Globalizing the Working Class

David Bell has an interesting take on France's (and now the Netherlands') recent rejection of the European Constitution in The New Republic. He notes the supposedly under-reported exit poll indicating 80% opposition among the working class to adopting the charter, a figure he attributes to anxiety over the influx of cheap labor from Eastern Europe and resentment towards the pompous elites that run the country. In this view, the vote represents a growing antagonism between the upper classes, who largely benefit from European integration, and the poor, who basically lose out.

The discrepancy mirrors the election season concern over outsourcing in the United States. In a globalized economy, capital will ignore national borders and move where it can be most efficiently used. In manufacturing and other low-skilled jobs, it will move towards the third world, where labor costs are low and unions are flimsy. In terms of services, particularly highly skilled 'knowledge professions', it will move towards the great metropoli of the West, where the brains and know-how are most highly concentrated.

In economic terms, this isn't a bad thing. If widgets can be most cheaply produced in China, that is where they ought to be produced, even if it leaves a couple hundred people unemployed in rural Pennsylvania. Politically, however, that move is combustible and French workers are telling their leaders they aren't going to stand for it.

Now that national borders no longer represent the most important boundaries of economic activity, a realignment of classes along transnational lines is inevitable, and perhaps also to be welcomed. Certainly Marx would be happy. The working classes in countries like France are going to find themselves with much in common with the workers of the East, a prospect they are unlikely to welcome, accustomed as they are to their generous welfare benefits and state services. Meanwhile, amongst the elites, the opposite will occur. Those with the necessary skills are going to command salaries and benefits comparable to their counterparts in the West. Which is why the class polarization in France is but a microcosm of the rift that runs between the global elite and the masses. Except that third world workers, while remaining workers, can still effect a slight rise in their welfare by taking advantage of lower barriers between EU countries and flocking West. The big losers are the Western working class, who are none too happy about becoming global proletarians.