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Great piece by Louis:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/03/covid-19-and-the-just-in-time-supply-chain-why-hospitals-ran-out-of-ventilators-and-grocery-stores-ran-out-of-toilet-paper/
***
Ouch, that brings back some painful reminiscing of our Marxist lads'
right-turn here:
Excerpt from Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South
Africa (Pluto Press, 2000)
Many progressive economists across the globe had taken to describing
mass production/mass consumption systems as ‘Fordist’ and to projecting
a ‘post-Fordist’ epoch characterised by an emphasis on product quality,
variety and differentiation, speed of innovation, increased workplace
democracy (‘team concept,’ ‘quality circles’), and Japanised production
and inventory control techniques (‘Just-In-Time,’ also a favourite of
Nedcor/Old Mutual).
Inspired by a growing literature in ‘flexible
specialisation’ and a popular academic offshoot of marxism known as
French Regulation Theory, and having established a new moniker for
apartheid-capitalism--racial Fordism--Cosatu’s academic allies began
developing scenarios for a future economic growth path (‘the regime of
accumulation’) characterised by much different institutions, norms and
practices (‘the mode of regulation’). Specifically, the 1990 arrival of
Raphie Kaplinksy of Sussex University, to co-direct Cosatu’s Industrial
Strategy Project (ISP), helped inaugurate post-Fordist thinking in SA.
There was some overlap here with Tucker’s Prospects,
which never reached the sophistication of ISP but for which the Cosatu
researchers were known to have developed great ideological fondness. For
on the one hand, Kaplinsky and three local colleagues shared the
post-Fordist critique of monopolistic inefficiencies and its fascination
with skills upgrading--which are, no doubt, both vital components in any
progressive labour strategy.(10) Kaplinsky et al’s appraisal of
corporate structure was often incisive, and the overall objective
laudable (if purely reformist): ‘an alternative agenda in which high
productivity is associated with living wages, and [which] involves the
active participation of the labour force in production’ (probably
referring here to planning of production).
But on the other hand, like Tucker and like post-Fordists
everywhere, the four also tended to place inordinate stock in
international competitiveness (the most important ISP report summary was
entitled ‘Meeting the Global Challenge’). Here it is worth recording
that Kaplinsky’s influential early papers on post-Fordism in South
Africa--’Is and What is Post-Fordism’ (sic) and ‘A Policy Agenda for
Post-Apartheid South Africa’--generated a sole (unintentionally comical)
example of SA’s possible comparative advantage in manufacturing exports:
swimming-pool filtration systems (‘creepy crawlers’).(11)
Was this an intelligent basis upon which to develop a
trade union economic strategy? Cosatu leaders were apparently misled as
they commissioned more and more work from ISP researchers, even when
faced with Kaplinsky’s own admission (in the second paper) that ‘It may
seem crazy for a post-apartheid state to target the export sector in the
face of the economy’s present problems in meeting basic needs.’ Quite
right, but Kaplinsky et al plowed ahead anyhow with one concession after
the next to the neoliberal agenda.
Thus even after several years spent studying global gluts
in swimming-pool filtration system (and related) markets, the ISP team
recorded their agreement ‘with most of the World Bank proposals for
trade policy reform.’ Granted, such proposals were at that stage
(mid-1993) much less severe than what the Bank imposed upon the rest of
Africa. Yet the shared ISP/Bank commitment to ‘outward orientation’ was
dubious in view of the ongoing failure of SA’s export-led growth
strategies, not to mention SA’s tough labour movement, relatively high
wages (by international standards) and durable uncompetitiveness (see
Chapter 1).
Simply stated, it was very hard to see how outward
orientation serves labour’s interests. Consider a conclusion from the
1993 study of South Africa’s trade prospects by staff of the Gatt:
‘Export-led growth, while beneficial to the balance of payments, is
unlikely to immediately affect levels of unemployment, given the capital
intensity of the export sector, unless labour-intensive downstream
industries can be developed.’(12) If the main beneficiaries of the
late-apartheid government’s evolving industrial policy--the gargantuan
Columbus stainless steel and Alusaf aluminum projects--were any
indication of such downstreaming investment, prospects were indeed very
bleak. Worse, neither Cosatu’s post-Fordist ISP economists nor the ANC
offered up anything that made more sense from the standpoint of export
revenues.
