in Northern Mexico-Southern
USA (where the author is based) around the attempted horizontal
coordination of autonomists, anarchists, Zapatistas, socialists,
indigenous and peasant movements, and the efforts to include
independent trade unions and the more radical NGO campaigns
against the femicide of some 450 working class women and girls in
Ciudad Juarez since 1993, as well as other issues based around
migration, the US-Mexico border, the hegemonic maquiladora
(corporate assembly plant for export) hyper-exploitation model and the
social violence and urban degradation produced by “savage
capitalism”. This “other” organizational paradigm, which includes the
“Other on the other side” (of the border), will be also be connected
with the May Day Latino boycott movement in the US against the
criminalisation of undocumented migrants. The broader socio-political
context is framed by the events surrounding the July 2006 presidential
elections, which proved to be particularly “dirty” and fraudulent,
despite the consensus among the three candidates of the main parties
on the need to consolidate through “institutional reforms” the neo-
liberal model (constructed on the 1994 NAFTA agreement), which
seeks to extend a deepened US economic hegemony over Latin
America through the 2001 Puebla-Panama Plan, the 2005 Central
Americas Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the recently shelved Free
Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) proposal. The desperate, cynical
capitulation of the “vertical” left2, both parliamentary and extra-

2 By “vertical” Left I mean those organizational traditions within the historical

Left that favour a centralist, hierarchical, organizational structure (a mirror
image of the capitalist firm) and that practice dogmatic, vanguardist, statist
and “top-down” politics, i.e. all their political initiatives either stem from or
have to be approved by the leadership, while rigid discipline and obedience is
enforced on the membership by threat of expulsion. Their political ideology is
usually based on an orthodox “scientific socialist” interpretation of the Marxist-
Leninist canon. Left political traditions considered to be “verticalist” would be
social democrats, Leninists and Trotskyists, but in the context of alterglobalism
would also include (ex-) national liberation movements like Sinn Fein. A
Mexican example would be the Trotskyist PRT (Partido Revolucionario de los
Trabajadores/Workers Revolutionary Party), which split in the early 90s over

80
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

parliamentary (including some ex-Zapatista supporters and much of

the post-1968 New Left) to the populist, demagogic presidential
campaign of the centre-left PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador (AMLO), some on the basis of keeping the corrupt mafia-linked
PRI and Christian right-ultra neoliberal PAN out of power, others in the
hope of benefiting personally from future presidential largesse, mirrors
a deeper crisis as a divided global anti-capitalism seeks to intensify
resistance against an increasingly fragmented and degenerate “global
war capitalism”. This helps to explain why the EZLN and its global
network, under the title of the “Zezta Internazional”, are also
organizing a third “Intergalactic Encuentro” in late 2006-early 2007,
faced with the perceived neo-reformist inefficacy of the now verticalist-
controlled and Chavez-dependent World Social Forum (WSF)3. The
paper also examines the impact of the particularly brutal repression of
the Atenco movement, the Oaxaca teachers’ strike and APPO
movement and AMLO’s orchestrated but massive anti-fraud movement
on the Other, before reaching some conclusions on the present state of
anti-capitalism (autonomist, Zapatista and other/wise) in Mexico, and
the implications for “the slow and laborious process of consolidating
the new Latin American revolutionary left” (Cuban Libertarian
Movement/CLM 2005: 1) and global anti-capitalist and alterglobalist
movements.

Introduction

Mexico, as the USA’s southern neighbour, is the Latin American

country most directly prone to North American influence and pressure,
now being virtually hard-wired into its economy through the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since 1994. However, that
year also saw the birth of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas in

entryism into the PRD, a path the majority chose to follow, while a minority
became close allies of the EZLN and now edit the monthly magazine, Rebeldia,
the main Zapatista publication. In fact, this is a simplification as there is a
certain amount of “crossover” particularly between the leaderships of the two
factions, which tends to muddy the waters of radical left politics in Mexico. An
English example would be the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In recent years
the “verticalists” have increasingly clashed with the “horizontalists”
(autonomists, anarchists, ecofeminists, environmentalists, independent social
movements in general) over the control and future direction of the World and
European Social Forums in particular and global anti-capitalism/alterglobalism
in general. For a discussion of verticalist-horizontalist politics, see Levidow
(2004).
3 “(…) what seems to be happening in Caracas – the apparent complete
dependence by the local civil organisations (those who the WSF International
Council has appointed to organise the particular edition of the world Forum) on
Hugo Chávez and his government for organising the Forum - seems to directly
contradict the spirit and soul of the Forum” (Jai Sen 2006).

81
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

opposition to NAFTA, neoliberalism and 500 years of the racist

discrimination and exclusion of the Mexican indigenous population,
composed of over 50 ethnic groups each with its own language and
culture, accounting for about 15% of its 110 million population. Twelve
years on and the remarkably resilient and unceasingly creative
Zapatistas have bounced back yet again into the centre of national
political life and international mobilisation through the Other
Campaign, launched by the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle
in July 2005, which marked a definitive rupture with the PRD and the
liberal urban intelligentsia, once united in their opposition to the PRI
dictatorship 10 years previously. The new “enemy” was identified as
AMLO, the moderate PRD (Partido de la Revolucion Democratica/Party
of the Democratic Revolution) presidential candidate, at that time clear
favourite to win the 2006 elections. His party had betrayed the
Zapatistas and the indigenous peoples in 2001 when they broke their
word and supported the enactment of an unrecognisably diluted PAN
(Partido de la Accion Nacional/National Action Party) government
version of the San Andres Accord on Indigenous Autonomy, reached
with the then PRI (Partido de la Revolucion Institucional/Party of the
Institutional Revolution) government in 1996. Furthermore, as Mayor of
Mexico City he had shown a preference for pharaonic building projects,
zero-tolerance policing against the vendors of the “informal economy”,
the main source of income for many of the city’s 18 million population,
and attempts to expel rooted proletarian communities and gentrify the
historic centre in association with Mexico’s richest entrepreneur Carlos
Slim. The result has been a bitter division with the peasant and urban
working class grassroots of the PRD, where some wanted to support
both AMLO and the Other Campaign, while many, including some
former Zapatista intellectual sympathisers, considered the Zapatistas
to have become the unwitting stooges of the right, as part of its plot
against AMLO. The suspicion of both technologically sophisticated
cybernetic fraud and cruder old-fashioned ballot stuffing has hung over
the elections of July 2, which favoured the ultra neoliberal, Christian
right PAN candidate Felipe Calderon by 0.5% or just over 240,000 of
the total vote of 41 million (Burbach 2006 & Palast 2006 for example).
The brutal repression in May of the Peoples Front for the Defence of
the Land (FPDT), and Other Campaign activists in Atenco caused a
global wave of revulsion against the Fox “government of change”, as
brutal and fraudulent as its PRI predecessors.
The Other Campaign - the first attempt in Mexican history to
create a coordinated anti-capitalist network “below and to the left”
among the splintered groups, movements and unaffiliated individuals
to the left of the PRD - in the space of a few weeks in May transformed

82
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

itself from a support network for the caravan of “Delegate Zero”

(Subcomandante Marcos) and the Sixth Commission into a cohesive
national and transnational (thanks to the "Otra en el Otro Lado" [Other
Campaign in the USA]) movement with strong links to the anti-
capitalist alterglobal movements. Nevertheless, compared to AMLO’s
multitudinous marches of a million and a half on July 16 and over two
million on the 30th, hundreds of thousands of whom still remain
camped in Mexico City’s main square, central avenues and business
district in protest against the electoral fraud, the Other’s national
march against repression of 15,000 in late May and only 5,000 on July
2nd seem tiny in comparison. The AMLO anti-fraud movement allegedly
is financed by the local construction industry that benefited so
handsomely under his mayorship, as well as by the PRD through its
various state governors, senators and deputies and is– at least for the
moment – directly orchestrated by AMLO and the PRD leadership, who
have promised the increasingly worried press, international investors
and Mexican business class to send everyone home as soon as a total
recount is agreed. The Other or “Otra” has established itself as a
consolidated transnational movement in less than a year, while AMLO’s
chances of turning the tables on the neoliberal right and its support
from Bush, thanks to an impressive popular mobilization which
exceeds the electoral base of the PRD, seem however ever slimmer.
Since the publication of the Sixth last year, a feud has raged
among left intellectuals as to whether the Other is part of a rightist plot
to frustrate the centre-left yet again, as happened in 1988 when fraud
permitted the PRI’s Carlos Salinas, later the architect of NAFTA and still
seen as the eminence grise of Mexican politics, to steal the election
from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of the PRI president and “national
revolutionary” General Lazaro Cardenas who expropriated and
nationalized the oil industry in the 1930s. Former Zapatista
sympathisers like Araujo, Poniatowska and Monsivais are now part of
AMLO’s entourage, which has constantly attacked the Other in the
press, accusing it of naivety and opportunism over Atenco and of
complicity with the right. Others like Almeyra (2006a, b & c; Olivares
Alonso 2006) and Ross (2006) have attempted to remain critically
detached from both camps, claiming more sympathy with the broader
Zapatista movement, while heavily criticising Marcos and the EZLN’s
“sectarianism”, “voluntarism” and “disrespect” for the autonomy of
the Zapatista communities which have been “forced” to cut
themselves off from the outside world once again by the “red alert”
since May. These accusations have led Marcos to criticise some
intellectuals as fence-sitting cowards (Bellinghausen 2006c) and to a
storm of disagreement with Ross in particular from the Other (Barrios

83
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

Cabrera 2006). Others like Lopez y Rivas (2006) and Gonzalez

Casanova (Bellinghausen 2006) defend the Other Campaign, while
seeking to reopen relations with AMLO and the PRD. In contrast,
Subcomandante Marcos has been relentless in his criticism of AMLO
and the PRD as the real enemy of both the Otra and the Mexican
working class, since their “alternative national project” will breathe
new life and legitimacy into the notoriously corrupt Mexican political
system and the orthodox neoliberal model it serves, and will inevitably
break their promises to put “the poor first for the benefit of all”
(AMLO’s electoral slogan). Other academics close to the Zapatista
movement like Harvey (2005) and Holloway (2002b, 2003) seek to
defend the Zapatistas from their detractors within the global
revolutionary left, while analysing the EZLN’s paradoxical inability to
capitalise on its enormous global political capital to help foment lasting
social, economic and democratic change from below, as has happened
in Ecuador and Bolivia where strong indigenous movements have
helped to topple unpopular neoliberal governments.
Having established the political basis for the rupture of the EZLN
with the institutional and much of the historical Mexican left as the
backdrop to the Other Campaign, the following section will explore in
greater detail the proposals outlined in the Sixth Declaration and how
they have panned out in the trajectory of the Other and its
international sister campaign, the “Zezta” or Intergalactic Commission
of the EZLN.

“The Sixth”, “The Other” and the “Zezta”

In common with the first five Declarations, the Sixth as event marks a
turning point in the Zapatista struggle and as text communicates to
national and international “civil society”4 the decisions of the Zapatista
assemblies through the EZLN and Marcos. The Sixth was initially
greeted with positive statements by the Mexican political and
intellectual classes as a sign of the EZLN’s further move away from
armed struggle and towards non-violent democratic politics. In fact
non-violence is stressed throughout the document as the basis for
direct action, in common with most of the alterglobalist movement but

4 I use inverted commas since there is so much disagreement over the term,
although the Gramscian, more social movement-based interpretation tends to
predominate within Zapatista and movement discourse, while the Hegelian
version, based on all individuals and groups outside the state, including
entrepreneurs, religious institutions and rightist interest groups, predominates
in both NGO and academic discourse in Mexico. On the question of what is
“civil” in “civil society” see Cleaver (in this volume) and Bonefeld(2006).

84
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

in continued rupture with the history, ideology and praxis of both

Mexican and Latin American vanguardist guerrilla movements:

“The EZLN continues its commitment toward an offensive

cease-fire and will not attack any governmental force nor
carry out offensive military manoeuvres; the EZLN continues,
still, its commitment to insisting on the path of political
struggle with this peaceful proposal that we now make. As
such, the EZLN will continue in its belief in not making any
secret alliance with national politico-military organizations nor
those of other countries; the EZLN reiterates it commitment to
defend, support, and obey the Zapatista indigenous
communities that create it and that are its supreme
command, and, without interfering in their internal democratic
processes and in the measurement of its possibilities, to
contribute to the strengthening of their autonomy, good
government, and improvement of living conditions. That is to
say, what we are going to create in Mexico and in the world
we will create without weapons, through a peaceful civil
movement, yet without ignoring or abandoning our
communities.” (EZLN 2005: 3-4)

The right was particularly happy about the severe criticisms made of
AMLO and the PRD, which seemed to promise a divided “left”. The
Zapatistas and the Other, however, do not consider the PRD to be any
longer a party of the “left”, or at least only of the top-down variety. In
fact, the Sixth has reinvigorated the debate over the meaning of this
historically ambiguous political category and identity, born during the
French Revolution of 1789, which anarchist, autonomist and libertarian
groups in the Other generally reject as obsolete and meaningless,
given the objectively pro-capitalist position of most of the historical
left, whether social-democrat, institutional socialist or (ex-)communist.
Another reflection on the meaning of “left” within the Sixth as “utopia”
is provided by the Cuban Libertarian Movement (2005: 1-2):

“(…) left is the one that has not renounced utopia neither by
word or deed, and that, in spite of everything, finds its main
encouragement in a utopia that could be generally defined as
a thick web of relationships among free, equal and mutually
supportive beings; a utopia capable of identifying its distant
and venerable beginnings and of reclaiming them for their
much needed actualisation. (…) This is the left that has
learned to recognize and look askance at the narrow, dry road
left in the wake of the guerrilla vanguards later become some
exclusive and excluding party, civil or military populism and
social-democratic reformism; this is the left that doesn’t feel
represented by any authority and even questions the meaning
of ‘representation’, that seeks itself among the cries of ‘let
them all go!’ [“Que se vayan todos!”, the slogan of the
December 2001 revolts in Argentina] and the whispering
promise to “change the world without taking power”
[Holloway 2002a]; the left that depends on the non-negotiable
autonomy of grassroots social movements as the template for
a new world and that in self-management and direct action

85
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

finds its truest expression. A left that surely the EZLN wants to
belong to and that, in open reciprocity, finds in it one of its
most visible manifestations.”

