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GreigCharnock andGuidoStarosta
Thus, from the bare enumeration of some of the more glaringly obvious fea-
tures of the present-day world economy, it can be seen that the old or classi-
cal international division of labour, by which the underdeveloped countries
were on the whole incorporated into the capitalist world economy as mere
raw materials suppliers, no longer exists. The underdeveloped countries are
increasingly chosen as sites for manufacturing industries producing goods
that are competitive in the world market.
This tendency will be designated the new international division of
labor (to be considered as an on-going, not a completed, process) (Frbel
etal. 1978: 845, 849).
G. Charnock (
)
Politics, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
G. Starosta
Department of Economics and Administration, National University of Quilmes
and National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Buenos Aires, Argentina
back then, he summarises, had little to say directly about the transforma-
tions of production and work within firms, or about the political relations
between organised economic interests and the state, while international
economic relations between states were understood firmly in nineteenth
century terms of autonomous and mutually antagonistic powers, great or
small (Radice 2015: 9). Yet profound and lightning-paced transforma-
tions in worldwide production and trade were indeed palpable to any
observer back then, and by the mid-1970s Marxist scholars in the UK
and beyond were beginning to engage in highly productiveand still
influentialdebates on the labour process, state theory, and alternative
political strategies in the context of deep world recession and heightened
social and political tensions across much of the West. Radice recalls, in
particular, his participation in a 1974 workshop in Starnberg, Germany,
at which Otto Kreye and his colleagues presented the first results of
their project on the new international division of labour. This work, he
confirms, was to become very influential for progressive scholarship on
global capitalism (Radice 2015: 9).
The new international division of labour (NIDL) thesis developed by
Folker Frbel, Jurgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye very much stands out
as one of the most influential and widely debated contributions at the
forefront of discussions on late-industrialisation and global production
long into the 1980s and 1990s. Based on their empirical studies in the
1970s, Frbel, Heinrichs, and Kreyes work seemed to capture extremely
well the transformations in the world market taking place by the begin-
ning of that decade, and very rapidly caught the attention of most analysts
of international political economy (IPE) and the changing geographies
of global capitalism. Although the argument in their book The New
International Division of Labour (published in English in 1980) rested on
very distinctive theoretical foundations and arguments, reviewed below,
the expression new international division of labour was to somehow
acquire a life of its own and soon became very much a part of the working
vocabulary of most scholars empirically concerned with global processes
of industrial restructuringa kind of conceptual shorthand to encapsulate
what were regarded as the main developments in the world economy at
that time. The NIDL thus became a catchphrase, widely accepted and
loosely used (sometimes by default) to describe the novel configuration of
the capitalist world market, but without always making a self-conscious
effort to acknowledge or flesh out the particular conceptual approach
INTRODUCTION: THE NEW INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOUR ... 3
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labourer responsible for the advance in the conscious control of the move-
ment of natural forces (that is, science) and its technological applications
in the directly social organisation of the immediate production process.2
Although not explicitly addressed by Marx in Capital, the benefit of his-
torical hindsight makes it very easy for us to recognise how the total social
capital deals with its constant need for the development of the produc-
tive powers of science and for the conscious organisation of the increas-
ingly social labour process, namely, by engendering a special partial organ
of the collective labourer (see Starosta 2016: Chap. 8). Capital requires
from these workers ever more complex forms of labour. As much as those
discussed in Capital, these are also immediate effects of machine produc-
tion on the worker (Marx 1976: 517). Needless to say, inasmuch as this
expanded productive subjectivity is nothing more than a concrete form of
the production of relative surplus-value, the exercise of newly developed
intellectual productive powers is also inverted into a mode of existence
of capital in its movement of self-valorisation. Moreover, sooner or later
many of these intellectual dimensions of living labour will also experience
automation (or knowledge codification) and therefore become relatively
simplified. As we shall see later in this book, this latter aspect has been
central to the more recent phases in the evolution of the NIDL (as shown
in Chap. 6 through a discussion of the Irish software industry).
