Workers North and South

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the relationship between the unevenness of capitalist development on a world scale and processes of working-class formation both before and during the current crisis. Our main argument is that, contrary to widespread opinion, the so-called North-South divide continues to constitute (as it has throughout the twentieth century) the main obstacle to the formation of a homogeneous world proletarian condition. In spite of the relocation of industrial activities from North to South typical of the current crisis, conditions of working-class formation remain thoroughly dependent on the huge and still widening gap that separates the wealth, status and power of a relatively small number of Western countries from those of the countries that contain the vast majority of the world's population. Any meaningful attempt to reconstruct socialist politics must put the overcoming of this gap at the centre of its theoretical and practical concerns.