However, the initial enthusiasm of Fox et al for the Sixth added grist to
the mill of the Zapatistas’ critics in academic left and PRD circles.
Adopting a neo-Stalinist version of the theory of the “extremes that
touch”, critics like Almeyra (op. cit.) have ranted against the Sixth and
the Other in their columns in La Jornada, the only leftist national daily
newspaper and close to the PRD, as evidence that the Other is,
wittingly or not, part of the Fox-Salinas anti-AMLO plot, and therefore
objectively a reactionary movement, unless it corrects itself and allies
itself with AMLO. However, since the repression of the movement at
Atenco in May, such conspiracy-theory charges have lost the illusory
credence they may initially have had.
The organization of the Other campaign began in August 2005
with a series of meetings between the different sectors of what the
Zapatistas continue to refer to as “civil society” convoked by the Sixth
and the EZLN in the “Caracol” of La Realidad, the traditional meeting
place, in the Lacandona jungle near to the border with Guatemala, of
the EZLN and its allies. Through these meetings with core
organizations and groups prepared to coordinate the Other throughout
the various federal entities of Mexico, the Other’s strategy was
discussed and decided through the direct democracy of the assembly.
All groups, movements and individuals who accept the organizational
principles of forming an anti-capitalist alliance “below and to the left”
could become “adherents” to the Sixth and participants in the Other.
“Below” implies bottom-up, grassroots self-organization among the
rural and urban working class and poor, eschewing relations with more
privileged strata like intellectuals, small entrepreneurs etc. whose
support the EZLN once sought 10 years previously. “To the left”
signifies that the Other is both theoretically and practically anti-
capitalist, to distinguish it from the ambiguous and opportunist left,
particularly the PRD, which in the past used an anti-capitalist discourse
in the form of orthodox Marxism and socialist politics, mainly as a
rhetorical window-dressing exercise and always subordinated to the
discourses of “patriotism” and “national sovereignty”, i.e. the interests
of those sectors of the national bourgeoisie opposed to global
capitalism. As for the Other’s plan of action in Mexico, guidelines had
already been set out in the Sexta:

“In Mexico…
1. We will continue fighting for the Indian peoples of Mexico
but not only for them nor only with them, but, rather, for all
the exploited and dispossessed in Mexico (…) And when we
speak of all the exploited of Mexico we are also speaking of

86
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

the brothers and sisters who have had to go to the United

States to seek work in order to survive.

2. We are going to listen to and speak directly, without

middlemen nor mediations, to the simple and humble Mexican
people, and depending on what we hear and learn, we will
construct, together with these people who are like us, humble
and simple, a national plan for struggle, but a plan that will,
clearly, be of the left, which is to say anti-capitalist, or anti-
neoliberal, or which is also to say in favour of justice,
democracy and freedom for the Mexican people.

3. We will try to construct or reconstruct another way of

practicing politics, in the spirit of serving others, without
material interests, with sacrifice, with dedication, with
honesty, a way that keeps it word, or, that is to say, in the
same way that militants of the left – who were not stopped by
violence, jail or death, and much less with offers of dollar bills
– have done so.

4. We will also keep looking at ways to rise up; a fight to

demand that we create a new Constitution, (…) new laws that
take our demands, those of the Mexican people, into account,
which are: housing, land, work, food, health, education,
information, culture, independence, democracy, justice,
freedom and peace. A new Constitution that recognizes the
rights and liberties of the people, and that defends the weak
against the powerful.” (EZLN 2005: 5)

Point four has been particularly controversial for the autonomist-

anarchist-libertarian groups within or sympathetic to the Other, who
reject constitutionalism as the gateway to institutional politics and the
bourgeois “political game” of partial, retractable “human rights” and
“individual liberties”, always dependent on the fundamental “duty” of
obedience to the “democratic” capitalist state (CLM 2005).
Nevertheless, perhaps this is too narrow a reading of the word
“constitution”, which after all figures centrally in the thought of one of
autonomism’s most important thinkers, Toni Negri (1992), whose
theory of “constituent power” recognises how the counter-power of
historical and actual movements tends to constitute a new set of social
relations, which either breaks with previous ones or forces them to
negotiate a new “constituted power”, following which the antagonistic
force of the movement tends to be institutionalised and co-opted under
the terms of the new “constitution” and its “institutions”, so catalysing
a new cycle of antagonist movements to struggle against the former
antagonists. One needs to look no further than the history of the
incessant struggle between the revolutionary and reformist left during
the 20th century. Thus the Other, if it becomes the hegemonic
antagonist force in Mexican politics, will have to “constitute” new
social relations and political balances as one of its unwritten tasks.

87
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

The organizational principles of the Other are assembleist,

horizontal, anti-electoral, anti-delegatory and directly democratic, but
to what extent these principles are consistently practiced, given the
overwhelming prestige of the EZLN and Marcos within the Other,
remains to be seen:

“We also announce that the EZLN will establish a policy of

having alliances with non-electoral movements and
organizations that define themselves, in theory and practice,
as of the left, according to the following conditions:

• No making of agreements from above to impose upon those

below, but rather, they should make agreements to advance
together and to listen and to organize indignation;

• No to beginning movements that will be later negotiated away

behind the backs of those who made them, but, rather, they
should take into account, always, the opinions of those who
participate in them;

• No to seeking little gifts, jobs, advantages, patronage, of

Power or of those who aspire to it, but, rather, they should go
farther than the electoral calendars allow;

• No to trying to resolve from above the problems of our Nation,

but rather, they must construct FROM BELOW AND FOR
BELOW an alternative to neoliberal destruction, an alternative
of the left for Mexico.

• Yes to mutual respect for autonomy and independence of

organizations, of their ways of fighting, of their way of
organizing themselves, of their internal decision-making
processes, of their legitimate representatives, of their
aspirations and demands;

• And, yes, to mutual respect and autonomy and independence

and yes to a clear commitment of mutual and coordinated
defence of national sovereignty, and with intransigent
opposition to the attempts to privatise electricity, oil, water
and natural resources.” (Ibid.: 6-7)

88
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

It is evident that these conditions exclude the instrumental politics of

the institutional left, but also of the “revolutionary left” that seeks
state power. The second “no” is particularly topical, given the
manipulation of popular outrage over the electoral fraud of July 2nd by
the PRD leadership to create a “designer revolt” (Gibler 2006b), which
now faces not only imminent violent repression by the protofascist
Mexican state, but also the perpetual danger of betrayal through
backroom negotiations by its “leaders”. At the same time these
organisational conditions present problems for the left-wing of the
Other, uncomfortable with traditional anti-imperialist politics and
notions of “national sovereignty” that do not problematise its basis in
the dominance of the national bourgeois classes and it use of
nationalist ideology to manipulate and divide the global working class,
even when nationalism may appear to have a “progressive”, “anti-
Yankee” face in Mexico. It remains to be seen, therefore, to what
extent the EZLN and other more historical left groups within the Other
can go beyond the limitations of Guevarist “left nationalism”, still the
dominant ideology within the Mexican and Latin American radical left,
although increasingly criticised by the growth of autonomism and
anarchism in recent years.
The Other also seeks to separate itself from the verticalist
traditions of Marxist-Leninist vanguardism, rejecting both the pyramid
model of organization and its historical objective, the seizing of state
power as the means to constitute a socialist society, organized as a
mirror image of hierarchical capitalist society. From the start the EZLN
made it clear that it would not be forming the “leadership” of the
Other, much to the chagrin of the verticalists, democratic centralists,
propagators of the Marcos personality cult and believers in
“charismatic leaders” among the orthodox left:

And we don’t come to you to tell you what you should do nor
to give you orders. Nor are we going to ask you to vote for a
candidate, since we already know that the only candidates
are neoliberals. Nor are we going to tell you to do what we do,
nor that you should rise up in arms. What we are going to do
is ask you how your lives are going, your struggles, your
thoughts about how our country is doing and about what we
can do so that they don’t defeat us (…) And maybe (…)
together, we will organize throughout the entire country and
come to an agreement between our struggles that, right now,
fight alone, separated from one another, and we will come up
with a plan about how we will continue with this program that
includes what we all want, and a plan for how we are going to
achieve this program, that is named ‘the national plan for
struggle’ (…) (EZLN 2005: 2-3)

Nevertheless, Delegate Zero is without doubt the primus inter pares of

the Other, as could be observed at the First National Assembly on May

89
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

29, when he informed the Assembly, supposedly the highest

decisionary body of the Other, of the EZLN’s “National Plan for
Struggle” up to and including election day on July 2 nd to free the Atenco
prisoners, leaving the Assembly to rubberstamp it, rather than debate,
discuss and if necessary criticise and amend it, given the lack of time
to do so (only 15 minutes of discussion time remained for each set of
state and regional delegates to give their opinion on the proposal as
the independent cinema where the Assembly was held was about to
shut for the night).
In keeping with most of the global anti-capitalist movement,
many within the Other are diffident about such “grand narratives” as
socialism, communism, autonomism and anarchism or any preordained
blueprint to change society “from above”, although within its ranks are
some of the most dogmatic Marxist-Leninists in Mexico, the Maoist
“Communist Party of Mexico (Marxist Leninist)” whose huge banners of
Marx, Lenin, Engels, Stalin and Mao have adorned every meeting and
march of the Other’s caravan, to the consternation of many within the
Other and the derision of its critics (Almeyra 2006a; Sanchez Ramirez
2006)5. In probably unintentional accordance with the autonomist
theory of “multitude” (Hardt & Negri: 2000, 2004; Virno: 2004), these
archaic images, once the icons of organized working class centrality,
are accepted along with the hammer and sickle, anarchist and
autonomist symbols, images of Zapata, Villa, Magon and Che Guevara,
and perhaps even the Virgin of Guadalupe, a religious image used in
the past by Zapatista indigenous women on their International
Women’s Day marches through San Cristobal, Chiapas, and an integral
part of revived popular Latino identity in the US, as one more part of
the Other’s baggage, which above all contains the history of class
struggle in Mexico.
The Zapatista slogan of “walking by asking” (caminando
preguntando), i.e. moving forward in the struggle against and beyond
capitalism by constantly questioning and criticizing both our own
ideological and organizational assumptions, and the constantly
changing and amorphous political and social environment produced by
the clash between capitalist high-tech and human globalisations, has
returned to Mexico in the cycles of global struggle to reinfuse the
Other, via the absorption of that slogan by the alterglobalist movement
since the “Battle of Seattle”.

5 These same banners are now to be seen in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s huge
central square, adorning AMLO’s bi-weekly “report assemblies”, a sign that
part of the Other is involved in the PRD-controlled anti-fraud movement, while
the rest of the Other focuses on the increasingly violent repression of the
teachers and APPO movements in Oaxaca and continuing efforts to free the 27
Atenco prisoners.

90
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

The Other Campaign officially began on January 1st 2006, exactly

12 years after the uprising against NAFTA, when Delegate Zero left La
Realidad, Chiapas, on the back of a motorbike headed for the first of
four months of daily meetings, speeches, protests and marches as he,
the Sixth Commission and the Other Campaign caravan, made up of
the groups in the Other and the Zezta close to the EZLN, like the
“Disobedient” (ex-White Overalls) now global movement for example,
wound their way through the southern and central states of Mexico.
The Other has catalysed the organization of previously non-existent
anti-capitalist movement networks, involving previously disparate
struggles and rival groups, and the intensification of those already in
place. It has also provoked a growing chorus of criticisms from pro-
AMLO quarters, although AMLO himself has been careful to abstain
from directly criticising Delegate Zero or the Other. However, the
general tone of the Other had been intentionally low-key and focused
on organization rather than propaganda, with Delegate Zero refusing
to give interviews and the Other barring the mainstream press from its
meetings and events, ignoring the total media coverage of the
choreographed presidential campaigns6. The events of May 3 and 4 in
and around Atenco, a small town near Mexico City where in 2002 the
local population had mobilized to defend their communally-owned
“ejido”7 land and prevent the construction of a multi-billion dollar
international airport, inflicting a stinging defeat on Fox and his
international backers, pushed both Marcos and the Other back into the
national and international limelight. By that time the Other had already
reached Mexico City, its stronghold outside Chiapas due to the
presence of the UNAM students’ movement and the dozens of social
movements and grassroots organizations spawned by the daily
struggles of life in the “Monster”. Since those events, Delegate Zero
has remained in Mexico City to coordinate the Other’s efforts to free
the political prisoners remaining from the Atenco mass arrests,
declared “red alert” in the Chiapas Zapatista communities and

6 The Other caravan was accompanied however by members of the “Other

journalism”, including Hermann Bellinghausen of La Jornada, Indymedia, Narco
News, ZNet and NACLA among others.
7 The ejidos were established throughout Mexico under the 1917 Constitution to
formalize the widespread squatting by landless peasants that took place
during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) and as a means of land
redistribution, one of the principle demands of the Revolution, on the principle
of common ownership. The revocation by the Salinas government in 1992 of
the Constitution’s Article 27, which forbade the breaking up of ejidos into
private lots or their sale to landowners, was both a forbearer of NAFTA and the
spark for a series of land disputes and peasant uprisings, including that of the
EZLN, as corporate agribusiness, Mexican landowners and tourism projects
have conducted illegal land grabs and enforced sales, with the instigation and
support of the state and federal governments. This kind of struggle forms the
backbone of the Other in the rural areas of Southern Mexico (Ballvé 2006).

