The New Internationalists
Immanuel Ness, Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class
Pluto Press, 226pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780745335995
reviewed by Daniel Whittall
Neoliberal capitalism can appear a complex beast, but recent happenings have laid bare its central dynamics. An Indian-owned multinational announces plans to sell off its steelworks in Port Talbot, Wales, because of the collapsing global steel prices driven by the dumping of cheap, often lower-grade steel produced in factories run by the Chinese State. In doing so, it blames environmental regulations and high overhead costs. Neoliberal theory has traded off the idea that it unleashes market forces, removing the obstructions of the State, and market forces have certainly played their part in price collapses and in the decisions by global companies to shift their manufacturing operations South towards countries where labour costs and regulations are more advantageous. Yet the State has not sat idly by in all this. The Chinese state has been driving the overproduction of steel; the UK government has lobbied to ensure that the EU’s inter-state institutions didn’t raise tariffs against cheap Chinese steel imports.
The backdrop to these machinations between states and corporations is and always has been the workers so easily taken for granted by capital’s global flows. A global shift in industrialised labour has been ongoing for decades. At the one end workers in the developed economies have been left squabbling over scraps – increasingly precarious work, declining welfare support, all the while accompanied by rampant increases in the cost of living – in a manner that has forced some to respond by scapegoating those even more vulnerable: migrants, racialised others, the unemployed. Their governments and trade unions, meanwhile, have singularly failed to protect, and have often been complicit in the collapse of, the industries on which their livelihoods depended.
Meanwhile, at the other end of capital’s flows stands a working class still in formation. The oppressive conditions embodied by industrialisation are captured poignantly by the poetry of Xu Lizhi, a Chinese worker employed by Foxconn, the technology manufacturing firm most well-known for its role in the production of Apple gadgets. Xu’s poetry makes plain the immiseration experienced by many in China’s vast swathe of rural-to-urban migrants who have fled to the cities, often escaping collapsing livelihoods in the countryside, to take up work. Take Xu’s 2013 poem ‘Rented room’:
Xu’s articulation of the physical and the psychological damage wrought by industrialisation is made all the more painful when read alongside the story of his own suicide in 2014. As Chinese urbanisation proceeds apace, itself a force for the accumulation of capital as the construction of the infrastructure for vast new cities drives growth in the enormous Chinese construction industry, a new scale of urban life emerges. According to a 2015 World Bank report the Pearl River Delta, a largely rural area until the 1970s which then saw the establishment of several low-tax Special Economic Zones in the 1980s designed to attract foreign-owned multinationals, is now the largest city in the world, with a population larger than that of countries like Canada and Argentina.
With the trials and tribulations of industrial workers in developed economies paired with the immiseration of those in developing economies, it is at first jarring to read Immanuel Ness assert, in Southern Insurgency, that ‘the working class has a heartbeat and is stronger than ever before.’ Taking China, India and South Africa as his case studies, Ness has produced an important account of the dynamics of global working class struggle and its role in contemporary capitalist globalisation. But can he really be right that labour struggles are today stronger than ever before?
Ness begins by outlining the contours of what he terms ‘the new international working class.’ As capital found a spatial fix to its crises of the 1970s and 1980s, breaking whatever strength labour in the developed economies had accrued by largely withdrawing manufacturing and industrial production and shifting it wholesale to underdeveloped economies in the global South, so too did it initiate a complex recomposition of the global working class. In doing so it has created a working class that ‘substantially overshadows the historical size of the working class of mass production in the Global North’. Not only has capital reconfigured social life in countries like China, where ‘cities become the cradle of economic insecurity for urban dwellers and recent migrants’, but it has also stimulated the lively formation of novel strategies and tactics for working class resistance, including the use of worker assemblies, the establishment of independent trade unions, and the application of pressure upon traditional, hidebound, often state-led trade unions. On such contradictions does the versatility of capitalism rest.
The recomposition of global capital has also fundamentally transformed the dynamics of contemporary migration and human mobility. Ness theorises an historical-materialist approach to labour migration whereby the uneven development of capitalism produces regional concentrations of surplus populations. As the recognition of their superfluity dawns on them, Ness argues that ‘workers are driven from impoverished locations in the Global South to new locations of commodified capital accumulation in their home countries and the Global North’. This schema may simplify the real human stories that underlie global migration, but it neatly captures the operative structural forces.
