By Adam Hanieh
Neoliberalism, the 'New Middle East' and Palestine
In the late 1960s, with the definitive collapse of British and French colonialism in the Middle East, the US rose to become the dominant imperial power within the region. Because of the presence of oil, the Middle East became critically important to the overall construction of US hegemony in the global order. Control of the region's resources functioned simultaneously to secure a vital commodity, provide a source of profits, and as a cudgel with which to influence rival powers within the global marketplace. In the last 30 years, the region – particularly the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – has taken on an increasingly important role as a source of flows of surplus capital – and hence overall power – within the global financial order.
US policy towards the region is driven by these factors. Because the Middle East is a vital nexus of overall US power in the global economy, it needs to develop a political framework that will sustain and maintain its influence in the region. This political framework (otherwise known as US ‘foreign policy’) is worked out through the daily debates, struggles and experiences of US capital and its representatives in governments, boardrooms and think-tanks. Despite the real and important differences that continually arise, a broad consensus has emerged throughout the last four decades over how to exert and maintain influence in the region. This consensus rests upon three key pillars.
First, like elsewhere around the world, the US relies upon corrupt governments and narrow elites that are dependent upon it for military and economic survival. We can see this most clearly in the case of Jordan and Egypt – two key US allies in the region. These governments cooperate closely with the US in matters of regional security and economic ties as well as the global 'war on terror'. They have extensive networks of secret police, and their prisons are filled with individuals who have been tortured in close cooperation with the CIA and other bodies. Their economies are wide open to foreign investment and neoliberalism has held sway for years.
Secondly, in addition to these client regimes, the US power rests upon the countries brought together through the regional integration project – the Gulf Cooperation Council. The GCC was established in 1981 between Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. As a regional integration project, the GCC resembles the European Union, aiming to create a single economic zone covering the six member states with uniform laws, economic policies, a common central bank, and single currency by 2010. The GCC countries are particularly dependable allies of the US. Their heavy reliance on migrant workers means that they differ from states such as Iraq, Iran, Egypt and elsewhere where strong indigenous working class movements present a potential threat. The GCC is also a key outpost for the US military in the region. In 2003, the U.S. military moved its Centcom forward headquarters, the unified commander center for operations in 27 countries, to Qatar. By 2005, according to a US congressional report, over 100,000 U.S military personnel were located in Gulf states (not including the approximately 150,000 in Iraq or security personnel operating under private firms).[1]
Finally, and most importantly, the third key prop to US power in the region is the Israeli state. Since the 1967 war, Israel has played a key role in defending US interests in the region. It is the weapon that the US uses when it wants to crush popular movements but is unable to invade directly. There are many examples of this – beginning in 1967 and continuing throughout the 1970s, Israeli military attacks and assassinations crippled leftwing and Arab nationalist movements throughout the region that were threatening client regimes. During the 1980s, Israel was used to crush Palestinian and progressive forces in Lebanon. Further afield, Israel has promoted US foreign policy objectives across the globe. It was a key political, military and economic supporter of Apartheid South Africa and in the peak years of boycott and sanctions was the conduit for South African goods into Europe (one of the reasons for Israel's central position in the world diamond trade). In Latin and Central America, Israeli weapons and training were used to arm and equip the military dictatorships of the region during the 1980s.
Since the early 1990s, within the context of a generally more favorable global geo-political environment, the US has attempted to reshape the relationship between these three pillars of support in order to better consolidate its power and influence. The underlying goal of this policy is to tie these three pillars together in a single neoliberal economic zone (dubbed the 'New Middle East' by Condoleeza Rice in 2006). It is very important to understand this strategy: it is key to the regional environment in which the politics of the region is unfolding today, as well as the specific forces driving economic plans such as the PRDP.
The New Middle East and MEFTA
The central thrust of the 'New Middle East' strategy is the deepening of neoliberal economic policies – such as privatization, free trade agreements, cutting-back of public sectors, opening to foreign investment, removal of state subsidies, and so on – throughout all states in the region. Over the last decade, cajoled by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF and supported by regional bodies such as the Arab Monetary Fund and the Arab Business Council, virtually all governments in the region have embraced these policies.
The neoliberal turn is indicated by the rapid wave of privatization across the Middle East: factories, airlines, postal services, hospitals, banks, electricity and water plants, have been transferred into private hands. Most importantly, from the perspective of US and other foreign capital, the opening of the region's oil and gas fields (and the downstream sectors of petrochemical industry) promises a generational reversal in ownership structures. The most dramatic example of this is found of course in Iraq, where the government recently agreed to the return of the four largest Western oil companies (the same four companies which controlled Iraqi oil from the 1920s until nationalization in 1972). Despite the uniqueness of the Iraqi occupation this is not an isolated example, elsewhere in the Gulf foreign oil companies are also winning access to oil and gas resources that have been off-limits for decades. In 2003, for example, foreign oil companies were given access to explore for gas in Saudi Arabia for the first time in three decades.
Neoliberal policies have also meant the removal of subsidies on basic items such as food, fuel, electricity and water, and rent. This is often mandated by the World Bank and IMF in return for loans and other aid. As early as 1991, a World Bank loan to Jordan was conditional on the doubling of the price of electricity and an increase in the price of water by 140%. And this year in Egypt, where 22% of the population lives below the poverty line of $1 dollar a day, and with food prices having more than doubled over the past year, the government lifted subsidies on fuel prices leading to a more than 40% increase overnight.
The most far-reaching aspect of neoliberalism in the region, however, is the implementation of bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The US has signed FTAs with individual countries including Bahrain, Oman, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Morocco. These FTAs commit the countries in question to open their markets to US companies and prevent them from controlling import policies (such as privileging local companies or hindering the flow of foreign capital into the region). In doing so, they inevitably mean the destruction of local industries and, most importantly, the inability of countries to extend state services and public spending designed to help the poor (as this would be considered 'discriminatory').
There is an additional development of FTAs in the region that is essential to understand: the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA). Announced by the US in mid-2003, the goal of MEFTA is a single, free trade area across the Middle East by 2013. The logic behind MEFTA is explicitly neoliberal: maximum wealth, happiness and prosperity will be achieved by removing all barriers to exports and capital flows into and within the region, treating foreign capital on par with domestic capital, adopting widespread privatization programs, allowing foreign ownership, and reducing state expenditure on social services.
In June 2003, then-US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick gave a speech to the World Economic Forum in Jordan where he clearly outlined these principles as the basis of the MEFTA plan. Zoellick's speech blamed poverty, unemployment and terrorism on Arab 'autarky' and 'failed socialist' models. He argued that if economies liberalized and opened to foreign capital within a regional trading bloc then these problems would be solved. According to Zoellick, the goal of the US “is to assist nations that are ready to embrace economic liberty and the rule of law, integrate into the global trading system, and bring their economies into the modern era.”[2]
The US strategy was to negotiate individually with 'friendly' countries in the region using a graduated 6-step process eventually leading to a full-fledged FTA between the US and the country in question. These individual FTAs would then be linked over time until the entire Middle East came under US trading influence. In essence, the logic driving MEFTA is an economic free trade zone across the whole region, anchored by Israeli capital in the west and Gulf capital in the east, and each tied in turn to the US economy in the advanced capitalist core. This is what Condoleeza Rice means by the ‘New Middle East.’
Normalization with Israel
Paramount to achieving this vision is the economic and political integration of Israel into the region. It is very important to understand this point: 'normalization' (as it is called by the Palestinian and Arab left) is the sine qua non of MEFTA and the neoliberal vision for the region. A rejection of normalization has long formed a dividing line between progressive forces in the region and those governments and leaders willing to collaborate with Israel and US imperialism. The basic contention behind the rejection is that Israel should not be considered a 'normal' country in the region as long as it refuses to recognize the explicitly colonial nature of Zionism and denies the right of Palestinians to return and self-determination.
The US insistence on economic and political normalization of Arab state relations with Israel is nothing new. The linkage of this objective with neoliberal policies, however, came to the surface during the 1990s with the Oslo Accords. As Oslo unfolded, the US and other world powers sponsored a series of four consecutive summits, known as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Economic Summits, first held in Morocco in 1994. The Jordanian government was not shy about promoting MENA's goal of normalization, with its Foreign Ministry openly noting that the summits are “intended to create economic interdependencies between Arab states and Israel, promote personal contacts between the two sides and foster trade, investment and development.”[3]
Following the onset of the Palestinian uprising in late 2000 and the apparent breakdown of negotiations between Israel and the PA, discussion of a trend toward normalization of relations with Israel may appear mistaken. Yet away from the public spotlight, the economic and political ties between Israel and Arab governments continue to deepen. One example of the essential link between neoliberalism and normalization are the bilateral FTA agreements. Each of the agreements between the US and countries in the region contains a clause that commits the country in question to normalization with Israel, and forbidding any boycott of trade relations.
Perhaps the most revealing confirmation of the way in which normalization has become integrated into the neoliberal project is the establishment of the so-called Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) in Jordan and Egypt. These zones came about as a result of economic agreements between the US, Israel, Jordan and Egypt. Their establishment contained the extraordinary provision that goods produced in these industrial areas can gain duty-free status to the US provided that a certain proportion of inputs are Israeli.
Most of these QIZ contain textile factories that act as subcontractors for large US capital such as Walmart, GAP and other clothing chains. The factories themselves are owned by regional and international capital, predominantly from the United Arab Emirates, Israel, China, Taiwan, and Korea. Although it is difficult to accurately determine the size of the QIZ workforce, it is estimated that in Jordan they hold over 40,000 workers, most of whom are migrant labourers from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and other South Asian countries. The conditions in which they work are horrific and rarely tackled by Arab leftists and trade unions. No labour laws apply and workers are prevented from joining unions. Pay is as low as 2 cents an hour, with 72-hour shifts reported. Workers are regularly beaten, sexually assaulted, and forced to live in extremely overcrowded and filthy conditions. They must pay their own way to reach the Middle East and their passports are confiscated from them on arrival.[4]
These QIZ have come to dominate bilateral trade between the US and Jordan (and to a lesser extent, Egypt). By 2007, the US government was reporting that exports from the thirteen QIZ established in Jordan accounted for an astonishing 70% of total Jordanian exports to the US.[5] Egypt launched its first QIZ in 2004 and now has a total of four of these areas. By 2006, the proportion of Egyptian exports to the US produced in QIZ had reached 26% of total exports.
These zones are constructed to weld Israeli and Arab capital together, integrating them with the US market and the American empire, in the joint exploitation of cheap labour. No clearer depiction can be found for how the US envisions the New Middle East.
Destroying Popular Unity
A corollary of this US-inspired vision of a single neoliberal economic zone linking Israeli and Middle East capital is the sustained attempts to fracture and break apart the forms of political unity and social resistance, both national and regional, that stand opposed to this outcome. US foreign policy in the Middle East, it needs to be stressed, is pre-occupied with isolating and then breaking any forces that stand opposed to its vision.
For this reason, US military intervention in the region must be understood as a necessary complement to neoliberal ‘peace.’ With the American occupation in Iraq, and the threats and attempts to destabilize and attack Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, the US supports and cultivates those social forces that it hopes will act as subserviently towards its interests in the region, and pursue normalization with Israel, as have the Jordanian and Egyptian governments. The most important factor in US policy is to limit capacities for countries in the region to exert independent control over economic or foreign policy. In this sense, regardless of the regimes in place (and we should not forget that countries like Iran and Syria have their own dungeons filled with political prisoners), the national interests of these countries inevitably clash with the forms of rule that the US attempts to impose on the region.
In the case of Palestine, this fracturing of national unity of the resistance is pivotal to the success of the neoliberal project in the region. Because of the intimate relationship between normalization with Israel, and the US vision for a single neoliberal economic zone stretching across the Middle East, the Palestinian struggle holds a central position within the broader regional anti-imperialist struggle. The fact that, sixty years on, Palestinians have refused to accept their expulsion in 1947-1948 and continue to demand the right to return and live on their land, is a potent threat not just to the racist character of the Israeli state but also to the nature of US power in the region. This is why it is impossible for any progressive movement to develop in the region that is not centrally concerned and linked with the Palestinian struggle. All popular struggles across the region are soon intertwined with the question of Palestine.