91
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

suspended indefinitely the rest of the Other Campaign’s tour around

northern Mexico, where both the institutional left and grassroots
movements are fewer and weaker.
The organization of the “Zezta Internazional” (in mock reference,
perhaps, to both Inter Milan’s acceptance of Marcos’ invitation last
year to play a series of matches with the Zapatista football team, and
to the idea of forming a “Sixth International”, the “Fifth” being the
centralist tendency within the WSF), also called for in the Sixth, has
been conducted through meetings in Latin American and European
countries, especially Spain, where the Second Intercontinental
Gathering for Humanity and against Neoliberalism, or “Encuentro
Intergalactico”, happened in 1997, the first having been organized by
the EZLN in Chiapas the year before. Both “encuentros” can be seen as
among the most important steps in setting up Peoples Global Action, a
global alliance of autonomous movements, in 1997 and the global
justice “movement of movements” since 1999.
The final part of the Sixth Declaration begins by identifying the
Zapatista movement, more as students who listen than teachers who
talk, with the popular, socialist and autonomous movements of
contemporary Latin America in particular, but also with the global anti-
war movement:

And we want to say to you, to the Latin American peoples,

that, for us, we are proud to be part of you, although we are a
small part. We remember well when years ago the continent
was lit up by a light named Che Guevara, just as that light
was named Bolívar beforehand, because, at times, the
peoples take up a name in order to show that they carry a
flag. And we want to say to the people of Cuba, who already
have spent years in your path of resistance, that you are not
alone and that we do not agree with the blockade against you
and that we are going to look for the way to send you
something, even if it is just corn, to support your resistance.
And we want to say to the people of the United States that we
don’t confuse you with the evil governments that you have
and that harm the whole world, and that we know that there
are North Americans who fight in your country and work in
solidarity with the struggles of other peoples. And we want to
say to our Mapuche brothers and sisters in Chile that we see
and we learn from your struggles. And to the Venezuelan
people, that we watch very carefully your way of defending
your sovereignty and your right to be a nation and to decide
where you will go. And to the indigenous brothers and sisters
of Ecuador and Bolivia we say to you that you are giving an
excellent history lesson to all of Latin America because right
now you are putting a stop to neoliberal globalisation. And to
the piqueteros and the youth of Argentina we want to say that
we love you. And to those in Uruguay who want a better
country, we admire you. And to the landless of Brazil we
respect you. And to all the youths of Latin America, it’s so
great that you are doing what you are doing and you give us
great hope. And we want to say to the brothers and sisters of

92
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

Social Europe, that is to say the Europe that is rebellious and

has dignity, that you are not alone. Your large movements
against neoliberal wars make us very happy. We watch,
attentively, your ways of organizing yourselves and your
styles of fighting so that perhaps we can learn something.”
(EZLN 2005: 1)

As for the programme of the Zezta, the Sixth, perhaps to distinguish

the horizontalism of the Zezta from the incipient verticalism of the
WSF, proposed through characteristically tongue-in-check language
that:

“In the world…

1. We will build more relationships of respect and mutual aid

with people and organizations that resist and fight against
neoliberalism and for humankind.

2. In accordance with our abilities we will send material

support such as food and crafts to those brothers and sisters
who struggle throughout the world. (…)

3. And to everyone throughout the world who resists we say

that there have to be other intercontinental gatherings (…)
We don’t want to give an exact date, or place, or decide who
comes or how it is done, because this is about making
horizontal agreements among us all. But we don’t want it with
a stage from where just a few speak and everyone else
listens, but, rather, that there not be a stage, that it all be at
ground-level, but well ordered because if not well organized
there will just be a lot of noise and no one will understand the
word. And with a good organization, everyone can listen, and
they can write down in their notebooks the words of
resistance that others tell so that later each participant can
talk it over with their colleagues in their worlds. And we think
that it ought to be in a place where there is a very big prison,
because it could be that they repress us and jail us, and that
way we will not all be piled one on top of another but, rather,
well organized though we be prisoners. And from there in jail
we can continue the intercontinental gathering for humankind
and against neoliberalism.” (EZLN2005: 4-5)

The Zezta’s participants are from horizontalist movements, probably

disillusioned by their experience in the now verticalist-controlled WSF,
from which the EZLN as an armed organization was constitutionally
excluded, and the hijacking of the European Social Forum by the old
orthodox left and its anti-democratic methods and obsolete political
style. The Zezta is due to take place by January 2007 and the decision
to organize the Zezta globally in tandem with the Other is a sign both
of the continuing strength of Zapatista-instigated “new

93
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

internationalism” (Dinerstein 2002) and of the presently fractured

state of the alterglobalist movement8.

Atenco, Oaxaca and the Other

On the morning of May 3 in the town of Texcoco, a few miles from

Atenco and about 15 miles north-west of Mexico City, the PRD local
mayor sent riot police to evict a group of flower sellers, typical
members of the informal economy, from their established pitch. The
scuffle that followed quickly developed into a major conflict as
members of the Peoples Front in Defence of the Land (Frente de
Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra / FPDT) from Atenco, also known as the
“macheteros”, (they carry machetes on demonstrations as a symbol of
the peasantry in struggle) came to the flower sellers aid and blocked
the main highway to Mexico City for the rest of the day, repelling
various charges by riot police. During the arrest of the leader of the
FPDT that day a 14-year-old boy was shot dead at close range by a
police officer. Hundreds of Other activists, human rights observers,
doctors, media activists and others immediately gathered in Atenco to
support the people of Atenco and Texcoco. The rightist Televisa and
Teleazteca media duopoly bayed for protestor blood, repeatedly
showing images of a riot policeman being kicked, while filtering out
images of police brutality. Early in the morning of the next day, 3,000
armed riot police from various local, state and federal forces invaded
the town of Atenco in retaliation for their defeat the day before and for
the political humiliation inflicted on the Fox government four years
earlier over the new Mexico City airport. The centre of the town was
smothered in tear gas as gangs of riot police viciously attacked,
clubbed and kicked men and women, the elderly and the young, FPDT,
Other activists and bystanders, photographers and human rights
observers, all were badly beaten before being dragged to jeeps where
the beatings continued and the sexual abuse of the arrested women
began. One 50-year-old woman out shopping was forced to have oral
sex with three riot policemen in the street, under threat of beating and
arrest (Ballinas 2006). A UNAM student activist Alexis Benumea was
shot in the head with a tear gas canister and died a month later from
his wounds. Some 20 houses, identified by an informer as belonging to
FPDT activists, were broken into without warrants and the occupants
and others who had taken shelter there beaten and arrested and their
belongings stolen or destroyed. 280 were arrested and taken by bus to

8 See for example the recent split within ATTAC France along verticalist-
horizontalist lines (Callinicos 2006).

94
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

a high security prison in the State of Mexico. During the 8-hour journey
most of the women, including three foreigners, and some of the men
were sexually tortured and 30 women and at least one man were
raped by the police. At present, 27 people remain imprisoned in a high
security jail reserved for terrorists and drug traffickers on charges of
obstructing the highway and kidnapping police officers (eight police
were captured – a common practice in social conflicts in Mexico -
during the clashes of May 3, and were well treated before being
discovered in a safe house by their colleagues during the police
operation of the following day). There have been two hunger strikes by
the imprisoned. Some are not members of the FPDT or from Atenco,
while others are human rights observers and doctors who were
voluntarily aiding the injured from the day before. A permanent vigil
was established outside the prison where they are being held to
demand their release. At the Other’s first national assembly on May
29th, Marcos formalized the decision to suspend the caravan until all
the remaining imprisoned are released. He proposed a campaign of
artistic and political actions, including a demonstration for the release
of all political prisoners and the presentation of the disappeared from
the Seventies, as well as a second National Assembly, until and
including election day on July 2nd which the assembly unanimously
approved. As a result of the national and international outcry over the
exceptional police brutality, the Other’s profile was raised significantly,
a 15,000 strong national demonstration against the repression in
Atenco and for the release of the prisoners took place in Mexico City on
May 30th, with smaller marches, pickets and protest actions throughout
the country, in the USA and internationally during May and June.
Marcos broke his boycott of the mainstream media and gave press and
television interviews in which he intensified his attack on AMLO, whose
response to the Atenco events was a studied silence, and on the
destruction of any notion of legal order and human rights in Mexico by
the political class, since all three of the main parties were involved in
the repression.9 The repression of the Atenco and Other movements in
May launched the other Campaign into the Mexican and international
public realms, dramatically intensifying the organization and
networking of struggles. However, since election day on July 2, the
decision to remain in Mexico City until the liberation of the imprisoned

9 The data and incidents mentioned here were taken from reports in La Jornada
and Indymedia Mexico, and have since been confirmed by the preliminary
report of the ongoing investigation bythe International Civil Commission on
the Observance of Human Rights (Comisión Civil Internacional de Observación
por los Derechos Humanos) into theevents in Atenco and Texcoco on May 3rd
and 4th this year: http://cciodh.pangea.org; accessed 11th August 2006.

95
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

and suspend the rest of the Other Campaign’s tour of Mexico, while
humanly and ethically unquestionable, have nevertheless led to the
Other’s perceived stagnation and “swamping” by the media coverage
given to AMLO’s anti-fraud movement.
Since July 2nd, the focus of the movement has switched to the
teachers and popular movements in Oaxaca City, the capital of Oaxaca
state, one of the most impoverished and historically combatative
regions of Mexico, along with Chiapas, Guerrero and Puebla, the states
with the main concentrations of autochthonous peoples, among the
most antagonist social subjects in recent years in Mexico and Latin
America. The Oaxaca movement started on May 22 as the annual
strike and occupation of the city’s main square for a meaningful salary
raise by the dissident section of the SNTE (National Educational
Workers Union), Latin America’s largest union and the fiefdom of Elba
Esther Gordillo, the pro-Fox PRI leader widely suspected of using her
union members to carry out the more traditional fraudulent activities
on July 2. The movement rapidly spread throughout the middle and
working classes of Oaxaca, disgusted by the despotic style of the PRI
governor, Ulisses Ruiz, whose removal from power became the
movement’s minimum demand. The crude attempts to baton the
teachers off the street on June 14th led to a battle in the city centre
resulting in the main square being retaken by the striking teachers,
now supported actively by ample sections of the general population,
and the formation of APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca).
The occupation of the main square has spread to the building of
barricades throughout the city and the occupation of most of the public
and government buildings in the city, as well as all the TV and radio
stations, rendering the state ungovernable. Ruiz survives only due to
the pro-fraud post-electoral PRI-PAN pact against the anti-fraud and
Oaxaca movements. The use of “state terrorist” tactics by the
repressive apparatus, reminiscent of the “dirty war” fought against the
guerrilla movements of the 70s, includes the murder of 5 APPO
activists, the wounding of several others and the kidnapping of four
APPO leaders by plain clothes police and paramilitary gunmen, who
now launch nightly armed attacks against the pickets outside
government buildings and radio stations (Gibler 2006a). The violence
of the now totally discredited governor’s response and the non-
intervention of the Fox government has only increased the growing
sense of political vacuum, destabilization and polarization evident
throughout the country, but most notable in Mexico City and Oaxaca,
as the lines for a generalised conflict begin to harden.

96
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

The “Other on the Border” and the “Other on the Other

Side”

One of the most innovative aspects of the Other has been the attempt
to depart from national Mexican politics and transcend the crumbling
boundaries of the nation state to include those (non-)Mexicans who live
and struggle in one of the most extreme borderlands, where “First”
and “Third” Worlds meet, clash and intermingle, creating a
transnational space, sometimes called “Amexica”. This is the land of
maquiladoras (corporate assembly plants for export, compared by
Bowden [1998] with Nazi slave factories for their salaries, too low to
permit worker reproduction, guaranteed instead by a constant stream
of internal migrants, and for appalling work and health and safety
conditions), narco executions (drug trafficker cartels, now the most
powerful in Latin America, engaged in an increasingly deadly turf war),
coyotes (immigrant traffickers, who will be among the main
beneficiaries of the Sensenbrenner anti-immigration bill), Mara
Salvatrucha/MS13 (a counter-cultural gang movement and organised
crime cartel from El Salvador now present throughout the US), the
Migra (US Border Patrol), child sex tourism and the black on pink
crosses to remember the femicides (some 450 mainly working class-
indigenous-internal migrant women and girls murdered in Ciudad
Juarez and Chihuahua City since 1993, 130 of whom were raped,
tortured and mutilated, over 1,000 “disappeared”, only 30 cases
investigated to the victims’ families’ satisfaction10), but also of
neofascist Minutemen militia and the militarisation of “America’s” soft
underbelly in the “war against terrorism”. Ciudad Juarez is the region’s
most emblematic city and is about to host the first Border Social Forum
in October, being strategically positioned in the very centre of the
1,500-mile long border and the twin city of El Paso, Texas, containing
the CIA’s headquarters for the border and global south. Bowden (1998)
despairingly calls Juarez “a laboratory of our future”, a place where the
now relatively low level of worker resistance allows capital to create a
“posthuman” society (Berardi 2003). Beyond the borderlands lies
“Atzlan”, the Chicano term for “occupied Mexico” (the south-western
states of the US ceded by Mexico after the 1847 invasion), where the
Latino population has grown vertiginously in the last 25 years, as some
30 million Mexicans and Central Americans have crossed the border,
most without documents, one of the great exoduses of recent history.
Hundreds have perished from heat exhaustion in the Arizona desert,

10 See the constantly updated bilingual website of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a

Casa (Our daughters back home), the most radical NGO working on the
femicides in Juarez and Chihauhua:

97
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

one of the hottest places on earth and where US anti-immigration

policies deliberately funnel migrants with walls, border patrols,
pilotless spy planes and now with armed militias and the armoured
vehicles of the National Guard. But Aztlan now also includes Los
Angeles, Chicago and New York, which have become dependent on the
cheap labour of Mexican migrants, whose remittances to their home
communities are now Mexico’s third largest source of foreign exchange
after oil sales and tourism, making organized migrant communities in
Chicago and elsewhere among the most significant investors in
Mexican rural communities, so much so that the Bush government now
wants to tax them. The growing dependence of the US economy on
migrant “prosumers” was laid bare by the May Day “Si se puede”
movement’s huge demonstrations and boycott of US businesses
against the proposed criminalization of undocumented migrants as
“potential terrorists” by the Sensenbrenner bill. This mass movement
of millions of previously subordinated migrants, together with the
increasingly powerful social movements of Latin America, which have
forced their national oligarchies to abandon or modify their slavish
obedience of the Washington Consensus, has been described as the
most important generalised anti-capitalist struggle in the Americas
since the Civil Rights, black nationalist, students, counter-cultural and
anti-war movements of the 60s (Midnight Noters 2006).
So where and how has the Other tried to connect with these
movements both in the US and on its borders? Starting with the “Other
on the Border”, an attempted transnational zonification and
networking of struggles in Chihuahua in Mexico, with west Texas and
New Mexico, activists from the autonomist Kasa de la Cultura para
Tod@s (House of Culture for All), the Trotskyist LUS (United Socialist
League), ejiditarios from the Valle de Juarez (the last remaining
agricultural area near the Juarez-El Paso border), the indigenous
movement of the Raramuri people, the FAT (Authentic Labour Front,
the only independent trade union active among maquiladora workers),
students, teachers and NGOs campaigning for justice for the victims of
the femicides, have met weekly with a Chicano rural farmworkers
union in El Paso campaigning to save their homes in the Segundo
Barrio in the downtown from gentrification as part of the San Jeronimo
Project, which will lead to the diversion of water, the construction of
social housing and other scarce resources away from the fast growing
but almost completely unplanned and unserviced urban sprawl of
Juarez, and with trade unionists, migrant rights activists and teachers
from El Paso and Las Cruces in the US; altogether some 50 groups as
well as many unaffiliated individuals. However, the Other on the Border
has been dogged from the start by a sectarian war of words carried out

