Imperialism does not play out much in the 2020 presidential race. That says more about US corporate power over the two political parties and other institutions such as the new media, e.g., Comcast owning MSNBC.
Meanwhile, as the US has deindustrialized, 79 percent of the globe’s industrial workers toiled in the Global South in 2010, over double the figure in 1950. The fruits of their exploited labor sell in the Global North.
How and why that process benefits corporations in North America, Europe and Japan (the triad) is the special focus of Intan Suwandi, author of the must-read “Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism” (Monthly Review Press 2019). Her Marxist critique of capitalist political economy complements those of Samir Amin, Paul A. Baran, Harry Braverman, John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff, Immanuel Ness, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, John Smith, Paul M. Sweezy and Michael D. Yates.
According to Marx, capitalism is value in motion. On that note, the “hidden abode” of production is where capitalists control labor to compel the creation of more value than the workers earn. Suwandi takes a deep dive into this realm of power and class relations.
In my view, what makes her five-chapter book unique is the case studies of two Indonesian companies, named with pseudonyms. Suwandi’s granular analysis of these firms’ operating practices sheds light on the unequal power relations such dependent foreign businesses have with corporate America.
Indonesia along with China and India is a site of industrial activity that multinational companies in the Global North control. Military power and information technology are part of this controlling equation.
Suwandi explains how corporations in the Global North use information technology to expand their market power over dependent firms’ subordinate place in value-chains that originate in the Global South. There, dependent firms simply lack the power to be autonomous.
Two practices that Global North corporations use to perpetuate their market power and profits are flexibility and systemic rationalization. These are not household terms.
Suwandi clarifies the meanings of flexibility and systemic rationalization. The relentless application of these corporate practices reap increases in workers’ productivity, or output per hour per worker.
When comic Ricky Gervais called out Tim Cook, Apple Inc.’s head, at the Golden Globe awards for the company’s operating of sweatshops in China, the funnyman was missing a major point of corporate production unlike Suwandi. Apple and other corporations in the Global North employ arm’s length contracting with foreign firms to reduce unit labor costs that are already low in the Global South.
In Apple’s case, the Taiwanese firm FoxConn is the labor contractor hiring workers and enforcing workplace standards. The standards were horrid to the point that workers were committing suicide to escape their labor assembling components for Apple products.
This is the logic of capital accumulation: produce commodities for the lowest price to sell them at the highest price, and to hell with the lives of workers. Their blood, sweat and tears propel labor-value chains that embody the new economic imperialism.
Suwandi, who writes in English and Indonesian, delivers a data-rich and readable account of the world system, the winners and losers. The book wraps up with statistical notes and notes for the case studies of two Indonesian firms.
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers.
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2020
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