This also means that successful regional struggles against the imposition of neoliberalism act to strengthen the Palestinian struggle. Recent strikes and worker demonstrations in the Egyptian town of Mahalla are one example of this. Mahalla is home to the largest textile factory in the Middle East (with a labour force of 27,000 workers) and is also the location of one of Egypt's QIZ. For two years, these workers have been at the center of one of the largest strike waves in the Middle East, culminating most recently in an attempted strike on 6 April 2008 that was met with bloody repression by the Egyptian government. During these actions, demonstrating workers carried placards denouncing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's close links to the IMF, the US government, and the process of normalization with Israel. These strikes thus need to be understood not only in their narrow economic sense of improving wages and conditions in Egyptian factories, but also through the way that they inevitably confront the nature of the Egyptian regime and its role in the configuration of US power in the Middle East.
This is the same context in which the PRDP and the actions of the Palestinian Authority must be situated. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel has aimed at truncating the Palestinian population in those areas into isolated population centers divided from one another by Israeli settlements, bypass roads, and military installations. These pockets of territory – aptly described as Bantustans by many analysts in reference to the black 'homelands' developed under Apartheid South Africa – would be given the trappings of autonomy. But in reality they would be nothing more than open-air prisons. In place of direct Israeli military rule over the Palestinian population in these areas, a quiescent Palestinian leadership would mediate Israeli control. As with all prisons, real control would remain with those who hold the keys: i.e. the Israeli occupying forces that continue to regulate the entrance of all goods, people and services.
The Oslo process was designed to formalize the establishment of these Palestinian Bantustans and to confer the blessing of the 'international community' on a subservient PA. Although this intention was disrupted by the beginning of the popular Palestinian uprising in September 2000, it is painfully obvious to anyone who cares to look at a map of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that these Bantustans have taken on a very real existence with the final contours of the Apartheid Wall encircling villages and towns in the West Bank. An elaborate scheme of checkpoints, ID cards and permits completely regulates entrance in and out of these areas of people and goods.
We can see the reality of this system of control in the case of Gaza, which can perhaps best be understood as a test case for the West Bank. Because the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip has not accepted the vision of Bantustanization or normalization, Israel has chosen to simply lock 1.5 million people within an open-air prison and attempt to starve them into submission. The Palestinian Authority, despite some lip service to the unity of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has generally acquiesced to this siege. Indeed, in a striking example of how the PA leadership has effortlessly come to adopt the language of Israel, a key PRDP document states that blame for the siege on Gaza should be laid at the feet of Hamas,[6] ignoring the fact that Israel's closure of the Strip and separation from the West Bank is not a new phenomenon, but has been evolving since 1989 as part of a clear strategy to fracture territory.
Palestinian and other regional capitals are fully integrated into this project through joint economic schemes such as the industrial zones outlined above. These forces directly benefit from the Bantustan arrangements and will be granted some controlled economic spaces in which to accumulate. As the Palestine Investment Conference attests, they will not be subject to the same restrictions on their movement as the average Palestinian. Blessed with the appellation 'peace' by the 'international community', this solution will be heralded as the ‘Palestinian state.’
In reality, the truncated patchwork of territories and industrial zones has nothing to do with self-determination. Within this evolving map, the West Bank becomes the gateway for Israel into the broader Middle East hinterland. The massive highways running east-west across the West Bank, and that connect Israeli cities on the Mediterranean with settlements in the Jordan Valley, are clearly designed for much more than local traffic: they are intended to function as conduits for trade between Israel and the Gulf (through Jordan and the West Bank). The success of MEFTA, and the parallel normalization of Israel into a neoliberal Middle East, is predicated on the successful completion of this process.
Conclusion
Activists and supporters of the Palestinian struggle spend much time documenting and conveying to a broader audience the horrific conditions faced by the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The litany of abuses faced by the people of Gaza under the siege, the ongoing construction of settlements and the Apartheid Wall in the West Bank, the ways in which movement and daily-life are regulated by Israeli military orders, and the ever-growing levels of poverty are all meticulously catalogued.
These facts are essential to explaining the depth and scope of Israeli control over Palestine. For those who have not had the opportunity of living under or witnessing these conditions first-hand, the routinization of misery that is the reality of everyday life in Palestine needs to be conveyed.
Yet, it is necessary to understand that an appeal for solidarity based on these ever-present human rights abuses does not go far enough. Palestinians are not victims but a people in struggle. This struggle goes beyond the borders of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: it is a central component of a broader regional fight. It is impossible to understand events in any country of the Middle East today without situating the national context within the single, coherent and unified offensive that the US and other imperialist states are waging against the peoples of the region. It is not merely the depth of suffering or length of exile that makes the Palestinian struggle an imperative of international solidarity in the current period. It is also the central location of the struggle within the broader context of global resistance to imperialism and neoliberalism.
At the heart of this regional framework is the intrinsic relationship between the development of neoliberal capitalism in the Middle East and normalization of relations with Israel. All of the efforts of the US and their client regimes in the region are aimed at promoting these inter-related themes. It is not accidental that the key discussions at the regional meetings convened between Rice, representatives of the Quartet, and other international figures revolve around ways of encouraging joint projects between Israeli and regional capital, including Palestinian capitalists. This is why the bilateral US FTA agreements centrally insist upon normalization with Israel, and why such an enormous effort has been extended in schemes such as the Qualified Industrial Zones.
Solidarity activists can play a key role in rejecting and preventing this process of normalization. While this has long been a demand of the Palestinian and Arab left, the call has gained a renewed urgency following Bush's announcement of the MEFTA plan in 2003. In 2005, Palestinian grassroots organizations called for a global movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli state in the manner of the campaign against South African apartheid.[7] Since that time, student groups, municipalities, artists, and labour unions around the world have passed BDS resolutions in support of the 2005 call.
This movement is critical to the overall struggle in the region. International solidarity is not a question of charity or helping out the 'misfortunate'. It is fundamentally a question of siding with and supporting people in struggle. The BDS call reinforces and strengthens those regional forces that refuse to normalize with occupation and apartheid in Palestine. It is aimed at severing the international support – ideological, economic and military – that enables the Israeli form of apartheid to continue.
The effort to de-legitimize and turn back normalization with the Israeli state is, moreover, not just an act of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. It is also an indispensable element in supporting other peoples of the region, whether in the struggle against the US-led occupation of Iraq, attempts to prevent military action against Iran, or numerous other popular movements across the Middle East. But most fundamentally – because of the region's central role in underpinning global US hegemony – what happens in the Middle East has implications for all. Confronting the neoliberal policies of immiseration and 'race-to-the-bottom' competition that have brought such catastrophe to the vast majority of the world's people depends critically on our future success. •
Adam Hanieh is a doctoral candidate in political science at York University, Toronto, whose research looks at the political economy of Middle East and the Gulf Cooperation Council. He can be reached at hanieh08@gmail.com.
Notes
1. Kenneth Katzman, “The Persian Gulf States: Issues for U.S. Policy”, 2006, Washington D.C: Congressional Research Service The Library of Congress, p.10.
2. Robert B. Zoellick, “Global Trade and the Middle East: Reawakening a Vibrant Past”, Remarks at the World Economic Forum Amman, Jordan June 23, 2003, at http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2003/June/20030623105708zemogb0.2713282.html.
3. Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Foreign Ministry, Middle East and North African Summits, at http://www.mfa.gov.jo/wps/portal/FMEnglishSite.
4. See the May 2006 report by the National Labor Committee, “U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement Descends into Human Trafficking and Involuntary Servitude” for a detailed examination of these conditions in Jordan.
5. Office of the United States Trade Representative, 2007 Trade Policy Agenda, Section III, p.5.
6. “Building a Palestinian State”, p. 4, http://www.imeu.net/engine/uploads/pna-full-report.pdf#page=4.
7. See stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/968.shtml.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Palestine in the Middle East:Opposing Neoliberalism and US Power
By Adam Hanieh
Over the last six months, the Palestinian economy has been radically transformed under a new plan drawn up by the Palestinian Authority (PA) called the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan (PRDP). Developed in close collaboration with institutions such as the World Bank and the British Department for International Development (DFID), the PRDP is currently being implemented in the West Bank where the Abu Mazen-led PA has effective control. It embraces the fundamental precepts of neoliberalism: a private sector-driven economic strategy in which the aim is to attract foreign investment and reduce public spending to a minimum.
Understanding the logic of this economic framework is critical to assessing the current juncture of the Palestinian struggle. The neoliberal vision underpinning these policies is a central corollary to the political direction promoted by the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and their US and European Union (EU) supporters. The aim, as the first part of this article explains, is to formalize a truncated network of Palestinian-controlled cantons and associated industrial zones, dependent upon the Israeli occupation, and through which a pool of cheap Palestinian labour is exploited by Israeli, Palestinian and other regional capitalist groups. The evolving institutional framework for the Palestinian economy not only incorporates the Israeli occupation into the way 'development' is conceived, but also acts to foster the culpability of Palestinian political and economic elites for how these structures operate.
Such an analysis, however, is only part of the story. The second part of this article argues that these changes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the regional framework of the Middle East. Over the last two decades, and particularly accelerating under the Bush administration, the US has pursued a policy of integrating its bases of support in the region within a single, neoliberal economic zone tied to the US through a series of bilateral trade agreements. This vision is aimed at promoting the free flow of capital and goods (but not necessarily labour) throughout the Middle East region. The region's markets will be dominated by US imports, while cheap labour, concentrated in economic 'free' zones owned by regional and international capital, will manufacture low-cost exports destined for markets in the US, EU, Israel and the Gulf.
A central component of this vision is the normalization and integration of Israel into the Middle East. The US envisions a Middle East resting upon Israeli capital in the West and Gulf capital in the East, underpinning a low wage, neoliberal zone that spans the region. What this means is that Israel's historic destruction of Palestinian national rights must be accepted and blessed by all states in the region. In the place of real Palestinian self-determination (first and foremost the right of return of refugees), a nominal artificial state will be established in the dependent islands of territory across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This goal is an essential pre-requisite of US strategy in the region. Our political activities must be informed by this understanding if we are to successfully build effective solidarity movements to confront and turn back this project.
Neoliberalism in Palestine:The Reform and Development Plan
On 17 December 2007, at a one-day conference in Paris, over 90 international representatives from various countries and donor organizations gathered to pledge their support to the Palestinian Authority government headed by President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The conference was the largest of its kind since 1996, and was chaired by the French and Norwegian governments, Tony Blair (as representative of the Middle East Quartet), and the European Commission. Following speeches by various EU member states, the Palestinian Authority, the International Monetary Fund, and the Israeli government, attendees at the conference pledged over US$7.7 billion to the PA.
The main impetus for this conference was an attempt to garner financial support for a new PA economic strategy called the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan for 2008-2010 (PRDP). Based upon a detailed series of proposals written by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, the broad outlines of the PRDP were first presented in November 2007. Since that time it has become the guiding framework for economic policy, particularly in the West Bank areas where the Abu Mazen-led PA has effective control.
The first thing to note about the PRDP is that the heavy hand of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other neoliberal institutions such as the British Department for International Development (DFID) can be clearly seen in its policy recommendations and outlook. The argument behind the PRDP is explicitly neoliberal, calling on the PA to undertake a series of fiscal reforms in order to foster an “enabling environment for the private sector” as the “engine of sustainable economic growth”. Palestinian grassroots organizations have gone so far as to describe neoliberal financial institutions as “a de facto 'shadow government' in the West Bank, dictating the development programme of the Salam Fayyad government.” [1]
What does the PRDP actually mean for Palestinians on the ground? As the name suggests, there are two main policy components to the PRDP: 'reform' and 'development'. The reform component commits the PA to a program of fiscal tightening that exceeds measures imposed by the IMF and World Bank on any other state in the region. There are three key elements to this program.