98
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

on its email list and aimed at the Kasa, the core movement, which had
bilateral meetings with the EZLN in Chiapas at the beginning of the
Other and is responsible for coordinating the Other on the Border: yet
another example of the horizontal-vertical conflict within global anti-
capitalism, which has resulted in a considerable waste of time, energy
and motivation. As a result the actions taken in solidarity with the
Atenco movement in May were very limited compared to south and
central Mexico, where sizeable demonstrations and roadblocks were
organized throughout May. When the Kasa was attacked by armed,
masked “state terrorists” the same month and for the second time in
six months (an example of the now commonplace state intimidation
tactics used against the Other throughout Mexico), its computers
destroyed and a member kidnapped for several hours, the response by
the rest of the Other in Juarez was well below what the Kasa had hoped
for in terms of solidarity and support. Once the decision was taken by
Marcos, who was due to visit the borderlands in June, to suspend the
rest of the Other Campaign until the Atenco imprisoned were freed,
enthusiasm has gradually dropped off and the once packed weekly
organizational meetings have now ceased. Even though the focus in
the Other on the visits of Marcos was criticised in some quarters as
reinforcing his de facto leadership, nevertheless the “Zapatour” had
important organizational and mobilisational impacts, especially on
areas of relatively low militant activism such as Juarez where
intermovement relations were minimal or non-existent. While some
voluntaristically welcome this as a necessary self-depuration of the
less committed members of the Other, others have criticised Marcos’
decision to “imprison” himself in Mexico City, which has led to a sense
of stagnation since the July 2 elections, concomitant with the
spectacular (in all senses of that word) rise of the AMLO anti-fraud
movement. Nevertheless, the Zapatistas credibility as a core
movement, not only in Mexico but globally, depends on their insistence
on political coherence. Thus their commitment to the Atenco
imprisoned will be kept even if the remainder of the Other Campaign
has to be postponed to next year and the opportunity to “shadow” the
presidential campaigns in order to reveal the falsities of official politics
has been lost for another six years. This is also a sign of the Zapatistas
patience and different conception of political time from the more
urgent, but perhaps more opportunist and capitalisistically integrated
political rhythms of some urban social movement activists.
The Other on the Other Side participated in the “Si se puede”
movement and has coordinated with the local struggles of the Latino
community, for example the attempt to save a community urban farm
and park in South Central Los Angeles from being repossessed for

99
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

development. This struggle brought together activists from all the

communities in LA in defence of an occupied green space, one of the
few left in a highly polluted and alienated urban environment. It has
also organised “free radio” workshops and alternative media skill
sharing with the less-resourced Tijuana and Juarez Others. The Other
on the Other Side is a vital conduit between the Other Campaign in
Mexico and the increasingly powerful struggles of the Latino migrant
communities in the US.

Old Lefts and New Foes: AMLO, the PRD and the Other
after the July 2nd Electoral Fraud

It should be apparent by now that the contemporary political cleavages

in Mexico are not only left-right, as personified by the bitter personal
feud between Fox and AMLO, but also the growing conflict between the
revolutionary/anti-capitalist left represented by the Other Campaign
and the substantially pro-capitalist/ “reformist” (in reality, “reformism
without reforms”, typical of the Latin American post-insurrectional
institutional left) PRD. Taking both the political elites and the broader
left parties and movements by surprise, the EZLN first attacked the
presidential aspirations of AMLO and the PRD, the main centre-left
party, as neoliberal and even “fascist”, causing considerable
consternation among the PRD’s generally pro-Zapatista base. The
confused resentment and outrage expressed in the letters that flooded
into La Jornada in July and August 2005, following the publication of the
Sixth, were born of the fact that most within the party view AMLO as a
messianic figure, the PRD’s best chance to win the presidency since its
foundation in 1989, following the electoral fraud of 1988. AMLO’s
elevation to virtual political sainthood has been greatly aided by the
clumsy conspiracy of Fox and Salinas to remove him from contention
through spurious legal actions and media vilification. AMLO’s right-
hand man when Mayor of Mexico City, Rene Bejerano, was caught on
video in 2004 receiving bribes in return for city contracts from a
businessman subsequently linked to Salinas, so provoking a far-
reaching scandal which showed that the PRD was very much part of
the endemically corrupt, clientalist political class, although AMLO’s
reputation as an “honest” politician remained unscathed. The
conspiracy was momentarily frustrated by a huge demonstration of
over one million mainly but not exclusively PRD supporters in April
2005, forcing Fox to back down and reinstate AMLO’s legal immunity

100
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

as Mayor, so permitting him to continue as the PRD’s presidential

candidate11.
Marcos has since clarified the reasons for the now intense
antagonism between the Zapatistas and the PRD, which in many ways
had been simmering since 1994:

 the 2001 betrayal by the PRD of the 1996 San Andres Accords
on indigenous autonomy and rights, signed by the EZLN and
the then PRI Mexican government as well as various
independent indigenous organizations and which the PRD had
always verbally supported (and the enactment of which AMLO
made the first of the “51 promises” in his 2006 electoral
manifesto), but which it unexpectedly dropped when the
majority of its senators supported a diluted PAN
counterproposal which substantially maintains the racist
status quo and denies autonomy.
 The armed attack in April 2004 by PRD members on a
Zapatista march in Zinacantán, a community in Chiapas
where the local PRD government had cut off water and
electricity to Zapatista families in an attempt to force them to
join the PRD. Nearby Zapatistas organized a march to
reconnect the services, which local PRD members then
ambushed with gunfire, wounding several of the marchers.
Although the PRD national leadership promised a full
investigation into the incident, it has yet to happen and the
local PRD leader responsible for the attack is now one of the
main organizers of AMLO’s non-party “Citizens Support
Network” in Chiapas.

Other reasons for the breakdown of relations between the EZLN and
the PRD would be:

• The EZLN’s unconditional support for the UNAM students

movement’s strike and occupation in 1999-2000 against the
hiking of fees as the first step in the privatisation of Latin
America’s largest state university, was a watershed in the
radicalisation of the Zapatista movement, leading to rupture
with Cardenas, the then PRD Mayor of Mexico City, and the
radical liberal urban intelligentsia, led by Carlos Monsivais and
Elena Poniatowska, once so fascinated by the EZLN. Relations
also became tense with La Jornada, which reported the

11 Under Mexican law, a person accused of a crime or involved in a court case

cannot stand for election as president.

101
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

occupation objectively but whose cartoonists and editorialists

joined the general media demonization of the autonomous
students’ movement as violent, anachronistic “Stalinist
monsters”, after they expelled the PRD “colonels” (official
student leaders) to stop them manipulating the movement.
The CGH (General Strike Council) movement was repressed in
February 2000 when the Zedillo government sent riot police
onto the campus of an autonomous university and hundreds
of students were imprisoned or expelled, although UNAM
dropped the fee hike and the movement’s nerve centre, the
Aula Magna Che Guevara, remains occupied and is now one of
the Other’s main organizational hubs.
 The Chiapas state government has been under PRD control
since 2000, and while the army and PRI-linked paramilitary
groups no longer harass Zapatista communities to the same
extent (although no action has been taken against those
responsible for the 1997 Acteal massacre and hundreds of
other extra judicial summary executions), the state’s counter-
insurgency effort has continued through discrimination
against Zapatista families and communities over government
aid, often administered through PRD-linked NGOs, forcing
some to join the PRD and leading to conflicts over squatted
land with the Zapatista autonomous “Caracoles” and “Good
Government Councils”12 in an attempt to divide and weaken
the Zapatistas in their heartland. The Zapatistas ended
relations with most Mexican NGOs, some of which are both
PRD-linked and financed by the US State Department13, in
2003 when the “Aguascalientes” meeting places with “civil
society” were shut down and replaced by the present
“Caracoles” (seashell, an important symbol in Mayan culture
and more defence-oriented), which maintain more guarded
relations with a few carefully vetted NGOs and with “civil
society” in general. The Zapatista autonomous communities,
taking advantage of the probably only temporary lull in
hostilities, have since embarked on a dual strategy of local
consolidation and gradual inter/national expansion of the
movement, of which the Sixth and the Other are the results.

12 Juntas de Buen Gobierno, set up to self-govern the autonomous municipalities

on collective leadership-revocable delegate principles anddrawn from ordinary
citizens, who then return to their former occupations, so avoiding the re-
emergence of the corruption and clientalism characteristic of a professional
political class with its own interests and agenda.
13 According to Eligio Calderon, an academic of the UAM-Xochimilco, Mexico City,
and former advisor to the EZLN during its 1995-96 negotiations with the PRI
government.

102
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

Relations with the PRD have worsened still with the choice of
Juan Sabines, formerly of the PRI, as their candidate for the
Chiapas governorship elections on August 20, which he seems
to have won. Sabines has included in his team of advisors the
ex-PRI governor Albores, responsible for the Acteal massacre
and the 1998 military offensive against the Zapatista
communities that left several dead, hundreds imprisoned and
thousands displaced.
 The failure of AMLO’s Mexico City government to properly
investigate the 2001 assassination of Digna Ochoa, an
indigenous woman and radical human rights lawyer close to
the Zapatistas, and of the UNAM student activist Pavel
Gonzalez in 2004. Many suspect the involvement of the
Yunque (anvil), a semi-clandestine neofascist group linked to
the PAN, some of whose main leaders are former members,
and/or CISEN, the Mexican secret service. However, the
judicial arm of AMLO’s government, despite hard evidence to
the contrary (both were shot more than once and Gonzalez’
body was found crucified in a forest outside the city) persists
with the “suicide” theorem, typical of one of the worst aspects
of the PRI’s 70-year dictatorship when political dissidents were
regularly “suicided”. Given the lack of judicial independence
at any level, this would seem to indicate AMLO’s reluctance,
as a prospective presidential candidate, to confront the
Mexican “secret state”, which ill bodes any prospect of justice
under his hypothetical presidency for the victims of the 1968
and 1971 massacres of students and teachers, the thousands
of disappearances and summary executions of the “dirty war”
in the 1970s, and of the more recent massacres of peasant
and indigenous movements at Aguas Blancas (1995), Acteal
(1997) and El Charco (1998), the full investigation and
punishment of which are the main demands of Mexican social
justice and human rights movements, supported by Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch.
 A disturbing tendency by both AMLO, a former member of the
PRI, and of the PRD to accept into their ranks and leadership,
and now in leading positions in the presidential electoral
team, some of the worst PRI authoritarian “dinosaurs” such as
Manuel Bartlett, one of the architects of the 1988 fraud,
Leonel Cota, formerly an orthodox neoliberal on the right-wing
of the PRI and now PRD party secretary, Adolfo Uribe and
Socorro Diaz, close advisors to former President Zedillo and
implicated in the Acteal massacre, as well as opportunists like

103
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

Munoz Ledo and Camacho Solis, both former PRI leaders who
have flirted with the PAN, and are now among AMLO’s closest
advisors.
 AMLO’s close relationship with top Mexican capitalists like
Carlos Slim, the third richest man on the planet according to
Forbes Magazine (2006), with whom he shares a project to
gentrify the historical centre of Mexico City, involving the
expulsion of its working class population and the repression of
the street vendors of the “informal economy”, through the
introduction of former New York mayor Giuliani’s “zero
tolerance” policy, while leaving organized crime rackets
untouched. As Mayor (2000-2005) AMLO had a mixed,
populist style, providing social security top up payments to
impoverished pensioners and single mothers and founding a
much-needed new state university with an adult education
mission, the UACM, while favouring the middle class
consumerist, car and construction lobbies by building the
pharaonic “Second Floor” of the city’s heavily congested ring
road, instead of investing in improved public transport,
housing and social services, all desperate needs in one of the
world’s most socially polarized, congested and polluted cities.
 The PRD, a coalition of competing “political tribes” brought
together by PRI “democratisers”, the reformed ex-Stalinists of
the Mexican Communist Party and the defeated remnants of
the New Left vanguardist parties in 1989, has made persistent
attempts to co-opt the Zapatista movement since 1994, as
part of its clientalist galaxy of ex-social movements now
converted into internal party factions or NGOs, as happened
to the more traditionally socialist Assemblea de Barrios of
Superbarrio fame and much of the once autonomous “Colono”
(community squatters) movement, enticed by the offer of
parliamentary seats and organizational funding, thanks to the
PRD’s enhanced finances following its historical victory in
1997 when Cardenas became the first elected Mayor of
Mexico City, now the party’s electoral stronghold.

So gone are the days back in 1996 when Marcos, Cardenas and AMLO
met in San Cristobal to discuss common strategy in the “transition to
democracy”, as part of the Peace Dialogue between the PRI regime
and the EZLN. The EZLN’s evolution as an autonomous movement has
led it to break with most of its broad left and democratic allies,
including the small “liberation theology” component, represented by

104
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

the ex-bishop of San Cristobal Samuel Ruiz, of the otherwise deeply

traditional and hard right Mexican Catholic Church.
The evidence for electoral fraud against AMLO and the PRD on
the July 2nd presidential, congressional and senate elections is
accumulating by the day, despite the right’s pretence that nothing
untoward happened and that everything is the product of AMLO’s
feverish imagination. The growing body of evidence for both cybernetic
and traditional fraud shows that the foreign observers provided by the
European Union and other organizations singularly failed in their task
and that Bush, Blair and Zapatero rubberstamped fraud in one of the
most important “emerging democracies” by precipitously recognising
Calderon, the PAN candidate, as the winner. Although the fabulously
paid judges of the TEPJF, the final court for electoral disputes, are
about to make their unappealable ruling, predictably, that the elections
were fair, AMLO and his "Planton" (picket) tent city, which has covered
much of the city centre since July 30th, completely disrupting traffic
flows and tourism (Mexico’s second source of foreign revenue), will
continue at least until September 15th. Under the pretext of needing to
clear the central square for an army Independence Day parade, the
“planton” may well be violently dislodged, given President Fox’s
threatening language and the creation of a militarised no-go area
around the Congress building, reminiscent of the “red zone” at the G8
Summit in Genoa in 2001, in preparation for his final September 1st
“Report to the nation”. Such repressive action will only worsen the
already profound systemic crisis caused by the fraud and the Oaxaca
conflict, possibly precipitating generalised conflict throughout Mexico.

Conclusions: An/Other Anti-Capitalism is Possible?

