Geographical and Historical Background

In this text, we will deal only with the struggles which have unfolded since the first big strike wave in 2006. We don’t think it necessary to dwell on the very troubled historical past of this country, a past which goes back much farther than the recent colonial wars and French colonization itself, to the conflict-ridden domination by powerful neighbors (above all China), although this past has influenced and continues to influence recent social and political events.1

On the other hand, we feel it essential to remind the reader of a few basic geographical, economic and social realities which still condition the political orientations, most often beyond whatever the current political system happens to be. The relatively recent political unity of Vietnam is a poor reflection of its political vicissitudes, shaped to a great extent by its varied terrains and the living conditions flowing from them. The 330,000 square kilometers (three-fifths the size of France) inhabited by 90 million people (one and a half times the French population with a density six times higher than the world average), unequally distributed between two poles (the Mekong Delta for Cochinchina and the Red River for Tonkin), separated by roughly 1,500 kilometers of a narrow coastal mountain range where a third pole, Annam, developed. Two-thirds of the territory, therefore, is formed by mountains and high plateaus. The whole history of Vietnam up to the present is bound up with these disparities, which led to integrations and disintegrations with neighboring countries.

The Meaning of the “Independence” Won Militarily in 1975: The Failure of State Capitalism as an Ideology in its Pure, Hard Form

The present economic development of Vietnam, once the reconstruction period at the end of the American occupation was over, can be seen in parallel to that of China, once things are kept in proportion. The occupation of Saigon by the Viet Cong in April 1975 put an end to a long period of warfare but left the country completely ruined and drained, to be rebuilt from an unprecedented level of destruction affecting material conditions, nature and people with short and long-term consequences.2 Nearly thirty years were necessary to overcome this economic handicap, one made even worse by the collapse of the Soviet system and by the autarchy of a strict state capitalism dominated by a very large, totalitarian, corrupt and often incompetent bureaucracy.

The problem posed in 1975, when the victorious Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army took over the whole country, was the survival of a state and political system of an essentially agrarian country (in 2003, in an industrial capitalist world, 68 percent of the Vietnamese population still lived off of agriculture) which for all its diverse natural wealth, cannot survive without interacting with the capitalist world, and without submitting to its laws.

To understand the terms of this necessary economic reorganization, we must emphasize that these peasants, who were the great majority and thus the social base of a political regime established by force of arms, had massively contributed to the successes of the wars against the French and later the Americans but who had, by the same token, borne the brunt of the war (from its military demands to the impact of defoliants). Their commitment and their sufferings were the counterpart of their hopes for a new world: for the peasants, this new world meant the recovery of the land and the chance to till it as they wished, in order to feed themselves and to perhaps, one day, to expand their activities.

The Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) at this time mainly lacked any theoretical or precise vision of how to organization rural production while still winning the support of the peasants. The party’s vision was one of total planning of the economy, one whose bureaucratic dimension was supposed to give (or impose upon, if necessary) the peasants a “socialist or—if one prefers—communist” knowledge which they did not have from their earlier evolution in a “capitalist world.” This was a first phase, one necessary to win peasant support in the period when the expanding power of the nationalist struggle was based on the seizure and redistribution of land on an egalitarian basis (or one presumed to be such). But this was in fact only a political strategy, one rapidly replaced, in the framework of the planned economy, by a collectivization of agriculture (the land being in any case state property), a copy on a small scale of what had been done previously in the USSR and of what was then underway in China.

The goal of this collectivization was to have an agriculture providing not merely for the needs of the entire population, but also for it to be an important pawn in the necessary international exchanges. We won’t linger over the details of the collectivization, imposed in 1978, but its result was catastrophic in terms of agricultural production, to the point that Vietnam in 1980, two years later (given the importance of the peasantry), continued to be an importer of basic foodstuffs. This was due to the fact, as everywhere else where forced collectivizations took place, the peasants saw no reason to produce anything above and beyond their own consumption. Further, in the advisory and control structures, experienced local leaders had been replaced by incompetent (and often corrupt) bureaucrats who were being repaid for their loyalty to the party and for their military actions in the “liberation war.”

“Market Socialism” under the Dictatorship of the VCP: the Opening to World Capital and the Mutation of the Ruling Class

The VCP needed to find a solution that fit into the overall program of necessary economic development, which implied the social control of an excess peasant population. Beginning in 1981, and until 1988, the collectives were dismantled; land remained state property but its distribution, through local cooperatives, was finally given to the peasants with usage rights (which could be passed on to others) of 50 years. Similarly, in 1986, a more thoroughgoing measure authorized the creation of private enterprises, most importantly in agriculture.

This turn did not, however, attenuate the control of the VCP over the use of land, or the impact on agricultural production of a melange of local privileges, corruption, subsidies and speculation. From 1990 to 1999, industrialized farming increased by 64 percent for annual rotations, and by 91 percent for non-annual rotations (including an increase in fruit production by 80 percent) whereas the sector producing locally consumed food increased only 30 percent, as did stock breeding. While there was an extension of plantations (coffee, tea, etc.), setting off conflicts involving speculative hoarding (supported by corruption) with the peasants, most notably in mountainous regions, on the other hand, in the areas close to cities, in 2002, the average size of agricultural plots was 0.7 hectares, and 0.3 hectares in the Red River delta in Tonkin,3 and 19 percent of the rural population was made up of “landless peasants.”