First, in probably the harshest attack on any public sector in the Middle East in recent history, the PA has committed to cut 21% of jobs in the public sector workforce by 2010. Nearly 40,000 people will lose their jobs through this mass layoff. [2]
Second, the PA has pledged not to increase any public sector salaries over the next three years. In an environment of very high levels of inflation (11% in the year to March 2008) and rapidly rising food and energy prices, this wage freeze is a recipe for disaster for the average person in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Finally, a further key component of the PRDP is the requirement that citizens present a 'certificate of payment' of utility bills in order to receive any municipal or government services. This measure will have a dramatic impact on the poor, as the subsidization of electricity and water bills (i.e. allowing these services to continue despite the non-payment of bills) was a central means of survival for millions of people in an environment of rapidly spiraling poverty levels. This new measure means that individuals applying for various services – including requests for ID cards, car licenses, building permits etc – will be denied if these debts are outstanding. Public sector employees will have utility debts docked from their salaries.
International financial institutions place such a high priority on the PRDP that virtually all donor support to the Palestinian Authority – including the $7.7 billion earmarked at the Paris Conference – is contingent on its implementation. To ensure this compliance, a new bank account called the PRDP Trust Fund has been established through which international support to the PA will flow. This account is headquartered in Washington D.C. and managed by the World Bank. The Bank has explicitly stated that disbursements through this account are based upon “assessment of the progress of implementation of the PRDP.” [3]
A ‘Culture of Entitlement’?
To fully comprehend the impact of the PRDP measures they need to be placed in the context of the existing economic situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WB/GS). During the period 1999-2007, Palestinian GDP per capita declined by approximately two-thirds and personal savings were wiped out as a result of Israeli attacks on Palestinian areas. These are the worst levels of poverty ever witnessed: around three-quarters of households in Gaza and well over half in the West Bank now live in poverty. [4]
In addition, over the last 15 years there has been a significant shift in the structure of the Palestinian labour force that further compounds the effect of these policies. Israel has reduced its reliance on Palestinian labour in areas such as construction and agriculture, replacing these workers with migrant labour from regions such as Asia and Eastern Europe. As a result, employment by the PA has become a key means of survival for Palestinians in the WB/GS. Around 1/5 of Palestinian workers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are employed by the PA in sectors such as education, health, security, and municipal affairs. In an environment of increasingly high dependency ratios (an average of 5.3 people were dependent on each employed person in 2007), nearly 1 million people rely upon wages garnered from public sector employment. [5]
On 5 February 2008, soon after the announcement of the PRDP fiscal measures, public sector workers launched a strike. In addition to protesting the wage cuts and the 'certificate of payment', workers called for an increase in the 'travel expenses' component of their salaries because of rising costs of travel (a result of Israeli military checkpoints and fuel price increases). [6]
The strike was largely unsuccessful, however, in turning back implementation of the PRDP. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that public sector workers in the West Bank (and their trade union representatives) are traditionally tied to Fatah, the ruling party that dominates the Palestinian Authority and is responsible for the PRDP. Because of this relationship, strikes and other labour actions tend to be curtailed in the name of political expediency. [7]
Nevertheless, the strike did indicate the widening chasm between the Palestinian Authority's neoliberal trajectory and its ever-weakening claim to national liberation. One of the starkest indications of this was the language employed by the PA leadership in reference to the PRDP's proposed 'certificate of payment'. Repeatedly throughout the strike, prominent PA representatives took to condemning public sector workers and the poor for their supposed “culture of non-payment” and “sense of entitlement.”
It needs to be clearly understood that the Palestinian population in the WB/GS has no control over basic services such as water, electricity and telephone access. As a result of the system of control established by Israel in these areas, all of these utilities are supplied by Israeli companies through Palestinian interlocutors. The bill a customer receives for electricity may be written in Arabic, but the service is ultimately sourced from an Israeli company (with the exception of a small amount of electricity generated in the Gaza Strip).
Because of this relationship, the PRDP 'certificate of payment' essentially means that the PA has taken on the role of debt collector for Israeli companies, choosing to target the poorest layers of the community in order to sustain the structures of occupation. Even worse, the neoliberal language adopted by the PA blames millions of people living under never-before seen conditions of poverty for attempting to find ways to survive.
South African activist, Salim Vally, has recently noted that neoliberal municipal governments in South Africa use the same language of a “culture of entitlement” to describe the failure of poor township residents to pay new user-fees. Indeed, in a striking confirmation of the similar trends at play in both countries, Vally reveals that a few years ago, officials from the South African Cape Town municipal government awarded a visiting Palestinian delegation (including chief PA negotiator Saeb Erekat), a supply of pre-paid water meters as part of the drive to encourage the imposition of user fees. The PA has pledged to install these types of meters as part of the PRDP. [8]
By gutting 1/5 of the labour force, imposing a wage freeze as prices skyrocket, and compelling the poor to immediately pay millions of dollars in debt, the PRDP will have a savage and unparalleled impact on the population. These neoliberal measures will undoubtedly open significant fissures within the different political forces and social movements over the coming period. But key to any effective response is an understanding that the PRDP is not solely a deliberate attempt to impoverish the population. Rather, it aims at complementing the second component of the PRDP: its particular model of ‘development.’
‘Development’ and the Industrial Zone Model
Alongside the fiscal measures discussed above, the PRDP promotes a series of development projects that have been heavily backed by the US, EU and the Israeli government. An essential pre-condition of this development model is a large pool of desperate, poverty-struck Palestinian workers, who are willing to accept the jobs envisaged under this type of development. This is the intersection between the 'reform' and 'development' components of the PRDP.
The PRDP development model aims at utilizing cheap Palestinian labour in industrial zones and parks, located at the edges of the patchwork of Palestinian territories in the West Bank. Under this vision, Israeli, Palestinian and regional capital will cooperate (under the banner of 'peace') within these industrial zones to take advantage of very low Palestinian relative wage costs. While some of this production will involve traditional low value-added sectors such as textiles, some zones will focus on complementing high tech sectors of the Israeli economy where a well-educated Palestinian labour force can offer low-wage alternatives. The goods produced will be exported to the US, the EU and the Gulf states. The Palestinian Authority will play the role of policing the several million-strong reserve army of labour locked behind the walls and checkpoints of the Palestinian territories. In return, the PA leadership will wield the trappings of a state, obtain for itself the privileges to travel and move freely, and earn a stake in the profits that flow from the zones.
The first stage in this scheme focuses on the West Bank where the government of Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad wields power and is able to implement this vision with the support of the Israel. A series of industrial zones are planned for areas near Jenin, Nablus and Tarqumiya (near Hebron). Although the exact details of these zones have been kept under wraps, institutions involved claim that the initial phase is expected to directly employ around 40,000 workers with a similar number of jobs created 'indirectly' outside the zones. [9] If these plans come to fruition they will have a major impact on the structure of Palestinian labour in the West Bank: just under 20% of jobs in the West Bank will be tied in some way to these industrial zones.
Inside these zones, Palestinian and Israeli labour laws, wage levels, environmental regulations, or other workplace conditions will not apply. Movement in and out of the areas will be controlled by the Israeli military and Palestinian security forces. Presumably, if Israel's typical pattern of movement control applies, workers will need to pass stringent security checks in order to obtain necessary work permissions. In this way, the ability to work becomes dependent upon complying with Israeli military orders (over 11,000 Palestinians are currently held as political prisoners for violating these military orders). The main trade union body in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), has not been given the right to represent workers in the industrial zones.
Plans for the Tarqumiya zone would appear to confirm this prognosis. Turkey will be the major partner and financer of factories in the zone and will control internal security. The PA and Israel will control external security from their respective sides. Turkish sources expect around 200 factories to be established in the zone, employing around 10,000 Palestinians. Turkish business representatives explicitly note that in a global environment of low-cost Chinese goods, zones such as Tarqumiya will assist the relocation of Turkish industry across the region to take advantage of cheap labour. They also intend that the goods produced in the zone would be exported to the US, EU and the Gulf states. [10]
In addition to the exploitation of cheap labour, these zones serve to normalize and legitimate the existing structures of the occupation. A clear example of this is shown by the case of the Jenin Industrial Estate (JIE). The land for the JIE has twice been confiscated from Palestinian farmers: in 1998 when the PA first mooted the idea for the industrial zone, and then once again in 2003, when the Israeli military confiscated the land as part of construction for the Apartheid Wall ‘buffer-zone.’[11] Indeed, in a striking example of how this model of development is integrated with the structures of the occupation, the Wall will form the northern border of the JIE.
The centrality of the industrial zone 'development' model to the US, Israel and the PA was confirmed at the end of March 2008 during a visit of US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to the region. On 30 March, at a meeting convened between Rice, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in Jerusalem, the establishment of industrial zones was a major topic of discussion. At the meeting, Israel agreed to facilitate the establishment of Tarqumiya and presented it as a 'confidence building' measure. The Tarqumiya project has also been heavily promoted by Quartet Representative Tony Blair as one of the four so-called 'Quick Impact' projects tied to the implementation of the PRDP.
The May 'Palestine Investment Conference'
As the March meeting between Rice, Barak and Fayyad indicated, the construction of zones such as Tarqumiya and the JIE is a high priority of current political negotiations. Another component of the tripartite meeting was a discussion of how Israel would help to facilitate a 'Palestine Investment Conference', convened in Bethlehem from 21-23rd May. This conference unquestionably confirmed the neoliberal trajectory of the Palestinian Authority and the integration of the Israeli military occupation into its development model.
Over 1000 delegates attended the conference, including all of the key figures in the Palestinian Authority (Abu Mazen, Salam Fayyad and other key ministers were present). [12] It brought together the wealthiest Palestinian capitalists from outside the country (particularly North America and Europe) as well as regional Arab capital groups from Jordan, the Gulf and elsewhere. The conference was sponsored by the main Palestinian business groups active in the West Bank and Gaza (including the Arab Bank, Bank of Palestine, Paltel, Consolidated Contractors Company, Arab Palestinian Investment Company); large foreign capital (CISCO, Intel, Coca Cola, Marriott Hotels, Booz Allen Hamilton); and US and European governmental organizations (USAID, DFID, and the French Development Agency).
The main aim of the conference was to showcase the neoliberal attacks on the public sector implemented by the PA under the PRDP, holding these up as 'good for business' and an attractive reason to invest in Palestinian areas. In addition to the industrial zones discussed above, several projects were promoted throughout the conference that aimed at bringing together Arab and Israeli capital in joint investments. Israeli businesspeople were encouraged to attend, although this fact was not widely publicized due to the opposition of the Palestinian public to these types of joint projects.
One of the projects highlighted during the conference was the 'Corridor for Peace and Prosperity' (CPP), which aims to create an agro-industrial zone in the fertile areas of the Jordan Valley. For centuries the Jordan Valley has been a key agricultural area for Palestinian farmers in the West Bank. But following the occupation of the area in 1967, the Israeli military proceeded to evict many of these farmers, confiscate land, and establish Israeli settlements (first as military-agricultural settlements and then as Israeli agribusiness and civilian settlements). By controlling water, access routes and other resources, the land essentially became an Israeli military zone although scattered Palestinian villages remained in the area.
The CPP aims to establish a free trade agricultural zone in the area that will turn the small-scale Palestinian farmers into day-labourers and sub-contractors to large agro-industry controlled by Israeli and regional capital. [13] In other words, not only does the CPP consent to the occupation and expropriation of land that has taken place over the last 40 years in the Jordan Valley, it actually aims to integrate this occupation into the project itself. The agricultural produce grown as part of the CPP will do nothing to alleviate concerns of food security in the area: the produce is intended for export to Israel and the Gulf states.