The Sixth and the Other represent the constitution of a potentially

revolutionary autonomous “left”, organized for the first time in
Mexican history as an officially “leaderless”, (although Marcos is for the
moment at least its unofficial leader and spokesperson) and
transnational (since it includes the “Otra en el otro lado” in the USA)
grassroots network of social movements, extra-parliamentary political
parties, independent trade union branches, community groups, radical
NGOs and unaffiliated individuals, all linked to the networks of the anti-
capitalist alterglobalist “movement of movements”. However, at the
present conjuncture the Other and indeed the Zapatista communities
in Chiapas find themselves facing repression by an authoritarian ultra-
neoliberal president, imposed through an electoral fraud which is
tantamount to a fascist coup d’etat and which slams Mexico’s 18-year-

105
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

old “transition to democracy” into reverse. The challenge to build a

mass autonomous anti-capitalist alternative “below and to the left” at
this moment seems huge and much will depend on developing close
ties with the global networks of anti-capitalism both to defend the new
movement from repression and to increase its counter-power within
the Mexican political scenario. It will also be important for the Other to
avoid the pitfalls that allowed President Kirchner to co-opt important
elements of the Piquetero movement in Argentina (see Dinerstein in
this volume), a similar fate befalling parts of the indigenous
movements in Ecuador and Bolivia, although the Sem Terra landless
peasants movement (Latin America’s largest and one of its most
autonomous) has successfully resisted Lula’s attempts to divide and
co-opt it (Fernandes 2006). So along with avoiding cooption by the
greatly expanded PRD, which won 35% of the senate and congress
seats and is only slightly smaller than the PAN, with the PRI facing
major internal splits and possible disintegration, the Other will need to
build strong links with Latin America’s growing number of autonomous
anti-capitalist movements. It will also be necessary for the Other to
strengthen its links with the Oaxaca and Atenco movements and join
forces with those potentially autonomous elements within the anti-
fraud movement, disillusioned with the prospects for radical change
through electoral politics and prepared to continue the struggle for
participative democracy “from below and for below” long after AMLO
and the PRD have made their peace with Fox and Calderon. All these
movements will need to go beyond the region’s historical tendency
towards left nationalism and “popular patriotism”, which view all forms
of globalisation as a calamity, not just the neoliberal economic variety:
an ideology which finally only legitimates the return to power of the
national bourgeoisie vis-à-vis transnational capital. For the first time an
autonomous, alterglobal, anti-capitalist movement is emerging in
Mexico, aided by the eclipse of neoliberalism in the region and the
depth of the systemic political crisis, but its immediate fate now hangs
in the balance.

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, 28 August 2006.

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to Carolina Ballesteros and Werner Bonefeld for their

helpful comments on the first drafts of this paper. My thanks also to
Eligio Calderon, Ernesto Montes, Hector Pedraza, Carlos Morales and
Claudio Albertani for the information and insights they provided in

106
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

conversations and correspondence. The opinions expressed here are

entirely my own and for which, of course, I take full responsibility.

Bibliography

Albertani, C. (2006) “Lopez Obrador, il subcomandante Marcos e

l'autonomia dei movimenti sociali”, email manuscript, 12 July:
claudio.albertani@gmail.com.
Almeyra, G. (2006a) “Stalin y la historia de la contrarrevolución”, La
Jornada, 26 February; www.unam.jornada.mx; accessed 26
February.
Almeyra, G. (2006b) “El demonio del voluntarismo”, La Jornada,
Sunday 14 May; www.unam.jornada.mx; accessed 14 May.
Almeyra, G. (2006c) “Las palabras y los actos”, Memoria, no. 208, June;
http://memoria.com.mx/node/807; accessed 27 August.
Ballinas, V. (2006) “Recibe CNDH 16 quejas por abuso sexual y 7 por
violación”, La Jornada, 10 May; www.unam.jornada.mx; accessed
10 May.
Ballvé, T. (2006) “A Day in the Life of the Other Campaign”, NACLA
Report on the Americas, March-April, pp.4-7.
Barrios Cabrera, A. (2006) “Rechazando a John Ross”, Amate-3622; 23
August; sextachihuahua-bounces@lists.biciverde.org; read 24
August.
Bellinghausen, H. (2006a) “‘La izquierda neoliberal no resolverá los
problemas’: González Casanova”, La Jornada, Wednesday 22
March: http://www.jornada.unam.mx; accessed 22 March.
Bellinghausen, H. (2006b) “Toca a los adherentes a la Zezta decidir si
organizan encuentro en Venezuela: EZLN”, La Jornada, 26 June;
www.unam.jornada.mx; accessed 26 June.
Bellinghausen, H. (2006c) “Reprocha Marcos a intelectuales perder de
vista la lucha continua de desposeídos”, La Jornada, 27 June;
www.unam.jornada.mx; accessed 27 June.
Berardi, F. (2003) La fabrica de la infelicidad. Nuevas formas de
trabajo y movimiento global. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños
[online version available].
Bonefeld, W. (2006) “Anti-globalisation and the Question of Socialism”,
Critique, Vol. 34, No. 1, April, pp. 39-59.
Bowden, C. (1998) Juarez: the laboratory of our future. New York:
Aperture Foundation.
Burbach, R. (2006) “Electoral Fraud and Rebellion in Mexico”, Latin
American Perspectives; www.latinamericanperspectives.com;
accessed 15 July.
Callinicos, A. (2006) “Attac divisions reflect a shift”, Socialist Worker, 1
July:
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=9120;
accessed 2 July.
Cuban Libertarian Movement/Movimiento Libertario Cubano (CLM/MLC)
(2005) “Reflections on the VI Declaration of the Lacandona
Jungle”, UK Indymedia: Cuban Libertarian Movement | 29.08.2005
17:22 | Analysis | Social Struggles | Zapatista;
www.indymedia.org & www.movimientolibertariocubano.org ;

107
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

accessed 25 March 2006.

Dinerstein, A. (2002) “Beyond insurrection. Argentina and New
Internationalism”, The Commoner, no.5, Autumn:
http://www.thecommoner.org; accessed January 2003.
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) (2005) “Sixth
Declaration Of The Lacandon Jungle: Part V. What We Want To
Do” (Translated by Narco News, July 1, 2005). Narco News:
August 16 2006, Issue #38:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue38/article1371.html; accessed
16 August.
Fernandes, S. (2006) “Way forward for the left?”, ZNet, 9 August;
www.zmag.org; accessed 22 August.
Galan, J. (2006) “Alienta el abstencionismo el discurso barroco de
Marcos, según académicos”, La Jornada, 22 February;
www.unam.jornada.mx; accessed 24 February.
Gibler, J. (2006a) “Scenes from the Oaxaca Rebellion”, ZNet, 4 August;
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=10708
&sectionID=59; accessed 11 August.
Gibler, J. (2006b) “Designer Uprising. Scenes from Mexico City’s Post-
electoral Mobilizations”, ZNet, 7 August;
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=10724&se
ctionID=1; accessed 11 August.
Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2002) Imperio, Barcelona: Paidos.
Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire. New York: Penguin Books.
Harvey, N. (2005a) “Inclusion Through Autonomy”, NACLA Report on
the Americas (Empire and Dissent), September/October.
Harvey, N. (2005b) “La difícil construcción de la democracia
pluriétnica: el zapatismo y la hegemonía neoliberal en el contexto
latinoamericano”. Paper presented at the seminar Empire and
Dissent : US Hegemony in Latin America, Social Science Research
Council (SSRC), Cuernavaca, Mexico, 4 - 5 March 2005.
Harvey, N. (2005c) “Beyond Hegemony? Zapatismo, Empire and
Dissent”, unpublished manuscript.
Holloway, J. (2002a) Change the world without taking power. The
meaning of revolution today. London: Pluto Press.
Holloway, J. (2002b) “Zapatismo and the Social Sciences”, Capital &
Class, no. 79.
Holloway, J. (2003) “Is the Zapatista Struggle an Anti-Capitalist
Struggle?”, The Commoner, no. 6, Winter 2003:
http://www.thecommoner.org; accessed January 2004. (originally
published in Spanish in Rebeldía no. 1, Mexico City, November
2002.)
Levidow, L. (2004) “Making another world possible? The European
Social Forum”, Radical Philosophy, No. 128, November/December
2004: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id
=2187&editorial_id=16577; accessed January 2005.
Lopez y Rivas, G. (2006) “Imágenes distorsionadas de la otra
campaña”, La Jornada, June 30; www.unam.jornada.mx; accessed
30 June.
Midnight Notes (2006) “ Migration, movements, wages and war in the
Americas: reasons for unity on May Day 2006 – and after”, The
Commoner, Ground Zero, Movements: www.commoner.org.uk/01-
13groundzero.htm; accessed 15 July.

108
 Reinventing An/Other Anti-Capitalism in Mexico

Negri, A. (1992) Il potere costituente. Saggio sulle alternative del

moderno. Milan: Sugar Co.
Olivares Alonso, E. (2006) “Zapatistas, un mundo en construcción,
visión crítica desde la solidaridad”, La Jornada, 19 July;
www.unam.jornada.mx; accessed 19 July.
Palast, G. (2006) “Why democrats don’t count”, The Guardian, 14 July;
www.GregPalast.com; accessed 14 July.
Pineda, E. (2006) “La ‘otra campaña’ y el camino electoral: mitos y
demonios que hay que exorcizar”, Chiapas al Día, No. 504,
CIEPAC, 26 April: www.ciepac.org.mx; accessed August 10.
Rabasa, J. (2003) ‘Negri por Zapata: el poder constituyente y los límites
de la autonomía’, Chiapas, no. 15:
http://www.ezln.org/revistachiapas/No15.html; accessed May
2004.
Ross, J. (2006) “A report from the Red Alert: Zapatistas at Critical
Crossroads”, Counter Punch, July 31; www.counterpunch.org;
accessed 20 August.
Sánchez Ramírez, E. (2006) “¿Stalin en la otra campaña?”, Bandera
Socialista, Mexico, no. 22.
Sen, J. (2006) “Some hard questions about the upcoming World Social
Forum”; social-movements@listserv.heanet.ie; 14 January,
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos & Comisión Sexta del EZLN (2006)
“Algunas consideraciones del Supmarcos sobre la propuesta de
plan de acción de la Comisión”, 30 May; sextachihuahua-
bounces@lists.biciverde.org; read Wednesday, 31 May.
Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude. Boston, MA: The MIT
Press.
Zezta Internazional / Intergalactic Commission of the EZLN (2005)
“Concerning the Intercontinental proposed in the Sixth
Declaration of the Selva Lacandona”, Communiqué from the
Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee -
General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation,
Mexico, November 2005: http://zeztainternazional.ezln.org.mx
/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=65; accessed
December 2005.
Zibechi, R. (2004) “La autonomía es más que una palabra. Reflexiones
a propósito del Enero Autónomo.”:
http://www.memoria.com.mx/183/zibechi.htm; accessed January
2005.

109
 Reruralizing the World

Mariarosa Dalla Costa1

I began to pose to myself the issue of the land as a crucial question at

the end of the eighties, on the heels of a trajectory which, during the
end of the sixties and the seventies, had as its crux the factory as the
space of waged labour and then the home as the space of unwaged
labour within which the former finds its roots. The labour, therefore,
involved in the production of commodities and that of the reproduction
of labour power, the labour of the factory worker and the labour of the
housewife within the Fordist organization of society. At that time we
said that the employer with one paycheck in reality bought two people,
the worker and the woman behind him. Agricultural labour, or the
labour of the land, which reproduced life for everybody, remained in
shadows however.
The question that was always subtended to that path of mine, as
to that of so many others, was of where the Achilles heel of capitalism,
that profoundly unequal system we wanted to transform, could be
found. Workers, students and women were in movement, but at that
time, within the marxist culture that permeated rebellious society
within developed countries, the agricultural labour of the farmer was
seen as anachronistic.
The eighties, in which state politics formulated themselves as a
response to the cycle of struggles of the sixties and seventies, are the
years in which neoliberalism takes off, in which there are applied in a

1 This paper is a translated version of “Riruralizzare il mondo… per recuperare lo

spirito e la vita,” a paper delivered at the Terra e Libertà/ CriticalWine
convention held at the Centro Sociale La Chimica, Verona, April 11-13th, 2003.
It is published in Italian in M. Angelini et al. (Eds.). 2004.Terra e Libertà/Critical
Wine. Rome: DeriveApprodi.

111
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

systematic and increasingly drastic manner in many countries the

politics of structural adjustment, which cause in the world an
unprecedented poverty. During those years in fact, there multiply
struggles for bread, against the increase of the cost of living, from
Latin America to Africa to Asia.
Yet strongly influencing the direction of domestic governments
was the recommendation on the part of the International Monetary
Fund that where land was free or subject to forms of local community-
based usage that a price be fixed for it, in other words that it be
subjected to a regime of private property. A result of this is that
whomever wants to work it must first of all have enough money to buy
it. It is no coincidence that those years become ones in which there
multiply struggles surrounding the expropriation of land and the water
that runs through its veins.
It is in this context that the issue of the land became central for
me, considering the levels of poverty and the impossibility of
subsistence that its expropriation (together with neoliberal policies and
other measures typical of structural adjustment) determined.
Naturally the expropriation of the land had already been since the
sixties a particularly widespread practice characterizing the Green
Revolution, which demanded that the bigger and better allotments of
land be destined for export crops at the expense of public financing for
subsistence farming.
The expropriation of the land was accompanied by the expulsion
of populations that derived from it the possibility for nutrition and
settlement. Eradicated from their land, they added themselves to
urban slums or they took the route of migration. Yet the expropriation
of the land and the eradication/expulsion of its populations also
characterized many of the World Bank’s development projects,
beginning with the construction of large dams or roads or particularly
with the transferring of populations, projects that complemented the
policies of structural adjustment inasmuch as if the latter had
increasingly lowered the quality of life, the former had maximized
profit thanks to the large-scale demolition of factors at the base of
social reproduction in those settings. Therefore I found as crucial
constants of the development phase that took off in those years those
macro-operations upon the land and its populations that had allowed
the launch of the capitalist system five centuries ago: the expropriation
from, and the accumulation of, land on the one hand, and the
accumulation of immiserated individuals who could no longer
reproduce themselves because they had been deprived of the
fundamental means of production and reproduction, above all the land
itself, on the other. These operations were now functional to a further