If the recomposition of global capitalism has had implications for the mobility of the global working class, it has also shaped the characteristics of that class in different ways in different parts of the world. Ness tracks the specific dynamics of capital accumulation in three different industries through three countries, and explores the changing contours of labour militancy in each. In India he explores struggles amongst workers in the automotive industries, and especially in the manufacturing plants of Maruti Suzuki. Here, low-wage contract labourers have been used by the company to try to keep down wages amongst its more permanent employees, but workers have responded by setting up new trade unions and striking in solidarity actions aimed at improving conditions and wages for all scales of worker, rather than falling into the trap of dividing their struggles between those of the permanent and the contract-labour employees.
In China, Ness looks to the Taiwanese shoe-making firm Yue Yuen, and the labour militancy it has faced in the Pearl River Delta. The China chapter is the books best, bringing together the global transformation of capitalism with a study of the particular national characteristics of Chinese capital accumulation and resulting working class struggles, teasing out the specific dynamics of these struggles through those in the Pearl River delta. Here as elsewhere in China a tension has arisen between the national All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and the struggles of its members. A national, government-organised union federation, the ACFTU unites struggles across public and private sectors. Yet its close connections to the Chinese Communist Party mean that it is also wary of overly-militant activism. The ACFTU tries to walk a fine line between capital and labour, and the establishment of independent unions in China is banned. Yet the ACFTU has to protect the rights of striking Chinese workers, so reprisals from firms against militant workers can be limited. Recognising this, Chinese workers have struck in ever-larger numbers in recent years, driving up wages and accruing improved working conditions. As Ness writes, ‘more than 25 years after the Tiananmen Square protest, the contemporary workers’ movement has become the foundation of activism that is challenging bureaucratic state institutions and foreign capital.’
Finally, in a shorter chapter Ness analyses the background to the Marikana strike and massacre in the mining industry of South Africa. Here, workers have formed independent unions in the face of resistance from traditional unions to militant struggles, and a significant split has been established within the South African labour movement, especially around the mining industry. Despite confronting massive state violence South African miners have won improvements in wages and conditions, and have posed a political challenge to the ruling ANC party and to traditional unions as much as an economic challenge to the exploitative practices of the global mining industry.
Ness’s strategy of treating each country separately, of focusing on different industries across each country, and of drawing out the specific national and local conditions that constitute his global panorama of labour migration, capital flows and industrial militancy make this an important book for any effort to understand the present state both of global capital, and of workers’ struggles against oppression. His is an optimistic account, but there are signs of some more worrying trends leading into the future. Several companies are already searching actively for their next spatial fix, the next country they can outsource work to in the event that labour costs continue to rise in China especially. Whilst it may well be the case that, as Ashok Kumar and Alex Gawenda argue, the world economy simply cannot relocate to new sites of production anymore because no country quite brings together the specifically-Chinese combination of autocratic political structure, massive population, and ability to invest in and develop the infrastructure required for an export-oriented economy, nevertheless there remains scope for specific labour struggles to be neutered by capital’s ability to shift production around the world. Labour struggles in the global South are squeezing the contradictions of capitalism, potentially to their limits.
It is unsurprising, then, that some are turning instead to a potential technological fix. Management at Foxconn, where Xu Lizhi was driven to suicide by the awful working conditions, have been so stung by labour struggles that they have announced their intentions to replace employees with one million robots. China is now the world centre for industrial robotic purchases. Yet Chinese social and economic order is not so well developed as to be able to cast out vast numbers of workers without massive social strife. Automation is coming, and will doubtless transform global working class struggles in ways not fully discussed by Ness.
Ness is right to argue that the scale and significance of global working class struggle is more important than it has been for generations, and that the outcomes of those struggles will be largely driven by the way in which the tensions between capital and labour in the global South are resolved. We are moving into new terrain, wherein capitalism’s inability to resolve its own crises is opening opportunities around the world. Yet these opportunities are equally under threat by capital’s own constant striving for solutions – the future may not be as optimistic as Ness hopes. Nevertheless, as the global economy continues its long slump global capital will become increasingly desperate. Already the Port Talbot steel crisis has brought calls for the nationalisation of strategic industries back onto the table in Britain, to the horror of many in the political and media establishments. It may be too soon to skate over capitalism’s contradictions in the global North, as Ness sometimes does. Global capitalism is in for some bumpy years, but it is through books like Southern Insurgency that we can better understand where we are today, and how to move beyond it.
