---
schema_version: "library-reader-v1"
source_type: "original_book"
title: "Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx"
author: null
edition: null
publisher: null
year: null
isbn: "9781608461042"
library_document_id: "4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe"
source_sha256: "46dee6b4497d88f0c925457d635dd321964c6f4b00bbc137e1d31adde30698c7"
pdf_physical_page_count: 426
pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0
range_start: 330
range_count: 10
html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe?start=330&limit=10"
markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=330&limit=10"
previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=320&limit=10"
next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=340&limit=10"
---

# Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx

> 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=330 | PRINTED_PAGE=330

This notion, that the working class provides the agency that can change society, has been challenged even more than Marx's account of the economic dynamic of the system. Marx was a brilliant economist and a pioneering sociologist, the argument goes, but fell into an apocalyptic vision of the future which ascribed a metaphysical role to the working class. The spread of modern capitalism, the argument continues, has not been accompanied by the growth of the working class, the conditions of those workers that do exist have not been homogenised, and they do not develop a consciousness in opposition to the system.

Such contentions were already very widespread during the long post-war boom. As a notable sociological study of British workers told:

A major and recurrent theme-and most notably in liberal quarters-[ was] that of the incipient decline and decomposition of the working class. As the development of industrial societies continued, it was suggested, the working class, understood as a social stratum with its own distinctive ways of life, values and goals, would become increasingly eroded by the main currents of change. The very idea of a working class had been formed in, and in fact belonged to, the infancy of industrial society: in the era to come it would steadily lose its empirical referent. Social inequalities would no doubt persist; but these would be modified and structured in such a way that the society of the future would be an overwhelmingly "middle-class" society, within which the divisions of the past would no longer be recognisable.1

330

The Runaway System

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=331 | PRINTED_PAGE=331

So pervasive were these arguments that they influenced the thinking of radicals such as the American sociologist C Wright Mills2 and revolutionaries like Herbert Marcuse,3 while fashionable sociologists generalised the argument about "post-industrial society" to the advanced countries as a whole. They all looked rather foolish when French workers undertook the biggest general strike in history so far in May 1968 and waves of industrial struggle swept through Italy, Britain, Argentina, Spain and Portugal in the years 1969-75. Yet the argument revived in the 1980s and 1990s as the restructuring of capitalism through crisis decimated many old established sectors of the working class and industrial defeat led to a waning of class combativity.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe were swimming with the tide of intellectual opinion when they asserted in an influential work in the mid-1980s, "It is impossible today to talk about the homogeneity of the working class and to trace it to a mechanism inscribed in the logic of capital accumulation" .4 So too were Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri when they claimed in 2000 that "the industrial working class" had "all but disappeared from view. It has not ceased to exist, but it has been displaced from its privileged position in the capitalist economy".5

Yet, not for the first time, the common sense among philosophers has departed from empirical reality. A detailed study of the world's workforce in the mid-1990s by Deon Filmer calculated that of 2,474 million people who participated in the global nondomestic labour force, 889 million worked for wages or salaries, 1,000 million people mainly for their own account on the land, and 480 million for their own account in industry and services. 6 Probably about 1 0 percent of those employed will have been members of the new middle class who receive more value than they create in return for helping to control the mass of workers.7 This means there were around 700 million workers, with about a third in "industry" and the rest in "services". The total size of the working class including their dependants and those who have retired must have been between 1.5 and 2 billion. More recent figures from the United Nations Development Programme suggest a global total for those m industry substantially higher than

Who Can Overcome?

331

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=332 | PRINTED_PAGE=332

Filmer's.8 Anyone who believes we have said "farewell" to this class is not living in the real world.

Marx made a distinction between a class which exists in itself, as an objective element in the social structure, shaped by the relations of people to the means of making a livelihood, and a class for itself, with a consciousness of its position and of its interests in opposition to those of another class. The key conclusion to draw from all the figures is that the working class exists as never before as a class in itself, with a core of perhaps 2 billion people, or a third of the global population. On top of this there are very large numbers of peasants, up to 50 percent, who do some wage labour and so are subject to much of the same logic of the system as the workers. The global proletariat and semi-proletariat combined are the majority of the population for the first time in history.

But we need to go beyond these general figures if we are to grasp the potential for the world's workers to challenge the system. It is necessary first to look how changes in the system are changing different sectors of workers.

The "advanced" countries: the effects of restructuring

The repeated restructuring of production means that the working class in the advanced countries today is different in many respects to that 40 or 50 years ago. But this does not justify the claim that the working class has disappeared as a result of "deindustrialisation", the "post-industrial society", or the "weightless economy".