One final indication of the relationship between the structures of occupation and the neoliberal development model was the support given by the Israeli military to the conference itself. While everyday residents of Bethlehem are unable to move without elaborate security procedures, special colored ID cards and dedicated checkpoints, conference attendees entered the country and were granted the right to travel without harassment or any security checks at Israeli borders. Despite the fact that over 200 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have died in the last year due to the Israeli-imposed siege and inability to travel for urgent medical treatment, Israeli authorities permitted Gazan businessman to attend the conference. A sign erected by the Israeli military at the entrance to Bethlehem welcomed people to the conference. The sign was written in Arabic, Hebrew and English and was emblazoned with the logos of the Israeli military occupation.
It should be stressed that the conference did not pass without strong opposition from grassroots forces within the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A statement put out by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, and endorsed by a wide array of political forces, stated:
“Economic and social development in Palestine is crucial, and it is imperative that we should take should steps to improve the current economic and political situation. However, despite the ongoing national and international conferences designed to bring together the national efforts and resources; and despite the support of international solidarity, we believe that the economic conference that will be held in Bethlehem over the next few days, with the attendance of official and non-official Israeli representatives, has a serious political implications that cannot be ignored.... The proposed projects take as their starting point Israeli participation in decision-making, and Israeli control over their legal status... [they] are designed to meet the economic demands of the Israeli administration, not those of the Palestinian people.... These are not the development projects we want or need. What we require is a national Palestinian conference with Arab and international support for strengthening Palestinian steadfastness and as a step toward ending the dependency on the occupation and its economy.” [14]
In sum, the PRDP fiscal measures and their allied development projects will in no way contribute to ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In reality, these measures will only act to strengthen that occupation by conferring it the supposed legitimacy and blessing of the Palestinian Authority leadership. The vast majority of the population in these areas will find their living conditions worsen as a direct result of these plans. But while the PRDP and events such as the Investment Conference stand as a damning indictment of the trajectory of the Palestinian Authority, the forces driving this type of neoliberal vision do not simply result from corruption, infighting, or mistaken strategic choices. Rather, they are embedded within the overall US-led economic reconfiguration of the Middle East. The second part of this article explores this critical regional process and the place of Palestine within it. •
Adam Hanieh is a doctoral candidate in political science at York University, Toronto, whose research looks at the political economy of Middle East and the Gulf Cooperation Council. He can be reached at hanieh08@gmail.com.
Footnotes
1. Stop the Wall, “National BDS Steering Committee: Bethlehem investment conference: development or normalization,” at http://stopthewall.org/analysisandfeatures/1657.shtml.
2. The PA attempts to obfuscate this mass layoff by claiming that those losing their jobs were not 'legally appointed.' Regardless of the hiring procedures, this will have an enormous impact on those relying upon this employment for survival. See Palestinian National Authority, “Building a Palestinian State: Towards peace and prosperity,” p.14, http://www.imeu.net/engine/uploads/pna-full-report.pdf#page=14.
3. World Bank, Trust Fund Details – as of June 2008, http://www.worldbank.org/.
4. Karen Laub, “IMF: Palestinian Reform Plan Doable”, Associated Press, 11 December 2007.
5. Statistics on labour force and dependency ratios available from Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, at http://www.pcbs.gov.ps/.
6. Amira Hass, “Democratic Suspicion”, Haaretz, 6 February 2008.
7. A similar dynamic was revealed during the last significant strike over 10 years ago, when Palestinian teachers sought to win higher wage levels. This 1997 strike was initiated and led by a grassroots committee of teachers who bypassed the traditional union structures allied to Fatah. It was met with severe repression that saw dozens of teachers arrested by the Palestinian Authority. Industrial action by teachers continued off and on until 2000, when the onset of the Palestinian uprising ended organizing attempts in the name of “national unity.”
8. Salim Vally, “From South Africa to Palestine: Lessons for the New Anti-Apartheid Movement,” Left Turn Magazine.
9. See the Palestinian Industrial Estates and Free Zones Authority, http://www.piefza.org/.
10. Guven Sak, “The Challenge of Developing the Private Sector in the Middle East,” The Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, May 2, 2008.
11. Stop the Wall, “Development or normalization? A critique of West Bank development approaches and projects”, at http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/1654.shtml.
12. See the conference website at www.pic-palestine.ps for the conference attendees, press coverage, and presentations.
13. See “Development or normalization?”, op cit, for a full critique of this project
14. Stop the Wall, “National BDS Steering Committee: Bethlehem investment conference: development or normalization”, http://stopthewall.org/analysisandfeatures/1657.shtml.
Over the last six months, the Palestinian economy has been radically transformed under a new plan drawn up by the Palestinian Authority (PA) called the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan (PRDP). Developed in close collaboration with institutions such as the World Bank and the British Department for International Development (DFID), the PRDP is currently being implemented in the West Bank where the Abu Mazen-led PA has effective control. It embraces the fundamental precepts of neoliberalism: a private sector-driven economic strategy in which the aim is to attract foreign investment and reduce public spending to a minimum.
Understanding the logic of this economic framework is critical to assessing the current juncture of the Palestinian struggle. The neoliberal vision underpinning these policies is a central corollary to the political direction promoted by the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and their US and European Union (EU) supporters. The aim, as the first part of this article explains, is to formalize a truncated network of Palestinian-controlled cantons and associated industrial zones, dependent upon the Israeli occupation, and through which a pool of cheap Palestinian labour is exploited by Israeli, Palestinian and other regional capitalist groups. The evolving institutional framework for the Palestinian economy not only incorporates the Israeli occupation into the way 'development' is conceived, but also acts to foster the culpability of Palestinian political and economic elites for how these structures operate.
Such an analysis, however, is only part of the story. The second part of this article argues that these changes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the regional framework of the Middle East. Over the last two decades, and particularly accelerating under the Bush administration, the US has pursued a policy of integrating its bases of support in the region within a single, neoliberal economic zone tied to the US through a series of bilateral trade agreements. This vision is aimed at promoting the free flow of capital and goods (but not necessarily labour) throughout the Middle East region. The region's markets will be dominated by US imports, while cheap labour, concentrated in economic 'free' zones owned by regional and international capital, will manufacture low-cost exports destined for markets in the US, EU, Israel and the Gulf.
A central component of this vision is the normalization and integration of Israel into the Middle East. The US envisions a Middle East resting upon Israeli capital in the West and Gulf capital in the East, underpinning a low wage, neoliberal zone that spans the region. What this means is that Israel's historic destruction of Palestinian national rights must be accepted and blessed by all states in the region. In the place of real Palestinian self-determination (first and foremost the right of return of refugees), a nominal artificial state will be established in the dependent islands of territory across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This goal is an essential pre-requisite of US strategy in the region. Our political activities must be informed by this understanding if we are to successfully build effective solidarity movements to confront and turn back this project.
Neoliberalism in Palestine:The Reform and Development Plan
On 17 December 2007, at a one-day conference in Paris, over 90 international representatives from various countries and donor organizations gathered to pledge their support to the Palestinian Authority government headed by President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The conference was the largest of its kind since 1996, and was chaired by the French and Norwegian governments, Tony Blair (as representative of the Middle East Quartet), and the European Commission. Following speeches by various EU member states, the Palestinian Authority, the International Monetary Fund, and the Israeli government, attendees at the conference pledged over US$7.7 billion to the PA.
The main impetus for this conference was an attempt to garner financial support for a new PA economic strategy called the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan for 2008-2010 (PRDP). Based upon a detailed series of proposals written by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, the broad outlines of the PRDP were first presented in November 2007. Since that time it has become the guiding framework for economic policy, particularly in the West Bank areas where the Abu Mazen-led PA has effective control.
The first thing to note about the PRDP is that the heavy hand of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other neoliberal institutions such as the British Department for International Development (DFID) can be clearly seen in its policy recommendations and outlook. The argument behind the PRDP is explicitly neoliberal, calling on the PA to undertake a series of fiscal reforms in order to foster an “enabling environment for the private sector” as the “engine of sustainable economic growth”. Palestinian grassroots organizations have gone so far as to describe neoliberal financial institutions as “a de facto 'shadow government' in the West Bank, dictating the development programme of the Salam Fayyad government.” [1]
What does the PRDP actually mean for Palestinians on the ground? As the name suggests, there are two main policy components to the PRDP: 'reform' and 'development'. The reform component commits the PA to a program of fiscal tightening that exceeds measures imposed by the IMF and World Bank on any other state in the region. There are three key elements to this program.
First, in probably the harshest attack on any public sector in the Middle East in recent history, the PA has committed to cut 21% of jobs in the public sector workforce by 2010. Nearly 40,000 people will lose their jobs through this mass layoff. [2]
Second, the PA has pledged not to increase any public sector salaries over the next three years. In an environment of very high levels of inflation (11% in the year to March 2008) and rapidly rising food and energy prices, this wage freeze is a recipe for disaster for the average person in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Finally, a further key component of the PRDP is the requirement that citizens present a 'certificate of payment' of utility bills in order to receive any municipal or government services. This measure will have a dramatic impact on the poor, as the subsidization of electricity and water bills (i.e. allowing these services to continue despite the non-payment of bills) was a central means of survival for millions of people in an environment of rapidly spiraling poverty levels. This new measure means that individuals applying for various services – including requests for ID cards, car licenses, building permits etc – will be denied if these debts are outstanding. Public sector employees will have utility debts docked from their salaries.
International financial institutions place such a high priority on the PRDP that virtually all donor support to the Palestinian Authority – including the $7.7 billion earmarked at the Paris Conference – is contingent on its implementation. To ensure this compliance, a new bank account called the PRDP Trust Fund has been established through which international support to the PA will flow. This account is headquartered in Washington D.C. and managed by the World Bank. The Bank has explicitly stated that disbursements through this account are based upon “assessment of the progress of implementation of the PRDP.” [3]
A ‘Culture of Entitlement’?
To fully comprehend the impact of the PRDP measures they need to be placed in the context of the existing economic situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WB/GS). During the period 1999-2007, Palestinian GDP per capita declined by approximately two-thirds and personal savings were wiped out as a result of Israeli attacks on Palestinian areas. These are the worst levels of poverty ever witnessed: around three-quarters of households in Gaza and well over half in the West Bank now live in poverty. [4]
In addition, over the last 15 years there has been a significant shift in the structure of the Palestinian labour force that further compounds the effect of these policies. Israel has reduced its reliance on Palestinian labour in areas such as construction and agriculture, replacing these workers with migrant labour from regions such as Asia and Eastern Europe. As a result, employment by the PA has become a key means of survival for Palestinians in the WB/GS. Around 1/5 of Palestinian workers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are employed by the PA in sectors such as education, health, security, and municipal affairs. In an environment of increasingly high dependency ratios (an average of 5.3 people were dependent on each employed person in 2007), nearly 1 million people rely upon wages garnered from public sector employment. [5]
On 5 February 2008, soon after the announcement of the PRDP fiscal measures, public sector workers launched a strike. In addition to protesting the wage cuts and the 'certificate of payment', workers called for an increase in the 'travel expenses' component of their salaries because of rising costs of travel (a result of Israeli military checkpoints and fuel price increases). [6]
The strike was largely unsuccessful, however, in turning back implementation of the PRDP. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that public sector workers in the West Bank (and their trade union representatives) are traditionally tied to Fatah, the ruling party that dominates the Palestinian Authority and is responsible for the PRDP. Because of this relationship, strikes and other labour actions tend to be curtailed in the name of political expediency. [7]
Nevertheless, the strike did indicate the widening chasm between the Palestinian Authority's neoliberal trajectory and its ever-weakening claim to national liberation. One of the starkest indications of this was the language employed by the PA leadership in reference to the PRDP's proposed 'certificate of payment'. Repeatedly throughout the strike, prominent PA representatives took to condemning public sector workers and the poor for their supposed “culture of non-payment” and “sense of entitlement.”
It needs to be clearly understood that the Palestinian population in the WB/GS has no control over basic services such as water, electricity and telephone access. As a result of the system of control established by Israel in these areas, all of these utilities are supplied by Israeli companies through Palestinian interlocutors. The bill a customer receives for electricity may be written in Arabic, but the service is ultimately sourced from an Israeli company (with the exception of a small amount of electricity generated in the Gaza Strip).