112
 Reruralizing the World

expansion of capitalist relations and to the re-stratification of labour on

a global level.
Yet if the expropriation of the land remains a crucial element of
that process of primitive accumulation that is reproduced again and
again, generating ever-higher levels of poverty and famine, this makes
the urgency of the question relevant not only to those who risk
expulsion from the land, but to humanity in its entirety. The conditions
of labour and of life of men and women across the world, regardless of
where they live, are implicated, because it is upon the expulsion from
the land that the condition for class is re-founded and labour within the
global economy is re-stratified. As far as those expelled from the land
are concerned, it is unthinkable that jobs will multiply in accordance
with their number. Instead we are witnessing the decimation of such
positions by various means. Nor is it possible to fool oneself into
hoping for a global guaranteed income of such vast proportions. Yet
even if it arrived one day, replacing the bombs perhaps, could we
really delimit the matter to one of money, money sufficient for the
purchase of a farming product which, in its industrial and neoliberal
formulation, increasingly pollutes our bodies, destroys small economies
and their jobs, and devastates the environment? And, beyond this,
how much freedom would we have when all of the earth’s inhabitants
depended only and exclusively on money for they survival?
It is through posing questions such as these that, already in the
eighties, beginning from the Global South, and more importantly,
gaining greater visibility and formalization in the nineties, that there
was formed a series of networks, many of which became connected
through the best-known one, the Via Campesina, which make of the
issues of farming and nutrition their clarion call. New networks and
subjects, ones that are fundamental components of the movement of
movements. It can therefore be said that, in the decade that just
ended, yet with its roots in the struggles for bread, land and water of
the eighties, a planetary movement for the defense of the access to
land, for the preservation of its reproductive powers, for access to
fresh and genuine food, has been formed. I encountered the Via
Campesina in 1996 in Rome when, with Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies,
Farida Akter and people of other circuits we put together the first
alternative convention to that of the Food and Agriculture
Organization, a convention in which that same network had a vital role
in its ability to mobilize, to organize, and to fine-tune the themes that
were brought to everyone’s attention. It was also a crucial moment of
the Zapatista insurrection, which had at its heart as with all indigenous
struggles the issue of the land/Earth as a common good. In my view,
given the resonance with which it came to the fore and the response

113
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

and support that it enjoyed on the part of the most diverse sectors
within developed countries, that rebellion had built an ideal bridge,
which for the first time had joined the struggle over the question of
land expropriation with that of the post-Fordist expropriation of labour.
Emblematic of this was the fact that at one pole there were the
rebelling indigenous of Chiapas and on the other the
workers/unemployed of developed Europe protesting in the streets
carrying the banner of Zapata. In 1996 however agricultural issues
were still paid scarce attention by rebel forms of activism in Italy. I still
remember sensing a certain surprise surrounding the subject within a
movement meeting I raised it at in March of that year. The attention
paid to such themes today offers us a measure of the progress made
since.
The networks that have been constructing themselves from the
various global Souths and the Zapatista insurrection, as I was saying,
returned to the developed world the concept of the land/Earth as a
common good, and a many-sided concept at that. Let us consider the
primary facets:

a) The land/Earth above all as a source of life, of

nourishment and therefore of plenty if preserved as a
system capable of reproducing itself. Therefore the right
of access to the land and to the resources it contains,
above all water and seeds, against their continual
privatization. The right of access to and the economic
possibility of farming the land according to organic
techniques, using all of the biodiversity that place can
offer. Therefore a right to the variety of food as a
universal right, not only for elites, and as a guarantee of
better nutrition and greater health. The right to food
freedom as the other face of food democracy. Food
democracy as the basis for a different project of life,
where farming, production and commercialization
practices are sustainable from an economic, social, and
environmental point of view. This against farming
choices that condemn us to nutritional homogeneity (that
is also the bearer of low nutrition and poor health), to the
solely industrial production of food (possibly for import or
export, but for many impossible to purchase), and to the
specialization of crop cultivation imposed geographical
areas within the neoliberal internationalization of
markets;

114
 Reruralizing the World

b) The land/Earth as the source of natural evolution.

Therefore the right to protect the diversity and integrity
of the different varieties against their destruction and
genetic manipulation and the resulting immiseration and
risks for the population. Networks that oppose
themselves not only to the expropriation of the land but
to its violation and to the commodification of its
reproductive powers which constitute the crucial terrain
of the current capitalist strategy of hunger, itself
functional to stratifying labour and holding it ransom. On
the other hand this terrain is crucial for the possibility,
quality, and freedom of human reproduction. Therefore
on such issues the political positions that are the bearers
of the project of a different life, the most revolutionary
ones, appear to be the most conservative.
c) The land/Earth as territory on which to live against the
continual eradication brought about by the industrial
concept of agriculture and by war operations. Both of
these take away land, polluting it in the former case with
chemical products, and in the latter with explosives. War
increasingly provokes via such pollution with lethal new
explosives and toxic substances an infinite damage and
an expulsion without a possibility of return.
d) The land/Earth as a public space against its continual
fencing off and privatization. From the increasingly
numerous refugee camps to the increasingly numerous
golf courses that alter the environment, taking away
fields for farming or rice fields or public parkland.
Already there have been bloody struggles around such
elite projects from Vietnam to Mexico.

Yet even the construction of community that these networks represent,

beginning from the land as a primary common good - in that they
understand this to be the foundation of a different social construction -
is articulated within a multifaceted approach. Above all women occupy
an emerging role that corresponds to the crucial nature of their
position within agricultural labour and the reproduction of the family.
These networks, because they brought to the fore the fundamental role
women have in the labour of agricultural subsistence, remind us of the
fact that upon women and children fall the most dire consequences of
the Green Revolution and the neoliberal project, and therefore ask that
there be equal participation for women where planning for the farmers’
movement is carried out. And, in bringing to the fore the issue of the

115
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

woman’s condition, they above all raise the problem of the violence
she is the victim of within the family, within the society, and
particularly during the operations of land expropriations, such as
women and children’s right to education and health, to mention only
some of the most important cases. Also symptomatic of an evolution
in the relationship between the sexes, to give just one example, is that
within the Karnataka Farmers Union (founded in 1980, counting around
ten million members, and today a part of the Via Campesina) it was
decided to abolish particularly expensive wedding rituals that, given
their poverty, were impeding marriage for men and women. In other
words what have been promoted are civil marriages of “reciprocal
respect” without the intervention of the Brahmin in the place of the
conventional marriages that often generated huge debts for families.
The same union promotes programs and meetings for women, and a
fixed percentage of seats on its committees are reserved for them.
Another equally significant fact is that networks for the
recuperation of a different relationship with the earth, for the spread of
organic agriculture, for access to fresh and genuine food, are being
organized in the more developed capitalist countries. In the United
States as far back as 1986 farmers resisting the dominant agricultural
model founded the National Family Farm Coalition. Other examples,
and significant ones, were created in the nineties in that country as
well as in Canada, and of course in France there emerged the
experience of “peasant-based farming” with José Bové. The
Community Food Security Coalition formed in the United States in the
past decade, involving producers, consumers and various other
subjects, joined under the slogan of “food security for the community”,
a notion that gathered steam simultaneously from the Atlantic coast to
the Pacific. The latter not only put in place an organic agriculture, but
it assured the distribution of its products at a local level allowing for
access, through various types of arrangements, to low-income citizens,
building distribution points at low cost and providing the necessary
transportation to reach them. Declaring their intent to install a “more
democratic nutritional system,” it gathers 125 groups that connect
food banks, networks of family farms, anti-poverty organizations which
rarely collaborated on such network’s programs in the past, and
obviously operates on the basis of the push tying people together,
putting in contact small urban or rural farmers, food banks, and soup
kitchens for the poor and low-income communities. Similarly, the San
Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, which self-organized around the
same problem, then became key organizers in the struggle for more
decent conditions for reproduction, from housing to public parks, by
making available for the community capacities, work skills and

116
 Reruralizing the World

knowledges generated at a local level. The first thing to note here is

that a different will regarding the relationship to the earth, one that
plays itself out through farming, is in these examples the first step
towards a different will regarding modalities of life in their entirety, a
different food project for a different social project. This is particularly
evident if we look at that broad movement of initiatives that goes by
the name of “social ecology” or “bio-regionalism” or “community
economic development” which tend to re-localize development in the
sense of developing, alongside a different form of managing the land
(for nutrition, for housing, for public space), a different management of
work skills, professional abilities and knowledges geared towards the
strengthening and defence of the roots of a social context against its
destitution and the eradication of its citizen inhabitants decreed by the
global economy.
In the same way, the fact that the earth can represent housing
stability, beyond being a source of nutrition, has led to the
development in the United States of Public Land Trusts, which are
conceived also as a means by which to safeguard the environment.
With such initiatives people put together funds to purchase land. The
goal is to preserve it as a piece of untouched nature or to build housing
upon it: the latter can be sold but not the land upon which they are
built. In this way the price of the home is kept low and therefore
accessible for low-income segments of the population.
Even in the French case of peasant-based agriculture the plan for
a different social project, beginning from its declared principles, is
abundantly obvious. Above all that of international farmer solidarity
against the harshest and most destructive competition which
neoliberal globalization wants to impose, and beyond this are the
principles of the social and economic significance of labour and human
activity; of the refusal of productivism that is clearly expressed by
Bové when he says: our goal and our work are not those of production:
we occupy a space, we manage it and participate in the social bond
with the countryside”; of a management of the countryside that is
respectful of people, of the environment and of animals that translates
itself in not wanting to increase excessively one’s farm because the
countryside must represent jobs for many people, in not wanting to
have more animals than those which the earth can sustain, in
assuming responsibility of the maintenance of vegetable and livestock
varieties that characterize that area, and much more. Similarly, the
fundamental theme of nutrition and of not wanting to run risks with
respect to this has been key in allowing the political position and
commitment to grow and envelop the commodification of health,
education, and culture.

117
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

In sum we can say today that the land, farming and nutrition
constitute the emerging theme of the self-organized networks that
developed in particular in the nineties and which, with the global
movement of farmers, has vigorously come to the fore as the missing
subject, upon whose labour we all depend every day in the
reproduction of our lives. If re-localizing development is particularly
significant with respect to the agricultural question this only fuels the
re-localization of other aspects of development and life. Global is the
movement, global are the rights, and global are the struggles, above
all for the universal right to a healthy diet, a varied one and not a
standardized and not an estranged one with respect to one’s own
cultural traditions and the specificities that the land, worked by men
and women rather than raped by humans, can generate. And if it is
true that, as Columbian farmers that have self-organized around the
cultivation of varieties at risk of extinction say, the spirit is within the
nature surrounding us, in the trees and in the rivers, then reruralizing
the world is necessary to recuperate the spirit as well as life.

Translated by Enda Brophy

Bibliography

M. Dalla Costa, “L’Indigeno che è in noi, la terra cui apparteniamo”,

(paper delivered at the Per un’altra Europa, quella dei movimenti
e dell’autonomia di classe convention, Torino, March 1996)
published in Vis-à-Vis, n. 5, 1997, and in A. Marucci, Camminare
domandando, DeriveApprodi, Roma, 1999; Translated in English
as: “The Native in Us, the Land We Belong to”, in Common Sense
n.23, 1998; and in The Commoner n.6, 2002, Available at:
www.thecommoner.org
M. Dalla Costa, “Sette buone ragioni per dire luogo” paper delivered at
the Percorsi critici per un secondo ciclo di lotte globali roundtable
at the Radio Sherwood Festival, Padova, July 10, 2002, published
in Foedus, n.15, 2006, and translated in English as ”Seven Good
Reasons to Say Locality” in The Commoner n.6, 2002. Available
at: www.thecommoner.org

118
 “Two Baskets for Change”

Mariarosa Dalla Costa1

At the time of Fordist production I was particularly moved by a passage

of Marx’s, one which I read over and over. In it, he suggested that “as
soon as the working class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of
the new system of production, had recovered its senses to some
extent, it began to offer resistance, first of all in England, the native
land of large-scale industry.”2 Reading it, I heard the roar of machines
and felt the power of that great reawakening, that of a new chapter in
the human story.
The passage returns to mind as I observe another great
reawakening: one that is being enacted by farmers and citizens (who
are challenging their role as merely “producers” or “consumers”)
against the great machine of industrial agriculture and the politics that
bolster its delivery of noxious foods, environmental devastation,
economic crises, rural exodus, and above all its negation of the
relationship between humans and the land. If it is true, as Marx
suggested, that ”the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the
peasant, from the soil is the whole basis of the process”3 then these
wills that have been set in motion already contain the seeds of another
possible world. The forms of expropriation have obviously become
more refined and diverse - these days one’s relationship to the land
can be subject to expropriation even without a physical expulsion
having taken place.4 The negation of such a relationship, in its multiple

1 Transcript of a presentation delivered at the Terra e Libertà/ CriticalWine, Fiera

dei particolari, held at the LeoncavalloSocial Centre in Milan, December 5-7,
2003. Published in Italian in Angelini, M. et al. 2004. Terra e Libertà/Critical
Wine. Rome: DeriveApprodi.
2 Marx, Karl. 1990 [orig. 1867]. Capital: Volume 1. New York: Penguin: 390.
3 Marx, Karl. 1990 [orig. 1867]. Capital: Volume 1. New York: Penguin: 876.
4 I am alluding to when, while remaining on their land, farmers or live-stock

119
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

forms, remains to this day the basis for the process of capitalist
accumulation. To reinstate this relationship is therefore a fundamental
way to disrupt of a mode of production that has upended and
commodified the very mechanisms of the reproduction of life.
At the heart of this rural and urban rebellion and its construction
of networks and initiatives is the need, to use an agricultural term, for
a regrafting. Amidst the fallen illusion of technology’s abilities to
provide solutions a discussion has reopened around care, care for the
earth. Since people have begun to say enough to the risks involved in
such (bio)technological leaps, but above all to the continuous
interruption and upheaval that these inflict upon the forms and
networks of life’s spontaneous reproduction of itself.
J. Bové and F. Dufour5 describe how their breeder comrads felt
they had reached their lowest point when they became conscious of
the economic and ecological aberration inherent in the practice of
separating the calf from its mother who was supposed to feed it in
order to administer feedings of regenerated milk. This product had
been subsidized to the point that it was now more competitive than the
natural variety. For them that moment was critical to sparking a
reflection on the purpose of labour, one which brought them to the
concept of peasant-based agriculture. In order to qualify as such, the
farming must have a particular approach (made concrete through the
adoption of ten principles) and it must have a perimeter, within which
one can explore the observance of limits and test the principles.6

raisers, in the global North or South of the world, in actuality become workers
in large companies. The case of the agistment is typical. An agistment is a
contract by which two partners agree to follow in the raising of livestock. While
the farmer owns the land and any structureson it, the entrepreneur generally
provides the livestock, the feed, the medicines, etc. According to this kind of
agreement the farmer, for example, may raise chickens but cannot make any
decisions with respect to their feeding, medical treatment, or any otheraspect
of the practice.
5 J. Bové e F. Dufour, 2001 (orig. 2000). Il mondo non è in vendita. Milan:
Feltrinelli: 128. In English: Bové, Jose and Dufour, Francois. 2001. The World is
Not for Sale. New York: Verso.
6 Bové and Dufour’s work offers a better, if nonetheless partial, idea of the these
binding principles: the perimeter, or space in which to explore the observance
of limits refers to the verification of the limits such farming must abide by in
order to adequately respond to the needs of the society – limits, for example,
such as the maximum nitrogen level allowable per hectare, themaximum land
size per farmer (so as to allow other farmers the possibility to work), the
maximum quantity of animals the land can sustain and other measures that
are needed in order to avoid falling into the trap of intensification and
productivism. The approach, Bové suggests, is the manner, the direction, the
compass, and the horizon towards which we need to be heading regardless of
the particular situation of one’s own company… in the document the approach
is represented by ten principles of peasant-based agriculture (177)… this is a
result of the contemplation of three dimensions: the social one above all, that
is, that founded upon employment for and solidarity between farmers, across
world regions, and the fact that it must also be economically efficient and
respectful of both consumers and nature (176)… the triad of peasant-based