Even as it attempts to influence agricultural practices and to fit them into the industrial development plan, the VCP is attempting to tread carefully with the rural population, which makes basic land use problems very complex, caught as they are between regulations and local speculative or custom-driven realities. At the end of 2010, a study on “Land Reform in Vietnam” emphasized: “The situation of rural households is, on one hand, extremely unequal according to the region, and there are cases where the modalities of access to agricultural and forest lands are designed to effectively protect such households, especially the most fragile among them.”4 Recent events, and particularly the world food crisis, reminded Vietnam that the agrarian and peasant questions were not yet solved, and put the rural land question back at the top of the agenda. Responding to this crisis (and a considerable increase in the price of rice) the government decided to freeze the status of more than a million hectares of rice paddies and started a campaign (the “three nong”) whose objective was to rebalance the rural and urban worlds.5

Despite these flip-flops, we might say that on the whole, the peasants did respond to reforms which gave them more control over the land and more power to decide what to do with it. In 2010, Vietnam was not only agriculturally self-sufficient but had become an exporter: it was the fifth largest producer and the second largest exporter of rice; it was the second largest exporter of coffee; the fifth largest exporter of tea; and it had achieved a respectable ranking in other products: cashew nuts, rubber, and in hydroponic production. But, even though it employed the majority of the population and remained an essential factor, the agricultural sector’s share of the total product declined relative to (most importantly) industrial development from 25 percent of GDP in 2000, it represented only 20 percent in 2010 whereas industry had grown from 36 percent to 40 percent; this is, moreover, quite relative, since GDP had tripled between 2002 and 2010.

With these overall figures, it is difficult to get a sense of the general living standards of the peasantry, which is still by far the majority of the population. The small plots under cultivation, as well as variations in climate, in the price of fertilizers and of marketable products all mean that many peasants, even those with land, often live in poverty. We can find some indications in the marginal elements clearly in poor and precarious situations. The roughly 19 percent of the population who are landless peasants (at least 10 million people) live for all intents and purposes in the same conditions as the European agricultural workers of a century ago. One illuminating detail: in April 2008, when the absorption of these poor peasants by industrial development was already well underway, the VCP was worried about the theft of rice in “wildcat” nighttime harvests. The party passed legislation stipulating severe punishment for this kind of theft and outlawing all nighttime use of any implement or vehicle used in the rice harvest. At the same time, peasants were required to post armed guards in their fields night and day.

This pressure on the poor peasants to merely survive is further increased by demographic pressure (an increase in the birth rate but also in life expectancy, now reaching the level of the industrialized countries). Something that might be seen as positive brings with it a risk of social destabilization; the VCP is sufficiently aware of this to adopt a policy of restricting births to two children per couple.6 Overall, we see a combination of factors which, from the necessity of economic development to the maintenance of social peace, by way of the level of poverty and self-sufficiency in food, both compels and allows the VCP to promote industrial development by the entry of foreign capitals, with its competitive advantage of cheap labor power.

The “Doi Moi” (Renewal) policy was developed in 1986. It can be briefly defined: enterprise reform aimed at integrating the country into the world economy, by introducing methods and capitalist relations into a modification of the political apparatus of the party-state. This results in a dynamic of political and economic polarization, pushing the sphere of state power to appropriate for itself the benefits of the economic opening by the creation of increasingly Mafia-like networks. Generalized corruption transforms the party from a structure of domination into an access route to resources and a locus for the concentration of goods. Ideology itself has evolved considerably: personal enrichment is hailed as a contribution to national development, young business men are decorated with the “red star,” and the new millionaires (in dongs) are edified as heroes of the “renewal.”

Formation and Development of a Proletariat: The Sale of the National Work Force on the International Market Underwritten by the Dictatorship of the VCP

Nearly 20 years, however, were necessary before this reform allowed the VCP, in 2007, to request membership in the WTO, i.e., before it was able to open up, without too many risks, to a competitive penetration of the national economy by international trade. Only in 1991 was the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) authorized, allowing foreign capital to benefit not merely from facilities in place and financial and fiscal advantages, but also from conditions for the exploitation of the work force that were particularly enticing for the capital invested. These SEZs are unevenly distributed and will be concentrated in the most populated regions of Tonkin in the north and Cochinchina in the south.7 At first, these investments were not particularly important; as one official put it “One sewing machine, one brush to spread glue on a shoe sole, and we have created a job.” At the beginning of the 2000s, the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce advertised its work force on the international market in these terms: “One of our advantages over Indonesia is that the Vietnamese work force is not inclined to involve itself in struggles.” This was confirmed by another official who in 2003 clarified that “if the country is to remain attractive for FDI8 it must furnish a cheap and docile work force.” It is true that, on paper, the dictatorship of the VCP could guarantee rigorous working conditions, an official trade union present in only 10 percent of companies, and a new proletariat which could offer every guarantee of stability; but the bureaucrats, however sure of themselves, could hardly fail to know that a proletariat rapidly becomes conscious of the conditions of its exploitation and starts to struggle.

These changes deeply changed the attitude of the population toward the regime. The worker, peasant and minority revolts against the local party organs and company managements (who were flaunting their ill-gotten gain with insulting ostentation), are clear proof of the way that people kept involuntarily in poverty experience these situations as unbearable.

Workers certainly struck as foreign capital moved in and as people migrated to the centers where the work force was being exploited, and did so all the more when it was seen that the investors barely paid attention to existing labor legislation and that the state authorities not only closed their eyes but violently repressed people who merely asked that the laws be applied. Foreign investors had a weighty argument for getting their special conditions of exploitation: the threat of going elsewhere. According to a study by the official Institute of Workers and Trade Unions, only 60 percent of foreign direct investments offer working conditions compatible with Vietnamese labor legislation. One might think that the media coverage of these struggles in 2005 was not due merely to their dimensions in major workplaces and their geographic extension. One might think, then, that the young generation born after 1986, those whose exploitation began as soon as they finished school, no longer had the same reasons to “respect” the VCP, with its struggle for national liberation, and for the privations accepted by their parents in the patriotic reconstruction of a country ravaged by war. But one factor remained central in the escalation of struggles, a factor which led to the opposition to the totality of extremely harsh working conditions, and that was the inflation which made it impossible to live with very low wages.

