Beverly Silver: Forces of Labor

Beverly Silver’s Forces of Labor uses world-systems theory to examine the history of workers’ movements in the 20th century and to evaluate the prospects for the revival of substantial labor unrest in the 21st century. Silver begins by addressing the widespread belief that the labor movement has been “in a general and severe crisis,” if not total decline, since the 1970s. Rather than offering one more obituary for the working class, Silver proposes to examine the issue from “a longer historical and wider geographical frame of analysis.” Like her husband Giovanni Arrighi, Silver uses the deep and broad perspective of world-systems theory to assess the novelty of the apparent decline of labor militancy in recent decades. One of the most common assumptions about globalization is that it creates an economic “race to the bottom.” In a globally unified labor market, capital can always relocate to cheaper and more manageable regions. As a result, labor’s bargaining power is severely weakened and wages and working conditions worldwide converge upon the lowest levels found in the world-system. This mobility of capital also undermines state sovereignty by threatening states that agree to costly social-welfare compacts with capital flight to other countries. New post-Fordist forms of organization also undermine traditional forms of workplace solidarity by spreading workers across heterogeneous, geographically dispersed networks. Silver argues that these well-known criticisms of globalization need to be approached with some skepticism. She points out that data shows that the majority of international capital movement continues to be between high-income countries, not from high- to low-income ones. In the new regions to which capital has moved, strong new labor movements have typically appeared in response. And there is evidence that post-Fordist “just-in-time (JIL) production increases the vulnerability of capital to disruptions in the flow of production, and thus can enhance workers’ bargaining power based on direct action at the point of production.” Finally, state sovereignty may have much more power and flexibility than is admitted by those who assert “there is no alternative” (TINA). Another common assumption about globalization is that it is in the middle of generating a “single homogeneous world working class with similar (and unpalatable) conditions of work and life.” At the end of this process, a global proletariat (or the multitude) will confront a transnational capitalist class. A more restrained version of this argument maintains that a new labor internationalism is necessary because multinational corporations must be confronted by labor militancy in every country in which they operate. Silver once again argues that these commonplaces need to be more carefully evaluated. She points out that “recent empirical research on world income inequality is not easy to square with the image of an emergent homogeneous global working class-in-itself.” Also, if the weakness of the state in the face of capital mobility is revealed to be a myth, support for national policies, especially in the key states in the world-system, might be more effective than labor internationalism. At this point, Silver turns to Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi to theorize the historical transformation of labor movements. For Polanyi, labor, like land and money, is a “fictitious commodity” because it is not produced for sale on the market. Each time capital attempts to treat labor as a commodity (as is the case when liberalism and neoliberalism predominate), its destructiveness provokes a protective response, a struggle for the “decommodification” of labor, a push for greater recognition of the human needs and desires of the worker. This decommodification of labor increases the capitalist’s costs and eventually strains profitability, leading to a new round of commodification of labor, producing a new protective response, and so on. For Marx, the capitalist purchases labor-power as a commodity, but soon finds out that this commodity is not like others because it is embodied in human beings who struggle within and against the capitalist’s organization of the production process. The history of the development of production is therefore a “shifting terrain of labor-capital” conflict, in which “new agencies and sites of conflict emerge along with new demands and forms of struggle.” Silver concludes, “while our reading of Polanyi suggest a pendular movement (or repetition), our reading of Marx suggests a succession of stages in which the organization of production (and hence the working class and the terrain on which it struggles) is continually and fundamentally transformed).” Silver makes use of both models of historical development, arguing, “The insight that labor and labor movements are continually made and remade provides an important antidote against the common tendency to be overly rigid in specifying who the working class is. . . . Thus, rather than seeing an ‘historically superseded’ movement . . . or a ‘residual endangered species’ . . . our eyes are open to the early signs of new working class formation as well as ‘backlash’ resistance from those working classes that are being ‘unmade.’” But Silver adds that this “temporal dynamic is deeply intertwined with a spatial dynamic. . . . the periodic oscillation over time between phases tending toward the commodification and de-commodification of labor is intertwined with an ongoing process of spatial differentiation among geographical areas with regard to the level/intensity of labor commodification.” Blanket statements about globalization need to be replaced with a careful examination of the expansion and