Discover the fate of the global working class through the expert lens of communist geographer Field Neal, as we dissect the seismic transformations rippling through shrinking industrial sectors and spiking productivity. This episode traverses the historical legacies of industrial powers, such as the United States and Britain, to unpack the challenges faced by nations charting their developmental courses in today's economically concentrated landscape. Neal's insights provide a critical understanding of how these changes are reshaping the global economy and what they signify for the sustainability of contemporary economic strategies.
Venture with us into the heart of economic theory, where Modern Monetary Theory meets the real-world complexities of inflation and geopolitical fiscal maneuvering. Field Neal guides us through the maze of global economic trends, from the reorientation of China's economic helm to the quest for the next bastion of inexpensive labor. We take an incisive look at how socialist developmental models have been applied in various countries, with a focus on Ethiopia, to explore the practical hurdles faced by emerging economies. The episode's rich discourse illuminates the evolution of industry and its implications for employment, the critique of dependency theories, and the integration of value theory into the analysis of world systems.
Concluding our journey, Neal and I confront the evolving challenges of labor organization amidst a transformational workforce and the myths surrounding a unified workers' movement. We probe the social implications of China's deindustrialization and the rise of factions pushing against this trend. The episode culminates with a visionary discussion on how communism might reconfigure productive forces to tackle the pressing global issues of our time, offering an invigorating perspective on empowering individuals and reimagining community organizing. Join us for this thought-provoking episode, set to stir your contemplation on the future of labor, the essence of community, and the indelible impact of state policy.
Referenced Articles:
https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/forest-and-factory
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-labor-and-working-class-history/article/broken-circle-premature-deindustrialization-chinese-capital-exports-and-the-stumbling-development-of-new-territorial-industrial-complexes/334CA5CBD40587B4C770C55AA18F8D63
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/11/field-notes/Phil-Neel-with-Komite
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1krt15Qx0lPizv7SPR8b0GhsmGK61k1TP/view
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Discover the fate of the global working class through the expert lens of communist geographer Field Neal, as we dissect the seismic transformations rippling through shrinking industrial sectors and spiking productivity. This episode traverses the historical legacies of industrial powers, such as the United States and Britain, to unpack the challenges faced by nations charting their developmental courses in today's economically concentrated landscape. Neal's insights provide a critical understanding of how these changes are reshaping the global economy and what they signify for the sustainability of contemporary economic strategies.
Venture with us into the heart of economic theory, where Modern Monetary Theory meets the real-world complexities of inflation and geopolitical fiscal maneuvering. Field Neal guides us through the maze of global economic trends, from the reorientation of China's economic helm to the quest for the next bastion of inexpensive labor. We take an incisive look at how socialist developmental models have been applied in various countries, with a focus on Ethiopia, to explore the practical hurdles faced by emerging economies. The episode's rich discourse illuminates the evolution of industry and its implications for employment, the critique of dependency theories, and the integration of value theory into the analysis of world systems.
Concluding our journey, Neal and I confront the evolving challenges of labor organization amidst a transformational workforce and the myths surrounding a unified workers' movement. We probe the social implications of China's deindustrialization and the rise of factions pushing against this trend. The episode culminates with a visionary discussion on how communism might reconfigure productive forces to tackle the pressing global issues of our time, offering an invigorating perspective on empowering individuals and reimagining community organizing. Join us for this thought-provoking episode, set to stir your contemplation on the future of labor, the essence of community, and the indelible impact of state policy.
Referenced Articles:
https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/forest-and-factory
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-labor-and-working-class-history/article/broken-circle-premature-deindustrialization-chinese-capital-exports-and-the-stumbling-development-of-new-territorial-industrial-complexes/334CA5CBD40587B4C770C55AA18F8D63
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/11/field-notes/Phil-Neel-with-Komite
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1krt15Qx0lPizv7SPR8b0GhsmGK61k1TP/view
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Hello and welcome to VarmVlog. And today I'm talking with Field Neal, communist geographer located in the Pacific Northwest, author of Hinterland and Field Notes. And today we're talking about the state of the global working class, particularly in relationship to massive changes of investment and industrial and de-industrialization, focusing, I believe, on Tanzania and China. And so you've written a lot about premature de-industrialization recently and its effects on the global working class, and you've had to do, you know, geographic work in East Africa and in China to do so. What are the concerning trends on deindustrialization right now?
Speaker 2:on deindustrialization right now. Well, the big overarching trend, and if you've read Aaron Beneneff's book Automation and the Future of Work, also Jason Smith's book, Smart Machines and Service Workers, something like that, they both also talk about this in kind of slightly different terms, but Aaron is particularly good at framing it as this kind of long run trend where, when you look at these developmental bursts right, a developmental burst always includes industrialization and is almost always driven by industrialization. There's a few cases where that is not true and those are unique and I can talk about those if you'd like, but the core of it is always some sort of kind of industrial employment growth driving productivity growth, which drives output growth, et cetera, et cetera. And there's this particular relation between all of those measures that Aaron discusses in more detail. But the overarching pattern is that this period of rapid industrial growth, this big economic numerical period that is usually how it's referred to, has been getting shorter and shorter over time in each of its different iterations and it also employing a smaller and smaller relative share of the population. So even if you look at the big one right, which was China, it actually has already peaked. Was China? It actually has already peaked. It peaked several years ago and has employment. Manufacturing has been declining since then. It ticked up slightly, I think, after the pandemic, and then it's been coming back down and it never even reached the level of employment as a share manufacturing as a share of total employment in kind of the classic examples from the US in like the 1930s or the UK, you know, a little bit earlier than that. So it so that's the big overarching kind of pattern is that as these booms have happened, they've gotten kind of smaller and smaller.
Speaker 2:The other thing that's really important is that they've also become more and more geographically limited, and so that's something that I focus on a lot more is this idea of those industrial territories. You know we can produce more. Think about it as often we talk about being able to produce more goods per worker Right, so the workers productivity kind of increases. But there's something else that happens. There's a spatial productivity that also increases. We can pump more goods out of a given location right these industrial territories than we could in the past. What that means is that industrial production actually concentrates even more over time, and so you get what some industrial geographers and economic geographers have called like a spiky world, where there's this intense concentration of economic activity in particular areas, both in manufacturing and extraction, all kinds of things. This converts areas into what some other urban geographers call technical lands or technical territories, whether kind of territories given over exclusively to these extractive functions, whether kind of territories given over exclusively to these extractive functions or all of this is also what I talk about in the context of the hinterland is like sacrifice zones which are much more broad because they're not necessarily specialized at the leftover.
Speaker 2:That increased kind of concentration and this, these changes in you know, you don't need as many employees, et cetera, et cetera, is also that you get this intense overproduction and over.
Speaker 2:It's often called overproduction, overcompetition, because you're producing, you know, basically industrial overcapacity in a lot of sectors and overcapacity just means that you're producing this insane amount that the market can't quite clear all of the time.
Speaker 2:And the classic examples of this are like steel sectors and that drives profitability really low Overcapacity does People often attribute like low profitability in Chinese steel sectors to the fact that one of the big producers is state owned, but that's not at all true.
Speaker 2:It's all low profitability in Chinese steel sectors to the fact that one of the big producers is state-owned, but that's not at all. True Low profitability is true across the board, private or state-owned, and state-owned aren't really state-owned in the way that people think they are, et cetera, et cetera. But the idea is that it drives profitability down across these industrial sectors. This is something that Robert Brenner talks about a lot and that creates an increasingly zero-s sum battle in international markets for manufacturers over who's going to be able to fill those orders and win the few places kind of win the employment in the contracts, for the few places that do get those industrial booms, those industrial booms. So the big patterns over time are basically the peak is higher, it's shorter and fewer countries have the opportunity to do the traditional kind of Listian style developmental boom where you're kind of using tariffs and you're using kind of national support in order to to cultivate domestic industry and then you enter into the global market on that basis.
Speaker 1:Which makes 60s style developmentalism much, much harder to even pretend to be a viable option.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and not just 60s style, like it's. This developmental thing is much older than that Like, like it goes all the way back, um, I have, I'm working on a book project right now and one of the chapters is kind of like this quick, quick and dirty history of global development, right, um, and we could trace it back to how the british escaped and overcame dutch hegemony, and but I think in terms of like real, recognizable, like machinofacturing, like industrial world, the first case of like a developmental state as we think of it today is actually the US, right, it's the Hamiltonian project. It's very, very clear that that's like that's the core of this new school of like political economy that was forming in Pennsylvania and Hamilton, and that Hamiltonian scene was deeply influential on subsequent developmentalist states in Germany, in France, in Japan. Saint-simon, the utopian socialist he fought with Hamilton in the Battle of Yorktown and then was deeply influenced by that whole social circle and then went on to propound similar things in France, focusing on these large developmental mega projects at the Suez Canal. And in addition to that, frederick List is the big figure in kind of developmentalism. And if you read List's book the National System of Economy or something like that he has his whole. He does historical case studies. That's why he's really interesting compared to classical political economists, because he does a lot of historical case study. But his big like diffusive one is on the US and he's just like look at all these great, amazing things that the US has been able to do because it pursued, you know these, more protectionist policies and fostered local industry.
