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Title: The Factory Without Walls Author: Brian Ashton Date: 14 September 2006 Language: en Topics: Production, working class, Autonomous Marxism, sabotage Source: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/factory-without-walls
Wireless and social networking technologies depend on and help shape the
global logistics industry. This worldwide supply chain ensures
just-in-time production responds to consumer demand, whether it be books
from Amazon or exhaust pipes for Jaguars. If, contrary to theorists of
‘immaterial labour’, the mass worker is not dead but reconfigured, will
networked production and distribution see the rise of networked labour
struggles? Drawing on personal experience and ongoing research, Brian
Ashton gives a brief introduction to the complexities of the logistics
industry
Information Technology has enabled capital to coordinate the production
of commodities like never before. It is a seeming contradiction:
production is spread across the globe, parts are made here and there and
moved thousands of kilometres to be assembled, but this process produces
more commodities than ever before. Capital has renewed itself yet again,
and in the process it has thrown the left into crisis. While the talk
among the intellectuals is of immaterial labour and precarity, capital
is busy ironing out the kinks in its new system of production. At the
same time, though, it is creating a communication system that enables
workers to interact with each other across national borders and
continents. Just about every worker is now an IT worker, and it is the
potential that lies in this fact that poses the greatest threat to
capital. It is not about immaterial or material labour. The
intellectuals have got to stop creating hierarchies of labour, the mass
worker and the social worker, the immaterial worker and the precariat.
They would be better employed getting a proper understanding of how the
supply chain – some capitalists call it the virtual enterprise – now
works. Know thine enemy, as Sun Tzu said in The Art of War.
A team of researchers from the Cardiff Business School studied the chain
of actions required to make a can of cola. The whole process, starting
at the Bauxite mine in Australia and ending with the can in somebody’s
refrigerator took no less than 319 days. Of that time only three hours
were spent on manufacturing, the rest was spent on transport and
storage. An advertisement for the shipping company P&O Nedlloyd claims
that the journey of one single container can involve literally a hundred
people. These range from the guy who loaded the container to the IT
people, from the logistics planners to the dockers, through the haulage
drivers to the warehouse workers, from the customs officer to the
captain of the ship. This highlights time and labour. The control of
these two factors is the major concern for those charged with the
management of supply chains.
As the Cardiff Business School study highlights, logistics is a major
factor in the supply chain. According to the Council of Logistics
Management, logistics is:
the process of planning, implementing and controlling the efficient
effective flow and storage of raw materials, process inventory, finished
goods, extraction/production to the point of consumption.
In the last twenty years there has been a revolution in the world of
logistics, a revolution that seems to have escaped the attention of the
autonomous left. The cause of this upheaval was the application of
technology to the globalisation of commodity production. Or as Marx put
it:
A radical change in the mode of production in one sphere of industry
involves a similar change in other spheres. This happens at first in
such branches of industry as are connected together by being separate
phases of a process, and yet are isolated by the social division of
labour, in such a way that each of them produces an independent
commodity … But more especially, the revolution in the modes of
production of industry and agriculture made necessary a revolution in
the general conditions of the social process of production, i.e., in the
means of communication and transport … The means of communication and
transport were so utterly inadequate to the productive requirements of
the manufacturing period, with its extended division of social labour,
its concentration of the instruments of labour, and of the workmen and
its colonial markets, that they became in fact revolutionised … And in
the period of ‘modern industry’ the means of communication and transport
handed down from the manufacturing period became impediments.
Capital, vol.1, pages 262-26.
Autonomist marxism sees the struggle of the working class as the driver
of capitalist development. In the ’70s capital started to attack the
concentrations of working class power that some have called the mass
worker. It attacked on three fronts. It started to break up the
rigidities imposed on production by working class militancy using
technology to de-skill the workers and reconfigure the factory layout.