Second, it tends to degrade the subjectivity of those workers that
acquire and exercise their increasingly simpler manual or experienced-
based productive attributes in the direct process of production. Indeed,
large-scale industry is based on the objectification of tacit knowledge, pre-
viously embodied in the manual industrial worker and largely acquired
through lengthy on-the-job, learning-by-doing processes, as an attribute
of the system of machinery (Huws 2006). In this sense, the impact of capi-
talist automation certainly tends to be one of deskilling or degradation
of direct production work through the objectification of formerly manual
tasks as functions of machines. Yet the effect of increasing automation has
not just been one of deskilling. It has been mixed, also entailing a cer-
tain creation of new skills required by capital even from direct production
workers. The key point, however, is that these newer skills have been of
a different kind from those that have been eroded. While the older skills
tended to be based on the particularistic development of the productive
subjectivity of wage-workers (both manual and intellectual) as a result of
the practical experience of machining in the direct process of production,
the newly created skills tend to revolve around the universalistic dimension
8 G. CHARNOCK AND G. STAROSTA
authors in this book see the transformations associated with NIDL as being
products of the total social capitals drive to enhance the production of
relative surplus-value on a world scale through the development of labour
productivity, which finds its most advanced expression in the mechanisa-
tion of large-scale industry. Succinctly put, Iigo Carreras fundamental
argument is that the essential general content that defines the NIDL,
and which has been reproduced under its evolving historical configurations
since the 1950s until the present time, consists in the international frag-
mentation of the productive subjectivity of the working class (Iigo Carrera
2013). Thus, as a result of its own immanent tendencies, the simplest origi-
nal form of the NIDLwhich we think Frbel and his colleagues were
right to identify as signifying an on-going processhas evolved into a more
complex constellation, whereby capital searches worldwide for the most
profitable combinations of relative cost and qualities/disciplines result-
ing from the variegated past histories of the different national fragments
of the working class (through their impact upon their general conditions
of reproduction and condensed in the so-called historical component of
the value of labour-power). Each country therefore tends to concentrate
a certain type of labour-power of distinctive material and moral produc-
tive attributes of a determinate complexity, which are spatially dispersed
but collectively exploited by capital as a whole in the least costly possible
manner (Grinberg 2011: 356). Production in specific industrial sectors
has thereby expanded in some countries while contracting in others where
new and more advanced sectors have developed, following a rhythm deter-
mined by the evolution of two main factors, that is, technological change
and relative cost and productive attributes of national labour forces.
This different constellation does not involve the transcendence of the
NIDL, as many of the critics of the original thesis have suggested (see
Chap. 4), but instead represents a more complex form assumed by the same
general content. This was the content that the original formulation of the
NIDL thesis by Frbel, Heinrichs, and Kreye failed to uncover, influenced
as those authors were by dependency and world-systems theories, and the
view that different countries and regions of the world achieve different
levels of development on the structural basis of unequal exchange. And
it is this content that has generally eluded alternative international and
critical political economy approaches that seek in their own way to explain
the specificity of national development and the relations between distinct
national capitalisms under conditions of globalisation or of combined
and uneven development.
10 G. CHARNOCK AND G. STAROSTA
in new guises the problems we argue were already inherent in the classic
literature: principally, in terms of explaining the concrete forms of varie-
gated national capitalisms and uneven development through the strategic
and conscious action of key agents and social forces that are somehow
constituted outside of the process of capital accumulation; or in terms of
resorting to the theory of unequal exchange to explain underdevelop-
ment; or in terms of failing to explain the social determination of uneven
and combined development, other than by means of a prior reliance upon
the primacy of this under-theorised, abstract and trans-historical category.4
We suggest that the approach taken in this book can indeed provide
such a unified field theory. By deciphering the national forms taken by
the general content of an historically specific mode of the reproduction
of total (worldwide) society, on the basis of the fragmentation of the pro-
ductive subjectivity of the international working class, and through the
development of the automation of large-scale industry within the NIDL,
this book advances a substantive explanation of the inner relation between
global transformation and uneven development that may well provoke
criticism and debate, but which at least does so on distinctive and hitherto
largely unfamiliar grounds.
