Full text: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/anthropos-and-the-material/Intranet/economic-practices/reading-group/texts/tsing-supply-chains-and-the-human-condition.pdf

Abstract: “This article theorizes supply chain capitalism as a model for understanding both the continent-crossing scale and the constitutive diversity of contemporary global capitalism. In contrast with theories of growing capitalist homogeneity, the analysis points to the structural role of difference in the mobilization of capital, labor, and resources. Here labor mobilization in supply chains is the focus, as it depends on the performance of gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and citizenship status. The article uses the concept of figuration to show how difference is mobilized within supply chains, and to point to the importance of tropes of management, consumption, and entrepreneurship in workers’ understandings of supply chain labor. These tropes make supply chains possible by bringing together self-exploitation and superexploitation. Diversity is thus structurally central to global capitalism, and not decoration on a common core.”

Some of the examples given are:

  • Walmart and fake Christian values, such as “allowing” people to prioritize church and family to justify irregular hours and starvation wages.
  • Textile companies moved “their assembly plants abroad to match the superior sewing skills of women in the global South. These skills, the managers told her, are learned at home, not on the job. ‘This paradoxical framing of skill makes women’s ‘disadvantages’ in the labor market at least a temporary advantage.’”
  • Nominally “nonwork” work, such as U.S. chicken farmer entrepreneurs, FedEx drivers, and matsutake mushroom pickers.

IMO a good way of framing the analysis is supply chains being a useful basis of analysis for understanding capitalism. This is similar to how Marxism views the factory, although Tsing’s thesis is not as ambitious.

Disclaimer: It's the first time I've read something like this, but I read the article 3 times to try and not mischaracterize it.

Part 1/2

Terms

  • Supply chain capitalism: “Subcontracting, outsourcing, and allied arrangements'' (enterprises that are legally autonomous, but not actually). This has happened since the 1990s
  • Superexploitation: “Exploitation that depends on so-called noneconomic factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and citizenship status”
    • Other terms for “so-called economic factors” are “identity” and “cultural identity”
  • Self-exploitation: Self-inflicted exploitation
  • Figuration
    • “Firms distance themselves from labor victories of the past by outsourcing and resignifying work outside of earlier labor struggles”
    • Configuration without the “con,” meaning “together.” Because supply chains are fragmented, they “figure” without “configuring.” (thanks /u/Nagarjuna)

Introduction

  • Analyzing supply chain capitalism grants insight into contemporary global capitalism
    • Supply chain capitalism
      • Supply chain capitalism is not the only contemporary form of global capitalism. Other examples include finance and giant, centralized corporations
      • Supply chain capitalism is not necessarily more diverse, but supply chain capitalists consider diversity because they link up dissimilar firms
      • Outsourcing relies on:
        • New technologies to communicate and send commodities quickly and reliably
        • New financial arrangements
        • Mobile labor and economic/political vulnerabilities created by imperialism
        • “Creative” accounting
      • This outsourcing is pressured by stockholders
    • Types of mobilization: labor, nature, and capital
      • This paper focuses on labor mobilization, which depends on performance of identities (gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and citizenship status)
        • Heterogeneity of identities is mobilized in supply chains
    • Superexploitation
      • Labor, nature, and capital are mobilized in fragmented but linked economic niches
      • Supply chains are made possible by the blurring between the lines of superexploitation and self-exploitation
        • Thus, diversity is a central part of the structure of global capitalism, not a contingency
    • Supply chain diversity is influenced by both inside and outside the supply chain
      • “No firm has to personally invent patriarchy”