Instead, the implications of the ISP research were only
unveiled in an incident in September 1994. Over a year earlier, during
National Economic Forum negotiations on Gatt, an ISP researcher and
then-Cosatu representative Alec Erwin agreed--on behalf of tens of
thousands of autoworkers--to a substantial lowering of protective
tariffs enjoyed by the motor industry (from 110 per cent to 85 per cent
in 1994). The deal in the Motor Industry Task Force was only publicised
a year later when it took effect, at the most crucial moment in the
first-ever national auto strike by the National Union of Metalworkers
(Numsa). Trade minister Trevor Manuel took intense heat from Numsa
general-secretary Enoch Godongwana (later Eastern Cape economic
minister) who--in the immediate aftermath of the surprise tariff
announcement (a boon to the car-makers’ cost-cutting drive)--was forced
to wind up the strike. But Manuel angrily replied, correctly, that Erwin
(then Numsa’s education officer) had been party to the tariff agreement
several months before.(13) This was news to most Numsa autoworkers,
reflecting how thinly through the ranks the Cosatu leaders’ acquiescence
to Gatt had spread. Even one of the most conservative of major Cosatu
affiliates, the SA Clothing and Textile Workers Union, attacked trade
liberalisation with a vengeance that stunned labour-watchers (especially
Manuel, who took the brunt of a Cape Town demonstration against a
Malaysian trade mission in August 1994).
A different dialect of the same post-Fordist discourse
was heard from a formerly hard-boiled marxist scholar, Duncan Innes, who
in his Innes Labour Brief (sold mainly to industrial relations
executives) commented, ‘A brain-elite has emerged as the new aristocracy
of labour in the post-Fordist era in the more developed capitalist
countries.’ Concomitantly, said Innes, industrial jobs were fleeing the
advanced capitalist world; ‘the corresponding rise of Fordist structures
in semi-peripheral countries holds further promise for South African
trade unions ... A “new era” for trade unionism and industrial relations
in South Africa has dawned and will take root during this decade.’(14)
Characteristically, Innes was rather too glib given the saturation of
Fordist processes and products in SA, and he never grappled with the
much richer ISP arguments about how to establish post-racial Fordism.
But his megatrend intervention does lead us to ask further questions:
• Who was right, those (from ISP) arguing that the new
era is post-Fordist and thus open to the dangers and inducements of
radical restructuring along ISP lines--or those (like Innes) arguing for
a revival of South Africa as a semi-peripheral Fordist producer where
growth stems from changes mainly in the sphere of industrial relations?
• Was there any use at all in such heuristic devices if
workers were left with such basic interpretive differences and such
dismal strategic options?
• Would workers not have been better served by
questioning both international capitalist Fordism and international
capitalist post-Fordism, in favour of international labour solidarity
and sub-regional economic self-reliance?
Indeed, this latter option was precisely what the
continent’s preeminent economist, Samir Amin, posited in early 1993:
We have to be clear about the goals. Should it be to become a
competitive exporter as rapidly as possible? I think not. Rather, it
should be to achieve the changes associated with redistribution of
income: more popular consumption items, greater capacity to
establish better productive systems in the rural areas, to meet
popular needs in housing and the like, and less wasteful consumption
by the minority ... Until then, the political economy of genuine
democratisation implies what one might call ‘delinking,’ turning the
economy inward to ensure that the democratisation process is
thoroughgoing and not just cosmetic.(15)
Sadly, such common-sense thinking was lacking within Cosatu prior to May
1994, when many of the post-Fordists, led by Erwin and Jay Naidoo,
migrated into government. Added to organised labour’s generally weak
response to the retrenchment massacre underway across most industrial
sectors, the forces of neoliberalism had begun to blockade Amin’s more
humane route. But, scenario cynics asked, wasn’t such disempowerment of
the working-class--through self-made export-led fantasies which fit
nicely into corporate-liberal pipe-dreams--precisely the point of
scenario planning?