Speaker 2:And I think people also forget that this. This was a really, really bloody and like no holds barred kind of industrial competition. I mean it was. It involved piracy, industrial espionage, literally people going undercover to tour British factories and then coming back and founding the same type of factories in Massachusetts. Britain tried to ban the export of technology and of any technicians. So if you were a skilled artist and you couldn't migrate.
Speaker 2:And then on top of that and this is the funniest part is the US patent system, which is now the base for the world patent system was essentially just a form of legalized theft, where you could come to the US and patent something that was already patented in the UK and then the patent wouldn't be recognized from the UK or the intellectual property rights wouldn't be recognized, and then that would establish kind of the legal authority for the patent, so that attracted a bunch of other skilled engineers and whatnot so they could patent their ideas. So you know it's a lot. It's very, very similar to the types of things that happen during later developmental kind of developmental state attempts and just kind of repeats itself over history. But the change, right, is that, like, fewer and fewer and smaller and smaller portions of the global population are able to like, do this.
Speaker 1:So I mean the geographic element of it I've never thought about. The technological element of it has quite interested me. I mean even from like a very, very like stayed classical Marxist perspective. The amount of automation is going to reduce socially necessary labor time dramatically. So you just need less labor to do stuff and that's going to. You know, it doesn't ever hit rock bottom, as Benenev actually says. Like the fully automated world is not really possible, at least not without machinery. That is effectively, as human beings are, the.
Speaker 1:But it does seem like this concentrates things. So now you're doing the developmental programs. The interstate competition is going to be huge. Now, to me that actually really does have some pretty big effects on what various kinds of lefts are arguing you can do in the developing world right. Lefts are arguing you can do in the developing world, right. I mean, you know, um, there's a, you know, there's a modern monetary view that if, basically if, you pump currency into it, it'll come. But the trends that I'm seeing from your work indicates that that might not be the case yeah, well, the modern monetary theory people, um, they're interesting.
Speaker 2:I talk about them in my dissertation a bit. I have a second on them. A lot of what they write is kind of this two faced thing where a lot of times they're talking about things that like the US can do and they sort of pretend like other countries can do them as well, but they don't actually make that case Right. They make the case with like the US and then when you think about it, there's two major kind of issues with their fundamental arguments. The one issue is that when you dig into what they're saying, they actually do always admit that there is a hard limit to this spending right, and the hard limit is not inflation itself. Inflation is the symptom of this hard limit to this spending right, and the hard limit is not inflation itself. Inflation is the symptom of this hard limit for them, or it's one of the symptoms.
Speaker 2:But if you read like what the MMT people wrote about Zimbabwe, for example, where there's this massive inflationary wave, they basically make this argument that the spending wasn't necessarily causing inflation on its own. It's that like the spending was running up against kind of these, the actual productive capacity of the economy. They always go back to this sort of idea that like, well, no, there is an actual kind of capacity of the economy that's embedded in what can actually be done with that level of technology, the amount of wealth concentrated there, etc. Really negative results such as hyperinflation, and so that's an interesting point, because that completely blows all of these schemes out of the water for poor countries. Basically, they're saying like no, no, there are these hard limits for poor countries. You can't just use the, even if you have a sovereign currency, you can't just use the treasury to kind of pump money through spending because you have these hard limits. But then again we think, well, where, what are these hard limits? Where are they coming from? Well, that's just the global structure of kind of imperial inequity, right, like so we're coming back to the same problems that are just not really dealing with it.
Speaker 2:Now, the second problem that they have is that even in their case study of the US, right, they are being a little bit dishonest in this classical political economy fashion of pretending like countries exist in this really strong sense. Right, because the US isn't just a country. Right, especially the US and the US Treasury is not just producing a national currency. The US Treasury is producing the global currency right, the dollar, so in, or so many of the things that they point out are possible for the US are actually possible, but they're. They're possible because the US has this massive imperial seniorage right through its control over the US dollar.
Speaker 2:So what would happen if we pursued some of those policies? Maybe there would be some domestic inflation. I think there are arguments about why that wouldn't happen, or you know pretty good, I think, that the inflation that is happening is happening for somewhat different reasons, et cetera, et cetera. But what would really happen if we went all out and started kind of pumping cash through the Treasury to do spending programs? Well, it's fairly obvious that would just initiate massive turmoil in these international exchange markets. And when you look at different things, like these trade war patterns that have kind of cropped up again and again over the past 50 years Brenner focuses on this a lot those currency exchange rates become like the central thing eventually, because that's how you make manufacturing competitive in this kind of zero-sum competition. One of the easiest ways of manufacturing competitive is to devalue a currency relative to the US dollar.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember my first arguments with the MMT. People were when I was living in Egypt during a hyperinflation crisis so um, for floating the currency, um, uh. So that's this. It's interesting though, um, you hear a lot about China as if it's an industrial miracle. I mean, it's died off recently because Chinese GDP is like 5%, which is not bad compared to the West, but it's bad for China and doesn't really look to have many ways to recuperate anytime in the near future. Now, gdp is not necessarily always the best way to judge an economy. I admit that, but it does seem like the leapfrogging pattern of industrial development in China is plateauing in a pretty severe way post-COVID. How is that likely to affect international development?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, so I would say the COVID basically just made clear what had already happened. A lot of these trends actually peak in like the mid 2010s, essentially.
Speaker 2:So if we're, looking at like Chinese outbound investment, chinese growth in the share of employment and industry. If we're looking at things like factory closures, relocations, et cetera, et cetera, they have this sort of ghost tale that gets carried forward because of the real estate and infrastructure bubble, but a lot of the core trends actually peaked quite a bit earlier and service employment started to take up at the same time. So in one sense, the only all that, all that's happening in China, is what has happened everywhere else, which is just that you're going to see a bunch more employment in services slowing growth and that growth will continue to slow, although there may be upticks. I think China has a lot more of a potential to have stronger upticks in growth over the next two decades than like Japan did. I think people always don't quite have a grasp on exactly how big China is and how much it still includes these kind of large segments of cheaper labor population and then also areas just for like like physical kind of development and huge market kind of potential, like it's a little bit more similar to like how the US was back in like the 19th century, where there was still like a lot of potential even during like the slow growth of like the 1870s or whatever, the first Great Depression, right, the US had this massive domestic market potential because of just like its size and expansion and all of that stuff domestic market potential because of just like its size and expansion and all of that stuff. It's going to be more muted today, but I think that there's still a lot more of that potential than we often kind of think when we see these kind of declining growth measures.
Speaker 2:Now, at the same time, what's really kind of going to happen worldwide is, first, there is going to be a lot more demand for new sources, new sites for cheap labor, and that's that's kind of a global problem right now, and that's actually one of the major reasons behind this inflationary kind of burst is that we're hitting certain limits in the supply of cheap labor without having uh fully, uh develop any sort of like alternative to it. Now there's some Vietnam is the big one, right, but Vietnam is really small like compared to China. So there's this big new industrial burst in Vietnam and it's basically just like an extension of these South China Sea industrial complexes just going down to the Red River Delta. They're very close geographically. That's really important for industrial supply chains, and then culturally it's very close to the Chinese border and all that stuff. But, like I said, vietnam is pretty small.
Speaker 2:The big ones that you're looking at right now are going to be Indonesia and India, pakistan as well.
Speaker 2:Those are the big areas where we're seeing kind of bursts of industrialization, especially in the core sectors, and then also see they are relatively large populations, but even there the population really isn't that big compared to the original Chinese input of kind of cheap labor into the global economy. So this is kind of like a very long run issue as well is that when you start to look out further, the only place that's going to have very large pools of labor in the next hundred years is going to be Africa. So that's one of the reasons why there's a lot of focus on, you know, looking at kind of these development trends in Africa and the idea of like is Ethiopia that sort of developmental state, and there are cases in Africa, like the Ethiopian example, of trying to emulate that traditional kind of developmental state model, and that's that's really the direction that a lot of those like a lot of those kind of left-wing, uh developmentalist things from the 60s uh, right they were like kind of rebel development kind of things.
Speaker 2:They all sort of boiled down eventually to this one program that was formulated in um. In the chinese case it was shui muqiao who's the guy who basically created like the socialism with Chinese characteristics more or less, or like market socialism idea in China. He essentially wrote the book on it and then Melisandre in Ethiopia. I think people forget that like the develop, the initial developmental state in Ethiopia was like they were the last anti-revisionists too. They had like jumped from. You know it was, it was Soviet classical Stalinism, and then it was support for China and then it was support for Albania, and then you know they're on their own. But the program was essentially got boiled down to the same thing of just this classic listian um model of you need state protection, um, and then that will serve, and then it's got this kind of like new element of serving export markets. So it's kind of like this um, uh, updated kind of listianism for like globalization right, where you do protectionist stuff in order to be competitive on the global market and then you enter selectively into certain product lines early on for export production. You use export earnings to then fund further developmental things.
Speaker 2:The problem is this? Is people trying to emulate this chinese example or the taiwanese example before it? Or, you know, you could argue, uh, south korea and japan and stuff, but especially mainland china, because it didn't have as much explicit military support from the US. But what it did have is this very long period of basically like autarkic industrial development, the development of immensely literate and healthy population right during the socialist period, and these, this massive amount of embedded kind of like technical knowledge that was just already there.