It started to relocate some productive capacity to smaller sites,
sub-contracting the work to other companies. And it used the state to
impose crisis upon the working class. It was largely successful in its
project and as the ’80s developed, defeat followed defeat for the
working class. A political composition forged in battle was dismantled
and discarded. It seems to this old car industry worker that it wasn’t
only capital that discarded us but that quite a number of communist
intellectuals turned their backs on us, too. The consequence is that now
we have a generation of anti-capitalists who don’t know how to engage
with the working class. Despite being surrounded by the class they seem
more interested in what goes on in the Mexican jungle, or prefer to go
to Genoa and Seattle and give the state machine an opportunity to
practice crowd control.
In the ’60s and ’70s there was constant interaction between working
class militants and the left emerging from the universities. This wasn’t
always positive, but, where there was a synergy, theory and practice had
some connection. We learned from each other and good work was produced.
Here in Britain work published by Solidarity and Big Flame is evidence
of that. In Italy Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua helped to develop an
understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of capital’s composition.
Today we may talk about a globalised production system but how many of
us can describe how it works? How does the can of cola get from A to Z?
In the ’70s we knew how the factory and the transport systems worked and
in that knowledge lay our ability to combat capital. Today, it is
certainly difficult to grasp exactly how things are made, but it is
imperative that we gain deep knowledge of the processes of production
and logistics, the supply chains of capital or, to put it another way,
the factories without walls. Some capitalists see the supply chain as a
virtual factory and want workers to relate to the supply chain rather
than perceiving themselves as employees of the separate organisations
that make the chain up.
Working class composition comes from struggle, but first capitalists
have to bring the workers together and impose the discipline of
production upon them. In the present period we can only understand how
that discipline is imposed if we take a global approach. The technical
composition of capital is spread across the world, as are the workers in
the commodity’s supply chain. Discipline under such a system is imposed
through the application of kaizen (continuous improvement) and
just-in-time stock delivery combined with the application of information
technologies that police the workers’ productivity.
This is reinforced by the change in how commodities are moved through
the system. Capital has moved from a push to a pull economy, in other
words, it is making things that are being demanded rather than making
them to forecast demand. The motto of the pull economy could be, ‘If it
isn’t sold, don’t make another one.’ The pull economy gives the big
supermarket chains enormous power because they control the information
that pulls a commodity through the supply chain. When you buy a tin of
beans in Asda the information is sent out to all those along the chain
in order for another tin of beans to be produced. Of course, millions of
such pieces of information are flying through cyberspace every moment of
the day. One of the results of the pull economy is an increase in
precarious work: if demand is down then lay off workers. Companies have
computer programs that calculate the number of workers needed to satisfy
a given demand, drawing in extra workers from a pool of casual labour,
often supplied by employment agencies. And increasingly they outsource
non-core activities to service companies; this is one of the reasons for
the mushrooming of the logistics industry in these last years. The
automotive industry is moving to a pull economy model and this is one of
the main reasons autoworkers in the States are being battered at the
moment.
If you spread your supply chains across the globe and reduce your stock
levels to just-in-time then you increase the importance of the
logistical exercise in the completion of the cycle of accumulation. At
the same time you increase the possibility of effective working class
struggle: when the truckers on the west coast of the USA struck a year
or so back they paralysed the supply chains of Wal-Mart and other chain
store giants, sending waves of panic through many a boardroom. The
importance of logistics cannot be overestimated; try imagining the
supply chain of any product without the logistical input. The
globalisation of production has left many workers believing they can do
nothing about it when companies move production to China or India, they
stand hypnotised by the lights on the capitalist juggernaut as it runs
them over, but this apparent strength of multinational capital is in
fact its weakness.
Historically, logistics workers have been carriers of radical thought
and transporters of the news of working class struggles. They have, of
course, been involved in many a battle themselves. In the last twenty
years many of those battles have been defensive, fighting to save jobs
and maintain working conditions. The withdrawal of the state from the
direct management of the logistics industry was the catalyst for a
global attack that continues to this day. As the state withdrew, private
capital stepped into the breech and attacked workforces throughout the
industry. At the same time these companies have been engaged in a frenzy
of mergers and acquisitions that have resulted in the emergence of truly
global organisations employing many thousands of workers.