The backdrop to these machinations between states and corporations is and always has been the workers so easily taken for granted by capital’s global flows. A global shift in industrialised labour has been ongoing for decades. At the one end workers in the developed economies have been left squabbling over scraps – increasingly precarious work, declining welfare support, all the while accompanied by rampant increases in the cost of living – in a manner that has forced some to respond by scapegoating those even more vulnerable: migrants, racialised others, the unemployed. Their governments and trade unions, meanwhile, have singularly failed to protect, and have often been complicit in the collapse of, the industries on which their livelihoods depended.
Meanwhile, at the other end of capital’s flows stands a working class still in formation. The oppressive conditions embodied by industrialisation are captured poignantly by the poetry of Xu Lizhi, a Chinese worker employed by Foxconn, the technology manufacturing firm most well-known for its role in the production of Apple gadgets. Xu’s poetry makes plain the immiseration experienced by many in China’s vast swathe of rural-to-urban migrants who have fled to the cities, often escaping collapsing livelihoods in the countryside, to take up work. Take Xu’s 2013 poem ‘Rented room’:
A space of ten square meters
Cramped and damp, no sunlight all year
Here I eat, sleep, shit, and think
Cough, get headaches, grow old, get sick but still fail to die
Under the dull yellow light again I stare blankly, chuckling like an idiot
I pace back and forth, singing softly, reading, writing poems
Every time I open the window or the wicker gate
I seem like a dead man
Slowly pushing open the lid of a coffin
Xu’s articulation of the physical and the psychological damage wrought by industrialisation is made all the more painful when read alongside the story of his own suicide in 2014. As Chinese urbanisation proceeds apace, itself a force for the accumulation of capital as the construction of the infrastructure for vast new cities drives growth in the enormous Chinese construction industry, a new scale of urban life emerges. According to a 2015 World Bank report the Pearl River Delta, a largely rural area until the 1970s which then saw the establishment of several low-tax Special Economic Zones in the 1980s designed to attract foreign-owned multinationals, is now the largest city in the world, with a population larger than that of countries like Canada and Argentina.
With the trials and tribulations of industrial workers in developed economies paired with the immiseration of those in developing economies, it is at first jarring to read Immanuel Ness assert, in Southern Insurgency, that ‘the working class has a heartbeat and is stronger than ever before.’ Taking China, India and South Africa as his case studies, Ness has produced an important account of the dynamics of global working class struggle and its role in contemporary capitalist globalisation. But can he really be right that labour struggles are today stronger than ever before?
Ness begins by outlining the contours of what he terms ‘the new international working class.’ As capital found a spatial fix to its crises of the 1970s and 1980s, breaking whatever strength labour in the developed economies had accrued by largely withdrawing manufacturing and industrial production and shifting it wholesale to underdeveloped economies in the global South, so too did it initiate a complex recomposition of the global working class. In doing so it has created a working class that ‘substantially overshadows the historical size of the working class of mass production in the Global North’. Not only has capital reconfigured social life in countries like China, where ‘cities become the cradle of economic insecurity for urban dwellers and recent migrants’, but it has also stimulated the lively formation of novel strategies and tactics for working class resistance, including the use of worker assemblies, the establishment of independent trade unions, and the application of pressure upon traditional, hidebound, often state-led trade unions. On such contradictions does the versatility of capitalism rest.
The recomposition of global capital has also fundamentally transformed the dynamics of contemporary migration and human mobility. Ness theorises an historical-materialist approach to labour migration whereby the uneven development of capitalism produces regional concentrations of surplus populations. As the recognition of their superfluity dawns on them, Ness argues that ‘workers are driven from impoverished locations in the Global South to new locations of commodified capital accumulation in their home countries and the Global North’. This schema may simplify the real human stories that underlie global migration, but it neatly captures the operative structural forces.