Take, for instance, the world's biggest single economy, that of the US. There was much panic about "deindustrialisation" in the 1980s in the face of challenges to US industrial pre-eminence in fields like car production and computers. But in 1998 the number of workers in industry was nearly 20 percent higher than in 1971, roughly 50 percent higher than in 1950 and nearly three times the level of 1900. Baldoz, Koeber and Kraft noted at the beginning of this century, "More Americans are now employed in making cars, buses and parts of them than at any time since the Vietnam War" .9

Even after the recession of 2001-2 had led to a massive rationalisation of industry, with the loss of about one in six manufacturing jobs, the industrial working class had far from disappeared. Industrial production in 2007 was 8 percent higher than in 2000 and 30 percent higher than in 1996,10 and the US remained the world's biggest single centre of manufacturing, with a fifth of world output (the combined old European Union of 15 states was ahead with a quarter),11 despite much talk of manufacturing moving to the Third World in its entirety.

332

The Runaway System

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=333 | PRINTED_PAGE=333

The Japanese figures were even more astounding. The industrial workforce more than doubled between 1950 and 1971 and was another 13 percent higher in 1998. The fall in industrial employment in a number of countries over the last three decades does not signify deindustrialisation of the whole of the old advanced industrial world. It had 1 12 million industrial jobs in 199812-25 million more than in 1 95 1 and only 7.4 million less than in 1971. Toni Negri's Italy may not have been in the same league as the US or Japan, but industrial workers had certainly not disappeared. There were 6.5 million in 1998, down only one sixth since 1971 .13

These figures for industrial employment, it should be added, underestimate the economic importance of industry in general and manufacturing in particular. As Bob Rowthorn has rightly noted:

Almost every conceivable economic activity in modern society makes use of manufactured goods ... Many of the expanding service industries make use of large amounts of equipment.14

The small decline in the total industrial workforce is not because industry has become less important, but because productivity per employee in industry has risen more quickly than in "services". Slightly fewer manufacturing workers are producing many more goods than three decades ago. 15 The industrial workers are as important for the capitalist economy today as in the early 1970s. Glib statements like those of Hardt and Negri about their declining significance could not be more wrong.

The usual distinction between "industry" and "services" obscures more than it reveals. "Services" is a catch-all residual category of everything that does not fit into the sectors of industry and agriculture. So some of the shift from "industry" to the "service sector" amounts to no more than a change in the name given to essentially similar jobs. Someone (usually a man) who worked a typesetting machine for a newspaper publisher 30 years ago would have been classified as a particular sort of industrial worker (a "print worker"); someone (usually a woman) working a word processing terminal for a newspaper publisher today will be classified as a "service worker" . But the work performed remains essentially the same, and the final product more or less identical. Rowthorn undertook a statistical breakdown of the total "service" category for the OECD as a whole. There was a small fall in "total goods and goods-related services"-from 76 percent of all employment in 1970 to 69 percent in 1990.16 But this was certainly not a revolutionary transformation in the world of work.

Who Can Overcome?

333

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=334 | PRINTED_PAGE=334

There are many other jobs characterised as "services" that are essential to accumulation in the modern world-especially, as we saw in Chapters Five and Seven, health provision and the education service. Today there are over 10 million employed in health and educational services in the US (around one in 13 of the workforce), and US capitalism could not function without them. And the long-term trend is for most of them to be forced increasingly into conditions comparable to those of industrial and routine office workers, with payment by results, assessment and appraisal systems, increased concern with timekeeping, and enhanced discipline codes.

There is the myth that the "service" sector workforce is made up of well paid people with control over their own working situation who never need to get their hands dirty. So Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee writes:

We have seen the most rapid change in social class in recorded history: the 1 977 mass working class, with two thirds of people in manual jobs, shrunk to one third, while the rest migrated upwards into a 70 percent home-owning, white collar middle class.17

If Toynbee had looked at the Office for National Statistics' Living in Britain 2000 she would have found 51 percent of men and 38 percent of women in its various "manual" occupational categories.18 This is because the "service industries" include refuse workers, hospital ancillary workers, dockers, lorry drivers, bus and train drivers, and postal workers. Alongside them are a huge number of women-50 percent-in the "intermediate and junior non-manual" categories, where wages are typically lower than in most manual occupations and working conditions often at least as hard. In the US in 2001, 50 percent of the 103 million employees in service related occupations had manual or routine clerical or similar jobs.19 Together with the 33 million workers in traditional manual industries they made up three quarters of the country's workforce.