Speaker 2:So people think that China was just like a source of cheap labor, but that wasn't at all true. It was a source of highly skilled, cheap labor for low level industrial production. That is something that basically nowhere else in the world has right now. So I think that's the other kind of big hurdle is you're not just looking for cheap labor, you're looking for this particular type of population and these kind of unpaid amenities of like a socialist era that the global capitalist economy benefited from in the Chinese case are like not present anywhere else. So you know that's going to be, I think, an even bigger problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's not a ton of highly educated peasants in Bangladesh. You know this. This does I mean. This raises some interesting questions. One is implicit in what you're saying I just want to draw it out a little bit that Leninist-style developmental modelings was basically the American model. Against what America was selling, which was not what America actually did, Correct. That's basically against what America was selling, which was not what America actually did, Correct, that's basically More or less.
Speaker 2:But the Leninist thing is I think it's very distinct in and of itself and it's not even something that we would maybe call Leninist at a certain point it became really enshrined under Stalin as this particular style of hyper Taylorist developmentalism. I think it was more this In Lenin. There's this line that Mario Tranti says, like what was a tactic in Lenin becomes a strategy in Stalin, and I think that's a good way to understand it of like this what was being pursued is kind of this last ditch tactical retreat under Lenin, become in the like new economic program and then also in some of these elements of idealizing certain forms of American industrial organization. These things become kind of strategic elements of like Stalinist industrialization, especially that Taylorist kind of aspect to it. But they all there's this long history basically in leftist thought, right, we have like Marx and we have Marxian kind of socialism and all of that. But Marx at the time is also writing against all these like Ricardian socialists and then later these people like Vassal who are essentially Listian socialists, right, and that revives itself again and again. These other non-Marxist kind of socialisms, non-communist forms of socialism basically is how I would phrase it, and those things then get called Marxism later. So that's the very confusing part is that these Listian socialisms about like national development, right, they then become the thing that many people think of as like quote unquote Marxist orthodoxy that gets sort of enshrined in this Stalinist period for some of these reasons.
Speaker 2:But I would actually say so. Here's the funny thing, though. I would actually say that people, if the third world kind of developmentalists really want a program, that would work better. The Stalinist program would actually work way better, because it's much more hardcore about going for that all out industrialization in autarkic fashion early on, which then is what enables like in the Chinese case, right, that gives you that basis to then be attractive to the global market when it kind of starts to break down and ossify, which isn't like a good plan, right, but it's.
Speaker 2:It's kind of this ironic thing where the plan that's actually pursued now is worse because it doesn't include this intensive period of hyper industrial development that then gives people like technical skills and mass literacy and, you know, good health care and all of these things that then become attractive amenities when the market doesn't have to pay for them later, when that system starts to kind of break down, you know and you can just you can go in and discipline this massive potential proletariat population Right. And if you look at some of the older examples of some of the third world like third world is stuff from like Samir Amin and stuff their earlier versions of what they call de-linking were more that Right, more this classical Stalinist developmentalism, more this classical Stalinist developmentalism and they. But then later they become like, oh, look at what China is doing, like this weird argument about like export production is somehow de-linking because it gives like domestic industries more power, which is kind of true, but like it's really not de-linking, you know.
Speaker 1:Well that that always seemed to me to be the long socialist habit of making a virtue out of whatever necessity was at hand. Um which, uh, because you know, one of the things with the, with the, with the stalinist developmental paradigm is you do actually still need a lot of raw materials within your zone to do that yeah, exactly um, and I don't know if you're I mean, africa is mineral rich, but I I'm not sure that you can do you, that any one country can do, uh, that kind of developmentalism anymore.
Speaker 2:I'm just I don't know um, no one's advocating, no one is advocating that anymore is the other thing, even the um, what we would think of as like the stalinist parties that exist. They're like the communist party of kenya, um, uh, there's several others, just the one in um, um, iswatini and some other places. Um, these parties actually just look at china now and so they basically have like the zenawian um model, which is from, you know, ethiopia, like this, this idea of of emulating something like the chinese example, but the chinese example starting in like the 70s. So they're, they're basically like not really. It's this kind of weird thing where the people that everyone calls stalinist now are like not stalinist, they're dungus, you know, but like or right, you know, everyone calls them dungus. Really, I think the more accurate thing would be like, but you know the the idea is is that you can do this kind of export production, but then they're also skipping that whole early stage which, if you look at like Shri Mucha, he basically acknowledges that that's actually a very important stage, but skipping that kind of early stage makes it even weaker. It's not that it's not possible, but you get something more like Ethiopia is today, which is not a very successful developmental state.
Speaker 2:Right, because and here's the interesting thing about Ethiopia is that if you were just looking at cheap labor right, if that because this is how it often gets talked about the spatial fix and all that going to find new sources of cheap labor If you were just looking for cheap labor, ethiopia should have attracted far more FDI than it has. It's attracted a decent little amount, but Ethiopia is some of like the cheapest labor sources in the world. It's attracted a decent little amount, but Ethiopia is some of the cheapest labor sources in the world. It's got a massive population. It's much cheaper than even like the rest of East Africa and it's been basically kind of like middling results, like it has had some developmental kind of success, but much, much less than like the sort of boom that you saw in in the coastal regions in China. And again, it's because you're not actually just looking for cheap labor period. You're looking for this kind of like cheap skill, like labor with amenities, essentially.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah. So what does this mean for the development of Africa? Exactly Like? What can we expect there? Are we expecting a more precarious workforce, more sacrifice zones than even in the developed world? What are we looking at?
Speaker 2:you could almost call it like a Indianization of of Africa in some ways, where there's sort of, um, the type of deep peasantization and de-agrarianization that occurred in India, starting in, like the green revolution, right, um, where you still have a lot of people who live in the countryside. But those, those people, and they're farmers, right, but the actual amount of land that they farm on is not even enough for subsistence, so they're essentially all market dependent farmers, right, they're no longer peasants in this traditional sense because of that. But there aren't big employment centers in the cities or the employment centers of the cities aren't stable enough. Right, the cities themselves are going to get very large for different reasons. There is, right now, but let me back up so, in Tanzania.
Speaker 2:So one of the demographic kind of trends in most sub-Saharan African cities has been driven like urban growth, has been driven by demographic increase for a long time since, essentially like the collapse, right Since the third world debt crisis and the collapse of African industries that attended it. What that means is that a lot of the population growth in cities just come from people like having kids. Essentially there hasn't been a lot of migration to the cities. It's been sustained or it's been balanced by out migration from the cities in that period. Now, starting in the year 2000 ish and onward, a few urban cores in sub-Saharan Africa have started to see much more traditional styles of like migration driven urban growth. So Dar es Salaam, where I did my field work in Tanzania, is one of these centers. So if you look at all of the cities in Tanzania, dar es Salaam has been like basically the most astounding kind of growth in East Africa, which is set to become one of the biggest cities in the world, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time it's been driven by migration and other cities have had this more classical demographic pattern where they've just been grown by demographic increase or losing population or not growing that fast, et cetera, et cetera. But Dar es Salaam has been growing very, very rapidly. So you have all this migration but you don't have an industrial core to sop it up, right. So people end up in basically just what's called like the vast informal sector. And it's very notable that the informal sector, the idea of the informal sector, basically comes from Kenya, in East Africa, and the initial studies of it in like this widespread fashion Right, we're often conducted in India, because that was the other big kind of example.
Speaker 2:Low end sort of craft work, a lot of amorphous services, these very precarious kind of jobs that are in circulation sectors or in like really dangerous forms of kind of like processing. A lot of them might serve a domestic demand, like the wood product sector in Tanzania is a good case of that, where people are just kind of like hand make furniture but even but then that also kind of gets has this weird interaction with like Chinese made furniture, for example. And so there's this. It's not that there's no manufacturing involved in it, it's just that manufacturing is often of like a handicraft nature still, but it's plugged into market. So it's not subsistence handicrafts anymore and it's not super local markets, it's like these weird domestic markets that are somewhat larger. They exist in interaction with these large kind of manufacturers in the sense that, like, some new form of chair will come out of a Chinese factory and then these local handicrafts will try to like, figure out and make something sort of like it out of local wood products, you know. So there's markets like that, that kind of evolve.
Speaker 2:Basically, the problem that you have is you have this massive proletarianization going on but you don't have this industrialization underneath it.
Speaker 2:So that's really the core issue that I'm talking about with premature deindustrialization is this employment problem of that you basically have a massive portion of the population just employing these hyper precarious sectors that are sort of services or handicrafts or hard to define informal economy things.
Speaker 2:This is a condition you know, a general condition of deindustrialization, but in poor countries is particularly brutal because you don't have like this massive amount of wealth sloshing around to fund like bullshit NGO jobs basically, which is what happens in the wealthy countries when you have the same sort of problem. There's still wealth going around to trickle down to give someone their, their stupid little office job. That really kind of does nothing, you know, but there's enough money to kind of pay for it. Or you know, like American construction industry is kind of like that too, like this massive wastage of money, horribly unproduproductive, tons of like contractors and middlemen be a huge bureaucracy, that sort of thing, um, but in poorer countries you can't really. You know, you still have many of the same industries like um, like you still have, you know, a lot of people employed in construction for and it's very, very hard work and very brutal, um, in those conditions.
