Baba Aye's

NEO-LIBERAL GLOBALIZATION IN THE 21st CENTURY: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS FOR THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT Being a paper presented at the December 20 – 22, 2006, Public Services International Workshop on “The future of Public Sector Unions in Nigeria” Kaduna – Nigeria by Baba Aye, National Auditor, LP INTRODUCTION We wish to start by commending the apt theme of this workshop: “Workers in the changing world of work”. We have however, taken the liberty to re-phrase this paper’s title. This is for the following reasons. “Trade union survival” really is very important, considering the onslaught of neo-liberal globalisation’s “for-profit’ crusade which is rolling back both the state and rights won through two hundred years of struggle by workers and their trade unions. Job losses are reflected in dwindling unions’ memberships. “Doctrinaire free-market ideologies” are setting new bench-marks of values, institutional relevance and power balances not exactly favourable to the union movement in the “wo

ON MARXISM AND GLOBALISM A preliminary outline by Baba Aye "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways – the point is to change it" Karl Marx Theses on Feurbach INTRODUCTION The documented history of communistic thoughts and ideas could be traced to the "collectivist doctrines from Plato" (1). These stemming from an Athenian democracy that had freemen and slaves held in thrall i.e. a socially stratified society or a class divided socio-economic formation as it were, it is believed in some quarters could have been a mediated reflection of the preserved memory of "earlier, more just, more equal societies" or what is considered as "primitive communism" (2) A number of the major religions in the world also have their roots in that period of the subsuming of "primitive communism" by forces unleashed by