Much of what Freeman writes in this impressively well-written chapter may already have been familiar from occasional reports in the media. But seeing it presented together in one piece makes for a truly upsetting experience. Plants with between 300,000 and 400,000 workers; a factory with a workforce of 350,000 producing iPhones and nothing else; a regime of residence permits for migrant workers designed to prevent them from organizing; the dormitories with their strict, nineteenth-century-American style of quasi-military discipline. No cities of the future here: only barbed wire, uniformed security guards and surveillance cameras. And the suicides of which some of us may have read: when, for example, in 2010, thirteen young workers jumped to their death from the roof of a Foxconn factory producing iPhones and iPads. Freeman reports how Apple politely pointed its finger at Foxconn, and how Foxconn responded with preventive measures to spare its biggest customer further embarrassment, installing mesh wire on the roofs and balconies of its factory buildings and putting up 3 million square metres of netting above the ground all around them to catch and thereby save anyone desperate enough to find a way, still, to try to kill themselves.
One interesting question that Freeman discusses is why those Asian factories are so big, making it necessary for their rulers to expend so much effort on controlling the workers. According to Freeman, this is not due to economies of scale; production processes are not complex enough to justify organizations of that size. More likely it is the nature of the outsourcing relationship dominated by customers like Nike and Hewlett-Packard and the way these companies work their markets, where ‘flexibility’ is everything. When Apple made its long-awaited iPhone 6 available to its eager devotees, it had to be able to sell 13 million units in its first three days on the market. Since ‘freshness’, according to Apple’s Tim Cook, is a modern gadget’s most important property, final changes in design must be possible until a few weeks before sales begin. Just-in-time production of this sort needs huge factories with huge workforces kept, as it were, in storage, in company-owned dormitories nearby, to be called out any time and ordered on short notice to work, if required, twelve-hour shifts or longer for several consecutive weeks. Nowhere is the secret of how we can pay for what we are made to believe we need, while being spared the pain of producing it at prices we can afford, laid bare more clearly than it is here.
Not that Freeman leaves his readers without hope. While wages have recently increased, labour turnover continues to be extremely high, indicating a degree of worker dissatisfaction that may become too costly for employers to sustain. The number and size of strikes at Chinese factories seems considerable, giving the lie to the idea of the submissive Chinese worker. Freeman argues that a ‘civilizing effect’ has always been associated with factory life. By moving away from the village and earning their own money, even in the most dismal of circumstances, the sons and daughters of peasants escape what Marx and Engels called ‘the idiocy of rural life’. Could modernization, its manifold discontents notwithstanding, spread from the factory to society in China, as it may have done before in other places?
Historians deal with the past; the future is not their turf. Still, at the end of Freeman’s outstanding book readers might have expected a few reflections, or speculations, on what may be next in the long story of organized work and production. Clearly the ‘satanic mills’ of Foxconn – set up at the behest of, among others, Apple, the greatest capitalist firm of all time – are one part of the picture, and undoubtedly a major one. Equally interesting, however, is an entirely new kind of factory, or quasi-factory, where the bulk of the productive capital is no longer centrally owned and factory discipline is replaced with the discipline of the market. In the world of the new platform firm, of the Uber and TaskRabbit kind, it is not a master capitalist who owns the means of production but rather (I am tempted to say, once again) the skilled worker on the frontline – at least by the time she has paid off the loan awarded to her by the firm to invest in her contribution to its physical equipment. Production is local, close to the customer, indeed customized. There is no agglomeration any more, not of production, or of workers and their living spaces. Only management is centralized at the global level. But like the utopian projects of the 1970s that were intended to restore the dignity of the factory worker, management now issues advice, not orders: it helps workers get their jobs done and services workers instead of pushing them around. Workers, in turn, work when they want, and the ‘alienation’ of their work from their lives, so characteristic of the factory of the industrial age, is forever a thing of the past.
Or so it appears, or is made to appear. On second thought, the Taylorist separation of planning and execution, as so brilliantly analysed by someone like Harry Braverman, may nowhere be more rigid than in the new platform firms, where the tools of planning are solely and incontestably in the hands of management, incorporated as a separate firm. Execution, meanwhile, planned and coordinated by that firm, is left to subcontractors controlled, not just by material incentives, but by the latest behavioural technologies embodied in proprietary algorithms stored in the latest, also proprietary, remote-control equipment. Rather than social life reintegrating work, the now virtual factory integrates workers’ private spaces into the sphere of production. In extreme cases, life can be turned into work without those working-by-living becoming aware of it. One example is the ‘users’ of Facebook, its customers, who inadvertently produce Facebook’s most important resource, the data left as indelible traces of their increasingly virtual lifeways. Another is the hundreds of thousands of would-be ‘influencers’ who spend their days producing pictures and videos endorsing industrial products, in the hope of eventually being paid for it by their producers.
Traditional categories, such as wage labour or the labour market, easily reach their limits here and are at risk of becoming meaningless. In the giant decentralized service factory, you are given a socially networked opportunity to do work – this work can include what we produce for Apple, Google, Facebook, Tinder and the like, believing that we are ‘using’ them when actually we are being used ourselves. Is there in this world a role for labour law, for social protection, collective protest and power, voice before exit – in other words, politics? Can we hope for the return of the independent craftsperson of yesteryear, ready to organize in modern guilds and resurrected trade unions, or of the gang system of the docks or the aircraft industry as it still existed half a century ago in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the United States? Or can, perhaps, civil law take the place of labour law in regulating the new factories? If our societies still see it as their task to civilize the world of organized production, they had better get working on it, now.
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* Joshua Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2018.
March 2018
LIKE BLOOD IN GOETHE’S FAUST, money ‘is a very special fluid’. It circulates in the body political-economic, whose sustenance depends on its liquidity. And it is surrounded by mystery. In fact, money is easily the most unpredictable and least governable human institution we have ever known. Allegedly invented as a general equivalent, to serve as an accounting unit, means of exchange and store of value, it has over time penetrated into the remotest corners of social life, constantly assuming new forms and springing fresh surprises. Even Keynes had to admit that his attempt at A Treatise on Money (1930) ran into ‘many problems and perplexities’. How money came to be what it is today, in capitalist modernity, may perhaps with the benefit of hindsight be reconstructed as a process of progressive dematerialization and abstraction, accompanied by growing commodification and state sponsorship. But how money functions in its present historical form is more difficult to say; where it is going from here, harder still. This social construction has always been beset with, and driven by, unanticipated consequences – caused by human action, but not controlled