Because of this relationship, the PRDP 'certificate of payment' essentially means that the PA has taken on the role of debt collector for Israeli companies, choosing to target the poorest layers of the community in order to sustain the structures of occupation. Even worse, the neoliberal language adopted by the PA blames millions of people living under never-before seen conditions of poverty for attempting to find ways to survive.
South African activist, Salim Vally, has recently noted that neoliberal municipal governments in South Africa use the same language of a “culture of entitlement” to describe the failure of poor township residents to pay new user-fees. Indeed, in a striking confirmation of the similar trends at play in both countries, Vally reveals that a few years ago, officials from the South African Cape Town municipal government awarded a visiting Palestinian delegation (including chief PA negotiator Saeb Erekat), a supply of pre-paid water meters as part of the drive to encourage the imposition of user fees. The PA has pledged to install these types of meters as part of the PRDP. [8]
By gutting 1/5 of the labour force, imposing a wage freeze as prices skyrocket, and compelling the poor to immediately pay millions of dollars in debt, the PRDP will have a savage and unparalleled impact on the population. These neoliberal measures will undoubtedly open significant fissures within the different political forces and social movements over the coming period. But key to any effective response is an understanding that the PRDP is not solely a deliberate attempt to impoverish the population. Rather, it aims at complementing the second component of the PRDP: its particular model of ‘development.’
‘Development’ and the Industrial Zone Model
Alongside the fiscal measures discussed above, the PRDP promotes a series of development projects that have been heavily backed by the US, EU and the Israeli government. An essential pre-condition of this development model is a large pool of desperate, poverty-struck Palestinian workers, who are willing to accept the jobs envisaged under this type of development. This is the intersection between the 'reform' and 'development' components of the PRDP.
The PRDP development model aims at utilizing cheap Palestinian labour in industrial zones and parks, located at the edges of the patchwork of Palestinian territories in the West Bank. Under this vision, Israeli, Palestinian and regional capital will cooperate (under the banner of 'peace') within these industrial zones to take advantage of very low Palestinian relative wage costs. While some of this production will involve traditional low value-added sectors such as textiles, some zones will focus on complementing high tech sectors of the Israeli economy where a well-educated Palestinian labour force can offer low-wage alternatives. The goods produced will be exported to the US, the EU and the Gulf states. The Palestinian Authority will play the role of policing the several million-strong reserve army of labour locked behind the walls and checkpoints of the Palestinian territories. In return, the PA leadership will wield the trappings of a state, obtain for itself the privileges to travel and move freely, and earn a stake in the profits that flow from the zones.
The first stage in this scheme focuses on the West Bank where the government of Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad wields power and is able to implement this vision with the support of the Israel. A series of industrial zones are planned for areas near Jenin, Nablus and Tarqumiya (near Hebron). Although the exact details of these zones have been kept under wraps, institutions involved claim that the initial phase is expected to directly employ around 40,000 workers with a similar number of jobs created 'indirectly' outside the zones. [9] If these plans come to fruition they will have a major impact on the structure of Palestinian labour in the West Bank: just under 20% of jobs in the West Bank will be tied in some way to these industrial zones.
Inside these zones, Palestinian and Israeli labour laws, wage levels, environmental regulations, or other workplace conditions will not apply. Movement in and out of the areas will be controlled by the Israeli military and Palestinian security forces. Presumably, if Israel's typical pattern of movement control applies, workers will need to pass stringent security checks in order to obtain necessary work permissions. In this way, the ability to work becomes dependent upon complying with Israeli military orders (over 11,000 Palestinians are currently held as political prisoners for violating these military orders). The main trade union body in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), has not been given the right to represent workers in the industrial zones.
Plans for the Tarqumiya zone would appear to confirm this prognosis. Turkey will be the major partner and financer of factories in the zone and will control internal security. The PA and Israel will control external security from their respective sides. Turkish sources expect around 200 factories to be established in the zone, employing around 10,000 Palestinians. Turkish business representatives explicitly note that in a global environment of low-cost Chinese goods, zones such as Tarqumiya will assist the relocation of Turkish industry across the region to take advantage of cheap labour. They also intend that the goods produced in the zone would be exported to the US, EU and the Gulf states. [10]
In addition to the exploitation of cheap labour, these zones serve to normalize and legitimate the existing structures of the occupation. A clear example of this is shown by the case of the Jenin Industrial Estate (JIE). The land for the JIE has twice been confiscated from Palestinian farmers: in 1998 when the PA first mooted the idea for the industrial zone, and then once again in 2003, when the Israeli military confiscated the land as part of construction for the Apartheid Wall ‘buffer-zone.’[11] Indeed, in a striking example of how this model of development is integrated with the structures of the occupation, the Wall will form the northern border of the JIE.
The centrality of the industrial zone 'development' model to the US, Israel and the PA was confirmed at the end of March 2008 during a visit of US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to the region. On 30 March, at a meeting convened between Rice, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in Jerusalem, the establishment of industrial zones was a major topic of discussion. At the meeting, Israel agreed to facilitate the establishment of Tarqumiya and presented it as a 'confidence building' measure. The Tarqumiya project has also been heavily promoted by Quartet Representative Tony Blair as one of the four so-called 'Quick Impact' projects tied to the implementation of the PRDP.
The May 'Palestine Investment Conference'
As the March meeting between Rice, Barak and Fayyad indicated, the construction of zones such as Tarqumiya and the JIE is a high priority of current political negotiations. Another component of the tripartite meeting was a discussion of how Israel would help to facilitate a 'Palestine Investment Conference', convened in Bethlehem from 21-23rd May. This conference unquestionably confirmed the neoliberal trajectory of the Palestinian Authority and the integration of the Israeli military occupation into its development model.
Over 1000 delegates attended the conference, including all of the key figures in the Palestinian Authority (Abu Mazen, Salam Fayyad and other key ministers were present). [12] It brought together the wealthiest Palestinian capitalists from outside the country (particularly North America and Europe) as well as regional Arab capital groups from Jordan, the Gulf and elsewhere. The conference was sponsored by the main Palestinian business groups active in the West Bank and Gaza (including the Arab Bank, Bank of Palestine, Paltel, Consolidated Contractors Company, Arab Palestinian Investment Company); large foreign capital (CISCO, Intel, Coca Cola, Marriott Hotels, Booz Allen Hamilton); and US and European governmental organizations (USAID, DFID, and the French Development Agency).
The main aim of the conference was to showcase the neoliberal attacks on the public sector implemented by the PA under the PRDP, holding these up as 'good for business' and an attractive reason to invest in Palestinian areas. In addition to the industrial zones discussed above, several projects were promoted throughout the conference that aimed at bringing together Arab and Israeli capital in joint investments. Israeli businesspeople were encouraged to attend, although this fact was not widely publicized due to the opposition of the Palestinian public to these types of joint projects.
One of the projects highlighted during the conference was the 'Corridor for Peace and Prosperity' (CPP), which aims to create an agro-industrial zone in the fertile areas of the Jordan Valley. For centuries the Jordan Valley has been a key agricultural area for Palestinian farmers in the West Bank. But following the occupation of the area in 1967, the Israeli military proceeded to evict many of these farmers, confiscate land, and establish Israeli settlements (first as military-agricultural settlements and then as Israeli agribusiness and civilian settlements). By controlling water, access routes and other resources, the land essentially became an Israeli military zone although scattered Palestinian villages remained in the area.
The CPP aims to establish a free trade agricultural zone in the area that will turn the small-scale Palestinian farmers into day-labourers and sub-contractors to large agro-industry controlled by Israeli and regional capital. [13] In other words, not only does the CPP consent to the occupation and expropriation of land that has taken place over the last 40 years in the Jordan Valley, it actually aims to integrate this occupation into the project itself. The agricultural produce grown as part of the CPP will do nothing to alleviate concerns of food security in the area: the produce is intended for export to Israel and the Gulf states.
One final indication of the relationship between the structures of occupation and the neoliberal development model was the support given by the Israeli military to the conference itself. While everyday residents of Bethlehem are unable to move without elaborate security procedures, special colored ID cards and dedicated checkpoints, conference attendees entered the country and were granted the right to travel without harassment or any security checks at Israeli borders. Despite the fact that over 200 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have died in the last year due to the Israeli-imposed siege and inability to travel for urgent medical treatment, Israeli authorities permitted Gazan businessman to attend the conference. A sign erected by the Israeli military at the entrance to Bethlehem welcomed people to the conference. The sign was written in Arabic, Hebrew and English and was emblazoned with the logos of the Israeli military occupation.
It should be stressed that the conference did not pass without strong opposition from grassroots forces within the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A statement put out by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, and endorsed by a wide array of political forces, stated:
“Economic and social development in Palestine is crucial, and it is imperative that we should take should steps to improve the current economic and political situation. However, despite the ongoing national and international conferences designed to bring together the national efforts and resources; and despite the support of international solidarity, we believe that the economic conference that will be held in Bethlehem over the next few days, with the attendance of official and non-official Israeli representatives, has a serious political implications that cannot be ignored.... The proposed projects take as their starting point Israeli participation in decision-making, and Israeli control over their legal status... [they] are designed to meet the economic demands of the Israeli administration, not those of the Palestinian people.... These are not the development projects we want or need. What we require is a national Palestinian conference with Arab and international support for strengthening Palestinian steadfastness and as a step toward ending the dependency on the occupation and its economy.” [14]
In sum, the PRDP fiscal measures and their allied development projects will in no way contribute to ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In reality, these measures will only act to strengthen that occupation by conferring it the supposed legitimacy and blessing of the Palestinian Authority leadership. The vast majority of the population in these areas will find their living conditions worsen as a direct result of these plans. But while the PRDP and events such as the Investment Conference stand as a damning indictment of the trajectory of the Palestinian Authority, the forces driving this type of neoliberal vision do not simply result from corruption, infighting, or mistaken strategic choices. Rather, they are embedded within the overall US-led economic reconfiguration of the Middle East. The second part of this article explores this critical regional process and the place of Palestine within it. •
Adam Hanieh is a doctoral candidate in political science at York University, Toronto, whose research looks at the political economy of Middle East and the Gulf Cooperation Council. He can be reached at hanieh08@gmail.com.
Footnotes
1. Stop the Wall, “National BDS Steering Committee: Bethlehem investment conference: development or normalization,” at http://stopthewall.org/analysisandfeatures/1657.shtml.
2. The PA attempts to obfuscate this mass layoff by claiming that those losing their jobs were not 'legally appointed.' Regardless of the hiring procedures, this will have an enormous impact on those relying upon this employment for survival. See Palestinian National Authority, “Building a Palestinian State: Towards peace and prosperity,” p.14, http://www.imeu.net/engine/uploads/pna-full-report.pdf#page=14.
3. World Bank, Trust Fund Details – as of June 2008, http://www.worldbank.org/.
4. Karen Laub, “IMF: Palestinian Reform Plan Doable”, Associated Press, 11 December 2007.
5. Statistics on labour force and dependency ratios available from Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, at http://www.pcbs.gov.ps/.
6. Amira Hass, “Democratic Suspicion”, Haaretz, 6 February 2008.
7. A similar dynamic was revealed during the last significant strike over 10 years ago, when Palestinian teachers sought to win higher wage levels. This 1997 strike was initiated and led by a grassroots committee of teachers who bypassed the traditional union structures allied to Fatah. It was met with severe repression that saw dozens of teachers arrested by the Palestinian Authority. Industrial action by teachers continued off and on until 2000, when the onset of the Palestinian uprising ended organizing attempts in the name of “national unity.”
8. Salim Vally, “From South Africa to Palestine: Lessons for the New Anti-Apartheid Movement,” Left Turn Magazine.
9. See the Palestinian Industrial Estates and Free Zones Authority, http://www.piefza.org/.
10. Guven Sak, “The Challenge of Developing the Private Sector in the Middle East,” The Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, May 2, 2008.