120
 “Two Baskets for Change”

Here it is not as much the worry about health risks but

indignation over the upending of the spontaneous forms of the
reproduction of life that creates the conditions for reflection on the
meaning and purpose of labour, that generates a desire to change
one’s direction. It is the same indignation that provoked a desire for
the pursuit of other relationships in labour and in life for many other
sectors of the world’s population, that which provoked a response of
“ya basta” towards this model of development and subsequently
resulted in the opening up of communication aimed at experimenting
with other paths. It is this indignation that has sparked the creation of
concrete alternatives.
Yet the Conféderation Paysanne is only one node, albeit one of
the most significant amongst those in developed regions, of the vast
Via Campesina network that links very diverse farming communities in
the North and the South of the world. These communities are
connected by a commonality of goals and approaches. First amongst
these is the construction of food sovereignty in its various expressions
(above all that of different kinds of relationships between producers) of
which I spoke at the preceding conference in Verona. 7 There I
suggested that, explicitly or implicitly, there is increasingly emerging
from such situations the articulation of a need to re-localize
development and re-ruralize the world. I will try to expand upon some
aspects of this while attempting to allow for the greatest possible
freedom to the reader’s imaginary. This need for the re-localization of
development, in conjunction with a series of other initiatives that I will
not mention here for the sake of brevity, is not solely addressed to the
thematic of agriculture, but in any case the latter has reacquired the
centrality it used to enjoy, and because of that I will focus on it here.
Re-localizing development is a need that, emerging in particular from
the discontinuities provoked by neoliberal globalization in developed
countries, has led to a series of efforts to retain and valorize at a local
level money, professional skills and above all agricultural labour,
against their continual de-localization and the resulting misery of
citizen inhabitants of these settings.

agriculture is to produce, provide work, and preserve (121) … the

development of peasant-based agriculture requires at least two conditions: a
political context which instead of favouring industrialization and concentration
must sustain farmers, as well as the personal choices of farmers in their own
companies in order to have a space for initiative and responsibility (177-178).
Translator’s note: page references are to the Italian version.
7 This is a reference to Dalla Costa, M. “Riruralizzare il mondo… per recuperare
lo spirito e la vita,” a paper delivered at the Terra e Libertà, CriticalWine
convention held at the Centro Sociale La Chimica, Verona, April 11-13th, 2003,
and published in Italian in M. Angelini et al., 2004. Terra e Libertà/Critical Wine.
Rome: DeriveApprodi.

121
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

Now in the attempt to read these two needs by relating it to a

context that is closer to our own, but not only this, I could say that if I
had two baskets, one with which to re-localize development and the
other with which to re-ruralize the world, in the first I would place four
things: 1) the right of access to the land; 2) short-cycle farming and
one that is sustainable in every respect; 3) the practice (one that is
growing in numerous countries) of the recuperation of varieties that
have fallen into disuse as well as of their modalities of cultivation and
consumption; and 4) a focus on policies that contrast the extroversion
of development. In the second basket I would put another four things:
1) the diffusion of an agriculture such as the one defined above; 2) the
adequate remuneration of farming, including that practiced in more
challenging areas; 3) the reintroduction of diffuse free-range livestock
rearing; 4) the promotion of a culture, but above all of a politics, that
gives pride of place once more to an agriculture redefined in this
manner. Obviously these factors only provide a bottom layer for the
baskets. Let us take a closer look at each of them.

1. The right of access to the land in the areas in which one lives:
this is obviously a matter that needs to be articulated
according to the geographical context in question. For areas
in the global South it means above all the ability to have or
maintain access to the land (through common rights or
individual ones, for small and medium-sized farmers) against
the continual expropriation practiced by large investors or the
state. The availability of land where life is guaranteed by
subsistence agriculture or via small-scale sustainable
agriculture makes the difference between the possibility or
impossibility of survival. If in various regions of the world the
scope of this problem gestures to the necessity of agricultural
reforms that have always been promised but rarely enacted, it
is nonetheless important to recall the gains achieved on this
terrain by the large-scale movements for the appropriation of
land, above all the Sem Terra who in the last 20 years have
contributed to the settling of 250,000 rural families on 8
million hectares in almost all Brazilian states. For developed
areas, beginning with Italy, access to the land requires above
all that the land has maintained a price that is accessible to
the farmer. In our case this is no longer possible when land is
particularly close to important tracts of highway or when there
are tourist-industry interests or other profitable investments
nearby, thanks to which the price rises so much that it is no
longer accessible or amortizable within an agricultural

122
 “Two Baskets for Change”

process. This has been a typically Italian phenomenon, one

that, due to the greater availability of land, is not as much the
case in Spain, France or Germany. Yet in our case this is an
added obstacle for the possibility of a diffuse presence of
agriculture. And, obviously, a problem that aggravates the
matter and is substantial in our area with respect to the issue
of access to the land is that of a justly remunerative
agricultural income, especially when managing a type of
farming that is other than the productivist and industrial kind.
Another important aspect of being able to access the land is
that relative to the lands upon which there persist practices of
common usage (often this dates back to medieval times), a
necessary corollary of the breeding of livestock and farming.
These lands are diminishing in Italy as well, where they are
sold or hoarded by private companies or individuals also
thanks to negligence in their cataloguing or in the
conservation of land records.
2. Short-cycle farming, one that is sustainable across its various
dimensions, is the only kind capable of guaranteeing
freshness, authenticity, and the traceability of the food.
Freshness and authenticity have increasingly become a part
of the demands made by movements of farmers and citizens
in the most developed regions, beginning with the United
States where from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific “fresh and
genuine food for the community’s nutritional security”8 has
been the banner of networks like the Community Food
Security Coalition. Another emerging demand has been that
the food be produced and distributed with methods and
organizational networks that can guarantee moderation in its
pricing and therefore its accessibility for customers with less
income at their disposal. To this end agreements are
stipulated between the producer and the consumer, according
to which an amount of agricultural product is purchased in
advance with cash or through offering other forms of labour in
exchange. Another important phenomenon that, significantly,
is growing in the United States (but not only) in past years, is
the possibility for producers to directly sell their products in
farmers’ markets in cities without resorting to costly
intermediaries. In Italy fair trade buying associations have
been growing. GAS (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale), which has
roughly 2 million members, has adopted 5 basic principles: 1)

8 Dalla Costa, Mariarosa. 2002. “The Native in Us, the Land we Belong to,” in
The Commoner n.6, 2002. URL: http://www.thecommoner.org

123
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

respect for human beings, so the purchased products cannot

be the result of social injustice but rather must actively
contribute to a sustainable social development; 2) respect for
the environment, or the choice of products obtained in a
manner that is respectful of nature while trying ensure the
least possible transportation; 3) respect for health, which
comes in the form of choosing organic products; 4) solidarity,
or choosing to purchase from small producers who otherwise
would be crushed by larger ones; 5) respect for flavour, as a
part of returning to natural rhythms by eating seasonal foods
such as organic products, which beyond having greater
nutritional capacity are notoriously better tasting. It is
significant that the new ethic that is appearing involves the
economic, social, and environmental aspects of the question.
Here too there is the desire to declare “ya basta” in the face
of the modalities of this kind of development and their
consequences, the desire to affirm other relations. In this way
initiatives such as that of the [prezzo sorgente]9, or ensuring a
registered designation of origin, including the new forms of
local designation, (De. Co., or “Denominazione comunale”, is
a simple and inexpensive method created by the
municipalities) guarantee transparency and traceability,
valourize the location of production against the invisible or
uncertain place of origin, and valourize the locality of
production and the difference of relations that flow from it,
not only between producers and consumers, but between
citizens. These practices obviously re-familiarize humanity
with the local, which is valourized as the fragment of a
common good and therefore as something accessible to
everyone.
3. The series of projects in many countries that for some time
have been organizing in order to recuperate varieties of
foodstuffs, and their relative methods of cultivation and
preparation, that are at risk of being forgotten or becoming
extinct. This is a reclaiming of cultivation, of cultures and of
knowledges against the disappearance of varieties and the

9 “Prezzo sorgente” is an expression that emerges from social movements, and

refers to the original price or source price, that which is paid to the farmer.
The proposal is that this be noted on the product’s label in order to discourage
unjustified price hikes during the phases in whichthe product is transformed
and commercialized. In this way the consumer can be aware of such price
increases if they have occurred. The problem is that the farmer is paid very
little and yet the end consumer pays a great deal due to the unjustified profits
that are eked out during intermediatephases. Such distortions and price
increases are caused by “long cycle” agricultural production.

124
 “Two Baskets for Change”

standardization and the obliteration of flavour imposed by the

nutritional dictatorship of the multinationals. This is
connected to the right to variety (beginning with the variety
offered by the land upon which one lives), which in turn is tied
not only to the right to a variety of taste but also to the
greater nutritional potential of a varied diet and the greater
nutritional security that this provides considering the risk of
species becoming subject to disease. In Italy in the most
recent years, together with an emerging interest in the
revalorization of some partially forgotten species, within the
context of Civiltà Contadina, the activity of the Seed Savers is
also growing.10 Yet without defining themselves as such,
elderly people and farmers also act as seed savers, seized as
they are with the preoccupation of “prolonging” the life of
varieties of fruit and vegetables that have been absent for
years from the catalogues of seed companies. Young women,
with the ancient love for the reproduction of life, are seed
savers as well. If some varieties lend themselves to being
commodified in different regions others do not, as they might
not be able to survive the trip, and therefore in such cases
only the locality and the regionality of production and
distribution could offer the pleasure of seeing and enjoying
these species. Associations such as Pomona that are
dedicated to the recuperation of ancient fruit also
demonstrate another process these practices address: that of
the survival of animal species that do so through the
consumption of endangered fruit. The re-localization of
development, therefore, geared towards the recuperation of
some of the immense richness not only of vegetable, but also
of animal biodiversity.
4. The necessity of revealing the falseness and to contrast the
abuses of a neoliberalism that wishes to simply impose on all
countries the erasure of borders for the benefit of a
dictatorship of the strongest, the extroversion of development
(that is, a strong orientation towards exports), and above all
agricultural development (with the pretext of reducing
international debt). In reality this model of development
cannot but increase foreign debt and with it the difficulties for

10 Civiltà Contadina is an association that valourizes and protects farming

traditions. Seed Savers are a group belonging to an international network that
in Italy work within Civiltà Contadina, in the area of recovering varieties of
seed at risk of becoming extinct or forgotten. Such a practice is is
exceptionally important given that it occurs in the face of tendencies that are
destructive and commodifying of biodiversity, such as European Directive
98/95 that declares the free exchange of seeds illegal.

125
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

nourishment and for life. Next to the construction from below

of a new agriculture there should also be the reclamation of a
political regulation that promotes, protects and valourizes a
local, regional and national agriculture (the qualification of
such terms must be contextualized however) that is
sustainable in every aspect, aimed at the maximum
promotion of self-sufficiency as well as the conservation of
biodiversity and the diversification of cultivation, all aspects
that are subtended to the perspective of food sovereignty
which alone can offer a guarantee against the growth of
foreign debt. Food, as a fondamental rule for and right of of
citizens in the North as well as in the South, must not only be
available, but above all it must not be alien to the history and
the geographical context of those consuming it. Therefore,
imports or exports, instead of constituting the driving axis of a
nutritional system, ought to be a subsidiary measure with
respect to that which cannot be produced locally or that which
constitutes an excess.

As for the items placed in my basket with which one could figuratively
re-ruralize the world, let us take a closer look at these.

1. The spread of an agriculture that is sustainable and diversified

in every respect. In order to be able to spread, this farming
must be oriented towards the creation of the maximum
possible number of jobs and therefore to the refusal of the
industrial model and the logic of the concentration of industry
which is its bearer. Therefore an agriculture that is not only
organically, but also socially oriented.
2. A type of agriculture with these characteristics ought to be
maintained even in areas where the land presents particular
difficulties, along with economic incentives that could assist in
the remuneration of greater work. A landscape without
agriculture is, in fact, a landscape with less life. Yet the
landscape is a common good, and it makes sense therefore
that everyone make it their responsibility.
3. The resumption of a widespread free range raising of livestock
as a crucial element of agriculture, allowing the animals to
graze, allowing herbivores to remain such, and maintaining in
this manner the fertility of the land through organic
fertilization. The reflections, honed and practiced by François
Dufour, beginning with not keeping more animals than that

126
 “Two Baskets for Change”

which the land which one has access to can sustain, seem
quite illuminated to me.
4. The promotion of a culture, a diffusion of experiences of self-
organization, the appeal for politics that concretely sustain
the possibility of a broad agricultural re-conversion. In
developed regions in particular, after the phase of Fordism
and then post-Fordism in which agriculture was first
considered the poor sister and then a degenerate daughter of
large-scale industry, it is necessary to ensure a primary role
for agriculture, one which it has had and which it must
continue to have in human history. This must occur by
allowing agricultural practices access to the means that can
allow it to re-convert itself in its entirety to an agriculture that
is healthy and sustainable in all of its aspects, the social one
above all. In different situations one might discover that, as
my students tell me, many people, instead of considering
spending their lives amidst paper and plastic and in front of a
computer, want to be farmers. Thus from the earth there has
also begun to germinate a new imaginary.