This table shows precisely how inflation was progressing after 2002 and how it then surged in 2004 and in the following years.9

The financial crisis and the major devaluation of Asian currencies in 1997 (between 40 and 50 percent relative to the US dollar) rendered more vulnerable the outsourced sector of key industries (textiles, clothing, shows, electronics, etc…) employing many workers. Textile industries alone, for example, employ 500,000 workers. As they became less and less competitive, these industries were forced to constantly lower the outsourced price on many items. The cost of producing one jacket, for example, fell from $4 in 1993 to $3 today. In spite of that, outsourcing contracts brought in less and less money, as did the price for the raw materials (gas, natural rubber, coal, etc…) Vietnam exported. This was an increasingly difficult situation for those who had migrated from agriculture to the factories, out of necessity but also with hopes for a better future.

Who then were these new proletarians who would be revolting?10 As in other Asian countries, including China, they were and are the migrant workers, often those coming from the north to the south of the country. Four and a half million migrated between 1994 and 1999; 6.7 million more between 2004 and 2009; women make up about half of them, but they are much more numerous in the temporary migrations. Starting in 2000, the importance and the character of these migrations can be seen in the 43 percent turnover rate which the bosses complain about, and notably in the fact that after the Tet festival only two-thirds of these migrants return to their jobs in the same factory.

Development and Fluctuations in the Class Struggle: Organization and Repression

Before the major strike wave of 2005–06, a few warning signs had revealed and spread through the media some idea about the conditions of exploitation of the Vietnamese workers. In June 2005, 10,000 workers of a factory in Da Nang (a joint venture with a Hong Kong firm) staged a wildcat strike11 against a whole situation which is too poorly rendered as “working conditions,” a situation found just about everywhere, with a few variations:

* no contract,
* a minimum 12-hour day but often expanded by unpaid overtime,
* two bathroom visits per working day, under surveillance,
* one cup of water during the entire work day,
* no social benefits, no days off for illness or for death of a relative,
* “we are treated like animals,” according to one woman, i.e., not merely insulted, and humiliated, but sometimes hit,
* firings for the first infraction.

The first strike wave took place between December 28, 2005, and January 8, 2006, on the Binh Duong SEZ (Cochinchina). Sixty thousand workers in 50 factories took part, three-fourths of them women between the ages of 18 and 25. The first factory to walk out was a Taiwanese plant with the lowest wages and the worst conditions. This factory employs 1,000 workers, who demanded an increase in the basic monthly salary of €32; they resumed work with a 10 percent pay increase but, to make up for it, management increased the pace of work: 1,200 pieces had to be submitted by 6 pm, as opposed to 8–8:30 pm before the strike. After this first wildcat, the movement spread to other factories in the zone throughout 2006 over salaries and other demands about working conditions. The impact of the strikes was such that the CPV raised the minimum wage by 40 percent in February 2006, but in a differential way: €44 a month in the two biggest cities, Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon); €40 in medium-sized cities and €36 in the rest of the country.12

These strikes (which were always wildcats) marked the beginning of a sort of race between inflation and wage increases, in struggles which have continued up to the present at an uneven rhythm. One can surmise that, after having made these concessions (as in the above examples) management tried to recover their control by other means, most notably in labor time or in speedup, which resulted, given the constant increases in inflation, in a new strike wave. In Hanoi alone, in June 2006, every week saw between 400 and 2,000 workers in wildcat strikes. The official figures at least give some sense of this:

2006: 330 strikes in 6 months;
2007: 700 strikes for the year;
2008: 762;
2009: 218;
2010: 424;
2011: 857 over an 11 month period.
Seventy-five percent of these strikes took place in foreign companies. The falloff in 2009 can be explained by the impact of the crisis in 2008 which reduced the activities of the exporting companies, resulting in the layoff of migrant workers.

One of the first questions we might ask, in guessing the reasons that sparked these struggles, given (stated bluntly) the totality of the conditions of exploitation, is how they broke out and how they spread. On these points, we have little information, beyond official statements and/or on-the-spot accounts of the strikes.

First of all, there is no doubt that these were wildcat, i.e., illegal, strikes; it is difficult to say if low-level organizers of the official trade union were able to participate in sparking the wildcats and/or if they were able to play a role as mediators with management (in 2008, while wildcats strikes were underway in different sectors, one official noted that the wildcats “are becoming more and more common and that is due to the fact that the union cannot play its role as mediator”; the official union was represented in only 10 percent of the foreign export firms and even there was not recognized by the workers as their representatives). In May 2009, during a strike of 500 workers in a textile factory in the south, an official admitted that “the strike was launched independently by an informal group of workers.”