11. Stop the Wall, “Development or normalization? A critique of West Bank development approaches and projects”, at http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/1654.shtml.
12. See the conference website at www.pic-palestine.ps for the conference attendees, press coverage, and presentations.
13. See “Development or normalization?”, op cit, for a full critique of this project
14. Stop the Wall, “National BDS Steering Committee: Bethlehem investment conference: development or normalization”, http://stopthewall.org/analysisandfeatures/1657.shtml.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Which Side Are You On? - Billy Bragg
This government had an idea
And parliament made it law
It seems like it's illegal
To fight for the union any more
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
We set out to join the picket line
For together we cannot fail
We got stopped by police at the county line
They said, "Go home boys or you're going to jail"
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
It's hard to explain to a crying child
Why her Daddy can't go back
So the family suffer
But it hurts me more
To hear a scab say Sod you, Jack
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on, boys
Which side are you on?
I'm bound to follow my conscience
And do whatever I can
But it'll take much more than the union law
To knock the fight out of a working man
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Ecology: The Moment of Truth—An Introduction
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York
It is impossible to exaggerate the environmental problem facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Nearly fifteen years ago one of us observed: “We have only four decades left in which to gain control over our major environmental problems if we are to avoid irreversible ecological decline.”1 Today, with a quarter-century still remaining in this projected time line, it appears to have been too optimistic. Available evidence now strongly suggests that under a regime of business as usual we could be facing an irrevocable “tipping point” with respect to climate change within a mere decade.2 Other crises such as species extinction (percentages of bird, mammal, and fish species “vulnerable or in immediate danger of extinction” are “now measured in double digits”);3 the rapid depletion of the oceans’ bounty; desertification; deforestation; air pollution; water shortages/pollution; soil degradation; the imminent peaking of world oil production (creating new geopolitical tensions); and a chronic world food crisis—all point to the fact that the planet as we know it and its ecosystems are stretched to the breaking point. The moment of truth for the earth and human civilization has arrived.
To be sure, it is unlikely that the effects of ecological degradation in our time, though enormous, will prove “apocalyptic” for human civilization within a single generation, even under conditions of capitalist business as usual. Measured by normal human life spans, there is doubtless considerable time still left before the full effect of the current human degradation of the planet comes into play. Yet, theperiod remaining in which we can avert future environmental catastrophe, before it is essentially out of our hands, is much shorter. Indeed, the growing sense of urgency of environmentalists has to do with the prospect of various tipping points being reached as critical ecological thresholds are crossed, leading to the possibility of a drastic contraction of life on earth.
Such a tipping point, for example, would be an ice free Arctic, which could happen within two decades or less (some scientists believe as early as 2013). Already in summer 2007 the Arctic lost in a single week an area of ice almost twice the size of Britain. The vanishing Arctic ice cap means an enormous reduction in the earth’s reflectivity (albedo), thereby sharply increasing global warming (a positive feedback known as the “albedo flip”). At the same time, the rapid disintegration of the ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland points to rising world sea levels, threatening coastal regions and islands.4
The state of the existing “planetary emergency” with respect to climate change was captured this year by James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the leading U.S. climatologist:
Our home planet is dangerously near a tipping point at which human-made greenhouse gases reach a level where major climate changes can proceed mostly under their own momentum. Warming will shift climatic zones by intensifying the hydrologic cycle, affecting freshwater availability and human health. We will see repeated coastal tragedies associated with storms and continuously rising sea levels. The implications are profound, and the only resolution is for humans to move to a fundamentally different energy pathway within a decade. Otherwise, it will be too late for one-third of the world’s animal and plant species and millions of the most vulnerable members of our own species.5
According to environmentalist Lester Brown in his Plan B 3.0, “We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. Nature is the time keeper, but we cannot see the clock....We are in a race between tipping points in the earth’s natural systems and those in the world’s political systems. Which will tip first?”6 As the clock continues to tick and little is accomplished it is obvious that the changes to be made have to be all the more sudden and massive to stave off ultimate disaster. This raises the question of more revolutionary social change as an ecological as well as social necessity.
Yet, if revolutionary solutions are increasingly required to address the ecological problem, this is precisely what the existing social system is guaranteed not to deliver. Today’s environmentalism is aimed principally at those measures necessary to lessen the impact of the economy on the planet’s ecology without challenging the economic system that in its very workings produces the immense environmental problems we now face. What we call “the environmental problem” is in the end primarily a problem of political economy. Even the boldest establishment economic attempts to address climate change fall far short of what is required to protect the earth—since the “bottom line” that constrains all such plans under capitalism is the necessity of continued, rapid growth in production and profits.
The Dominant Economics of Climate Change
The economic constraint on environmental action can easily be seen by looking at what is widely regarded as the most far-reaching establishment attempt to date to deal with The Economics of Climate Change in the form of a massive study issued in 2007 under that title, commissioned by the UK Treasury Office.7 Subtitled the Stern Review after the report’s principal author Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, it is widely viewed as the most important, and most progressive mainstream treatment of the economics of global warming.8 The Stern Review focuses on the target level of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) concentration in the atmosphere necessary to stabilize global average temperature at no more than 3°C (5.4°F) over pre-industrial levels. (CO2e refers to the six Kyoto greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide [CO2], methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—all expressed in terms of the equivalent amount of CO2. While CO2 concentration in the atmosphere today is 387 parts per million [ppm], CO2e is around 430 ppm.)
The goal proposed by most climatologists has been to try to prevent increases in global temperature of more than 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, requiring stabilization of atmospheric CO2e at 450 ppm, since beyond that all sorts of positive feedbacks and tipping points are likely to come into play, leading to an uncontrollable acceleration of climate change. Indeed, James Hansen and other climatologists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies have recently argued: “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”9 The Stern Review, however, settles instead for a global average temperature increase of no more than 3°C (a threshold beyond which the environmental effects would undoubtedly be absolutely calamitous), which it estimates can likely be achieved if CO2e in the atmosphere were stabilized at 550 ppm, roughly double pre-industrial levels.
Yet, the Stern Review acknowledges that current environmental sensitivities “imply that there is up to a one-in-five chance that the world would experience a warming in excess of 3°C above pre-industrial [levels] even if greenhouse gas concentrations were stabilised at today’s level of 430 ppm CO2e.” Moreover, it goes on to admit that “for stablisation at 550 ppm CO2e, the chance of exceeding 3°C rises to 30–70%.” Or as it states further on, a 550 ppm CO2e suggests “a 50:50 chance of a temperature increase above or below 3°C, and the Hadley Centre model predicts a 10% chance of exceeding 5°C [9°F] even at this level.” A 3°C increase would bring the earth’s average global temperature to a height last seen in the “middle Pliocene around 3 million years ago.”
Furthermore, such an increase might be enough, the Stern Review explains, to trigger a shutdown of the ocean’s thermohaline circulation warming Western Europe, creating abrupt climate change, thereby plunging Western Europe into Siberian-like conditions. Other research suggests that water flow in the Indus may drop by 90 percent by 2100 if global average temperatures rise by 3°C, potentially affecting hundreds of millions of people. Studies by climatologists indicate that at 550 ppm CO2e there is more than a 5 percent chance that global average temperature could rise in excees of 8°C (14.4°F). All of this suggests that a stabilization target of 550 ppm CO2e could be disastrous for the earth as we know it as well as its people.
Why then, if the risks to the planet and civilization are so enormous, does the Stern Review emphasize attempting to keep global warming at 3°C by stabilizing CO2e at 550 ppm (what it describes at one point as “the upper limit to the stabilisation range”)? To answer this it is necessary to turn to some additional facts of a more economic nature.
Here it is useful to note that an atmospheric concentration level close to 550 ppm CO2e would result by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions simply continued at present levels without any increases in the intervening years. However, as the Stern Review itself notes, this is unrealistic under business as usual since global greenhouse gas emissions can be expected to continue to increase on a “rapidly rising trajectory.” Hence, an atmospheric CO2e level of 550 ppm under more realistic assumptions would be plausibly reached by 2035. This would increase the threat of 750 ppm CO2e (or more) and a rise in global average temperature in excess of 4.3°C (7.7°F) within the next few decades after that. (Indeed, IPCC scenarios include the possibility that atmospheric carbon could rise to 1,200 ppm and global average temperature by as much as 6.3°C [11.3°F] by 2100.)
To counter this business-as-usual scenario, the Stern Review proposes a climate stabilization regime in which greenhouse gas emissions would peak by 2015 and then drop 1 percent per year after that, so as to stabilize at a 550 ppm CO2e (with a significant chance that the global average temperature increase would thereby be kept down to 3°C).
But, given the enormous dangers, why not aim at deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, a lower level of atmospheric CO2e, and a smallerincrease in global average temperature? After all most climatologists have been calling for the stabilization of atmospheric CO2e 450 ppm or less, keeping the global temperature increase at about 2°C above pre-industrial levels. While Hansen and his colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Institute have now gone even further arguing that the target should be 350 ppm CO2.
The Stern Review is very explicit, however, that such a radical mitigation of the problem should not be attempted. The costs to the world economy of ensuring that atmospheric CO2e stabilized at present levels or below would be prohibitive, destabilizing capitalism itself. “Paths requiring very rapid emissions cuts,” we are told, “are unlikely to be economically viable.” If global greenhouse gas emissions peaked in 2010 the annual emissions reduction rate necessary to stabilize atmospheric carbon at 450 ppm, the Stern Review suggests, would be 7 percent, with emissions dropping by about 70 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. This is viewed as economically insupportable.
Hence, the Stern Review’sown preferred scenario, as indicated, is a 550 ppm target that would see global greenhouse gas emissions peak in 2015, with the emission cuts that followed at a rate of 1 percent per year. By 2050 the reduction in the overall level of emissions (from 2005 levels) in this scenario would only be 25 percent. (The report also considers, with less enthusiasm, an in-between 500 ppm target, peaking in 2010 and requiring a 3 percent annual drop in global emissions.) Only the 550 ppm target, the Stern Review suggests, is truly economically viable because “it is difficult to secure emission cuts faster than about 1% per year except in instances of recession” or as the result of a major social upheaval such as the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Indeed, the only actual example that the Stern Review is able to find of a sustained annual cut in greenhouse gas emissions of 1 percent or more, coupled with economic growth, among leading capitalist states was the United Kingdom in 1990–2000. Due to the discovery of North Sea oil and natural gas, the United Kingdom was able to switch massively from coal to gas in power generation, resulting in a 1 percent average annual drop in its greenhouse gas emissions during that decade. France came close to such a 1 percent annual drop in 1977–2003, reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by .6 percent per year due to a massive switch to nuclear power. By far the biggest drop for a major state was the 5.2 percent per year reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the Former Soviet Union in 1989–98. This however went hand in hand with a social-system breakdown and a drastic shrinking of the economy. All of this signals that any reduction in CO2e emissions beyond around 1 percent per year would make it virtually impossible to maintain strong economic growth—the bottom line of the capitalist economy. Consequently, in order to keep the treadmill of profit and production going the world needs to risk environmental Armageddon.10
Accumulation and the Planet
None of this should surprise us. Capitalism since its birth, as Paul Sweezy wrote in “Capitalism and the Environment,” has been “a juggernaut driven by the concentrated energy of individuals and small groups single-mindedly pursuing their own interests, checked only by their mutual competition, and controlled in the short run by the impersonal forces of the market and in the longer run, when the market fails, by devastating crises.” The inner logic of such a system manifests itself in the form of an incessant drive for economic expansion for the sake of class-based profits and accumulation. Nature and human labor are exploited to the fullest to fuel this juggernaut, while the destruction wrought on each is externalized so as to not fall on the system’s own accounts.
