Classes finished up last week. One of the things I was teaching this semester was undergraduate economic history, which I hadn’t done in some years. (Perhaps I’ll have more to post on the class later.)
Our main books this time were Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, which I’ve used several times in this class; and Jonathan Levy’s Ages of American Capitalism and Joshua Freeman’s Behemoth, neither of which I had read before.
Behemoth is a history of the factory; the final chapter is on present-day factories in Vietnam and China, which are probably the largest factories that have ever existed. It’s a fascinating account, with a lot of details I hadn’t heard before. I was astonished to learn, for example, that all the iPads are made at a single facility in Chengdu.
A more interesting question is why these factories are so big. The answer, Freeman stresses, is not any sort of technical advantage. These giant factories in general are organized with small groups of workers doing the same tasks in parallel, independently of each other; there’s nothing like the division of labor that you have on an auto assembly line. Rather than economies of scale, he argues, the main reason production is concentrated in a few giant factories is to allow them to be more responsive to the changing demands of their clients, the Western companies whose subcontractors they are. As with giant factories through history, the impetus for concentrating workers in one facility is about centralizing authority and not just technical efficience, as people like Stephen Marglin and David Noble (or Levy in his chapter on River Rouge) have emphasized.
A question I posed to the class is: Is there any connection between China’s industrial success today and their earlier revolution? Is the fact that China had one of the 20th century’s greatest political revolutions connected to the fact that it is one of the 21st century’s greatest industrial-policy success stories? There was a bit of debate on this – some people pointed to the uniquely egalitarian organization of earlier Chinese factories, where workers discussed how to organize production, and even managers were required to spend time doing routine manual work. But others noted, correctly, that Foxconn isn’t anything like that – there are bosses who give orders just like everywhere else.
The picture you get from Behemoth and other careful accounts of modern Chinese factories is, in many ways, of a country that is following the same path that was blazed in Manchester andLowell and Detroit, albeit on a larger scale. This is, of course, a useful corrective to hysterical claims about industrialization based on slave labor and market manipulation, from people who ought to know better. But it’s a bit distressing if you would have hoped that the titanic struggles of the Chinese Revolution might have opened up a different road.
One way to think about whether, or how, the revolution mattered, I suggested, is to think about the counterfactual. We could look back at China 100 years ago – backward, riven by civil war, subjugated by Europe and Japan, desperately poor – and think that only some kind of radical political project could have rebuilt the country. Or in a longer view, we could say that for most of recorded history China has been one of the most advanced, prosperous and politically stable regions on Earth, so it’s hardly surprising that it would be returning to something like that position. Which of those seems more reasonable?
After they’d gone back and forth on that for a while, I asked them if they knew what major battle we’d just passed the 70th anniversary of. No one knew; I wouldn’t have expected them to. It’s Dien Bien Phu, I said. The decisive defeat of the French by the Viet Minh, the moment when Europeans were shocked to discover that they could be defeated by a backward, non-Western people in open battle. It was a major step in Vietnam’s road to full independence, and to the end of colonial empires all over the world – one of the most important battles of the 20th century. One of the biggest victories, one might say, for the liberation of humanity. And yet now Vietnam is manufacturing shoes for Nike just like everyone else.
So, did it matter? In the long run, do these titanic struggles between classes and nations make any difference? Do they really change how production is organized, and for what, and by whom?
I ended the class there. But one might add that how you feel about whether Dien Bien Phu is worth commemorating is probably as good a marker as any of the boundaries of radical politics. Does progress come through struggle — sometimes violent, always disruptive against the established order? (And in these struggles, has America and “the West” been on the side of human liberation, or the other side?) Or does progress, if it happens, happen incrementally, on its own, regardless of who wins the battles?
ETA: I should have mentioned this essay by the Chilean socialist Manuel Riesco, which struggle with this same question. His answer is in the transition to capitalist modernity requires a popular revolutionary movement, especially in the periphery.
It may be useful to start from the hypothesis that the epoch of the twentieth century has been no different in character from that of the nineteenth century: that is, that right up to today we have been living through the period of transition from the old agrarian, aristocratic society to capitalist modernity. In this view of things, the revolutions of the twentieth century have not been anti-capitalist (despite the wishes or programmes of their protagonists and the fears of some of their enemies) but rather the same as the revolutions of the last century.