OUTLINE OFTHEBOOK
The argument in Part I of this bookcontaining chapters by Iigo
Carerra, Caligaris and Starostasustains that Frbel, Heinrichs, and
Kreye were right to proceed from a global perspective on capital accumu-
lation, and also right in the centrality they attributed to the recent material
transformations of the capitalist labour process as key to the explanation of
the developmental potentialities of late-industrialisation. On the basis of
this critical re-examination of the NIDL thesis, the book goes on to argue
that a revised NIDL thesis can shed new light on the specificities of capital
accumulation in various parts of the contemporary world. Two particu-
larly significant general insights emerge from these early chapters. First,
that both the classical and new international divisions of labour should
be most fruitfully re-signified in terms of the role played by ground-rent
in specific national spaces of accumulation (a category explained in Part
I). And second, that there remain essential continuities inherent to the
classical international division of labour which necessitate that the current
constellation of the world economy be understood as being constituted
by the co-existence of both old and new international divisions of labour.
14 G. CHARNOCK AND G. STAROSTA
class within national borders since the 1970s has unfolded through a form
of differentiated integration in Europe. Charnock, Purcell, and Ribera-
Fumaz argue that it is crucially important to understand the longer-term
historical role played within the NIDL by relatively late-industrialising
countries that are today bearing the brunt of crisis and internal devalua-
tion in a unified Europe. Focusing on Spain, they argue that it is precisely
on the material basis of its full integration within the NIDL from the
mid-1970s that the conditions of the reproduction of the working class
were reshaped, and it is this historical component in the reproduction of
the Spanish accumulation process that has prefigured the process of the
differentiation of the conditions of the reproduction of the working class
across and within its borders ever since.
In Part III, we turn to specific sectoral case studies within the
NIDL.The choice of case studies is again not arbitrary, since the auto-
motive and steel production sectors have been at the historical vanguard
of the move towards the NIDL, and they have been industries in which
the actual determinants of the NIDL, which the book seeks to identify,
have been most visible. In Chap. 8, Alejandro Fitzsimons and Sebastin
Guevara examine the historical development of the Argentine automotive
industry from the mid-1950s to the present. They argue first that the pecu-
liar characteristics of low scales of production, obsolete technology, and
the resulting low global competitiveness of the local auto industry in its
initial stages were determined by the specific form of capital accumulation
prevailing in Argentina as a result of its participation in the CIDL.This
specificity had at its core the process of appropriation by industrial capital
of a portion of the relatively abundant ground-rent available in Argentina;
in this case, by transnational automotive manufacturers. Challenging the
dominant point of view that the development of the NIDL led to the
qualitative restructuring of the Argentinean automotive industry, this
chapter examines concrete changes within the labour process and forms
of valorisation of capital in the industry. In so doing the chapter argues
that, despite these changes, the automotive industry in fact continued its
development on the same basis as beforei.e. the appropriation by TNCs
of a portion of agrarian ground-rent. Fitzsimons and Guevara conclude,
therefore, that the NIDL did not restructure the Argentine automotive
industryas is commonly claimed.
In Chap. 9, Nicolas Grinberg offers an alternative account to the
mainstream, institutionalist view on the state-led process of economic
INTRODUCTION: THE NEW INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOUR ... 19
NOTES
1. See, for example, Iigo Carrera (2006, 2013, 2014, 2015). Several of Iigo
Carreras other working papers are available in English through the CICP
web site: http://www.cicpint.org/CICP%20English/Principal.html.
2. The productive attributes of workers include the strictly material or techni-
cal dimension of labour-power required by the particularity and complexity
of the productive functions to be performed, as well as its moral attributes
(that is, the general forms of consciousness and self-understandings that
make those workers suitable for the specific forms of discipline that a certain
organisation of the capitalist labour process entails). The term productive
subjectivity captures this twofold dimension of labour-power.
3. As Radice (2009: 29) summarises, the mechanism through which this
unequal distribution of rewards is sustained is, in essence, that of market
structure: businesses and zones engaging in core activities have market power
based on superior technology, management and access to finance, while
those engaging in peripheral activities have only generic resources of cheap
land and unskilled labour, the markets for which are highly competitive.
4. All three of these frameworks/concepts figure in the selection of articles
edited by Bruff and Ebenau (2014). See Rioux (2015) for a critical discus-
sion of Trotskys notion of uneven and combined development, and for a
thorough critique of the (failed) attempt to come up with a social theory of
the international in the work of Justin Rosenberg and others.
5. It ought to be self-evident from the foregoing outline of the approach taken
in this book that a focus on country case studies does not imply a crude
20 G. CHARNOCK AND G. STAROSTA
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