Uneven Development, Austerity and Worker Organization Response in the Eurocrisis

The response of labor federations and left parties to the Eurozone crisis has provided a stark demonstration of the ways in which these organizations can perform widely divergent functions despite similar institutional forms. Some workers organizations have become willing participants in the imposition of austerity, while others have sought to delay or modify austerity measures via formal political channels. Yet others, most especially the Communist and syndicalist union federations, have identified austerity as an attempt by capital to shift the costs of the crisis onto workers and have refused to acquiesce to labor oppression or control via austerity. Moreover, some organizations have forged links with square occupation movements such as the indignados via the use of unorthodox tactics and democratic organizational methods. Traditional social movement analysis might look to the ideological or organizational aspects of the organizations themselves, and the more recent political opportunity structure and political mediation approaches would seek to explain these outcomes by laying out the local state context in which they contend. In reality, neither of these approaches can explain how both labor oppression and mobilization are effected by ostensibly similar worker organizations across the continent. Instead, formal comparative methods such as QCA and ESA can be used within an incorporating comparative method in order to address these outcomes from a world-historical perspective. Only an analysis carried forward on multiple temporal and spatial levels can properly situate the worker organizations of Europe and the crisis itself within the history of the world-economy. The results of long-term processes of capitalist development such as the Eurozone’s neomercantilist core-periphery structure and the global financialization of late US hegemony can be related to, and thus become essential to understanding, how worker organizations come to aid or resist capitalist attempts at crisis management.