Peter Waterman

In case this might seem in doubt, I am not writing off workers, unions, the nation-state, enterprise-level struggles, the inter-state organisations, or international labour research conferences. On the contrary, I consider that all of these have a role to play in the development of a new global solidarity movement appropriate to the conditions of a globalised, networked capitalism. It is simply that each of these bodies or instances has to recognise their loss of (assumed) centrality or privilege, to become modest contributors to something much larger – and rather more politically and theoretically complex and sophisticated – than they are. To make the point unambiguous: participants in the World Social Forums have so far consisted to some 80 percent of the university-educated! Welcome as they must be to any new emancipatory movement, they need to be accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of ordinary working people, unionised or not.

Furthermore, the traditional international labour studies conference is not necessarily in the same parlous state as its object of study. Thus, the Labour Movements Research Committee of the International Sociological Association, announces in its latest bulletin (RC 44 Newsletter 2005) a whole series of coming conferences, including one of its own. This latter will consist of the following sessions, which seems to me thoroughly of our time:

1: Theorising Labour
2: Labour History in the era of Neo-liberal Globalisation
3: Global Corporate Restructuring and Global Governance
4: Changing Worlds of Work
5: Gender and Labour
6: Labour and Social Movements
7: Models of Union Organisation
8: Transnational Organising
9: Trade Unions and Politics Session
10: The Changing Geography of Power Session
11: Trade Unions and NGOs: Surviving the Future

One hopes, again, that this event, occurring as it will in Durban, the town which gave birth to the new trade union movement in South Africa in 1973, will have learned from the other recent international labour conferences I have mentioned (and might add a 12th session on computerisation, communications and culture?).

Finally, it has to be said that if the grand old tradition of Social Democracy is in a serious condition, it is not dead. This has already been suggested in my references to labour studies conferences in Part 1. But it is also true of Social Democrats operating outside the arena of academia (though they might, significantly, have a presence within such also). Amongst such contributors has been the one-time General Secretary of the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), an energetic contributor to international debates on labour. As he says in the preface to a collection on the future of organised labour globally:

Those who are developing the concept of global social move­ment unionism, or of the global justice movement, are seeking to rebuild a labour movement with a shared identity and shared values – not the lowest common denominator, that is what we have today and this movement, as it is, can only lose. Beyond the lowest common denominator, we need an alternative explanation of the world, alternative goals for society and a programme on how to get there that all can subscribe to. A new international labour movement, armed with a sense of a broader social mission, can become the core of a global alliance including all other social movements that share the same agenda. Such a movement can change the world. It can again be the liberation movement of humanity it set out to be hundred and fifty years ago. (Gallin Forthcoming).

The task of boulder seeking, trench digging and river-diversion is clearly one to which many traditions can contribute.