A manager of one of these companies summarized as follows the way in which these strikes unfolded: “The workers remained in the factory in an organized way and designated a representative to talk with management. Some of these workers were aggressive. They fought with the guards and with the police, threw projectiles and destroyed property.” This would not be confirmed by another official during a strike of 800 workers in a Japanese electronics factory: “They didn’t destroy anything. They merely gathered at the factory entrance to protest peacefully.” What is certain is that we can find all possible variants from peaceful occupations to violent confrontations. Some recent examples: on October 19, 2011, in Binh Duong province (south of Ho Chi Minh City), 6,000 workers in a Taiwanese shoe plant occupied the factory, fought with the security guards, blocked the adjacent streets and destroyed equipment. In January 2012, a minister confessed that strikes “imply confrontations, destruction and deaths.” This was undoubtedly an allusion to what happened in June 2011 during a strike in a motorcycle parts plant where a security agent rammed a picket line in a car, killing one woman and injuring six others. It seems that, here or there, strike or struggle committees were formed, and it is quite obvious that the VCP is trying at any cost to prevent these formations from becoming permanent and, even worse for these managers, from coordinating on a regional or national level through political or other channels of opposition. There have been, on one hand, direct forms of police or administrative repression during localized conflicts. From June 24 to 29, the 93,000 workers in the Pou yen Vietnam Co., a shoe factory in Ho Chi Minh City (producing mainly for Adidas), struck for a wage increase and for the payment of a bonus; the strike extended to neighboring factories. A thuggish intervention put an end to the strike, with the arrest of 29 workers and the condemnation of three of them—the so-called leaders—to prison terms of 7–9 years.13 There were on the other hand concessions attempting, more or less at the same time, to cool off pressure from the base (one reportage indicated that “every day in this country, there is a strike”); the government raised the minimum wage by 12 percent; another increase followed on October 1.

Such an alternation of repression and concessions is only one aspect of which is only one element among many of the whole apparatus of control and domination by the CPV. But in the last analysis, it is repression which wins out, ranging from direct military and police force to administrative detention, from constant surveillance of the conversations and writings of the population to an ever stricter control of the use of such modern means as cell phones and the Internet. This makes attempts to support struggles from the outside particularly haphazard, as has been the case of the Committee for the Protection of Vietnamese Workers (CPVW) which has been trying to be active in Vietnam itself (with leaflets, support and advice to strike “leaders”) but also with Vietnamese émigrés around the world, for the establishment of independent unions (we might suspect somewhat that, as in other totalitarian countries, such as e.g., China, they are instruments for American penetration, piggy-backing on struggles).

Current Economic Changes Resulting from the World Crisis and Their Impact on Struggles

f, in 2011, the number of strikes had been the highest in years (16 strikes per week) this situation seems to have changed in 2012. This surge of strikes in 2011 and in earlier years is usually explained by the surge of economic activity, which meant that strikers had no fear of being fired, being sure that they could find a new job. It does seem to be the case that the fall off of social conflicts in 2009 corresponded to the impact of the world crisis of 2008. This situation may well recur today. GDP grew at only 4 percent in the first quarter of 2012 and no major conflict cracked the media barrier. Nevertheless, inflation is still high, rising to 16 percent, and poverty levels are also high; roughly 30 percent of the active population is either unemployed or precarious. The average salary for unskilled workers is €100 a month; if it is difficult to estimate what that represents in terms of living standards, the announcement that one-third of all children under five is suffering from malnutrition gives a certain picture. In the same way, a lack of manpower in certain SEZs might indicate that low wages and harsh conditions are no longer attractive for migrants from the country.

The whole economic system is evolving, with the recent emergence of new sectors such as oil exploration and export, or the increasing use of new information technologies.14 To maintain its social dominance, the VCP nonetheless has to take account of this, given that three-fourths of its economy is based on the activity of the SEZs and new investments in FDI. The international crisis is harshly affecting all countries which live essentially off this activity, closely tied to that of importing countries, i.e., the industrialized countries, which are themselves in crisis.

The poverty wages paid to Vietnamese workers undoubtedly remain 30 percent lower than the wages of their Indian or Chinese counterparts, but other elements play a role in investors’ choices in this cutthroat competition over costs of production, namely the global conditions of exploitation.15 One of the first elements is the system’s resistance to workers’ demands both in terms of costs and of social peace; put another way, structural reforms of internal factors of the economy on one hand, and the strengthening of repression on the other. That assumes that the VCP can finance the necessary infrastructure, particularly for energy output and, once again, for guaranteeing social peace.

The older proletariat, which will not have given up its habits of struggle, will be joined by this new, better educated proletariat, which will demand wages and working conditions different from what has been the practice in the past. Last February, interviews at the highest level, and most notably with the head of the official trade union (VLC), were seeking ways to “reduce the number of strikes to attempt to reassure and calm investors.” But the main unknown, when we consider these domestic problems of Vietnam and class resistance, remains the world evolution of the economic crisis. Any forecast would be risky: in all circumstances, the VCP will seek to maintain its power by every means at its disposal. This future depends as much on the ability of world capitalism to overcome the resistance of the proletariat, and in this sense the working-class struggles in Vietnam, even in the absence of direct ties, are connected to the struggle of proletarians everywhere. These struggles are in fact unified because they are a response to a common exploitation and a common intensification of the conditions of exploitation and, while apparently separated by borders and by very different situations, they modify in their way the problematic of survival for a capitalism in crisis.