334

The Runaway System

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=335 | PRINTED_PAGE=335

Two related processes are taking place in all "advanced" economies (and many "non-advanced" ones). The traditional manual working class is put under more and more pressure as capital tries to squeeze its directly productive labour so as to get more profits from it. At the same time, the new "non-goods-producing service" working class is subject to proletarianisation as capital sets out to reduce the costs to it of non-productive and indirectly productive functions.

Each crisis in the last four decades has involved sudden increases in unemployment-in some cases permanent-and the wiping out of old established centres of production (factories, docks, mines, etc). Capital and its apologists have then tried to take advantage of workers' feelings of insecurity to remould their lives around its own continually changing requirements. Its slogans have become "flexibility" in labouring time, methods of work and labour markets, all justified by the claim that "lifetime employment belongs to a past age". Much academic research has accepted its message, and "Third Way" social democrats and those on the "autonomist" left have taken it for an unquestionable truth. Typical-and excessively influential-is the sociologist Manuel Castells who argues there is:

Structural unstability [sic] in the labour markets everywhere, and the requirement for flexibility of employment, mobility of labour, and constant reskilling of the workforce. The notion of the stable, predictable, professional career is eroded, as relationships between capital and labour are individualised and contractual labour conditions escape collective bargaining.20

The claim about the ability of capitalism to destroy industrial jobs instantaneously is a vast exaggeration of what is happening with restructuring. As we have seen in Chapter Ten it takes time and effort for capital to liquidate industrial investment in one part of the world and shift it to another-and new investment is still predominantly within the triad of the advanced countries, although the emergence of China as a manufacturing centre is adding a new twist to that pattern. Even in the electronics industry, in which components and most final products are very light and cheap to move, there was not an unambiguous move from centralised production in the advanced countries to contracting out in the Global South in the 1990s and early 2000s:

Who Can Overcome?

335

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=336 | PRINTED_PAGE=336

Although the proportion of production beyond the Triad of Europe, North America and Japan was high, and was indeed associated with international rather than local markets, it was confined to a few East Asian countries. At the same time, the "domestic" production workforce in the US continued to grow.21

In general, capital still finds it more profitable to locate itself in the regions which had industrialised by the mid-20th century. Workers may usually be better paid there, but a combination of established skill levels and existing investments in plant and infrastructure means they are also more productive, providing much more surplus value for the system than most of their poorer brothers and sisters in the Third World. This explains why the picture for most of Latin America in the 1990s was one of very slow average growth or stagnation, and for most of Africa of absolute decline.

The most important impact of offshoring and rising imports has not been their role in destroying jobs, but in helping employers to destroy workers' confidence in their capacity to defend conditions, wages and working hours.

A study by Kate Bronfenbrenner found that during the economic upturn of the 1990s American workers felt more insecure about their economic future than during the depths of the 1990- 1 recession. "More than half of all employers made threats to close all or part of the plant" during union organising drives. But afterwards "employers followed through on the threat and shut down all or part of their facilities in fewer than 3 percent" of cases.22 In other words, it is in the interests of employers to overemphasise how precarious jobs are in order to demoralise workers and lower the level of resistance. Those voices on the left who exaggerate that insecurity can add to that demoralisation, rather than countering it with a recognition of the counter-factors that provide workers with continued strength if they have the confidence to deploy it.

The evidence does not justify a picture of a uniform, relentless spread of precarious jobs. The crisis of the early 1990s did cause a substantial increase in "precarious" jobs in Western Europe. But that still left 82 percent in permanent jobs, as against only 1 8 percent in non-permanent jobs-a proportion that remained almost unchanged between 1995 and 2000. There has been a huge variation between countries,23 but a 2001 ILO study of Western Europe as a whole concluded that:

336

The Runaway System

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=337 | PRINTED_PAGE=337

The evidence simply does not sustain the view that we are witnessing the emergence of a "new" kind of employment relations, seen in the "end of the career" and the "death of the permanent job for life" .24

One survey in 2000 showed only 5 percent of British employees on temporary contracts,25 while the number of people who had worked at the same workplace for more than ten years had risen from 29 to 3 1 percent. 26 Even in Spain, which has the highest level of "precariety" in Europe, 65 percent of workers have permanent jobs.

Capital cannot manage without workers who have certain skills and it prefers workers who have some sense of responsibility for the job. It takes employers time to train people and they are rarely keen to lose them if they can avoid it. They therefore do not always treat workers as "disposable", even when it comes to semiskilled and unskilled labour. They can benefit from a generalised insecurity making the majority of workers with relatively secure jobs fear that they may lose them. But that does not mean that capital can really dispense with such workers. And that means they have the potential to put up resistance to its demands, even if they are often not aware of it.