This hypothesis makes it possible … to claim that those revolutionary processes were progressive and ultimately successful, even though they culminated not as they said they would but, curiously enough, in the opposite way…
… the mass of people…, when called upon to act in each of these transitions to modernity, burst onto the stage and generally cut down what was rotten to its very roots. It was this which cleared the way for the new to be born. …
The leading role of the people does not define only one moment in the transition to modernity. … It may be that a much more complex analysis of the world-wide transition to capitalist modernity will regard that heroic moment as an irruption of the people necessary for the process to advance from one to another of its discrete phases. …
Perhaps we could say today that Jacobinism, in the broad sense given to it here, was a characteristic and appropriate political form in certain popular phases of the transition to capitalist modernity. In this sense, its progressive role has been gigantic. … It is to Salvador Allende, Jacobin president of Chile, more than to anyone else, that the modern nation it is coming to be owes its existence. The monument he deserves will be built sooner rather than later, ‘más temprano que tarde’, in the cities and hearts of his people.
It reminds me a bit, on rereading, of some of Rubashov’s musings towards the end of Darkness at Noon. But then Koestler, in that book, was more than a little “of the devil’s party without knowing it.”
About the giant factories down the supply chain, I’m reminded of the argument Bowles and Gintis (I think) made about worker coops. WC’s are at a disadvantage in acquiring capital through either debt or equity channels because providers want what we could call a concentrated point of accountability. They don’t want to negotiate with a large or amorphous group of agents but one single agent, on whom contractual obligations can be readily enforced. So maybe a similar logic works with supply chains, and one cohesive supplier is preferred to a network. (But this is predicated on the attenuation of authority across facilities: true or false?)
As for the second question, I think both supporters and opponents of capitalism underestimate how adaptable and resilient the system is. It can accommodate itself to socialist and communist regimes, and fascist ones too. It can operate with substantial egalitarianism or vast differences in income and power. There can be much better and much worse capitalisms. Of course, there are abiding strengths and deficiencies that give it its historical character. I’ve come to believe that there won’t be a viable socialism (or whatever we’ll choose to call it) unless it is roughly as flexible and accommodating as capitalism has proved to be.
Hi Peter.
Concentrated point of accountability is a good way of framing it, and fits Freeman’s description. The issue, as I understand it, isn’t just attenuation of authority in the sense of independent sites of decision-making, but also the speed with which orders can be communicated and acted on. And that is, I suppose, faster if everything is in a single facility.
This goes with point that was really reinforced to me rereading Beckert this semester, which is how much the social transformations brought on by capitalism are about *flexibility*, as opposed to lower costs or higher profits per se. The advantage of slave labor over free labor in production of staples like cotton, in his telling – and it fits with other things I have read – isn’t that slaves are “free” — bound peasants who provide for their own subsistence needs might even be cheaper. The unique advantage of slave labor is that it can be freely moved across space and activities, which more socially embedded forms of labor cannot be, or not so easily.
That connects to your second point. I agree on your description of capitalism. But I would take it a different direction. I think socialism becomes possible (in all sorts of sites in the present, and not just in a hypothetical future) where flexibility is less of a priority compared with other things.
IMHO, both the communist and fascist regimes (and fascist-like, like pre-ww2 Japan) of the 20th century were a consequence of the passage from an agrarian to an industrial economy.
So: yes there is a connection between the communist revolution in China and the current situation where China is a sort of state-capitalist country, but it is not due to the revolution being anticapitalist. IMHO.
Sure, a connection in that sense. But the question I was trying to get my students to think about, and that bothers me, is a slightly different one: In a counterfactual world where the Nationalists had won the Chinese Civil War, how different do we think China would look today?
After some thinking: we can’t know, probably something would be different, but it is different to know what.
Speaking of the general “determinism” problem that exists in marxian theory, I think that the best solution for it is this: economic and social forces cause some specific social problems (this is the deterministic part), but it is up to the people living in the period to find a solution (the non deterministic part). However since the problem is the same the solutions might be similar even for people who ostensibly are on the opposite sides.
The most extreme example is that in Japan, when the Shogun was forced to open the commerce with the westerners, the traditionalist party sided with the emperor, and after some fighting the emperor after many centuries took effective power on Japan, but then the emperor started the Meiji restoration and in practice did the opposite of what the traditionalist wanted.
Thanks. Thanks a lot