Speaker 1:But then it's also you know, these weird, very, very marginal sort of forms of subsistence, market based subsistence, that are different paper which I'm going to link in the show notes Broken Circle that makes this period kind of interesting is trying to parse out critical development theories and dependency theories versus what premature industrialization actually is. Now you've already set up the framework for that. A little bit in explaining this, but can you talk about the differences and maybe like little bit in explaining this, but can you talk about the differences and maybe like Zambia versus Tanzania on this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so okay.
Speaker 2:So one of the interesting things that the premature de-industrialization argument points out is that you can have increases in industrial output as well, but these don, but increases in industrial employment don't follow from that.
Speaker 2:So one of the core things that's being argued there is basically that when you do have industries relocate so there have been industries that have successfully been relocating to East Africa, for example, and Ethiopia would again be a really good example of this, and Ethiopia is one of the case studies in premature deindustrialization for this reason so when you have industries that relocate, right, they're still competing on the global market and that competition on the global market is basically inducing them to use the global standard and technology for most industrial sectors. Right, because your savings on cheap labor aren't enough to offset the need to use whatever the you know machines that prevail in that industry are. So you're still using those kind of industrial standard forms of machinery and that capital intensive side is really, if you want to find like a single causal effect, right, it's in that technical change over the long term. So now that these industries are all fairly capital intensive, then when you transfer them, even when you successfully attract them to your business park in Dar es Salaam or wherever. You then have this problem.
Speaker 1:They don't actually employ that many people.
Speaker 2:Right, you don't have to have that many workers for modern factories. Look at the types that there's just the amount of employees that used to have in steel factories in Gary, indiana, back in the day, right, and compare that to the amount of workers that you need even in, like a shoddy, low end steel foundry in India. Right, it's way less. It's just way less Like. It's just a much, much more capital intensive sector now, and there's no reason to do it any other way. If you are being disciplined by global market forces, you also can't, right, because your steel is just going to cost too much. It will not be sellable on the market. So that is one of the really core differences, right. So we're not in this era where if you do attract the industries, they bring employment with them necessarily. So that's the big difference in terms of relating to critical development and underdevelopment like these, these older kind of theories. Those theories have a bunch of other issues, right, and they actually are very broad. Other issues, right, and they actually are very broad. So a lot of times when people talk about things like underdevelopment theorists or like dependency theory, right, so dependency theory is this super broad thing that includes vaguely Marxian strands but is really dominated by these liberal theorists from Latin America, like the Latin American structuralists, and the liberal theorists are making this very, very classical like political economy style argument about what uneven exchange is and basically that they're trying to theorize that a lot of this is happening at, like, the level of kind of circulation and that there's these inequities built into circulation and that that makes it so that, like, the terms of trade for poor countries are bad for those reasons and you need to do all these things. It's not necessarily that isn't true, but that's really not the cause of those things.
Speaker 2:Right, the Marxist dependency theorists got a little bit closer, but they often had these other weird ideas that totally kind of scuttled the core of their theory. So a lot of the Marxist dependency theorists, for example, were drawing from these very strong forms like the monopoly capitalism argument, which was arguing that, like competition was not functional at the highest levels of the global market, there were these monopoly prices that were just set by these giant conglomerates and they were literally saying, basically classical forms of capitalism no longer are functioning. Right, and if you look at the predictions at the end of the books that are these classical ones I think Paul Buran makes one and Samir Amin has this kind of list of predictions. At the end they're all fucking wrong, like for what happens in the next 40 years, like they're. They're so abjectly incorrect that that's why a lot of that theory fell out of favor is because they all were predicting the sort of things that happened in East Asia couldn't happen right.
Speaker 2:So that was really what scuttled their theories in general kind of reception and turned people more to like world systems theory, which had this more like wave-like model of development. It was essentially again just a return to this Smithian conception of how it worked. And I think that there's immense problems with world systems theory as well, in the sense that what happened when the dependency theory stuff fell out of favor was that a lot of the value theory that went into it also fell out of favor. And there's a few theorists Marini, the Brazilian guy Marini he's like one of the only ones who has like a fairly rigorous value theory aspect to it that doesn't rely on this monopoly capitalism theory. So Samir Amin has a value theory aspect that relies on all these shoddy predictions from monopoly capitalism and all these weird things about like we've entered a new stage of development and Marxist needs to be completed.
Speaker 1:And there's all this, you know the period of Marxist, where they all quit being Marxist, yeah.
Speaker 2:But that's a that's a recurring theme. Yeah it is.
Speaker 2:Especially in American Marxism. The first American Marxists all got really obsessed with Veblen and American pragmatism and they all abandoned Marxism. This includes the guy who basically translated and published the first US editions of Capital. Like all the first early American Marxists abandoned it because they got caught up with what was fashionable at the time and they justified it as like well, if you know, historical conditions change, so does the theory and therefore Dewey is really the guy. Dewey and Veblen are the guys who are theorizing it today.
Speaker 2:But it's this very. It is a very common and recurrent thing and it's especially common, I think, in American kind of Marxism where the monopoly capitalism theory comes from. But like, the Americans are just always getting caught up in in what's fashionable, right and then they end up giving up Marxism and providing. And there's a few I always really love those quotes from like Bordiga and some of the more stalwart people who say, like the people who are, who are trying to update Marx, are always the worst, like they're just the worst. Like we, we hate the people who are overly orthodox, etc. Etc. We hate the people who are opportunists, but the people who try to update Marx they're the worst.
Speaker 1:Well, it is interesting to me that anyone maintained monopoly capital theory after the 1970s. That is wild to me. And you're right, there are two things that I always had an issue with. World systems theory I mean both its Marxist and non-Marxist form, you know like is that they don't totally naturalize states, but ultimately they see states as the units of, of contestation, actually always the every now and then, wallerstein, I'll talk about the kind of stuff that you talked about in your first book.
Speaker 1:You know about first book. You know about, uh, you know, peripheries within the core and whatnot, but they never really develop a strong analytic for dealing with it. Um, and the other problem is like they don't have a value theory and they I'm not even sure they have a theory of power either. So it's, it's, it's just kind of assumed, um, yeah, uh, and so that kind of makes figuring out the mechanisms of exploitation kind of hard if you have no grounds for justifying what the exploitation is on um, yeah, oh, and it is all value theory problem, because you know, value, value is fundamentally a structure of, of power, of social domination, right.
Speaker 2:And so without that they you're totally right they can't explain the state. The state just exists. And then you know, because the state, you know, for communists the state is always an emanation of class power, and so you can't understand it without understanding class power. And then, of course, the emanation of class power, and so you can't understand it without understanding class power. And then, of course, the class element of class power means that you have this relationship of exploitation that is expressed through the value form. And so this is the big problem with world systems theory. Not that they don't have good historical accounts or arguments. They have great data, really good, just like documentation of these long wave cycles, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:And Giovanni Arriga is probably the best. He's probably the closest to like a Marxist value form, or sorry, a Marxist theorist in world systems theory, but he also does not engage with the real question of value at all. This is a big part of the current book I'm working on, which is very, very long for this reason, but basically can be thought of as like what happens if we try to put value theory back into some of these world systems type schema, so if we look at some of the same things they're looking at, but with value in mind, and this character of value is social domination. And that also brings up, like this, question of state theory what is the state and why does it take these forms? Because the world systems theorists are essentially offering they make these caveats all the time, like you said but they're essentially offering something that remains kind of methodically nationalist, but they're essentially offering something that remains kind of methodically nationalist.
Speaker 2:And they are looking at. They're basically offering like a more or less Smithian political economy and a barbarian understanding of like the nation state in combination over the long run.
Speaker 1:And they don't really, they're not super critical of any of those categories, right of any of those categories, right, yeah, so I mean one of the things that's interesting when I hear people talk about this today that your work, most recent research, makes very clear that the dynamics of automation that we see in like reshoring in the United States, where I've been telling people for years that the idea that the US is a non-productive economy is not true. It's just not true. I don't know where people get this from. It's just that production doesn't require that many people anymore. You've got socially necessary labor town down to almost nothing, which also means profit rates are going to be weird and kind of low. And then you built on that all these bureaucratic systems where we're moving money around in a highly inefficient way.
Speaker 1:Um, but what a lot of people don't seem to look at is that's also true in the developing world like that, that this is also not employing that many people there, like this idea that in Africa there's teeming industrial masses just isn't true. Yeah, in fact, it's not even as true as one would think in China, which is what she said, and and that that does. That should change a lot of the way people talk about the, about the global situation. That is a problem for Marxists. It's one that I ironically think we've kind of known about and been in denial about since the beginning of the 20th century when Bernstein first had the revisionist, the first revisionist crisis, because what triggered that is like realizing that Germany was never going to reach a majority of the population being industrial proletariat, but that's only gotten more extreme in the last 120, 130 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know absolutely. And I think that the revisionist debate is very interesting because it's also like the like the leninist response in many ways is still kind of correct, because the whole leninist response to that was just like, well, fuck it, it doesn't matter, right, like you don't need this big industrial majority, we can just, we just kind of go for it, uh. But I think the interesting thing now, the thing that's different from this leninist case, is that all of the really existing Leninist kind of Communist Party models they de facto relied on large peasant populations and this became really the apex of this became like the peasant army kind of model through the Chinese Revolution and then the subsequent kind of third world stuff that would later become what we know of as Maoism today.