“Implicit in the very concept of this system,” Sweezy continued, “are interlocked and enormously powerful drives to both creation and destruction. On the plus side, the creative drive relates to what humankind can get out of nature for its own uses; on the negative side, the destructive drive bears most heavily on nature’s capacity to respond to the demands placed on it. Sooner or later, of course, these two drives are contradictory and incompatible.” Capitalism’s overexploitation of nature’s resource taps and waste sinks eventually produces the negative result of undermining both, first on a merely regional, but later on a world and even planetary basis (affecting the climate itself). Seriously addressing environmental crises requires “a reversal, not merely a slowing down, of the underlying trends of the last few centuries.” This, however, cannot be accomplished without economic regime change.11
With climate change now more and more an establishment concern, and attempts to avert it now increasingly institutionalized in the established order, some have pointed to the “death of environmentalism” as an oppositional movement in society.12 However, if some environmentalists have moved toward capitalist-based strategies in the vain hope of saving the planet by these means, others have moved in the opposite direction: toward a critique of capitalism as inherently ecologically destructive. A case in point is James Gustave Speth. Speth has been called the “ultimate insider” within the environmental movement. He served as chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality under President Jimmy Carter, founded the World Resources Institute, co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, was a senior adviser in Bill Clinton’s transition team, and administered the United Nations Development Programme from 1993 to 1999. At present he is dean of the prestigious Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Speth is a winner of Japan’s Blue Planet Prize.
Recently, however, in his Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (2008), Speth has emerged as a devastating critic of capitalism’s destruction of the environment. In this radical rethinking, he has chosen to confront the full perils brought on by the present economic system, with its pursuit of growth and accumulation at any cost. “Capitalism as we know it today,” he writes, “is incapable of sustaining the environment.” The crucial problem from an environmental perspective, he believes, is exponential economic growth, which is the driving element of capitalism. Little hope can be provided in this respect by so-called “dematerialization” (the notion that growth can involve a decreasing impact on the environment), since it can be shown that the expansion of output overwhelms all increases in efficiency in throughput of materials and energy. Hence, one can only conclude that “right now...growth is the enemy of [the] environment. Economy and environment remain in collision.” Here the issue of capitalism becomes unavoidable. “Economic growth is modern capitalism’s principal and most prized product.” Speth favorably quotes Samuel Bowles and Richard Edwards’s Understanding Capitalism, which bluntly stated: “Capitalism is differentiated from other economic systems by its drive to accumulate, its predisposition toward change, and its built-in tendency to expand.”
The principal environmental problem for Speth then is capitalism as the “operating system” of the modern economy. “Today’s corporations have been called ‘externalizing machines.’” Indeed, “there are fundamental biases in capitalism that favor the present over the future and the private over the public.” Quoting the system’s own defenders, Robert Samuleson and William Nordhaus, in the seventeenth (2001) edition of their textbook on Macroeconomics, Speth points out that capitalismis the quintessential “Ruthless Economy,” engaged “in the relentless pursuit of profits.”
Building on this critique, Speth goes on to conclude in his book that: (1) “today’s system of political economy, referred to here as modern capitalism, is destructive of the environment, and not in a minor way but in a way that profoundly threatens the planet”; (2) “the affluent societies have reached or soon will reach the point where, as Keynes put it, the economic problem has been solved...there is enough to go around”; (3) “in the more affluent societies, modern capitalism is no longer enhancing human well-being”; (4) “the international social movement for change—which refers to itself as ‘the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism’—is stronger than many imagine and will grow stronger; there is a coalescing of forces: peace, social justice, community, ecology, feminism—a movement of movements”; (5) “people and groups are busily planting the seeds of change through a host of alternative arrangements, and still other attractive directions for upgrading to a new operating system have been identified”; (6) “the end of the Cold War...opens the door...for the questioning of today’s capitalism.”
Speth does not actually embrace socialism, which he associates, in the Cold War manner, with Soviet-type societies in their most regressive form. Thus he argues explicitly for a “nonsocialist” alternative to capitalism. Such a system would make use of markets (but not the self-regulating market society of traditional capitalism) and would promote a “New Sustainability World” or a “Social Greens World” (also called “Eco-Communalism”) as depicted by the Global Scenario Group. The latter scenario has been identified with radical thinkers like William Morris (who was inspired by both Marx and Ruskin). In this sense, Speth’s arguments are not far from that of the socialist movement of the twenty-first century, which is aimed at the core values of social justice and ecological sustainability. The object is to create a future in which generations still to come will be able to utilize their creative abilities to the fullest, while having their basic needs met: a result made possible only through the rational reorganization by the associated producers of the human metabolism with nature.13
Such rational reorganization of the metabolism between nature and society needs to be directed not simply at climate change but also at a whole host of other environmental problems. Some of these are addressed in the present issue: the geopolitics of peak oil (John Bellamy Foster), the production of biofuels as a liquid fuel alternative and its consequences (Fred Magdoff), the economics of climate change (Minqi Li), the science of climate change (John W. Farley), the ocean crisis (Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen), the problem of large dams (Rohan D’Souza), and the world water crisis (Maude Barlow). Other ecological crises of great importance are not, however, dealt with here: species extinction (and loss of biological diversity in general), deforestation, desertification, soil degradation, acid rain, the proliferation of toxic wastes (including in living tissues), market-regulated biotechnology, urban congestion, population growth, and animal rights.
No single issue captures the depth and breadth of what we call “the environmental problem,” which encompasses all of these ecological contradictions of our society and more. If we are facing a “moment of truth” with respect to ecology today, it has to do with the entire gamut of capitalism’s effects on natural (and human) reproduction. Any attempt to solve one of these problems (such as climate change) without addressing the others is likely to fail, since these ecological crises, although distinct in various ways, typically share common causes.
In our view, only a unified vision that sees human production as not only social, but also rooted in a metabolic relation to nature, will provide the necessary basis to confront an ecological rift that is now as wide as the planet. Such a unified vision is implicit in the articles included in this issue. A more explicit treatment of the political aspects of this struggle will appear in a second special issue of Monthly Review on ecology (meant to complement this one) to be published this coming fall.
Why Not?
In 1884, William Morris, one of the great creative artists, revolutionary socialist intellectuals, and environmental thinkers of the late nineteenth century, wrote an article entitled “Why Not?” for the socialist journal Commonweal. He was especially concerned with the fact that most people, including many socialists in his time, in rebelling against the evils of capitalism, tended to picture the future in terms that were not that far removed from many of the worst, most environmentally and humanly destructive, aspects of capitalism itself.
“Now under the present Capitalist system,” Morris observed,
it is difficult to see anything which might stop the growth of these horrible brick encampments; its tendency is undoubtedly to depopulate the country and small towns for the advantage of the great commercial and manufacturing centres; but this evil, and it is a monstrous one, will be no longer a necessary evil when we have got rid of land monopoly, manufacturing for the profit of individuals, and the stupid waste of competitive distribution.
Looking beyond the “terror and the grinding toil” in which most people were oppressed, Morris argued, there was a need to recognize other ends of social existence: most notably “the pleasure of life to be looked forward to by Socialists.” “Why,” he asked,
should one third of England be so stifled and poisoned with smoke that over the greater part of Yorkshire (for instance) the general idea must be that sheep are naturally black? And why must Yorkshire and Lancashire rivers run mere filth and dye?
Profits will have it so: no one any longer pretends that it would not be easy to prevent such crimes against decent life: but the ‘organizers of labour,’ who might better be called ‘organizers of filth,’ know that it wouldn’t pay; and as they are for the most part of the year safe in their country seats, or shooting—crofters’ lives—in the Highlands, or yachting in the Mediterranean, they rather like the look of the smoke country for a change as something, it is to be supposed, stimulating to their imaginations concerning—well, we must not get theological.
In rejecting all of this, Morris asked, was it not possible to create a more decent, more beautiful, more fulfilling, more healthy, less hell-like way of living, in which all had a part in the “share of earth the Common Mother” and the sordid world of “profit-grinding” was at last brought to an end? Why Not?14
Notes
1. John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), 12. The four decades projection was based on work by the Worldwatch Institute: Lester R. Brown, et. al., “World Without End,” Natural History (May 1990): 89, and State of the World 1992 (London: Earthscan, 1992), 3–8.
2. James Hansen, “Tipping Point,” in E. Fearn and K. H. Redford eds, The State of the Wild 2008 (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008), http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2008/2008_Hansen_1.pdf, 7–15. See also James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Times Review of Books, July 13, 2006. The argument on tipping points with respect to climate change is best understood in the context of a series of biospheric rifts generated by the system of economic accumulation. On this see Brett Clark and Richard York, “Carbon Metabolism and Global Capitalism: Climate Change and the Biospheric Rift,” Theory and Society 34, no. 4 (2005): 391–428.
3. Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 102. The share of threatened species in 2007 was 12 percent of the world’s bird species; 20 percent of the world’s mammal species; and 39 percent of the world’s fish species evaluated. See International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Table 1, “Numbers of Threatened Species by Major Groups of Organisms,” http://www.iucnredlist.org/info/stats. Additionally, climate change is having significant effects on plant diversity. “Recent studies predict that climate change could result in the extinction of up to half the world’s plant species by the end of the century.” See Belinda Hawkins, Suzanne Sharrock, and Kay Havens, Plants and Climate Change (Richmond, UK: Botanic Gardens Conservation International, 2008), 9.
4. David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red (Fitzroy, Australia: Friends of the Earth, 2008), http://www.climatecodered.net, 4; Brown, Plan B 3.0, 3; James Hansen, et al., “Climate Change and Trace Gases,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 365 (2007), 1925–54; James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 34; Minqi Li, “Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism,” this issue; “Arctic Summers Ice-Free ‘by 2013,’” BBC News, December 12, 2007.
5. Hansen, “Tipping Point,” 7–8.
6. Brown, Plan B 3.0, 4–5. Although Brown, correctly depicts the seriousness of the ecological problem, as a mainstream environmentalist he insists that all can easily be made well without materially altering society by a clever combination of technological fixes and the magic of the market. See the article by Minqi Li below.
7. Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
8. The Stern Review has been criticized by more conservative mainstream economists, including William Nordhaus, for its ethical choices, which, it is claimed, place too much emphasis on the future as opposed to present-day values by adopting a much lower discount rate on future costs and benefits as compared to other, more standard economic treatments such as that of Nordhaus. This then gives greater urgency to today’s environmental problem. Nordhaus discounts the future at 6 percent a year; Stern by less than a quarter of that at 1.4 percent. This means that for Stern having a trillion dollars a century from now is worth $247 billion today, while for Nordhaus it is only worth $2.5 billion. Nordhaus calls the Stern Review a “radical revision of the economics of climate change” and criticizes it for imposing “exessively large emissions reductions in the short run.” John Browne, “The Ethics of Climate Change,” Scientific American 298, no. 6(June 2008): 97–100; William Nordhaus, A Question of Balance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 18, 190.
9. James Hansen, et. al., “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?,” abstract of article submitted to Science, (accessed in May 2008). Even before this Hansen and his colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Institute argued that due to positive feedbacks and climatic tipping points global average temperature increases had to be kept to less than 1°C below 2000 levels. This meant that atmospheric CO2 needed to be kept to 450 ppm or below. See Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen, “Implications of ‘Peak Oil’ for Atmospheric CO2 and Climate,” Global Biogeochemistry (2008, in press).
10. Stern, The Economics of Climate Change, 4–5, 11–16, 95, 193, 220–34, 637, 649–51; “Evidence of Human-Caused Global Warming is Now ‘Unequivocal,’” Science Daily, http://www.sciencedaily.com; Browne, “The Ethics of Climate Change,” 100; Spratt and Sutton, Climate Code Red, 30; Editors, “Climate Fatigue,” Scientific American 298, no. 6 (June 2008): 39; Ted Trainer, “A Short Critique of the Stern Review,” Real-World Economics Review, 45 (2008), http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue45/Trainer45.pdf, 54–58. Despite the Stern Review’s presentation of France’s nuclear switch as a greenhouse gas success story there are strong environmental reasons for not proceeding along this path. See Robert Furber, James C. Warf, and Sheldon C. Plotkin, “The Future of Nuclear Power,” Monthly Review 59, no. 9 (February 2008): 38–48.