Thinking Big

  • Theories tend to either:
    • Try to find a single, homogenous, underlying structure
      • e.g. Marxism and the universal proletariat
        • The English working class had the same race, gender, and national privileges as the bourgeoisie. This made class relations appear foundational, transcendent, and neutral towards other factors such as gender, race, and national. This was all while the English working class benefited from, for example, cheap commodities produced by New World slavery such as sugar
        • With the decline of white male labor unions in the late 20th century, this view is no longer tenable. There are other figurations of labor, and we should pay attention to these differences rather than reject them as flawed protagonists
    • Be too particular (e.g. some conceptions of intersectionality, which are too particular to have revolutionary potential)
    • We need to simultaneously see the “bigness” of global capitalism (in its generality and its scale) and its heterogeneity
      • Analyzing supply chains can do this
        • Analyzing diversity aids the “critical imagination”
  • “Figurations of the capital-labor relationship often use imagery from successful firms.” Successful firms become models for capitalists. However, they only inspire; they do not determine practice. Examples:
      1. Bigness - mid-20th century General Motors was used as an example in the 1970s and early 1980s
      • It was characterized by bigness: economies of scale, expansion, the dominance of American manufacturing, and justifying development of the Third World
      • This featured “the institutional and ideological separation of the ‘‘economy’’ [from] “culture””
        • “Economy” was seen as forward-looking
        • “Culture” was seen to be backward-looking, particular, and not very relevant
      1. Franchising - McDonalds was used as an example in the 1990s
      • Franchising resulted in local enactments of globalization
      • “the BigMac would be the transnational standard of consumption”
      • There is deterritorialization, but capital and labor still have singular logics
      1. Walmart has been used as an example recently
      • 2 strategies: cutting labor costs and dictating conditions to suppliers
      • Walmart exerts overwhelming control, such as by requiring subcontractors to share their cost analyses and follow Walmart’s rules of conduct and standards
        • However, Walmart does not (and does not want to) control labor arrangements and environmental practices. This allows Walmart to be responsible for only its “community,” while corporate labor practices are not applied to suppliers
      • “Wal-Mart goes beyond exploiting market inequalities; it reshapes the possibilities of trade. ‘Wal-Mart often requires suppliers to open their books and submit to a rigorous cost analysis’”
  • “where firms succeed, it is often not by coercion alone. Supply chains tap and vitalize performances of so-called noneconomic features of identity. Labor is both recruited and motivated by these performances. On the one hand, workers become complicit with their own exploitation. On the other hand, they express hopes and desires that exceed the disciplinary apparatus of the firms they serve.”
    • “Diversity is both the source of low wages, and, potentially, the source of creative alternatives. The situation of labor is further complicated by the fact that performances of identity are by their nature particularistic, drawing oppositions and lines of exclusion with others who might otherwise have similar class interests”