If the recomposition of global capitalism has had implications for the mobility of the global working class, it has also shaped the characteristics of that class in different ways in different parts of the world. Ness tracks the specific dynamics of capital accumulation in three different industries through three countries, and explores the changing contours of labour militancy in each. In India he explores struggles amongst workers in the automotive industries, and especially in the manufacturing plants of Maruti Suzuki. Here, low-wage contract labourers have been used by the company to try to keep down wages amongst its more permanent employees, but workers have responded by setting up new trade unions and striking in solidarity actions aimed at improving conditions and wages for all scales of worker, rather than falling into the trap of dividing their struggles between those of the permanent and the contract-labour employees.
In China, Ness looks to the Taiwanese shoe-making firm Yue Yuen, and the labour militancy it has faced in the Pearl River Delta. The China chapter is the books best, bringing together the global transformation of capitalism with a study of the particular national characteristics of Chinese capital accumulation and resulting working class struggles, teasing out the specific dynamics of these struggles through those in the Pearl River delta. Here as elsewhere in China a tension has arisen between the national All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and the struggles of its members. A national, government-organised union federation, the ACFTU unites struggles across public and private sectors. Yet its close connections to the Chinese Communist Party mean that it is also wary of overly-militant activism. The ACFTU tries to walk a fine line between capital and labour, and the establishment of independent unions in China is banned. Yet the ACFTU has to protect the rights of striking Chinese workers, so reprisals from firms against militant workers can be limited. Recognising this, Chinese workers have struck in ever-larger numbers in recent years, driving up wages and accruing improved working conditions. As Ness writes, ‘more than 25 years after the Tiananmen Square protest, the contemporary workers’ movement has become the foundation of activism that is challenging bureaucratic state institutions and foreign capital.’
Finally, in a shorter chapter Ness analyses the background to the Marikana strike and massacre in the mining industry of South Africa. Here, workers have formed independent unions in the face of resistance from traditional unions to militant struggles, and a significant split has been established within the South African labour movement, especially around the mining industry. Despite confronting massive state violence South African miners have won improvements in wages and conditions, and have posed a political challenge to the ruling ANC party and to traditional unions as much as an economic challenge to the exploitative practices of the global mining industry.
Ness’s strategy of treating each country separately, of focusing on different industries across each country, and of drawing out the specific national and local conditions that constitute his global panorama of labour migration, capital flows and industrial militancy make this an important book for any effort to understand the present state both of global capital, and of workers’ struggles against oppression. His is an optimistic account, but there are signs of some more worrying trends leading into the future. Several companies are already searching actively for their next spatial fix, the next country they can outsource work to in the event that labour costs continue to rise in China especially. Whilst it may well be the case that, as Ashok Kumar and Alex Gawenda argue, the world economy simply cannot relocate to new sites of production anymore because no country quite brings together the specifically-Chinese combination of autocratic political structure, massive population, and ability to invest in and develop the infrastructure required for an export-oriented economy, nevertheless there remains scope for specific labour struggles to be neutered by capital’s ability to shift production around the world. Labour struggles in the global South are squeezing the contradictions of capitalism, potentially to their limits.
It is unsurprising, then, that some are turning instead to a potential technological fix. Management at Foxconn, where Xu Lizhi was driven to suicide by the awful working conditions, have been so stung by labour struggles that they have announced their intentions to replace employees with one million robots. China is now the world centre for industrial robotic purchases. Yet Chinese social and economic order is not so well developed as to be able to cast out vast numbers of workers without massive social strife. Automation is coming, and will doubtless transform global working class struggles in ways not fully discussed by Ness.
Ness is right to argue that the scale and significance of global working class struggle is more important than it has been for generations, and that the outcomes of those struggles will be largely driven by the way in which the tensions between capital and labour in the global South are resolved. We are moving into new terrain, wherein capitalism’s inability to resolve its own crises is opening opportunities around the world. Yet these opportunities are equally under threat by capital’s own constant striving for solutions – the future may not be as optimistic as Ness hopes. Nevertheless, as the global economy continues its long slump global capital will become increasingly desperate. Already the Port Talbot steel crisis has brought calls for the nationalisation of strategic industries back onto the table in Britain, to the horror of many in the political and media establishments. It may be too soon to skate over capitalism’s contradictions in the global North, as Ness sometimes does. Global capitalism is in for some bumpy years, but it is through books like Southern Insurgency that we can better understand where we are today, and how to move beyond it.