And didn’t such intellectual pessimism quickly become
labour’s practice as well? Responding to the difficult structural
conditions, some in Cosatu turned to concessions in industry-wide
negotiations--the corporatism so pleasing to the likes of Sanlam’s
planners--which in the 1980s would have been vigorously repulsed by a
more muscular and self-interested labour leadership. ‘What is required,’
the four ISP authors concluded in 1993, ‘is to identify a structured
forum in which these strategic discussions can be pursued across the
spectrum of industrial activity without at the same time becoming
swamped in a wider agenda of class conflict.’(16)
There was the caveat, pointed out by union intellectual
Jeremy Baskin in a 1993 Centre for Policy Studies paper, that local
capitalists were apparently not yet ready to take the corporatist turn
due to continuing intercapitalist competition and confusion.(17) If a
corporatist sentiment was to be located, it would be within the
Consultative Business Movement (CBM), home to SA’s most p.r.-conscious
firms (PG Bison, Premier, Southern Life, Upjohn and Shell). And as might
be expected, scenario planning helped nourish that self-interest,
according to CBM, as witnessed by the ‘significant difference in
perceptions between members of management who have not been exposed to a
detailed micro- and macroscenario covering South Africa’s economic,
social and political conditions, and those who have. There is a tendency
to complacency among those who have not been so exposed.’
To remedy matters CBM conducted a series of ‘Role of
Business in Transition’ workshops in mid-1992, and the manual that
resulted, Managing Change, offers important insights. For instance,
beginning in 1985, Eskom went through a change process involving a new
company Mission, Strategy and Philosophy, scenarios and problem-solving
involving half the workforce, voluntary quality circles, team bonuses, a
suggestion scheme, performance-based bonuses and the like. As Managing
Change reports, ‘Employees start questioning and making decisions in
terms of their new authority. Company leadership learns that their role
is now to facilitate. Autocratic rule is no longer acceptable as part of
the culture.’(18)
All this certainly sounded appealing, but again
cynics--including increasing numbers of workers and trade unions in
increasingly-Japanised countries such as the US and Canada (especially
the influential Sam Ginden of the Canadian Auto Workers)--told their
Cosatu comrades that a good deal of what was going on under post-Fordism
was simple ‘speed-up,’ with the added dimension that workers now
squealed on each other in a manner they never used to. Moreover, while
these measures were being developed during the late 1980s and early
1990s, Eskom downsized its workforce by a third (from 66,000 to 40,000)
even while three quarters of its potential black consumers had no
household electricity due to lack of hook-ups, and while the company
spewed untold amounts of poison into the environment (Eskom’s own
auditors remarked on the company’s failure to abide by weak internal
pollution controls).
Notes
10. Joffe, et al, ‘Meeting the Global Challenge.’
11. Raphael Kaplinsky, ‘Is and What is Post-Fordism,’ Unpublished paper
presented to the Economic Trends Group, 1990; and ‘A Policy Agenda for
Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ Transformation, 16, 1991.
12. Business Day, 28 October 1993.
13. Sunday Times, 4 September 1996.
14. Duncan Innes, ‘Towards the Year 2000: Megatrends Shaping Industrial
Relations,’ Innes Labour Brief, 3, 2, 1991.
15. Samir Amin, ‘SA in the Global Economic System,’ Work in Progress,
February 1993.
16. Joffe, et al, ‘Meeting the Global Challenge.’
17. Jeremy Baskin, ‘Corporatism: Some Obstacles Facing the SA Labour
Movement,’ Social Contract Series, Research Report 30, Centre for Policy
Studies, Johannesburg, April, 1993.
18. Consultative Business Movement (1993), Managing Change: A Guide to
the Role of Business in Transition, Johannesburg, Ravan Press.
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