11. Paul M. Sweezy, “Capitalism and the Environment,” Monthly Review 41, no. 2 (June 1989): 1–10.
12. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism,” Environmental Grantmakers Association, October 2004, http://thebreakthrough.org/PDF/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf.
13. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), xi, 48–63, 107, 194–98; Samuel Bowles and Richard Edwards, Understanding Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 119, 148–52. On the Global Scenario Group see John Bellamy Foster, “Organizing Ecological Revolution,” Monthly Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 1–10. On ecological sustainability, classical socialism, and Marx’s critique of capitalism’s metabolic rift with nature see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
4. William Morris, “Why Not,” in Morris, Political Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 24–27.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
CLC Convention Highlights the challenges facing the Labour Movement in Canada
By Roger Annis
The triennial convention of the Canadian Labour Congress held in Toronto from May 26 to 30 revealed the positive changes that have edged their way into the labour movement in recent years. It also showed the weighty obstacles that stand in the way of the organization's transformation into a more militant, fighting force on behalf of the working class.
On the positive side, a number of resolutions reflected the social rights work and spirit of solidarity on important issues by Congress affiliates, union activists and social movements that overlap with the labour movement. Chief among these was a resolution opposing Canada's participation in the imperialist war of aggression in Afghanistan. It was adopted by a large majority of delegates and it calls for an end to that war and the immediate withdrawal of Canadian soldiers. (The resolution and the debate surrounding it can be read on this author's blogsite).
The CLC's support to women's rights was symbolized by a ceremony presenting a lifetime humanitarian award to Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a pioneer in the struggle for women's right to abortion. Important women's rights resolutions were adopted, such as one in favour of a universal, affordable childcare program in Canada. The CLC and its affiliates have campaigned on this issue.
Notwithstanding feeble policy resolutions (more on this later), the convention devoted a lot of time to discussion on the urgent climate change crisis and to the harsh social and economic conditions facing Indigenous peoples in Canada. It examined the unique challenges facing unions as the number of part-time and “temporary” jobs grows, while hundreds of thousands of “temporary” workers from other countries, allowed into Canada to work in low-paid jobs, are deprived of legal citizenship rights, including the right to join trade unions. The convention was marked by frank debate on these issues.
Other examples of progressive resolutions and sympathies among the 1,700 delegates and dozens of affiliates of the Congress gathered in Toronto could be cited. But this would describe only a part of what the convention revealed and potentially misdirect those seeking a program to lead the labour movement forward. The overarching conclusion to draw from the convention is the growing gap between worsening economic, social and political conditions faced by workers today in Canada and the world, on the one hand, and the still-limited will and capacity of trade unions to fight for effective improvements in these conditions.
An action plan for change
The convention adopted an Action Plan on its final day that was prepared by the newly elected executive council of the CLC. It reads, “The CLC will mobilize the affiliates, federations and labour councils to lead a broad, diverse and inclusive movement for social change.”
The document highlights five areas of attention – renewing and expanding trade union membership and unity; fighting for women's equality; defending and expanding public services; fighting for jobs and environmental protection; and opposing the war in Afghanistan, including by building solidarity with the peoples of that country. It concludes, “...let us commit ourselves to continue to work in solidarity to achieve our goals and build a society that meets the needs of working people and their families.”
The Action Plan does not describe how the Congress could mobilize its members to achieve these goals. It says the Congress will devote resources and attention to supporting the New Democratic Party in federal and provincial elections. In Quebec, the picture gets muddier because the plan says the CLC will support the “political choices of unions in Quebec.” Those choices happen to be support for two parties – the Bloc québécois federally and the Parti québécois provincially – that have neither meaningful ties nor accountability to the unions.
The NDP in power has been a disappointment to workers. It has attacked social programs and workers rights, such as in British Columbia and Ontario during the 1990s. The NDP governments in those provinces demobilized and discouraged the working class, leaving it vulnerable to even harsher attacks by the governments that succeeded them. The same pattern has just repeated itself in Saskatchewan.
If the NDP today is unable to inspire and mobilize workers to elect it to office, it's because it doesn't want to challenge the domination of the capitalists and the laws of their market system over economic and social life.
Two examples, among many that could be cited, illustrate the Action Plan's shortcomings. One, the tar sands projects in northern Alberta are responsible for some of the worst environmental and humanitarian destruction on the planet. But the CLC and the NDP fail to fight for the one thing that could end the destruction – a planned and orderly shutdown of the entire project and a massive reorientation of the Canadian economy away from reliance on fossil fuels and towards sustainable energy production. This necessarily requires proposals to secure alternative training and employment for workers in the tar sands, including for the workers from abroad who have earned the right to stay in Canada if they so wish. Such a reorientation of the Canadian economy would require a head-on battle with the oil companies, not to mention leaving NAFTA.
Two, the Indigenous peoples in Canada are engaged in unprecedented struggles against calamitous social and economic conditions. These struggles illustrate, and are demanding, forms of political sovereignty. The federal and provincial governments have responded by criminalizing their causes and arresting or threatening their most outspoken leaders. The CLC convention featured guest speakers that delivered powerful and moving condemnations of Canadian government policy. Policy discussions on Indigenous rights issues were informed. But the convention did not take a stand in support of the most important of the current battles, such as the sovereignty struggles of the Haudenosaunee peoples in southwest and southeast Ontario (Six Nations and Tyendinaga, respectively), and the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) people in northwest Ontario.
More generally, the Action Program fails to project a struggle for a radically different society, one based on social justice and respect for the natural environment.
Labour needs an authoritative voice
One of the challenges facing the labour movement today is unity. In the years after its foundation in 1956, the Canadian Labour Congress was a central voice of the unions and the working class in Canada. In 1961, it co-founded the New Democratic Party with the goal of fighting for a government that would represent workers' interests. The prospects for a new, progressive party of the working class looked good in the early years of the NDP, including in Quebec. This made the role of a unified labour central like the CLC all the more relevant.
Today, the labour movement speaks with many voices. The autonomy accorded to the CLC affiliate in Quebec, the Quebec Federation of Labour (FTQ), is a progressive development over the past several decades that reflects a recognition of the national rights of the Quebecois people. But it does not follow that there should be two distinct trade union movements in Canada with little common purpose. That is what has evolved, by default. It was quite a surprise to this observer to see how limited was participation at the CLC convention by delegates from Quebec. Less than ten percent of reports and contributions to this year's CLC convention were in the French language. Despite the formal availability of translation services, it was, for all intents and purposes, an English-language convention.
Many CLC affiliates have evolved to become mini-labour centrals of their own. Unions such as steelworkers and autoworkers, to choose only two examples, include members from every walk of life. Industrial unions are organizing non-industrial workers under the pressure of the decline of employment and union membership in their respective industries or an inability to convince unorganized, industrial workers of the value of union membership. It's wrong if this gets in the way of having a recognized voice of the entire labour movement.
Organizing efforts would be much more effective if they were part of a common plan of action by the labour movement as a whole to create or support existing unions in those unorganized sectors.
Trade union independence
A recent and disturbing trend in the union movement has seen some unions engage in sweetheart deals with companies in search of the almighty dues dollar. The CAW's deal with Magna Corporation earlier this year comes to mind. So too the attempt by the Steelworkers to gain representation at the Dofasco steelmaker in Hamilton (see Socialist Project, November 18, 2007 and July 3, 2008).
In the retail grocery business, the United Food and Commercial Workers union has received automatic representation in the spin-off budget stores of the major grocery chains, on condition of accepting lower-wage collective agreements. This stems from the pressure on the retail industry of the non-union Wal-Mart juggernaut. The low wages and poor conditions contained in these agreements dampens workers' desire at Wal-Mart or other unorganized companies to join unions. How can the labour movement inspire Wal-Mart workers to join the UFCW? What can be done to win better conditions in the retail grocery sector?
Left currents within the CLC
Organized left forces at the CLC convention were weak, given the opening to radical thought and action that otherwise characterized convention proceedings.
A left caucus of delegates came together on the eve of the convention to discuss a published program issued by activists in the labour council in Toronto and elsewhere in the country. Titled “An Action Agenda,” it posited a need to struggle, “To Build Labour Power in the 21st Century” (www.labouraction.ca). Some 150 delegates met for an initial discussion of this program and had a positive exchange of ideas. But there were no follow-up meetings of this character to assess and direct a fight for the ideas of the program on the convention floor. And when it came time to elect a new executive council of the CLC, the caucus presented no candidates. The outgoing executive was re-elected by acclamation.
The Action Agenda said that three things were needed in order to win labour power in the 21st century: “grass-roots mobilization in both the workplace and the community”; commitment by CLC affiliates to “provide the leadership and resources necessary to build and sustain long-term campaigns”; and “the ability to combine formal electoral organizing with the building of popular movements.” This falls well short of a description of what “labour power” would look like, and how it could be achieved.
“Labour power” must ultimately mean “government power.” To create a society of social justice, working people – our social movements, trade unions and political parties – must take government power out of the control of the capitalists and wield it to lead a transformation of society, out of the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism and into socialism.
How can workers in Canada move towards such a goal? Are parties such as the NDP or the Bloc and Parti québécois a help or a hindrance along this road? What lessons can be drawn from countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, whose people are fighting a life and death struggle for socialism today? Such questions are not addressed in the Action Agenda, nor were they featured in the caucus discussions.
A recent step towards labour power in Canada was the formation in 2006 of a new, progressive part of the left in Quebec, Québec solidaire. Although it is not clear whether this new party will continue in a positive direction, the lessons of its first two years nonetheless warrant serious discussion. Unfortunately, members of the party were not in attendance at the CLC convention – or, if they were, their presence was unknown to delegates.
Can workers/unions win political power in Canada?
So what kind of political program is needed today in the labour movement in Canada? Here are some ideas offered in the hope that the discussion begun in Toronto will continue and deepen.
• The CLC and the labour movement need a forceful policy of international solidarity that supports trade unions and popular movements fighting for social justice. Unions in Canada must offer meaningful solidarity to peoples in countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia that are fighting for new societies, and to peoples in Haiti, Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan who are suffering directly the consequences of imperialist war and occupation. The Canadian government and ruling class are a predatory force in the world. For that reason, the union movement should reject the illusion that Canada and its armed forces, as presently constituted, can be a “peacekeeping” force in the world.
• The CLC needs to base its action plan on a strategy of unity and mass mobilization. There is a vast, untapped reserve of strength and creativity among the millions of working people (unionized and non-union wage earners, students and youth, farmers, the unemployed, Indigenous peoples etc.) that the unions must find ways to reach and mobilize.
• The sovereignty struggles of Indigenous peoples are growing in importance and must be actively supported by the union movement. The CLC should bring the weight of its affiliates to bear to fight against the criminalization of the Indigenous rights movements by federal and provincial governments.
• Finally, unions and working people need to fight for a government that will join the worldwide struggle for social justice.
The New Democratic Party was founded in 1961 for just that purpose. The CLC was at the center of that founding, and it remains central to the party today. But the NDP has never risen above minority status in the federal Parliament. There are two reasons why. The party has a timid and pro-capitalist program that discourages working class participation in politics and rejects mass mobilization as a means to confront capitalist rule. And it has historically opposed the national rights of the Quebec people, making it a minor force in political life in Quebec and condemning it to permanent minority status in the federal Parliament. A wide-ranging discussion on political strategy is required if the labour movement is to transcend the limitations of a simple pro-NDP electoral strategy for political power.
The CLC convention was an important gathering point for ideas and action proposals. The desire for a more combative labour movement, expressed by so many delegates, is a hopeful sign for the future. •
Roger Annis was a delegate to the 2008 Canadian Labour Congress convention. His daily reports from the convention can be read at: rogerannis.blogspot.com. Comment on this article is appreciated and can be sent to rogerannis [at] hotmail.com.
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