Part 2/2

  • hexagon_bear [any]
    ·
    4 years ago
    Part 2/2

    New Figures of Labor

    • “Cultural” factors are often seen as an add-on to economic generalizations, but this is wrong
    • Workers are expected to perform aspects of their identity, thus establishing their own superexploitation
      • This especially applies to contract work, such as:
        • Day laborers: perform brawn and availability
        • Prostitutes: perform sexual charm
      • These performances (and thus superexploitation and self-exploitation) bring in work, and it is difficult to get work without them
      • Supply chain capitalism encourages the conflation of superexploitation and self-exploitation
    • Examples:
      • Walmart
        • Not a Christian company, but “came to claim the Christian orientation of many of its workers”
          • Christ is characterized as a “servant leader”
          • Men can take on service jobs without being “clerks”
          • The manager can be the leader of a “family” of employees”
        • Pretends to let people “prioritize” family and church over work to justify irregular hours and starvation wages
        • Walmart sponsored business students to study “the specific business culture of the Christian service sector,” but this Christian-ish work culture did not extent to suppliers at all
        • Walmart “is proud of the regional and religious roots of its specificity. [...] Indeed, because Wal-Mart claims to represent consumer interests, it can cast its pressure on suppliers as a feature of its cultural orientation to consumers, with whom, Wal-Mart claims, it shares priorities. [...] This formulation depends on Wal-Mart’s favored figure of labor power, the servant leader. The servant leader is not a conventional ‘‘economic’’ figure; it brings the contours of gender, race, region, nation, and religion into labor subjectification. [...] Gender discrimination is not just an add-on to universal problems of labor; gender discrimination makes labor possible in the Wal-Mart model.”
      • Clothing
        • By the end of WWII, sweatshops in the US were being phased out due to historical labor struggles. These jobs were outsourced, but this process reversed starting in the 1980s
          • Many sweatshops are run by small entrepreneur immigrants without much capital. They make use of the immigrant status to connect with other immigrants willing to work below minimum wage due to a lack of alternatives
        • Textile companies moved “their assembly plants abroad to match the superior sewing skills of women in the global South. These skills, the managers told her, are learned at home, not on the job. ‘This paradoxical framing of skill makes women’s ‘disadvantages’ in the labor market at least a temporary advantage’”
        • Because of subcontracting, firms are able to claim that they are unable to force contractors to comply with their own high ethical standards
          • E.g. Nike was protested for using child labor. Nike joined an independent monitoring org. The process originally included citizen and labor groups, but Nike just wanted the appearance of change
      • Shoppers
        • Consumers have been wrongfully depicted as the “leading force of oppositional politics”
          • “Vote with your dollar”
          • Advertising commodified dissent
            • E.g. the commodification of African American rebellion
              • This even affects sweatshop workers in Honduras, who want the jeans they make
      • Nonwork Livelihoods
        • “Nonwork” is only nominal
          • “Dreams of entrepreneurship and consumption shape worker subjectivities*/and the meaning of ‘‘work.’’”
        • “Independence” is very important, although it is nominal
        • Garment workers in China dream of opening fashion boutiques
        • U.S. chicken farmers and FedEx drivers
          • U.S. chicken farmers make below minimum wage
          • Work is coded as entrepreneurship
            • They are very beholden to the chicken companies and FedEx, respectively. Independence is nominal
            • Chicken farming here draws in white males, with their conception of independence
        • North American matsutake mushroom pickers
          • The supply chain has several layers of middlemen which connects pickers in North America and importers in Japan.
            • “But it is important to almost everyone along the chain that they be considered independent contractors rather than employees.” Nobody imagines themselves as working for someone else
              • E.g. mushroom pickers do not describe the activity as “work”
          • Pay is low, roughly equivalent to disability and unemployment
          • Interestingly, there was a strike of matsutake mushroom pickers. This did not lead to labor negotiations because there were no possible representatives for labor and management. Instead, the strikers aimed for newspaper reports and exposure.
          • Types of mushroom pickers
            • Middle-aged white men
              • E.g. “traditionalists,” ex-loggers, military veterans
              • They view themselves like gold rush prospectors
              • They reject common conceptions of wage labor
            • Southeast Asian refugees
              • They lack the cultural capital (language, education, employment history, etc.) to find decent wage-labor
              • They make use of their community-building skills
                • They compare the mushroom camps to Laotian villages a and Thai refugee camps
            • “The nonwork status of mushroom picking is a reminder of the specificities of the cultural history that allowed the twentieth-century labor movement to take ‘‘work’’ for granted as the locus of negotiation between labor and capital. Nineteenth- and twentiethcentury labor struggles created the dignity of work as a sacrifice of time and effort in exchange for a wage. In the twenty-first century, an increasing number of laborers do not imagine their activities primarily through this history’s categories. Most commentators on this problem argue that less people are doing hard, physical labor; today, they say, the economy is run almost entirely by service and information. I see no evidence of the withering away of tiring, repetitive, or physical chores, although perhaps some have been moved farther away from privileged commentators. The issue is not that these chores have gone away. Instead, the challenge is that people doing these chores may not see themselves within familiar frameworks of labor.” This leads to…
        • China
          • In a coastal town in Fujian Province, men seek to go abroad, work in low-paying jobs like restaurants and warehouses in places like New York, and send remittances home
            • This is seen as “the fulfillment of a manly destiny and not just a matter of chores”
            • Meanwhile in the coastal town in Fujian, there is viewed to be no work for men. Remittances sent from those abroad are used to hire peasant migrants from poorer villages
              • These peasants are also looking for work to send remittances home and fulfill their “manly destiny”
              • coastal Fujian migrants : New York :: non-coastal Fujian migrants : Fujian coast
          • “Where ‘work’ as imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century labor movements is not a framework for people’s descriptions of their activities, it will be really hard to mobilize around familiar labor slogans or the notion of ‘solidarity’ that they inspired. Another set of articulations is needed. These will probably have to stay close to cultural niches and the links between them.”

    Conclusion (End of “New Figures of Labor” + “Into the Labyrinth”)

    • “Supply chain capitalism makes use of diverse socialeconomic niches through which goods and services can be produced more cheaply. Such niches are reproduced in performances of cultural identity through which suppliers show their agility and efficiency. Such performances, in turn, are encouraged by new figures of labor and labor power in which making a living appears as management, consumption, or entrepreneurship. These figurations blur the lines between self-exploitation and superexploitation, not just for owneroperators but also for the workers recruited into supplier enterprises. Through such forms of exploitation, supply chain capitalism creates both great wealth and great poverty.”
      • But this doesn’t mean that supply chain capitalism controls diversity. Supply chains are heterogenous, such as French supply chains favoring difference while British supply chains favor cultural similarity. This is based on the histories of those nations and colonialism, rather than disinterested “economics.”
    • “Because diversity is not entirely created by employers, it offers a wealth of resources, for better or worse, that workers use without considering the best interests of their employers.”
    • “The mushroom pickers I am studying want to be foraging in the mountains. Here they can combine making a living and revitalizing ethnic and gender histories. Supply chains are not always evil.”
    • “even in the most exploitative situations, nonwork identities are not only about labor discipline; they also open alternatives.”
    • Diversity is the source of low wages because it can divide people with shared class interests, but it also a source of radical criticism and, potentially, creative alternatives