Cira Pascual Marquina writes: ....Under conditions of imperialist siege, a society’s ability to reproduce life with dignity depends to a large extent on the organization of the working class. Communal production, collective management of services, and collective decision-making become concrete mechanisms both of resistance and of building new social relations that point toward emancipation.
The recent National Popular Consultation, held on March 8, International Working Women’s Day, expresses precisely this dynamic.... ---------------------------------- Venezuelan socialist Manuel Casique Herrera shows how actual empirical evidences indicates the complete opposite dynamic in Venezuela: ...Returning to labor statistics, they reveal a transformation that is directly relevant to working-class organization and subjectivity: the expansion of self-employment. Between 2013 and 2018, self-employment grew by 41 percent, accounting for 37 percent of total employment, while formal employment increased by only 6 percent. If one were to write a history of the Venezuelan working class and its transformation during the crisis, it would not be a history of communal organization, but rather one of labor precarization. Maduro’s expansion of communes has actually coincided, not with empowerment, but disempowerment of the working class. The outcome of this shift is evident in the decline of real wages: average salaries paid to workers in Venezuela fell by 43 percent between 2007 and 2018.9 As argued above, people employed in the communal economy account for less than 1 percent of the labor force, and 90 percent of the communal economy is made up of Family Productive Units. Communal growth during Maduro’s government was not independent of this broader transformation of labor; it was directly related to it. The Venezuelan crisis expanded self-employment and saw the proliferation of SPOs within the communal economy. These organizations were utilized by needy families to access financing for microenterprises. Over time, they increasingly came to function as part of a clientelist network through which the state bureaucracy mobilized support during elections and political rallies. Rather than a means through which to realize new socio-productive relations, the communal economy was a means for the state to manage the self-employment and family-owned microenterprises, itself necessitated by the processes of wage collapse and precarization. Rather than constituting a pathway toward “endogenous development” or “food sovereignty,” communal experiences have functioned primarily as mechanisms through which the state manages a growing rural relative surplus population generated by the crisis, largely through ground-rent transfers... https://spectrejournal.com/communes-and-crisis/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41307): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41307 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/118607353/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