Some idea of the size of these companies can be gleaned from two
examples, United Parcel Services (UPS) and Deutsche Post (DP). UPS is a
33.5 billion dollar company that operates in 200 countries and employs
more than 340,000 workers. It provides transportation and freight
logistics/distribution, international trade, financial services,
financial mail facilities and consultancy services. It has grown by
benefiting from the outsourcing processes that are common in industry
and by acquiring other companies. It plays for big stakes: it bought the
Fritz freight company for 450 million dollars. DP is partly owned by the
German government, who hold 41.6 percent of the shares. These will be
sold to institutional investors over the next few years. DP runs the
German postal service, owns DHL, and last year it bought the British
registered company Exel. Exel was an acquisitive company itself before
being bought out; it had previously bought Tibbett&Britten, the seventh
biggest logistics company in the world. This resulted in a company
employing more than 103,000 people. I don’t know how many people work
for DP, but it must be in the hundreds of thousands.
The Jaguar auto plant in Halewood on Merseyside can perhaps give us an
idea of how a supply chain works and how logistics fits into the chain.
Halewood was where Ford built the Escort, and where this proletarian
worked for seven long years. It was regarded as the basket case of the
Ford organisation and the threat of closure was always hanging over it.
Ford bought Jaguar and decided to manufacture Jags at Halewood, at the
same time it decided to radically alter working practices in the plant.
It brought in an American company called Senn-Delaney to alter the
mindset of the workforce, and it appears to have been successful because
Halewood is now regarded as the best car plant in Europe. If such a
company had been brought in during the ’70s their work would have been
challenged by counter-information from the left.
When I worked in Halewood in the ’70s there were 14,000 of us employed
on the site. Today Jaguar employs some 2,800 people, but this figure is
deceptive because a sizable chunk of the work has been hived off to
suppliers who in turn pass some of the work on to smaller suppliers. In
a supply chain firms are categorised thus: Original Equipment
Manufacturer (OEM), i.e. Jaguar; First Tier Supplier, i.e. Bosch; the
smaller suppliers are called second tier, third tier, etc. Linking all
these together are the logistics companies. At Halewood UCI Logistics, a
subsidiary of the Japanese company Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) runs the
logistical set up. As lead logistics supplier, UCI is responsible for
inbound logistics to Halewood as well as the internal logistics at the
plant itself. In the Ford days internal logistics would have been
carried out by Ford workers. The inbound logistics service involves a
supply chain operation and the collection of parts and sub-assemblies
from suppliers around Europe partly using their own fleet and partly UCI
Logistics-appointed partners. The internal logistics service involves
offloading parts, movement of components to storage areas and making
them available to the production lines without incurring line-side
storage. It is also UCI’s task to ensure that line-side stock never
exceeds the two-hour volume Jaguar has stipulated. It is UCI workers who
drive the fork lift trucks that transfer material within the Halewood
plant.
Let’s look at the logistics of a particular product going into Halewood,
the wheel and tyre assemblies. UCI moves 500,000 assemblies a year into
Halewood. The contract includes both external logistics for the supply
of alloy wheels from Italy to Pirelli’s facility in the UK and the
delivery of completed assemblies to Halewood, three times a day,
together with the internal logistics at the Jaguar site. UCI chooses
from twelve different types of assemblies on receiving automated
instructions from Jaguar and delivers the product to the point of fit.
The mass worker hasn’t been destroyed s/he has just been reconfigured.
Capital gets its power from the extraction of surplus value and the
supply chain is the factory without walls where this process takes
place. In the past socialists organised and agitated around the centres
of commodity production – one thinks of the work done around Fiat’s
Mirafiori factory in Turin and Big Flame’s efforts at Dagenham and
Halewood – but is that sort of work going on today? If such agitation is
to take place it will have to be on a global scale, but the technology
exists to do it. By going global with its supply chains, capital is
creating the opportunity for global working class struggle. In order for
such struggles to succeed we need to know how the present composition of
capital works. The craft worker and the mass worker knew how the system
produced commodities in their day; we need to develop such knowledge
today.