The new working classes of the "Third World"

Around 60 percent of the world's industrial workers are outside the "advanced" countries of the OECD, with perhaps 25 percent in China, about 7 percent in India and around 7 percent in Latin America.27 Such statistics do no more than provide a snapshot of the enormous change brought about by the sweep of capitalism's self-expansion across the world.

Sixty years ago 80 percent of the world's population lived in the countryside; and 30, 40, or even 50 percent worked on the land even in countries thought of as "advanced" like France, Italy or Japan. Today close to half the world's population live in towns and cities, and the urban population is a majority even in countries people often think of as rural-84 percent in Brazil, 76 percent in Mexico, 63 percent in Ecuador and 63 percent in Algeria. 28

Urbanisation and the spread of market relations are not necessarily the same as the growth of wage labour.29 People worldwide have been leaving the countryside at a much greater rate than the growth of stable livelihoods for them in modern sectors of the economy. This is especially true in countries where economic growth is slow or negative. Thus wage employment fell in absolute terms in several African countries during the 1980s,30 and half the non-agriculture workforce of Africa is self-employed.31 Even in China, with its rapid rate of accumulation, the employed working class has expanded more slowly than economic growth.32 But in general, the slowness of job growth should not be identified with "deindustrialisa ti on" . 33

Who Can Overcome?

337

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=338 | PRINTED_PAGE=338

There has been growth of wage labour in much of the Global South but it has been spasmodic, a product of the chaotic ups and down of capitalist industrial growth. And in very many cases, any growth in modern industry with "formal" employment has been overshadowed by what has been happening in the "informal" sector of very small businesses. The joint share of informal and small business activities of non-agricultural employment in Latin America as a whole rose from 40 percent in 1980 to 53 percent in 1990,34 while in Brazil half the occupied urban population were not "formal employees", although more than half of the informal workforce were wage workers. 35

In India growth has been even more concentrated in the informal "unorganised" sector, without workplace rights, while 40 percent of the urban population is self-employed-working in family businesses, usually without their own premises, or as vendors, rickshaw drivers, cart pullers and the like.36 In China too the informal sector has mushroomed-with the number of urban workers not officially classified and doing things "in the informal sector (such as street vending, construction, and household services)" growing by 79 million between 1 995 and 2002. By 2002 they amounted to 40 percent of urban employment. 37 In addition to-and often merging into-those in the informal sector, there are everywhere those denied any opportunities for employment by modern capitalism: the unemployed who typically make up 10 percent or more of the workforce in Third World cities. 38

The failure of regular employment in the cities to absorb the vast influx of labour from the countryside follows from the logic of capitalism. Competition on a global scale has caused capitalists to turn to "capital intensive" forms of production which do not require massive numbers of new workers.

338

The Runaway System

## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=339 | PRINTED_PAGE=339

Marx described very well the process by which the informal sector grows, looking at British society 150 years ago:

. . . The additional capital formed in the course of accumulation attracts fewer and fewer labourers in proportion to its magnitude. The old capital. . .repels more and more of the labourers formerly employed by it. 39

This dynamic produces a "stagnant" component of "the active labour army" with "extremely irregular employment":

Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class; this makes it at once the basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation . . . characterised by maximum of working time, and minimum of wages . . . Its extent grows, as with the extent and energy of accumulation the creation of surplus-population advances.40

In general, the suffering of a very large chunk of the urban masses in Third World countries comes not from being super-exploited by large capital, but from the fact that large capital does not see a way of making sufficient profits out of exploiting them at all. This is most clearly the case in much of sub-Saharan Africa. After squeezing wealth out of the continent during the period from the onset of the slave trade to the end of empire in the 1950s, those who run the world system (including local rulers who move their own money to Europe and North America) are now prepared to write off most of its people as "marginal" to their requirements-except in the all-important local enclaves where raw materials, especially oil, are to be found.

The relation of the formal and informal sectors

The unevenness of industrial expansion and the mushrooming of the informal sector can lead to conclusions about the incapacity of workers to organise and fight that very much parallel the orthodoxies about "precariousness" in the old industrial countries. It is assumed on the one hand that those workers with stable jobs in the formal sector are privileged labour aristocrats-as one report on north east Brazil puts it, to "be formally employed is almost a privilege, since less than half of those who want such a situation are in fact 'enjoying' it" .41 At the same time it is assumed that those in informal sectors suffer from "social exclusion" and are not capable of self-organisation.

Who Can Overcome?

339

下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=340&limit=10)