• 1The most penetrating approach to the struggles in Vietnam, both in the past and today, especially those of the Vietnamese peasantry, is to be found in the different books and articles of Ngo Van, particularly in Vietnam 1920–1945: revolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale, (Nautilus Publishers), in his articles in ICO (Informations et Correspondances Ouvrieres) from 1967–72, and in Le joueur de flûte et l’oncle Ho, Vietnam 1945–2005 (Paris-Méditerranée). The main work of Ngo Van available in English is the translation of his autobiography (Au Pays de la Cloche Felée in the French original), also covering the 1920–45 period in the first person, is In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (AK Press, 2010).
• 2 From 1965 to 1975, on this small territory, which was their experimental area, the Americans dropped 7 million bombs, three to four times the tonnage dropped by all belligerents during the Second World War (nearly 200,000 of these unexploded devices still present a latent danger) and 84 million liters of “Agent Orange.” In addition to the pollution of the soils, nearly 5 million Vietnamese have been contaminated for life by this defoliant, as well as their offspring. The American war alone killed one million Vietnamese combatants and five million civilians. These figures do not take account of all the long-term effects of the war among the wounded, the victims of unexploded bombs or mines, or of Agent Orange extended over several generations.
• 30.7 hectares correspond to 7,000 square meters and 0.3 hectares are 3,000 square meters (in reality a large garden), 0.3 à 3,000m². The average grain-producing farm in France covers between 500 and 1,000 hectares.
• 4The question of land use has been central to the peasant revolts which have been more frequent than those making it into the media throughout the years of VCP domination. A revolt by the peasants in the Mekong Delta over the issue of land use in 1987–88 ended bloodily. Four months were needed in 1997 to put an end to an agitation against the exactions of the local VCP cadre in Thai Binh (Tonkin) and Dong Nai (Cochinchina). In February 2001, in the high central plateaus, demonstrations (sometimes with an ethnic coloring) over land use and the granting of land to between 10 and 300,000 migrants from the overpopulated regions of the north and south ended in confrontations and numerous arrests.
• 5Cf. « La réforme foncière au Vietnam », published by Aménagement, Développement, Environnement, Santé et Société (ADES) (September 16, 2010).
• 6 We also find here a disequilibrium common to all of Southeast Asia; due to different discriminatory practices at birth, in Vietnam 112 boys are born for every 100 girls.
• 7f certain SEZs do manage to attract foreign direct investment, others show evidence of a bureaucratic megalomania, one certainly tied to corruption. Thus, for example, in the central region of the high plateaus of Binh Dinh, the 70,000 hectare SEZ Bo Y International was set up at great expense and, over an 8-year period, attracted only a few small factories. It is obvious that the choices of foreign investors are focused on the populated areas where infrastructure facilitates exports at low cost.
• 8FDI: Foreign Direct Investment is the term for investments in a specific country coming from another country for an economic activity under one or another juridical form (creation of a company, a joint venture, the purchase of an existing company) and where production is essentially for export. Three-fourths of all FDI comes from the United States and several Asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, Singapore).
• 9This persistent inflation may have different sources (capital entry, the export of agricultural products which squeeze the home market, risky credits from local banks in unprofitable operations, the disproportionate weight of the administrative and police apparatus) which can be summed up as an excess of financial liquidity (very poorly distributed socially) for a diminished mass of commodities on the market.
• 10The urbanization resulting from these migrations is developing in southern Nam Bo (Cochinchina) or in the Da Nang region on the central coast. As for exports from the SEZs, the center and the south are more important, because they are situated on the routes of container shipments.
• 11To be legal, strikes must be approved by local authorities and the bureaucrats of the official trade union, with advance notice of 20 days. The fact that the representatives of the official union are paid by the company puts into proportion of such strike approvals, not to mention of a possible strike call.
• 12 It is difficult to compare wages and even more so living standards in different countries. The wage of migrant women might be the complement of the income of a peasant, the latter as well being quite variable according to the extent and fertility of the land, and the degree of overpopulation. The theft of rice during the food crisis of 2008, widespread enough to motivate special legislation, can be evidence of a low living standard, or even, in extreme cases, of famine.
• 13These are not the only ones, because these arrests are rarely covered in the media. Such sentencing means being sent to forced labor camps, often presented as institutions for drug rehabilitation.
• 14] One of the VCP’s problems is how to absorb the annual 260,000 university graduates into economic development. One possibility is opened up by the evolution of competition in attracting FDI and shifting them toward the use of high tech, requiring a better-trained work force. This sector has apparently grown by 38 percent between 2009 and 2010 due to special circumstances: for example, a shift of Japanese factories from Thailand in the wake of the recent floods there, the choice being motivated not only by costs by campaigns of hostility toward Japan in China (also amplified by confrontations over offshore oil exploration). This high-tech development is still quite limited (32,000 workers in 2011 as against 7,000 in 2009) but it remains promising for FDI, with wages in this sector being half those in India and 60 percent of those in China.
• 15 It is quite difficult to give a prognosis when dealing with such contradictory analyses as those appearing recently in the media; cf. “Le Vietnam, eldorado des délocalisations” (“Vietnam, El Dorado of Outsourcing”), Le Figaro February 28, 2012, and “Paradise lost: strikes and riots in the export zones in Vietnam” (libcom, 2012).

…. oh, terrible days of green youth! Ah, on the road nearby, I hear the solitary song of the worker returning to his poor lodging, late, after the revels: and it grips my heart fiercely to think the whole world passes, and scarcely leaves a trace. See: the holiday’s over; some nondescript day follows; time carries off all mortal things.

Giacomo Leopardi, Canti XIII, La sera del dì di festa

To understand and make sense of the recent wave of social unrest in Chile, we have to refer to the history of the last half century of this country: the revolutionary upsurge that had its peak in late 1972, the destruction of the social movement after the military coup, the neo-liberal restructuring imposed by the Pinochet regime and the consolidation of that legacy by successive civilian governments. Such events, which have overshadowed the lives of several generations of Chileans, now emerge in a new light. Recent events seem to suggest that this nightmare was only an interlude between two festivals, and that it was only a matter of time before the old tensions re-emerged. Today, however, these tensions emerge in a much more educated form than forty years ago. Four decades of forced modernization in the economy and the culture had to leave their mark on minds and hearts: revolt has broken out again, but now with a decidedly “citizenist” (“ciudadanista”) cast, full of moderation and very suspicious of the ideologies and grievances that ruined everything in the uprisings of the past. What earlier generations had clearly perceived as class struggle and the abolition of an anachronistic social system, is now viewed with a much friendlier and more optimistic eye. Today the issue is not abolishing the horrible dominant mode of production, but to make it fulfill its promises. Indeed, although the current protest movement is far from homogeneous, it is easy to recognize its fundamental ethos: since it has not yet posed the question of the exploitation of man by man, but only its moderation, what this movement pursues is nothing but the old and incongruous dream of a good capitalism.