Translated by Enda Brophy

127
 Food as Common and Community

Mariarosa Dalla Costa1

Food is a fundamental human right because it is the basis of the most

important of all rights, the right to life to which all other rights depend.
The right to eat itself, however, has a long history of being
denied, which has run in parallel with the history of the denial of the
right to land. The most recent period of this history runs from the
drastic structural adjustments of the eighties to the maturing of
neoliberal globalisation which has been taking place from the nineties
on.
It is thus not by chance that the emergence and grassroots
organisation of the various collective subjects protagonists in the
movements of the seventies and then in the hard struggles for food,
land and water in the eighties has given rise to networks which,
crossing land and sea, have focussed on the most fundamental
question: how to get food. It is as if all the issues regarding
development were thrown upside down and the debate about them
landed with its feet firmly planted on the ground: there is no sense in
talking about anything else unless one first talks about how people can
feed themselves, unless a solution to the problem of staying alive is
found first. The other questions are subordinated to it.
This was also the story of my research. I had a deep sense of
rejection, and felt a deep lack of interest in the discourses which were
going on around me. I found them profoundly boring if the question of
how to get food, still outstanding for ever larger shares of humanity,
was still being sidestepped.

1 This article is from a lecture given at the European Social Forum, London, 14-
17 October 2004.

129
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

So I began by examining the land and sea routes of those were

working towards finding a way to feed themselves, and discovered first
of all the struggles and the experiences of self-organisation of native
peoples, marginalised population groups, and tribals who are for ever
being moved on because they are in the wrong place, somewhere
which was the most suitable place for testing the ground to find
precious materials, or flooding it to build dams or covering it with
concrete to build major roads and ports or, in the case of the sea,
plundering it.
This story concerns developed areas too, in ways which are
sometimes similar and sometimes different.
What I have found is that food is only regained as a fundamental
right in its fullest sense when it is regained as a common. It is regained
as a common if, along the way, all its conditions are also regained as
commons. This is what is already apparent from the ways in which
networks of farmers, fisherpeople, and citizens who are not only
consumers organize themselves.
First of all, the networks themselves are communities insofar as
they tend to guarantee food to the human community as a common
good, as a primary human right, and every link within a network forms
a community which is organised in various ways to guarantee such a
common good to the population of which it is an expression in the
context in which it lives. To reach such a common good, however, the
various links in the network need to be connected with the
community’s defence of other common goods. Otherwise we would
only be in the spiral of food as a commodity which is imported,
exported, contaminated and for many people difficult or impossible to
get hold of. Let’s take a look at some of these commons which have to
be defended to guarantee full access to food

I Safeguard of the ecosystem

This is even more important than access to the land. Significant

examples of this are the campaigns against the so-called ‘blue
revolution’, that is the industrial-scale shrimp farms which have
become notorious in many countries of the South for their
destructiveness to traditional integrated systems of farming, fishing
and the raising of fish, campaigns which many people have died in.
With the arrival of the enormous tanks (2 metres deep and a hectare
across) full of shrimps and chemicals, many populations have seen the
destruction of the ecosystem which was the means of production and
reproduction they depended on for their livelihoods. The damage has

130
 Food as Common and Community

ranged from the destruction of mangrove forests, a precious nursery

for many species of fish, to the salination of aquifers leading to a loss
of drinking water for people, animals and agriculture, and the chemical
pollution of the surrounding area with a deterioration in the water
quality of the sea nearby. For many, these shrimp farms have not only
meant that they cannot get food because they cannot carry out their
traditional farming and fishing activities, and they no longer have a
place to live; they have also deprived them of their small trade and
thus of the cash income that is an essential supplement to what they
produce for their own consumption. These fish farms have destroyed
mangrove forests in Ecuador, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, the
Philippines, Honduras, Indonesia, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Thailand and
Vietnam, as well as in India. They have given rise to a great deal of
protest, including violent campaigns and clashes. Murders linked to the
shrimp industry have been reported in eleven countries. In India this
industry has attacked the country’s 7,000 kilometres of coastline. The
people uprooted by these shrimp farms very rarely have land where
they can re-establish their economies. The alternative is the poverty,
degradation and hunger of big city slums, with other outcomes, from
emigration in inhumane conditions to becoming meat for the traffic in
organs and other foul trades.
The situations of many coastal communities which have been hit
by the arrival of big industrial trawlers are just as much examples of
the crucial importance of the ecosystem. These communities used to
make their living from a combination of fishing and farming and are
now seeing the sea being depleted, with a heavy reduction of fish
stocks and the extinction of many species. In such cases it really isn’t
enough to demand access to the land or the sea, while they are being
devastated. To tackle this primary problem, the reestablishment of the
ecosystem as a common, since it is a fundamental good, because
without it a community would not be able to feed itself and survive,
networks of fisherpeople, farmers, citizens and human rights activists
have been formed in the Philippines, India, Canada, Senegal and
Central America. For example, in the Philippines the Agri-Aqua
association, whose name itself shows its wish to respect the balance
between farming and traditional fishing, re-establishing it where it has
been upset, has succeeded in restoring the mangrove forest and at the
same time bringing back the bird species which had disappeared when
the trees were destroyed, and they even built an artificial coral reef. It
has rebuilt the basis from which to start again as a preliminary to re-
establishing an economy which the community is familiar with and
wants to preserve.

131
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

Comparable issues are found in many other cases, from that of

the people evacuated to make way for the great dams in India, of
which the Narmada dam is among the best known, to that of the
people living along the banks of the Mun river, a tributary of the
Mekong, who, again because of a dam, have experienced the loss of a
way of getting food which they often did not even have to pay for.
But I have emphasised the examples of coastal communities hit
by shrimp farms and industrial trawling carried out by major
companies, because thanks to the strength of the fisherpeople
movement which, from the seventies on, has grown in various
countries and then formed itself into a worldwide forum, the defence of
the ecosystem, from the maintenance of the specific character of the
coastline to the abundance of fish in the sea, has been a priority, a
primary common good which is defended not only because it
represents a reliable source of nutrition, but also an economy and a
way of life which people do not want to abandon, first and foremost
because it puts them in control of their own living conditions.

II Access to the Land

The second common good is that of access to the land and, of

course, to the sea for communities that live near it. Access to the land
is a much-debated theme. The Via Campesina network of networks, in
which farmers’ associations from the North and the South from the
Karnataka Farmers’ Union to Confederation Paysanne to the National
Family Farm Coalition has developed this theme in relation to a variety
of situations: communal or private systems of land tenure asserting
women’s right to land ownership where this is denied them, and the
possibility of working the land organically to get all the varieties that
that land can offer from it. These demands are brought together under
the network’s banner of “Food Sovereignty”. So this is about people’s
right to produce their own food, the right to a variety of foods rather
than having standardized, highly-processed foods imposed on them,
the product of the industrial concept of food production and of the
specialisation by geographical areas in the neo-liberal globalization of
the markets. In this way freedom of enjoying a variety food is the other
side of food democracy, which is itself an unavoidable base of a
different type of development. If anything it should be emphasised that
in countries such as Italy it is difficult for those who want to farm,
perhaps organically, to get access to land because of the very high
prices which are increased because of the presence of industry,
tourism and important motorways. Because of this there are only a few

132
 Food as Common and Community

areas (in the South and on the side of the Apennines overlooking the
Adriatic) where land can have a price that is amortizable within the
farming process. Then there are the other obstacles that get in the way
of agricultural work for a fair level of income comparable with that of
other works. As a consequence, in Italy a farm is closing down every
half hour. Because of this getting access to the land, farming in a
healthy way, earning a fair income from it, establishing relations with
other farmers from the point of view that the countryside should create
not a few but many jobs, as José Bové has stated, is a rather
complicated undertaking, for which it is significant that farmers’
networks have been set up that are completely in tune with those of
farmers in the South of the world. Notably, Foro-Contadino –
Altragricoltura which has backed land squats has launched an “Appeal
for the Right to Land” and organized a “Farmers’ Aid” and a “National
Farmers Coordination for the Right to Land”. In its appeal it states:
“More of all other difficulties a problem that Italy seemed to have
shelved with the victories of the farmers struggles of the last century
has become very serious again and is more and more dramatically
urgent: the denial of access to the land for those who want to work on
it due to the very high cost of agricultural land which is linked ever
more closely to speculation and less to the real agricultural value…”

III Healthiness, Freshness, and Quality

The third common good is made up of three elements: healthiness,

freshness and quality. This means a refusal of an agriculture that is the
product of chemistry and more recently of genetic modification. The
deceits of the green revolution and its products to make agriculture
more productive have meant that many farmers and other citizens
have become ill and are continuing to get ill. To give just one example,
xenoestrogens, that is toxic estrogens linked with pesticides, are
believed to be causing serious gynaecological disorders and to be a
factor in the reduction of male fertility. Thousands of Indian farmers
taken in by GMOs have committed suicide. The movement for an
alternative agriculture has undertaken various initiatives against foods
which increasingly bring death and disease rather than life and health.
It has rejected the industrial view of nature which sees the land, plants
and animals as things to be treated like machines and therefore it has
rejected productivism, that is the false productivity forced out of
nature by means of chemicals or genetic modification and which
intentionally fails to calculate other economic costs, let alone social
and environmental costs. As a consequence, in this context there is a

133
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

range of initiatives going from reintroducing indigenous and natural

seeds against the hybrids which farmers’ networks are already
engaged in (from the Karnataka Farmers Union to the Columbian
peasants’ unions to Seed Savers and other associations in various
countries including Italy), to the experiences of saving species which
have fallen into disuse and re-establishing traditional methods of
cultivation and cooking which are today being kept alive because of
the initiatives of men and women of both the third and first worlds.
Indeed, speaking of this, in the first world today there is a notable
reawakening of interest and promotional activities on the part of
various sectors of society. Other initiatives in advanced countries are
those aimed at guaranteeing that small agricultural producers can sell
their produce directly in city markets without going through expensive
intermediaries, as they have succeeded in doing in the United States
or, as it has happened on other cases, in places that people have
arranged themselves to meet the needs of customers with economic
difficulties. At the same time complaints and protests against the
various types of food adulteration which have if anything multiplied
with the processes of outsourcing/offshoring and importation. For
example, and this is just one example among thousands, the
outsourcing of chicken production from Italy to Brazil, with greatly
reduced hygiene and health safeguards, chickens which are then sent
back to Italy to be served on the tables of those who are poorest in
money or time. Against that picture, in the name of a more real
possibility of knowing and making known the food production cycle and
better preserving its variety and specificity, consumers and producers
have become more favourable to and interested in short cycle
production systems, where food is distributed locally, as opposed to
long cycle production systems which are, of course, still what match
the interests of big business. There are even types of vegetable which
cannot be transported at all. Only short cycle production can keep
them alive. Within the alternative agriculture movement as a whole,
there are also initiatives to maintain agricultural production even in
difficult places, such as in mountainous areas. When the alternative
agriculture movement promotes the short cycle, it is thus also
safeguarding various fundamental common goods: biodiversity,
freshness, healthiness, quality, the knowability of the production cycle.

IV Actual Transparency and Traceability

The fourth common good is the actual transparency and traceability of

the production process. The short cycle is already a good start in terms

134
 Food as Common and Community

of verification of the process, including verification by the consumer.

The movement has, however, already generated unusual actions to do
with this and a series of innovative proposals. Among the most
successful actions was one in Monopoli, near Bari in South-Eastern
Italy, against the olive oil fraud because of which some brands had
been sold for inexplicably low prices on the Italian market for many
years. In reality the olive oil was often mixed with other oils, or even
replaced by them, highly manipulated to give colour and flavour, and
at best made using olives imported from various countries. Since the
law permitted the place where the “last substantial transformation”,
that is the transformation into oil, to be considered to be the place of
origin, rather than the place where the olives had been harvested, it
was in fact easy to sell all sorts of things as Italian olive oil. New
legislation requires the indication of the place where the olives come
from. Apart from this case, though, which is striking just because this is
such a crucial product for Italian agriculture, there have been other
initiatives related to the deeply felt need to be able to verify the
production process which it is worth noting. First and foremost De.co,
that is a denomination of origin made by the local council. This
initiative is working alongside the very few products which have a
denomination of origin, such as Doc, Dop, which, however, are often
subject to an increase in price which makes them elite products
because of such denominations. It is showing the new powers of local
councils and thus the possibility of declaring the origin of a product by
means of a specific but simple procedure. This provision, which has
already been adopted by various councils, makes it possible to
enhance the value of a product, give certainty about its origin and
production, increase appreciation of the area and promote
employment without falling into a surge in price which would make it a
luxury product. At the same time a completely voluntary register of
producers has been proposed, in which producers self-certify their
product, describing its history, cultivation and characteristics and
above all creating a relation with the person who buys it which goes
beyond the limits of bureaucracy. Another initiative is that of the
“farm-gate” price, of course only for those producers who agree to
adopt it, that is the indication on the label of the price at which the
product is sold by the primary producer, for example the farmer. This
answers the need for price transparency. It makes it possible to
recognise the exorbitant increases which are often introduced when
the product is processed or marketed.

135
thecommoner :: issue 12 :: summer 2007

V The New Ethics

The fifth common good is the new ethics. In the alternative agriculture
movement in its broadest sense there is an explosion in the call for
alternative relations both from the producer’s and the consumer’s side
(among others) precisely because of the new relationship which they
are hoping to establish for food production and distribution. As a
consequence, new networks have also been established in the field of
distribution. In Italy mutual buying groups (Gas, Gruppi di acquisto
solidale) have taken hold. The two million people involved have given
themselves five basic rules:

5. respect for human beings, that is the products that are bought
must not be the products of social injustice but must rather
contribute to a socially sustainable society;
6. respect for the environment, that is the choice of products
obtained with a respect for nature which have also been
transported as little as possible;
7. respect for the health that stems from the choice of organic
products;
8. solidarity, that is choosing to buy from small producers who
would otherwise be crushed by bigger ones;
9. respect for taste, since organic food is well known for having a
better flavour as well as a higher nutritional value, in the
context of getting closer to the natural rhythms of life by
eating only foods that are in season.

What is significant is the emerging of new ethics which affects

economic, social and environmental factors. Here too, there is a will to
reject the procedures of a development that is becoming more and
more unsustainable, a will to establish other relationships. In this sense
initiatives which, like the “farm gate price” or the denominations of
origin made by the local councils guarantee transparency and
traceability, increase the value of local production, the value of the
area where the goods are actually produced and with it the value of
the new relations that spring from it, not only between producers and
consumers, but between citizens. As a result, these initiatives make
that area a common good which is available not only to local people
but to everybody.
To conclude: in both the South and the North there is a growing
global movement for food as a common good which will have to
embrace a series of commons, including respect for the ecosystem to
the re-establishment of its life cycles, the appreciation of the specific

136
 Food as Common and Community

features of various types of territory. Food that will be a bringer of life,

health, abundance, and alternative relationships with nature and
between people.

137