Speaker 2:At the time, this was not you know called that or anything, but these were all based on still having a fairly strong subsistence peasantry and there's a few places in the world where something of this model has been able to survive, like in the Philippines and whatnot.
Speaker 2:But even even those places you're seeing it seeing it really like go through this kind of harrowing because of the fact that you don't have this subsistence base for the peasantry anymore. So even even basic things like supporting your like guerrilla bases in the mountains actually becomes materially very difficult when you don't have a basis of subsistence in those areas.
Speaker 2:So this is the real question is how do you respond to that same conundrum that like the early kind of revisionist debates were about, but without having this alternate kind of base outside, you know, out in the countryside? Essentially and that's the real political kind of conundrum that we're in right now is how do we formulate things? Political interventions that can work without needing some sort of industrial kind of majority, but also without having this exterior to the system right, that can be kind of retreated to in the classical kind of peasant or even old utopian kind of fashion. Yeah, that's the real political core of the problem and yeah, Well, I mean, for me that's a fascinating problem today.
Speaker 1:I mean, if you look at the developed world, on one hand proletarian relations, and that we mean the rage relation is not universalized, but it's as close as you're gonna get, like you know, huge portions of the population uh, somewhere between, depending on how you count it, um, like 70 and 80 on the other hand, that's not an industrial proletariat that's skilled to work together and increasingly, that doesn't even always need basic literacy. And there's all these. There's a de-skilling in the developed world that I don't think people in the Second International could have even foresaw. It wouldn't even have registered them as a possibility. And international could have even foresaw, like they, it wouldn't even have registered them as a possibility. Um, but that's also paired into the developing world by a lot of people through this premature de-industrialization, also never being skilled. So so that does kind of lend.
Speaker 1:You know that leads to a pretty significant problem. I mean, you're right, yeah, there's parts of india and philippines where you can maybe still do a mass line model, but I don't even think there's a whole country. You could probably do that in um, and I have no idea how you'd use that to launch anything globally either like so it's, it's uh, it's kind of depressing. What do you see as, if any? I mean like, look, I'm not one of these people who says there always has to be hope, but what do you see, if any? Are there any countervailing trends and tendencies that we can look at that would give us maybe hints at what we need to do to organize this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a couple, a couple of things. One thing, as you sort of point out, is this whole social democratic and second international kind of arc was doomed from the start. But it's also it's like fundamental presumptions were really troubled by these trends where there was never going to be this massive increase in the industrial working class in a kind of classical sense, in the industrial working class, in that kind of classical sense. So a lot of those strategies are never going to work for various reasons.
Speaker 2:But like that's a really big one because they're so premised on this idea of having this strong working class culture based in a factory labor. At the same time we have a bunch of examples that are more similar to our era. Again, the big difference is kind of a peasant role. But if you look at like before the Second International, if you look at like earlier kind of workers' movement stuff in like the 19th century, like the formation of that early workers' movement, they really you know it wasn't drawn from this mass factory labor population, it was something a lot more similar to today. It was a lot of people involved in like these weird mishmash of handicrafts, shitty forms of service work, like all kinds of weird service work at the time and people who were like new migrants to the cities and all of these things that we kind of see today.
Speaker 2:A ton of like dock workers, logistics workers in general. That was a huge portion and huge, huge center of early industrial organizing efforts were all like these logistics kind of workers. So I think in many respects we've reverted to conditions that are in many ways more similar to the real classic kind of workers movement period of, like, you know, the middle of the 19th century, the later kind of 19th century, before this particular second international strategy kind of emerged from it, with these kind of big, big mass manufacturing centers with tons, you know, tens of thousands of workers employed in Indiana, you know, or in Germany. The big difference, like I said, is the kind of peasantry difference. It doesn't mean that you can't use subsistence as sort of a retreat or kind of sanctuary sort of model.
Speaker 2:I think that if you're, it's one of the things where you never want to say like well, you can't have some sort of revolutionary struggle here because the material conditions are just too bad, right, maybe that's somewhat true in some places, but really I think that you could have these insurrectionary struggles that are maybe even successful in many places, but then they get forced into into, basically, this question of how do we survive after that, because they don't have a way to kind of spread.
Speaker 2:And so we do see this in these peripheral, like far hinterland locations. We see this with, like the Zapatistas, we see this with the Kurds, we see this with even the Nepali Maoists would be kind of in this category and many of them face the same problems, despite having very different you know, ostensibly different like political theories and strategies and stuff. They basically put into the same position of like okay, we have these liberated territories, we sort of have to engage with the global market in some fashion, but we try to build up some sort of subsistence basis. And then, you know, it's just kind of open question, but I think it's something that's really not not solved and it's not like it's not like a strategy to advocate to people. It's sort of like a survival mechanism. You know, it's not like a winning strategy, it's just a surviving strategy.
Speaker 2:That said, there's a bunch of things going back to this idea of like you know, and there's these ways that employment stuff does kind of mirror these earlier like early, early industrial kind of models and and even and even some of the things that like, yeah, we don't have a peasantry, but if you look at the way that like the atomization of employment in the population stuff, in many ways organizing today is similar to organizing among peasant populations. For that reason you have like massive kind of like de-skilling right, you don't have a lot of industrial skills um. You have people who are like widely distributed, um in terms of where they live, and are very like socially kind of like atomized outside of their immediate kind of scene. You don't have some of the really good amenities for earlier peasant organizing of like communal structures and things like that Way more peasants in France and peasants in Russia.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that it does strike me. You know, all the rage these days talks about multip-polarity, which, uh, I'm not gonna go into that, but um, um, you know, as a framework that's just describing, you know, hegemonic powers, power bases, uh, and one of the things that I've talked about, um, you know, I kind of view the current, the geopolitical world right now, as the 19th century, with Cold War characteristics, meaning that nuclear weapons mean that we don't just directly fight each other but we're still competing for resources, great game style. And it feels like also, we're dealing with a bunch of hybrid class people, effectively, even if they are kind of dependent on the wage fund somehow, but are alienated, socially isolated, not used to communal labor, etc. And you know, I've even gone into this with thinking about, like you know, trucker strikes and whatnot, because truckers are a mixture of petite bourgeois and workers, right, but everyone is like, oh, why are they always so reactionary? I'm like, well, just think about the nature of their job. They're alienated all the time.
Speaker 1:Like, I hate to be like that obvious, but it is in some ways that obvious.
Speaker 1:They're one person in a car by themselves, like there's some coordination needed, but not a lot, and a lot of times, things that that, like you know, during COVID or during the seventies, with the gasoline shortages, et cetera, and the change in the speed limit, what they're responding to is their immediate needs as individual workers at, with the gasoline shortages, et cetera, and the change in the speed limit, what they're responding to is their immediate needs as individual workers that kind of have a semi-petite-pitch malfunction even when they're laborers. That's a lot of us now. I mean, you know, and it seems to me that you know and I didn't bring you on necessarily critique where the left is headed, but it seems to me that the left right now is positing this massive industrial working class that just doesn't exist, like and they're positing it off of, like, I guess, history or aesthetics or something like, and when they realize it doesn't exist in the first world, they start looking for it in the quote third world I'm gonna get in the three world theory, but also it's not really there either.
Speaker 2:So, um, yeah, well, and there's this question, though I think also, of like. I don't personally think it ever really existed, like. I think that there were certain moments where, in certain countries, it looked like it might be about to. There were strategies that formed of it. But like, even if we look at like let's look at the classical period of like, the height of mass manufacturing employment from like the 30s to the 50s what were a lot of the struggles that were going on? Because capitalism is a global system, it's always global right. So we have to talk about the entire thing. We can't just look at the US and say what kind of struggles were there in the US Even then, though, I think we could find plenty that didn't have that character.
Speaker 2:But look at these global struggles. What was going on? Well, there was massive uprisings in the colonial world. In many of these periods we had like the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya world. In many of these periods, we had like the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. You had massive strikes in the colonial world that were led by logistics workers, again like porters, people who were basically like the equivalent, like longshoremen, dock workers, that sort of thing, and by people in reproductive sectors, in the civil service, teachers, you know, government workers, et cetera in the civil service teachers, government workers, et cetera, et cetera. Those were massive, massive industrial actions in that same period.
Speaker 2:That same period also sees the most massive kind of peasant-based civil war in recent history in China, and then similar things in Vietnam, in Korea, in various other kind of locations had forms like that. These were all occurring at the same time that the supposedly classical workers movement of mass manufacturing also kind of existed. And then, if you look at, even within those core manufacturing kind of countries, manufacturing kind of countries, you actually had an immense amount of organizing that was kind of like outside of that, that focused on things like unemployment and like the depression, right. So you had these massive organizations of the unemployed that had more characteristics that are similar to, like you know, like tenants, rights struggles today and stuff were also, you know, very, very large at that time, probably larger, honestly, than they are today. And then you had all the other kind of things that are more familiar to today, like riots against police, killing people based on, you know, race and class, and all of these things in all these different countries. All of those things were already there. So in many ways, what this?