This crude affirmation does not mean we condemn this social movement in any way. The revolt that shook Chile over the past year has changed many things for the better, starting with the fact that it has awakened a social force that seemed to be languishing forever, and whose transforming potential we can scarcely foresee today. But this latent revolutionary force will never fully emerge if it is not aware of its own reality, its current limitations and future possibilities. Groping, especially through its most minoritarian and ambitious nuclei, the rebellious movement is trying today to ask the right questions, to arrive at more fruitful answers and to be fully aware of its strength and its real possibilities

With this text we wish to contribute to the social process now underway.

This movement of revolt, so full of unabashed confidence and realism, so free of messianic impulses and so hostile to the drama of the old class struggle, does not claim to change everything, and knows it. But it knows very well, on the other hand, what it does want to change. It wants to wipe out the old oppressive atmosphere which for decades has not allowed anyone to breathe freely, and that on first approach comes from an easily recognizable source: the educational apartheid that is also an outrageously lucrative business; authoritarian political institutions embedded in a constitution imposed by force of arms; the looting by transnational capital of natural resources and the resulting environmental devastation throughout the country, the ruthless exploitation of the labor force and its subjugation by credit, advertising and medication; the despotic control over politics and culture by ten billionaire families whose fortunes amount to one third of GDP …

All this, which was known and accepted as a fact of nature, has suddenly emerged as an intolerable reality. Consequently, there emerges an overwhelming need to change it and the suspicion that, after all, it is possible to change it. Of course, from the simple daily hassles to the consciousness that there is a socio-economic structure which produces them, there is always some distance to be traversed.

These themes had been, so to speak, in the air for some time. In recent years news kiosks have begun to gradually accommodate citizen newspapers, leftist and even anarchist publications, whose headlines challenge the government of the day and sometimes spread openly anti-capitalist positions. Some neighborhood radio and TV channels have developed, although with great difficulty, in various regions of the country.

At the same time, a “popular culture” has emerged at “ground level” with fairs, plays, music concerts, workshops and meeting places, which served as a refuge for many people reluctant to accept the frivolous desert of mass culture. This slow and laborious reconstruction of the initiative and creative power of ordinary people held out steadily and against all odds for decades, and has formed a breeding ground for revolt. The most notable result has been, above all, a certain spirit. Last spring, one felt, at times and everywhere, something of a breath of optimism and of power spreading through people’s countenances and words. One felt, after each day of protest, the joy that comes from the struggle, of any struggle whereby we will no longer be kneeling before our masters. On the walls of the city center one can read: “We will lose a year, but we will win the future,” “We are poor people at war,” “The streets are ours,” “Kill your rector,” “social war,” “joy and subversion”…

The main protagonists of the revolt were the secondary and university students. Since April, when there was the first big march organized by the CONFECH (the Chilean Student Confederation), the movement has never stopped growing in geographical extent and intensity, multiplying since then the occupations of schools, colleges and university campuses. The first manifestations, driven by the university students, focused on the modest demands which had been customary in previous years: more state funding for universities, for scholarships and for the National Student Card.1

Successive government responses to these demands were rejected by the students, which gave greater intensity to their demonstrations, and especially to street actions. This radicalization and extension of the movement forced the government to give in on one of the key demands of the moment: the resignation of Education Minister Joaquin Lavin. That was followed by an increasingly vast and intense escalation, which included calls by the CUT2 for a “national strike,” days of heavy street fighting from early morning until evening, and massive “cacerolazos,” beating on pots and pans in every street and every neighborhood,3

which otherwise had not been used in Chile since 1985, when it was often a form of opposition to military rule.

Only the arrival of the end of the year, with the cessation of academic activities and of uncertainty about the results of a “wasted” school year, defused the intensity of that progression of mutual challenges between the government and the mobilized masses.

The occupation of the local high schools for several months allowed students to develop their initiative in creating workshops and courses, artistic events, forums and lectures… This has not only fueled an increasingly accurate critique of the educational system, but also helped socialize to some extent a more elaborate critique of capitalism. Moreover, the occupied premises served as shelter against the brutal attacks of the police, which had systematically attacked the students with water cannon, tear gas, batons and torture sessions aboard the police vans.

This repression, directly ordered by Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter and his political team, did not, however, prevent the increasingly massive marches from being accompanied in turn by ever more numerous and better organized groups of self-defense, willing to confront the police force with stones, sticks and Molotov cocktails. As the weeks passed, it became common for students to perform lightning actions, leaving the occupied buildings to block the main streets, and stopping traffic early in the morning, thus bringing traffic to a halt in large parts of the capital and in the provinces. Most of these actions were sparked by high school students. The university students were more oriented to marches and “symbolic” protests.

The difference in the fighting methods of both sectors reveals a fairly significant fact, which we will try to elucidate further: during the whole wave of protests, radicalization of the high school students was largely ignored, and sometimes even rejected by the university students, who showed themselves generally more confident in the ability of institutions to provide a “negotiated” end to the crisis. The general perception, as the end of the year approached, is that the university organizations completely abandoned the high school students, and did not even include their demands in the negotiations initiated with the government and parliamentary representatives.

