Global Justice School 2005

Globalization and social recomposition, I:

what’s become of the working class?

Claude Jacquin, 30 May 2005

Part I

1) The working class? Some questions…

2) How are the different levels of analysis linked? What does it mean to analyze a ‘social formation’?

· Specific history of social relations; uneven development

· Analysis of socio-economic relations; specificity of ruling classes

· Proletariat / ‘lower classes’; class alliances … and many other issues!

Part II

3) 50 years…

· The ‘30 glorious years’ in the industrialized countries – May 1968 and many other things... The multinational-as-conglomerate. Concentration and the ‘mass labourer’... Trade-union movement / workers’ movement.

· The international division of labour resulting from post-colonialism; working class and liberation movements; the South African example

· The existance of a large ‘socialist’ area; the working class ‘in power’?; what was the ‘dialectic of the three sectors of the world revolution’?

Part III

4) A short capsule history of the process of ‘globalization’. Analyzing from the general (the system) ... to the particular (the shifting deployment of labour).

5) Towards a new international division of labour ?

· China, India, international reorganization of the circuits of production

· new processes of proletarianization / ‘deindustrialization’ in Western Europe

· therefore a new context for training, expansion, concentration and organization of the working class

· new shifts within social formations

6) What are the most important impacts on :

· Social formations?

· in the industrialized countries (decline of employment in industry, creation of ‘little jobs’, the new role of intellectual labour in production, etc.)

· in the Third World (on the one hand countries like India – on the other hand Black Africa )

· The development of the proletariat and its forms of organization?

· in what geopolitical framework?

· Where is the boss?

· What are the demands?

· Possible social alliances?

· The big strategic issues (the state, violence, etc.)?