Speaker 1:kind of leftist image of the workers' movement is is itself a kind of historical myth.
Speaker 2:I think that Tronte Mario Tronte is very interesting in the way that he also talks about this kind of fact, because he's talking about a period where there is this mass manufacturing kind of period, right.
Speaker 2:But he also points out that, like the, the workers movement itself is the ideology of capital. It is this bourgeois ideology that's kind of imposed on top of this working class antagonism, this kind of proletarian, revolutionary subjectivity that's potentially there. Subjectivity that's potentially there, the workers' movement in this classic kind of example, is the way that that gets sort of domesticated, reincorporated into what Tronte calls the plan of capital. It's just a necessary part. This image is constantly reproduced by the operation of capital itself, because that operation actually does require the participation of like large kind of labor unions kind of image of the world and our whole idea, this leftist idea of the workers movement, mass industrial kind of labor. That's really where that originates.
Speaker 2:If you look at the actual kind of history of revolutionary communist thought, right, it's always been about breaking that image and it's framed this in different ways historically. Like the classical leninist one was, uh, it to, you know, trade union consciousness or economism, et cetera, et cetera. But if you look at like Marx and Marx's engagement with, like the British trade unionists, he's making similar arguments against the Ricardian socialists, he's making similar arguments against the Lasallians, he's making similar arguments and you see this kind of repeated again and again in different eras. So I think we're always dealing with this problem of breaking through this myth and what you identify as kind of like this leftist myth. It's really part of kind of the administrative, ideological administration of capitalist society, so it's always going to be there. How much we buy into it maybe does measure the extent of, like you know, weakness of of the left or whatever. And because it's been dominant for a long time it's not just like this classical workers movement thing.
Speaker 2:We can also think of it as like movements in general, right, the idea that change comes from like social movements, from civil society, et cetera, et cetera. Like these are ideological kind of images of how politics works from this kind of bourgeois perspective, from this capitalist perspective and part of the whole idea of communist theory. Right is breaking through those kind of ideological you know appearances, seeing where they come from that also formulating sort of revolution, a coherent revolutionary kind of thrust beneath that and that does have to deal with these more concrete, these more concrete questions that you kind of bring up and we can talk there's some interesting things in, like the Chinese case about how do we understand these de-skilling kind of things that happen, the process of like re-industrialization, quote unquote re-industrialization. In the US it's not really re-industrialization, although it is regionally re-industrializing certain areas, but then again not a lot of employment. So I have a bunch of examples from this, but it just kind of depends where you'd like to go.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about the Chinese case and then let's go to America, because those are the two big polls right now. Screw Europe, we don't care about them, and I'm kidding European listeners, I know I have some. So what do we see going on in China with de-skilling, re-skilling, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So first I will say just to give a little tidbit to the Europeans, I will say that there is historically a pattern of like a lot of revolutionary situations kind of arising in the most kind of backwater and backwards parts of the world. So it wouldn't be surprising if we saw one arising in France or somewhere today, right, so in terms of like yeah, you're right, this kind of real core of the global economy.
Speaker 2:We're really talking about China. There's a very, very interesting discursive thing that's been happening in China in the past 10, 15 years. There's been a lot of concern about deindustrialization, basically, and so this has been expressed in official outlets by the party and also.
Speaker 2:So what I'm going to say sounds fake, but it's not fake.
Speaker 2:There's kind of this equivalent of like reddit in china, um, these kind of like blogging, micro blogging kind of culture, and these sort of like forums that have people who are like kind of known figures in these forums, um, and there are there's very, very good evidence that a lot of like high level thinkers and even like party strategists and statesmen, right, actually read these forums and potentially also are the ones posting on these forums kind of anonymously.
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of people who are posting on the forums whose whose um programs essentially get, get then duplicated in like official state documents later. Uh, and there's an open question to like what is that level of like? Is it just people are kind of reading this stuff and being influenced as part of like the zeitgeist, right? Or is this someone who works for the government? Or is this something where, like, this white paper was actually modeled on this weird paper that this person posted on this forum? Anyway, so there's this very vibrant kind of like internet culture in China is the point, but that internet culture also has this very clear influence on policymaking. It's a little bit. It's clear that it happens, but it's opaque exactly what the mechanisms are Now.
Speaker 2:That said, there's a lot of concern both in these official outlets to the extent that we kind of have, they're visible to us and in these kind of online forums and stuff. About de-industrialization, about the effects on China of de-industrialization and the effects on the population of de-industrialization. There's a couple, there's two really big examples I'll talk about. One is Wang Hunan. He's a member of the central committee and very high level kind of thing. Before that he was just academic and he wrote these books basically Let me see if I can find the title, oh yeah, so basically, so wang hooning wrote america against america is the big one that people um kind of cite. It's based on his trip to the united states in like the 90s, I think. Um, and so, just for context, wang hooning is like the chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He's one of the top leaders on the Politburo, et cetera, et cetera. So this is like a major figure, but when he was an academic he wrote this book. Once you're a major figure in China, you don't get to publish anymore. So we don't get like official outlets. Everything gets condensed into what's officially like Xi Jinping thought and everything like that. But you see, elements of his thought very clearly go into this.
Speaker 2:So he writes his book based on his trip in America. It's a fascinating book, absolutely fascinating. There isn't an official English translation, there's some shitty English translations out there, but like there's an official one. But he like goes around all these cities in the US and he's like oh yeah, this park in San Francisco is full of homeless people. And then he goes around and he goes to like I don't know somewhere in like Chicago or Detroit or somewhere, and he's talking to some other Chinese guys telling him like, oh yeah, you shouldn't go to these parts of the city because they're very dangerous and you know. So he gets like the idea of like a racial ghetto explained to him.
Speaker 2:And so he's kind of documenting all of these things and he's like look at all of these like kind of horrible forms of like social enemy in the in the US and like the 1990s Right. Look at all these horrible forms of like social collapse et cetera, et cetera. And he's tracing all of these things to this phenomenon of deindustrialization, financialization et cetera, et cetera. And his whole kind of strategy is like how do how does China like avoid these problems as it kind of develops is one of the open kind of questions. Now this gets. The other side of this is. This gets much more explicit in recent years on these kinds of internet forums. There's this kind of like sort of new right-wing faction within Chinese politics, colloquially called the Gong Yedong, the industrial party. There's people translate it some other kind of ways. There's sort of like this weird combination of like Promethean pro-technology people, but they're also very, very focused on this question of de-industrialization and the negative social effects of de-industrialization within China.
Speaker 2:And so they're really saying these industrial party people on the Internet are basically saying like look, china is going to lose its capacity to be to compete in advanced industrial lines Right, but be like it's going to create all these negative social effects if we deindustrialize. So we have to figure out ways to increase industrial employment. We have to find ways to give people good like engineering education. A lot of these guys are engineers and they say that they're engineers like working engineers in industrial districts in like Southern China, and so they're making these kind of interesting arguments about, ultimately, what it becomes. Is this like like technophilic, like technocracy, where they say like, look, we need engineers in charge and that then they can distribute more like industrial knowledge and lead into new kind of sectors, et cetera, et cetera. And in many ways the structure of the Chinese state is like this All the major leaders in China are engineers, except for one. I think Li Keqiang was not an engineer, he was an economist.
Speaker 2:So there's all engineers like one economist is kind of the idea, but everyone has an engineering degree, right, so it is very much this kind of techno technocratic thing. Now the point is that there's two new kinds of utopianism that get generated at the popular level by this phenomenon that you're talking about of deindustrialization and its effects on consciousness, like basically the decline in productive subjectivity and its effects on political subjectivity is sort of how we talk about it. One of the things is this utopianism that Nick Chavez and I talk about in the article we wrote for Endnotes, about like this sort of fantasy localism, right, where people kind of imagine they don't have a good understanding of production and therefore they sort of imagine that people can return to like subsistence economies, essentially these local autarchies, but they never are able to really theorize exactly how that works. But there's like this striving for it.
Speaker 2:You see this again and again and again the Kohei Saito, the guy who's very the Japanese Marxist, like Marxologist, who's now very popular for writing one of the big degrowth books, if you look at him, actually talk about like political strategy. It's very naive and in fact entirely idiotic, like it really does not make sense, but it's fantastic sort of image of returning to this peasant kind of countryside, life in Japan, of all places right, which is hugely reliant on like, massive imports of petroleum for, like, producing energy and imports of uranium for producing nuclear energy and like all of this stuff. Like it just really doesn't make sense. But this is one of the types of utopianism. This, I think, is the utopianism that many of us are familiar with in the American left as kind of a default thing.
Speaker 1:But there's another one.
Speaker 2:The other one is the one that gets expressed in this hard eco-modernist kind of guise, or this technophile guise of these industrial party people in China, which is this obsession with engineers as they currently exist.
Speaker 1:Right as if.