This attitude by the university students seems difficult to understand if one takes literally the central demand of the mobilization, which, moreover, was the same for all sectors: “an end to profits in education, free and public education at all levels.” But, of course, it is better not to take this literally, but rather read between the lines. This slogan expresses the general interests of a large mass of people eager for better living conditions, and who have found a way to express their discontent in a more or less unified and coherent way, but it also tends to hide the fact that this mass is rigidly segregated in sectors experiencing class domination, and the practical struggle against it, in different ways. Though this movement expresses a crisis of the reproduction of capitalist dynamics, and though to understand it we need to include all the actors within the general category defined as exploited labor power, that should not blind us to the fact that within the movement there is a real segregation with real practical and possibly decisive effects.

The demand for free education finds its legitimacy at almost a common sense level for most of the Chilean population, mainly because the increasing privatization of education has only contributed to the deteriorating quality of life for all who must sell their labor power to survive. Those who do not have capital or a rich enough family inheritance see obtaining a college or technical degree the only hope for a job and a decent life. With education being perceived as a vital necessity of the first order, its transformation into a lucrative business controlled by banks could only exacerbate the discontent of people. In fact, the full liberalization of the education business has taken things to disconcerting extremes: in Chile, studying for a university degree costs about $500 monthly, which when paid on credit can add up to $60,000, in a country where the minimum wage is less than $300 and the average wage is around $900. The common perception in this regard is ambivalent: on one hand, Chileans assume that “studying is for those who have money”; on the other hand, they consider professional qualifications as a need so basic that they have long been willing to endure any hardship or indebtedness to get them.

This disproportionate emphasis on professionalism has to do with immediate economic calculation, which in turn is justified by a powerful ideology. Currently two out of three college students are first generation, meaning that for their parents “higher” education was never anything but an impossible dream. The current generation of students and professionals carry with them this new burden of expectations that their parents and grandparents developed in an era of economic growth and of the expansion of individual consumption. Indeed, the idea which has acted as a driving force of the current mobilization is that higher education is not only a necessity but also a fundamental human right which the State must guarantee to all. Such an idea is inseparable from a belief in an unlimited expansion of production, consumption, of the cultural industry and of material well-being, and as such is part and parcel of a powerful faith in the basic logic of capitalism: infinite growth.

But it is not just a mirage. No ideology could hide the fact that in Chile today 60 percent of university graduates do not work in the field for which they studied, and this figure can only increase in the future. That proletarianized families nonetheless continue to make enormous sacrifices to professionalize their children is a result of the severe defeat of the workers in recent decades. As long as the Chilean working class is deprived of the most basic tools of economic struggle, its ability to recover some of the surplus value that the capitalist class takes from them in the production process has been reduced to a minimum. This weakening of the work force in relation to capital is clearly expressed in the very fact of economic growth in Chile: in recent decades almost all of this growth is attributable to corporate profits, while the overall wage bill relative to GDP growth has only decreased to negligible levels.

Given the apparent impossibility of extracting from employers the means for a minimally comfortable subsistence, Chilean workers have had no other way to escape from economic insecurity than to mortgage their hopes on the promises of well-being that professional qualifications imply, either for their children or for themselves. That this defeat of the working class, moreover, has been transformed into a booming capitalist business, is evidenced by the fact that nearly half of higher education is provided by Technical Training Centres (TTCs) and Professional Institutes (PIs), whose slightly lower fees than those of the universities have made their main marketing “target” the middle and lower layers of the population. Significantly, among the ranks of the lower classes, these PIs and TTCs are currently recruiting 87 percent of first-generation students, of whom 40 percent study in the evening in order to work during the day.

This, however, does not prevent these young people from graduating with a bank debt averaging $25,000, with interest rates higher than those imposed on the relatively privileged students at the state universities, whose employment prospects are much higher than those of the poorest students. All told, the increased access of poor families to higher education through these non-university centers does not at all mean that the rigid segregation reflected by the ESOMAR mode4

has become more flexible, since the quality of education that a young person receives and their labor market prospects depend on how much his/her family has paid previously. The industry of technical-professional education, in the best of cases, assures that members of the lower middle strata remain there, which, in any case, seems better than nothing.

The multi-million dollar business of the TTCs and the PIs continues to be presented, nevertheless, as a contribution to the advancement of the workers. Whether the workers believe it or not, the fact is that labor market saturation and the relative stagnation of wages never fail to show that this seeming way out is as illusory as any other within the existing framework of relations between capital and labor. For now, professionalization seems at least to give atomized workers psychological security and self-esteem in an extremely competitive and precarious environment.

For this and other reasons, the preservation of university education is a palpable reality, something concrete to defend, only for one-fourth of the Chilean population, including the most privileged classes. For other strata, “advanced studies” continue to be for the most part out of reach. This persistent social stratification must be taken into account if we seek to understand why, during the last wave of agitation, university and secondary students seemed to take divergent paths. The interests of the former consists, above all, in softening the burden of indebtedness they have had to take on, without forgetting that they did so in exchange for a personal validation already guaranteed them and one which was for life. They are already integrated in the mechanism which assures them of their places in the higher echelons of society, and their struggle is basically to keep increasing costs and debts from pushing them into the strata below them. For them, “an end to profits” in education means ending the risk of losing their relatively privileged socio-economic position.

For the students at the secondary level, taken as a whole, the situation is different. In fact, 40 percent of them study in technical-professional high schools, which set their life trajectory on a clear direction, one quite far from the universities and from the upward social mobility offered as compensation to whose students who “really work hard.” At least for the 65 percent of secondary students, who come from the poorest two-fifths of the population, these promises seem mainly a joke, because they are hardly stupid, and they know that their life situation from an early age gives their life chances an indelible stamp.