transformation of the structure of the world-system. Specific cases must be thought in relation to both time and space: “this book attempts to create a narrative of working-class formation in which events unfold in dynamic time-space.” Silver’s first chapter examines the effects of capital mobility by looking at the history of the automobile industry. With very few exceptions, the automobile industry has produced a strong labor movement wherever it has opened up production facilities. The automobile industry has repeatedly responded to labor unrest by relocating to other regions across the globe. But rather than creating a “race to the bottom,” these spatial shifts have reproduced the same “social contradictions,” the same kind of strong labor movements. As David Harvey would put it, capital “’reschedules crises’; it does not permanently resolve them.” Silver concludes, “it appears that corporations in the automobile industry have been chasing the mirage of cheap and disciplined labor around the world, only to find themselves continuously recreating militant labor movements in the new locations. Rather than providing a permanent spatial fix to the problems of profitability and labor control, relocation has only succeeded in geographically relocating the contradictions from one site of production to another.” This historical pattern leads Silver to expect future labor unrest in the automobile industry: “If past dynamics are a guide to future trends, then we have good reasons to expect the emergence of strong, independent autoworkers’ movement in Mexico and China during the coming decade.” Silver does admit that by the 1980s automobile industries had turned to a “technological fix,” the introduction of post-Fordist organizational forms adapted from Japan. But whereas the “Toyotist” model offered employment security, at least to a certain core labor force, the “lean and mean” post-Fordism that spread across the globe did not offer such security, and therefore was not very capable of obtaining “active cooperation of the workforce.” She adds that just-in-time production, which reduces inventories to a minimum, has been demonstrated to make post-Fordist organizations vulnerable to direct action by labor. Silver’s next chapter investigates the effects of what she terms the “product fix.” “Capitalists respond to a squeeze on profits in a given industry, with geographical relocation (a spatial fix) or process innovations (a technological/organizational fix), but they also attempt to shift capital into new innovative and more profitable product lines and industries. This product fix involves relocating capital from industries and product lines subject to intense competition to new and/or less-crowded industries and product lines. Successive new labor movements have risen (and established labor movements declined) with these shifts.” But the success of a product fix and the labor movement it generates heavily depends on their position within the world-system. Wealthier countries tend to move into new products early in the “product cycle,” when “competitive pressures are low and thus costs are relatively unimportant.” In these wealthier countries, labor unrest, at least temporarily, can be contained by offering more concessions to labor. But when a spatial fix occurs and the industry is relocated, the new location is typically less able to offer such concessions because competition increasingly cuts into profit as the product cycle matures and the new locations tend to be poorer nations. As Silver shows elsewhere in the book, the inequality of the global North and South is therefore reproduced, not eliminated, by globalization. The automobile industry replaced the textile industry as the leading industry for most of the twentieth century. What product fix will dominate the 21st century is less clear, though Silver investigates the semiconductor, producer services, personal services, and education industries as potential successors to the automobile industry. Silver’s third chapter turns to world politics and repeats the fundamental claims of Giovanni Arrighi’s work. She offers a particularly nice account of the relative capital-labor accord in the two decades following WW II. The diminishment of labor unrest was brought about partially by “deep institutional reforms at the firm, national, and especially global levels that partially de-commodified labor.” However, these efforts “proceeded along the knife’s edge between a major crisis of profitability, due to the costs of the reforms, and a major crisis of legitimacy, due to the failure to deliver on the promised reforms fully. This contradiction eventually exploded in the crisis of the 1970s.” Three disastrous decades of neoliberalism and financialization followed. Nonetheless, “The world-scale dislocations of established ways of life and livelihood caused by this late-twentieth-century swing toward unregulated markets is once again producing a deep crisis of social legitimacy for world capitalism. Whether the crisis of social legitimacy is (will become) sufficiently troublesome to the world’s elites so as to provoke a new swing of the pendulum back toward an emphasis on livelihood and security remains to be seen.” But this cannot simply be a return to the institutions of the early postwar era, whose contradictions were never resolved and whose environmental limits and social inequalities have become all the more evident. Silver instead concludes with a veiled call for communism: “Thus the ultimate challenge faced by the workers of the world in the early twenty-first century is the struggle, not just against one’s own exploitation and exclusion, but for an international regime that truly subordinates profits to the livelihood of all.”