Speaker 2:you, if you as if you just transferred political power to these people, then that would solve all these. They should really run society. That that would solve all of these kind of issues. And the production itself is neutral, right, it's this neutral technical apparatus that can just be geared toward better ends. And so the socialistic example of that are, like the People's Republic of Walmart and Amazon type arguments where the kind of people just argue well, if we just nationalize these things, we could just use them for good, right, but they don't get into these more intricate, but they're doing the same thing. Of't get into these more intricate, they're doing the same thing. I'm not getting into these more intricate questions like the social design of those apparatuses. What are they really designed for? Because in large part they're just designed for domination, exploitation of the workforce, right.
Speaker 2:And it's not to say that you can't repurpose technologies. You obviously can't, that's the whole point. But they actually don't talk about repurposing, they talk about just using it as it exists, unrepurposed for some different ends, right, not redesigning it. And so this is another kind of side of this utopian kind of scheme that comes from the degeneration of political subjectivity or, sorry, of productive subjectivity, and then it has this effect on political subjectivity. And so this I think is really really important to keep in mind is you have these two mutual kind of errors, utopian schemes that come from that process. One is this naive localism and the other one is this kind of like naive technophilia, you know, put the engineers in charge, technocratic kind of thing. And that applies not just to like actual engineers but also this idea of like, well, if we just had really smart social scientists, political economists right in charge of the central bank, then we could make it a central bank for the people, etc. Etc.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, in the odds that would have been David Graeber versus John Sarazin and today that's Lee Phillips versus Kohei Sato. You know, maybe I shouldn't name names, but I'm going to. So I know these people, I can get away with it. I know these people, I can get away with it. Yeah, the I mean it is a real interesting problem because it does feel like you're forever in a bind.
Speaker 1:I've done a series on the eco-socialist answers and I've been very unsatisfied with both the industrial bright greeners and the. Well, now they're degrowth, but I used to call them deep greeners, but I guess that actually does have a different metaphysics or something attached to it. But it seems to me like a problem that I've seen before, stated over and over again, not even just in Marxism. We've seen it it with with, with left anarchists too, and it just seems to come back reframed and it seems to me that that's kind of about not wanting to deal with the realities of both the population scale and production and what, how. And the under capital efficient production is actually kind of bad and the under capital efficient production is actually kind of bad.
Speaker 2:They're both utopian in this classic sense of not really wanting to think through how you get from A to B and also not wanting to address the fact of domination built into these systems. It's just different ways of rejecting actually thinking through both those. And then they're also both utopian in the sense of just being the elaboration of ideals. Right, they're nice ideals, maybe they're abstractly correct, right, and in their own ways Right, and probably the degrowth people are closer, like, morally they're probably more right in some some sort of philosophical sense. Right, but philosophy doesn't really matter in and of itself. Right, like it is important, but the whole point of communist theory is that it's not enough. Right that politics doesn't emerge from nice philosophical ideas.
Speaker 2:The classic critique of, like the utopian socialist is this idea of politics emerging from enlightenment ideals. Right, but it doesn't. It's this bloody, you know, struggle through the mud against you know, this other force that wants to put you in your place. Right, and so that's why these elements, you know, they're always proven so absurd when actual political outbursts happen because they don't have anything to offer, like when you have massive riots that see the downtown cores of every American city looted, you know, in the space of like a weekend.
Speaker 2:Neither of these political factions have anything to say about that, like they can't, there's just nothing. They have no level of political engagement possible with any kind of activity going on in the proletarian class and at worst they then see these forms of activity as just naive and stupid and just like, well, I guess isn't good enough. Basically because of course it isn't good enough. It's just like this, this amorphous kind of nihilistic, very media kind of uprising, and that's always going to happen, right, and the whole point of political organization is that you engage with those things and you build some terms of illustrating the actual character of political subjectivity right now, like where is it being expressed?
Speaker 2:How is it being expressed? What is it divorced from? What does it target and why does it target these sort of things we talked about, like what are some hopeful kind of elements of it? I think there are actually a few very, very hopeful elements that are kind of built into these trends. It's not just about the degeneration of productive subjectivity, like that is there, but at the same time you also see this massive awareness of questions of social reproduction that weren't nearly as obvious before, because so many more people now work in social reproductive sectors. Right, people are working as nurses, people are working as teachers, like these are the big employment sectors in a lot of areas, right, and that raises these new political kind of questions.
Speaker 2:I would a lot of the ways I would actually counter the both the eco-modernist and the degrowth sort of sides of the debate. Right, the eco-modernist thing is just a classic example of like, well, we can unfetter the productive forces right. And Right, the eco-monitoring thing is just a classic example of like, well, we can unfetter the productive forces Right, and the degrowth people say, well, that's bad, et cetera, et cetera. And both are wrong, right, in their own kind of ways.
Speaker 2:But, like I said, maybe the degrowth people are a little bit more like morally correct, but the big thing is they're also kind of wrong in the sense that there will be an unfettering of productive forces in certain respects Right, it just doesn't look like the eco monitors people will say it will say it.
Speaker 2:In fact, one of the big things I think that would happen, that that is this immediate kind of objective of communist organizing is instead what you might think of as like the unfettering of the reproductive forces. Reproductive forces, right. We have this massive capacity to just care for people right and to develop people's potential intellectual and physical and their basic kind of like level of like health and things like that. There is this massive embedded potential and immense skill in how to do those things right and if that can also be integrated with productive knowledge and this skill in how to like produce the things that form the basis of being able to do all of that stuff, that's a huge, huge potential. And that's also historically, what socialists you know, attempts to social societies have actually been very good at doing is like educating people, ensuring people have healthcare, ensuring that people have like access to like amenities for like physical health, massive physical culture kind of infrastructure and good food, et cetera, et cetera, like those sort of things I think are really we have a lot of embedded skill, a lot of amenities, a lot of capacity to just do that immediately Right, like that's not hard for people to envision, and that's why so much of just knee-jerk politics is like why can't we have healthcare? Why can't we go to school for free? Those sort of things are really salient and obvious. And then the other thing that's very obvious is just the fact that a lot of these interventions Joshua Clover and Jasper Burns and some other people have talked about this All these interventions are just by default they're targeting these circulatory systems because that's what's available and that's what's there. And you can extend that sort of logic to say, well, there is also actually really big organizing, classical organizing uh, opportunity within like sectors, like logistics, like right now I work at a big logistics facility in at the port right. It is a big. It's very, very de-industrializedized compared like historically in terms of how many people we employ, but it still does employ quite a few people and there is a huge potential. Like if you had that sector or unionized and organized in a radical way, it was integrated with some sort of larger political kind of body, integrated with some sort of larger political kind of body and this larger political subjectivity that could, you know, be an immense kind of tool in this, you know, revolutionary antagonism against the present world. So there are these little hopeful bits like that.
Speaker 2:In addition to that, we just the technical capacity is the other thing. I think people just forget that the basic argument, the living conditions in abject poverty, in awful conditions, in prison camps, in places like Gaza, like these things are produced by the capitalist system and they've always been produced by the capitalist system, right? So those things I think are clear. But that's actually not the core of the communist argument, right?
Speaker 2:The core of the communist argument isn't about absolute immiseration, it's about relative capacity. It's about what kind of technical capacity, what social capacity do we actually have right now as a global society, versus what we actually do with that capacity? Because we have the capacity to feed everyone in the world, no problem, right, way more than they need, and we don't do it. To feed everyone in the world, no problem, right, way more than they need, and we don't do it. We have way more than we need to give everyone free healthcare, everyone in the world, and we don't do it. And free education, and we don't do it. Right, we have the capacity to electrify Africa, and we don't do it.
Speaker 2:And I'm totally against these primitivist kind of ideas of like, well, maybe we don't need industrial development, you absolutely fucking do People need electricity? They're going to want electricity. If you can't give it to them, they're going to turn to capitalist means to develop it in a traditional kind of fashion, like it has to those developmental kind of mechanisms that don't go away. All that stuff becomes important. But in fact you could just do it Right. It doesn't have to happen through this capitalist means. That is the fundamental kind of point of this communist ethical argument is like the vast shortfall between what we're capable of and what we actually do. It's not about absolute miseration, although that obviously is there, right? No one is arguing. You can't base your ethical argument for capitalism on the fact that it just miserates everyone, because it doesn't. It also does produce development. It has these horrible ecological consequences, et cetera, et cetera. But like that's always a losing battle because you're always proven wrong, right. So this immiseration is part of. It, is a crucial thing to agitate against and to point out.
Speaker 2:But the real sin of that immiseration is not that it's absolute immiseration is that it's so so far short of what we're capable of, right, and so that's, I think, also where we see a lot of hope is that we're capable of a lot technically that we can produce mind boggling amounts of things If we wanted to. As I said, if we just organized social resources in a fashion that was like equitable and reasonable, you could like, you could introduce, you could electrify basically all of sub-Saharan Africa, you could introduce universal healthcare to everywhere in the world. You know you could do all of this within the space of like a decade easy If you had those social resources deployed in these particular ways they prioritize these sort of things and at the same time, you could lead a massive agroecological rehabilitation of present like industrial society, which is also a crucial aspect of like what a communist program needs to advocate for and is really central to the social metabolic idea of what communism is right Is rehabilitating this, this metabolic relationship, through more, more healthy, environmentally healthy agroecological systems of production Right.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean the latter takes a little bit longer than the former but yes, yeah, that's true, but both are.