As a result, for them the slogan of “an end to profits” in education does not mean improvement in a situation which is already assured them, but rather conquering something they never had and which they will never have if things continue as they are. This is the reason why the occupations, hunger strikes, barricades and confrontations have been carried out mainly by the 75 percent of young people who attend municipal or subsidized high schools, and not by those from the private high schools whose access to the university has been guaranteed from birth.

This also explains other revealing facts. For example: since 2006, the Coordinating Assembly of Secondary Students (CASS) has developed more ambitious sets of demands and more audacious programs for action, going well beyond the timid demands raised year after year by the CONFECH. Further: the CASS, and not the CONFECH, actively solidarized with the casualized miners of El Teniente on strike in May 2011, almost as soon as the last waves of protests began. During this joint march of miners and students, the secondary school youth spontaneously adopted the slogan “nationalization of copper under workers’ control” as a demand of their own, since they know that without structural economic changes, they will never set foot in a university.

But this disconnect between secondary school and university students does not merely reflect a spontaneous divergence of interests, determined by socio-economical stratification. It corresponds to the very logic of a social movement which is being instrumentalized for the specific ends of a political caste. The very existence of a “student” movement delimited as such, mediatized by the celebrities of the university student bureaucracy, fits, like other “citizen” movements, in the programmatic development of a left which, for now, has no other perspective than participation in national political life, which means in the life of the parties in power.

Whether this objective is expressed in calls for a “new kind of politics,” or anything else, is of no importance, because at bottom it is an attempt to expand the parameters of the same old politics, the only kind that is possible in a capitalist economic framework. At least in part, the power of the last mobilization can be explained by this ever more imperious necessity for the left to regain its existence as an active political force. Or, in other words, as an entity floating above the social movement to determine its evolution from the outside, as the active negation of the social.

This helps us answer the question why, today, the student movement is being much more intransigent in its demands than was the “penguin revolution”5 of 2006, or the periodic student “flues” of recent years. The fact is that, in the past several decades, the destruction of the social “tissue” gives the parties of the left and the right the monopoly over formal organizations, as well as over the very initiative and capacity for action of students and workers, in the student centers, federations and unions.

Discontent and rage have always been there, but while Social Democracy was in power, the supporters of the regime—well placed in the open spaces for action and thought in high schools, universities and companies—were able to use them to channel protests into directions that did not endanger the political credibility of the ruling parties. Thus the large mobilization of 2006 was unable to formulate any clear objective beyond the repeal of the general education law and free public transportation for students, remaining in a defensive position. This led to an agreement which helped to strengthen the image of the government then in power. Today, those political militants have quite simply ceased to act, allowing protest energy to flow spontaneously toward the more logical objective: the demand for free education, which was always in the air without being expressed with the clarity and force it took on in the past year.

The “laissez-faire” strategy toward the social movement, however useful it may be for the left and center left parties, also implies a potential loss of control which is difficult to ignore. This potential self-activity is obvious in the proliferation of autonomous means of communication, the assemblies and the independent networks emerging in recent months, through which a distant and cautious attitude toward parties and formal organizations became clear. This attitude was given form in a slogan cropping up repeatedly in the street demonstrations: “The people united moves forward without a party.”6 The spread of the conflict throughout the country also shows in some way this relative autonomy of the social movement from the parties, since the formal organizations have always tended to concentrate their forces in the capital, thus following the modus operandi of bourgeois politics, which centralizes and concentrates things in order to better control them.

In previous years, social agitation did not succeed in changing life in the provinces, where normally action tends to be very isolated and have a merely symbolic character. During the last wave of protests, on the other hand, in many cities, there were road blockages, “cacerolazos” and confrontation. This geographical extension of the conflict is especially revealing of the centrifugal tendencies of the movement, which found a powerful decentralizing impulse in its center, immune to any political manipulation.

The meaning given to all these events varies a great deal, of course, depending on the position one occupies in the order of exploitation; but for everyone it has some meaning, and this is perhaps the most important change: the revolt has forced people to think about how, why and for what they are living. Some, perhaps those most damaged by the capitalist order, have been content to take advantage of the temporary turmoil in a daily asphyxiating routine, throwing their own energies into increasing this turmoil. Others, more confident, have been redoubling their efforts to built up and increase what they call “popular power,” which is nothing else than the power of initiative and the ability to react which are hammered out in the course of the struggle itself. There are always those who, above all, pursue their politics, and those who bend submissively to the temperament of the majority, whatever that may be.

If, finally, one had to point to a dominant discourse which imposed its meaning on virtually all the manifestations of this revolt, this discourse can be summarized as follows: if we have taken to the streets, this means that the history of Chile has once again taken up its old march towards a future which will be most just, more developed, happier and more democratic…

Outside this candid desire for harmony between social classes, in the framework of a “good national capitalism,” there is not much else. An understanding of the how and the why of the categories which define real existing capitalism is something which remains deeply disconnected from the social malaise and its practical expression. Between the clamor about “civil society” and the latter-day regurgitations of Leninism, the radical critique of the system has at best a phantasmagoric presence in the public scene. In Chile, in the last analysis, explosions of mass non-conformity continue to be, as in other epochs, much ado within a disarmed prophecy.

• 1This card is used for discounts on various types of purchases.
• 2The Confederacion Unitaria de Trabajo, the national trade-union confederation.
• 3This method of protest characterized such uprisings as the “piquetero” revolt in Argentina in 2001–02.
• 4A plan for measuring social-economic status.
• 5A shorter-lived student mobilization in 2006, which began to raise some of the demands.
• 6 “El pueblo unido avanza sin partido.” A significant “correction” of the putrefied Popular Front slogan “el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido,” which mass demonstrations were chanting in Santiago just days before the September 1973 overthrow of Allende, and which has been mindlessly taken over by the international left with no apparent understanding of its sinister overtones.