Speaker 1:I remember just sitting and listening to I've had matt hoober on, I've had john berman foster on, I've had jason uh smith on. A bunch of people on the eco-socialist talk about this lately and I've just been sitting here thinking like um, it's, it is a massive unleashing of reproductive forces. But like once, like um, not not that there isn't a cost to maintaining it and whatnot, but like every incentive and capital is to make everything shorter and shorter term because you got to keep the market moving, etc. That's why I don't have faith that anything sitting on my desk Is going to last more than 10 years, whereas like Stuff made in the 19th century I have in my house but Blah, blah, blah, declining racist profits, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:But In a socialist economy we can make stuff to last and we know how to do it. That's the thing we actually do know how to do it. My fear is is a bit is that eventually enough of the population won't know how to do it. Like that's my nightmare scenario. That's like the common ruin of all is like de-skilling gets so decadent that population won't know how to do it. Like that's my nightmare scenario. That's like the common ruin of all is like de-skilling gets so decadent that we don't know how to do it anymore.
Speaker 2:No, I think that's this is a huge, this is a fundamental fear of like I talk about, like the industrial party people in China. This is a big thing that comes up again and again in in various kinds of forms. You see in again and again in various kind of forms. You see it in like different sci-fi kind of scenarios. And so Leo Tsuchin has a, the Chinese sci-fi author. He has a short story that's basically this idea like there's like an advanced human society. They originally seeded life on earth and they returned to earth at this hyper advanced stage, but they're all like, basically children, because they don't know how to operate their own technology and just takes care of them, and so then earth has to like it's also this weird Chinese story about filial piety. They are obligated to take care of their parent species, right, because of filial piety, but they they're just like fucking children. They don't know how to do anything for themselves, right? So I think this is a fear that really gets expressed in many ways. Now there's a couple of things I think push against it. One thing is that even within capitalist development, you're going to have new lines of production, and whenever you have a new line of production. Yes, it often automates faster, but initially it actually often requires quite a bit of human labor and quite a wider distribution of engineering knowledge about how to do it. So if you look at like electronics, this is a classic example, because electronics in the modern form we understand them like microelectronics. Right, that sector didn't really exist before. Like no one was making microchips, right, and so now you have this whole sector about of basically making microchips and plugging them into things and soldering circuit boards and whatnot and creating, um, uh, the casings that go on top of them. Right, and when that started that was very labor intensive because no one had done it before, so you just needed a bunch of people to do it by hand, and then it got rapidly mechanized, right, but it was a new sector and and so then it required some elements of this.
Speaker 2:There's certain things where we can expect that, like that's also going to happen. In fact, ai is a really good example of that. People think of AI as like this massive kind of automating sector and that's true, except it also has been this required this massive input of human labor, doing basically the equivalent of assembly work, where you just are correcting ai models. Uh, you're saying you know you have people saying that this prompt is wrong or this profit prompt is racist, don't use it, like those sort of things.
Speaker 2:And then you have background, all these background workers in the ai economy in the global south especially, who are doing like just weird uh, like weird ugly, like bug work or like content, uh supervision and stuff like that, and it's actually a huge employment sector right now and it will. That itself will get mechanized and get get slimmed very rapidly, but it's a good example of this kind of phenomenon. So in one sense, you do have some sort of generalization of uh knowledge about some new kind of things, because this is driven, you know, a bunch of new people have had to learn, like, how you operate AI models and just basically, they basically just have to learn Bayesian statistics and some coding.
Speaker 2:Right, but like that's the idea is that you have to get these things kind of operational, and so whenever you have new systems, you do have this surge in the need for these sort of skills Now at the same time.
Speaker 2:Your fundamental point is totally right, though, is that this atrophies, right, unless you do something to stop it, and that is in my opinion. I talk about this, I think I talk about this a little bit in the piece that co-authored with Nick Chavez. This is actually a fundamental part of that early period that I call that, we call um, like a period of communist construction, which kind of covers this transitional state where you don't really you can't really say you have like a communist society, right, but you're working towards it, and there's this intentional political drive to do, to decommodify, uh, life right, to eliminate, to do all of these. These core communist things provide all of these services for free, et cetera, et cetera, and part of that, maybe the central part of it, is rehabilitation of productive subjectivity, and that means distributing much, much giving people much wider access to things like basic engineering knowledge, all of that, right. These are things that have massive artificial scarcity imposed on them in capitalist society.
Speaker 2:If you just think about American universities, right, the coding departments or the engineering departments of major American universities, the coding departments or the engineering departments of major American universities, right, it's incredibly difficult to get into them because of this artificial scarcity, right, they only hire so many professors, they only let in so many students. Even if you get into college, you can't necessarily get into that program, et cetera, et cetera. But it doesn't mean that you couldn't create the capacity to more widely educate people, and so that's one of the core things. The other core thing is rehabilitating even more basic skills, like agroecological skills in people, and in that sense we're not distributing like what you and I would think of as like engineering knowledge, but it basically is right, it's this scientific knowledge at this broader sense. So it's this broader distribution of scientific knowledge which requires the facilitation of like rehabilitating basic agroecological practices. So, for example, the big example in much of like North America to do that and where and why spreading those traditional indigenous practices of ecological management.
Speaker 2:Right, those things become absolutely essential as well. So that's part of the scientific kind of project. I sort of joke that like this is the sense in which I believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat, which I believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat right. And when I tell people what the dictatorship of the proletariat kind of looks like, I say well, just like, imagine a giant, like everything is a giant community college but we're all also armed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, the one thing I like about Maoism and there's not a lot that I love about Maoism but it is that period of the peasantry in the countryside where you're teaching people malicious skills, basic literacy, the classics, how to plant shit, how to do crop rotations, and everybody learns a little bit of everything which I have Joseph tainter disease, one of my, one of my fears about capitalist specialization is like we're like we're all way, way, way too specialized in our skill sets and a communist society, since we want not that we're ever get rid of all division of labor I'm not that idealistic but like that we want division of labor to be somewhat voluntary. You, you have to have a bunch of different skill sets, right, you have to have the ability to access them or to get right is the other important thing.
Speaker 2:You don't have to always have them, but you have to be able to get them if you wanted to right, which you can't do like if I wanted to go get these skill sets, like I literally probably couldn't afford it right now and no one's going to give me like I don't know, like another student loan to go and do this other you know thing, etc, etc. And then could I even get into the program probably not, etc. Etc right.
Speaker 1:So you know, basically I mean universities are basically glorified pareto machines, but like, um, uh, you know, basically I mean universities are basically glorified Pareto machines but, like you know, communists really do have to deal with, with de-oligarchicization, and and that's something we really need to push. There's one other thing I did like about your work with with Nick and Endnotes, because it's something I drone on and on and on and on and on about, as because when I'm talk about social reproduction work, I'm an educator and two, um, I have just watched people get de-skilled like it's. You know, I see it in real and this, I think, as communists, is what we got to offer. We could, you know, we can handle the problems that exist out of basically like no, we're not going to make it like gay luxury space communism or whatever, but we can handle the problems that exist right now for most of the planet, even at current population sizes, pretty readily. If we really wanted to um and uh, we could give people a lot more empowerment over what they do with their life and time.
Speaker 1:Not, you know, not that there wouldn't be labor, there's still lots of labor but like you'd have a lot more control over it then when you wouldn't be laboring for shit. You don't need to um, um, and I think you know, yeah, and I'm also with you, everybody needs to be armed. Uh, with someone I was like, well, what will you replace the uh police with? And I'm like universal public militia. I don't like I don, well, what will you replace the police with? And I'm like universal public militia. I don't know. Like I don't know what else you want. None of us are cops. If we're all cops, right, but which? I think that scares people. That's the last, yeah.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't do that branding.
Speaker 1:But anyway, thank you so much. I want to get you and Nick back on sometime to talk more specifically about that article. You guys wrote for Endnotes, so I'll be in touch. Where can people find your work? I am going to link the two papers. Well, an interview and a paper we discussed indirectly in this will be linked in the show notes. But where else can people find your work?
Speaker 2:The most kind of the readiest place people will find. A concentration of my work is going to be on the. If you look at the Brooklyn Rail Magazine, the Field Notes section I write most regularly for them. I have the book Hinterland is out through the Field Notes book series which is on Reaction Press which is in the UK. I will have another book coming out through the historical materialism series in, I don't know, probably 2025, maybe 2026, the next year or the year after. It probably will move a little slow. It's just a very, very large book.
Speaker 2:So those are the places where people can go. I will also provide, because of the content of this talk, I'll give you the link to my dissertation. If people are interested, then you can provide that. That's just kind of a long document I made it all public on like a Google Drive has the public version and people can look at that if they're interested. That's a bunch of the data about all of this stuff that I sort of talked about and especially a bunch of data about other things that we didn't get a chance to talk about, like the kind of underwhelming actual reality of, like Chinese investment overseas, especially in Africa, and some things like that. So it's kind of all over the place.
Speaker 2:I don't have a single website, but those are the places I would suggest looking Brooklyn Rail and then these various links that you'll send out.
Speaker 1:Right, I'll put them in the show notes. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks.