Industrial Labour in an Unequal World: Ethnographic Perspectives on Uneven and Combined Development 9783111311418, 9783111304267

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Relevance of Trotsky’s ‘Uneven and Combined Development’ for the Anthropology of Industrial Labour
Uneven and Combined Development in Nepal: Industrial food-factories, unions and the urban anticipation economy
Workers and Transnational Unionism in a Latin American Steel Corporation
In the Web of Movements: Floating Industrial Labour between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan
From Militancy to Cooperation: Uneven Development and Labour Struggles within the Automotive Industry in East Germany
Eating Rocks: Multi-scale Confluence of Industrial Expansion and Mobile Labour in an Italian Alpine Extractive Industry
Uneven and Combined Development and the Politics of Labour in an Eastern Indian Coalfield: Shifts and Changes from Late Colonialism to Neoliberalism
‘A Good Job But Not A Good Life’: Ambiguous Realities and Uneven and Combined Development in a Tunisian Factory
The Uneven and Combined Development of Christmas Ornament Glass Production in Eastern France
Uneven and Combined Development in Bangladesh’s Garment Industry: The Politics of Up-Scaling, Up-Skilling and Re-masculinizing Labour
Uneven and Combined Development and the Anthropology of Capitalism: An Afterword
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Industrial Labour in an Unequal World

Work in Global and Historical Perspective

Edited by Andreas Eckert, Sidney Chalhoub, Mahua Sarkar, Dmitri van den Bersselaar, Christian G. De Vito Work in Global and Historical Perspective is an interdisciplinary series that welcomes scholarship on work/labor that engages a historical perspective in and from any part of the world. The series advocates a definition of work/ labor that is broad, and specially encourages contributions that explore interconnections across political and geographic frontiers, time frames, disciplinary boundaries, as well as conceptual divisions among various forms of commodified work, and between work and ‘non-work.’

Volume 20

Industrial Labour in an Unequal World Ethnographic Perspectives on Uneven and Combined Development Edited by Christian Strümpell and Michael Hoffmann

ISBN 978-3-11-130426-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-131141-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-131166-1 ISSN 2509-8861 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023940474 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: left: Timothy_Wang / iStock / Getty Images Plus; right: industryview / iStock / Getty Images Plus Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements This volume began life as a workshop, called “Industrial Labour and Uneven Development”, which we organised in virtual space in March 2021 amidst the second wave of the COVID-19 global pandemic. We are immensely grateful to the presenters who contributed chapters to this edited volume in such difficult times. We are likewise deeply indebted to other participants and discussants including Görkem Akgöz, Dimitra Kofti, Paolo Marinaro, Massimiliano Mollona, Patrick Neveling, Jonathan Parry, Claudio Pinheiro, Rebecca Prentice, Oliver Tappe, and Tommaso Trevisani. The presentations, comments and analyses from all participants advanced our understanding of the predicament of industrial labour in the uneven and combined development of capitalism in ways that none of us could have achieved on our own. We are also grateful for the support we received from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universität Hamburg, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for conducting this workshop. Our respective DFG-funded research projects “Psychosocial Stressors and Ready-Made Garment Industries in Bangladesh: an Ethno-Epidemiological Study of its Causes and Consequences” and “Uncertain Industrial Futures: An Ethnography of Industrial Labour, Revolutionary Change and Natural Disaster in Contemporary Nepal” provided us with the time to prepare this edited volume and financial assistance for the language editor Patty Gray whose sterling work improved this manuscript immensely. We are also extremely thankful to Rabea Rittgerodt and Verena Deutsch of De Gruyter for their invaluable support during the publication process, and to Andreas Eckert, Sidney Chalhoub, Mahua Sarkar, Dmitri van den Bersselaar, and Christian G. De Vito for their support in publishing our volume in their series Work in Global and Historical Perspective. Michael Hoffmann Christian Strümpell Berlin, May 2023

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-001

Table of Contents Acknowledgements

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Michael Hoffmann and Christian Strümpell Introduction: The Relevance of Trotsky’s ‘Uneven and Combined Development’ for the Anthropology of Industrial Labour 1 Michael Peter Hoffmann Uneven and Combined Development in Nepal: Industrial food-factories, unions and the urban anticipation economy 19 Julia Soul Workers and Transnational Unionism in a Latin American Steel 37 Corporation Umut Kuruüzüm In the Web of Movements: Floating Industrial Labour between Turkey and 63 Iraqi Kurdistan Katerina Ivanova From Militancy to Cooperation: Uneven Development and Labour Struggles within the Automotive Industry in East Germany 83 Andrea Tollardo Eating Rocks: Multi-scale Confluence of Industrial Expansion and Mobile Labour in an Italian Alpine Extractive Industry 109 Suravee Nayak Uneven and Combined Development and the Politics of Labour in an Eastern Indian Coalfield: Shifts and Changes from Late Colonialism to Neoliberalism 137 André Weißenfels ‘A Good Job But Not A Good Life’: Ambiguous Realities and Uneven and 157 Combined Development in a Tunisian Factory

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Arnaud Kaba The Uneven and Combined Development of Christmas Ornament Glass 177 Production in Eastern France Christian Strümpell and Hasan Ashraf Uneven and Combined Development in Bangladesh’s Garment Industry: The Politics of Up-Scaling, Up-Skilling and Re-masculinizing Labour 201 Sharryn Kasmir Uneven and Combined Development and the Anthropology of Capitalism: 225 An Afterword List of Contributors Index

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Introduction: The Relevance of Trotsky’s ‘Uneven and Combined Development’ for the Anthropology of Industrial Labour Introduction This volume is concerned with industrial labour and the ways it relates to the uneven yet combined development of capitalism. The contributors to this volume are all anthropologists who have undertaken long-term ethnographic research on a broad range of industries located in places across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. More specifically, the contributors undertook research at diverse sites that include a coalfield in India, food processing industries in Nepal’s lowland and mid-hill regions, garment factories in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, a steel mill in Iraqi Kurdistan, an electronics equipment plant in Tunisia, artisanal glass workshops in France, stone quarries in northern Italy, an automobile plant in eastern Germany, and the steel industry in Argentina. During the course of each of our ethnographic investigations, it became apparent that these sites were entangled in manifold and changing ways with other places near and far, be it through regional or international labour migration, through commodity chains, through remittances, through political parties and trade unions, through national governments and international bodies such as the IMF, or through threats or histories of capital flight and factory relocations, to name just a few prominent examples. These ethnographic observations correspond well to David Harvey’s (2004) call for a more serious investigation of the nature of uneven capitalist development resulting from surplus capital accumulated in one place being invested in others, only to withdraw from them later on for further reinvestment (Peck 2016). However, we agree with Kasmir and Gill (2018, 356–8) that while providing crucial insights, the approaches by Harvey and also Peck and Smith (2008 [1984]) tend to unwittingly produce an overdetermined and mechanistic understanding of capitalist development, because they remain overtly capital-centric and give little room for conceptualizing the agency of labour in such formations. We further agree with Kasmir and Gill (2018, 355) as well as with Andreas Eckert (2016) that labour has to be broadly conceived as encompassing multiple forms beyond wage labour and that the categorization, differentiation, and unification of forms of labour is a dynamic political process operating at various scales whose outcome should not be taken for granted. Attention to uneven and combined development allows https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-002

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us to give analytical justice to this process in our research, to the ways our respective field sites are integrated into global markets and geopolitical formations (Conrad 2016, 62–114) while at the same time remaining firmly grounded in local or regional structures and processes that only ethnographic engagement brings out. By doing so, the ethnographies presented in this volume emphasize the ’lumpiness’ inherent in the uneven development of capitalism, which the widespread concept of globalization conceals, as Cooper (2005, 91-112) already argued. The ethnographies further highlight that labour is centrally involved in the production of this ’lumpiness’, and in the fact that capitalist development knows no ’smooth surfaces’ (Kasmir and Gill 2018). Our introduction begins by tracing the origins of the concept of uneven and combined development in the writings of Leon Trotsky and by briefly exploring how it has been deployed since then as a theoretical device in the social sciences and humanities. We then move further to interrogate how useful the concept of uneven and combined development may be for anthropologists concerned with the study of industrial labour. In the last section of our introduction, we discuss more specifically the ways that uneven and combined development influences and impacts upon industrial labour at specific sites.

Uneven and combined development It is well known that Leon Trotsky coined the concept uneven and combined development in his History of the Russian Revolution (2017 [1930]). There, he engages critically with the famous statement of Marx in his preface to the first German edition of Das Kapital that ‘the industrially more developed country shows the less developed the image of its own future’ (Marx 1973 [1867], 12). Trotsky says that this might be true for Belgium and France, and to a lesser degree also for Germany and Italy, but certainly not for countries where capitalism developed later, for the simple yet important reason that these latecomers developed in an already capitalist world economy. His prime example was of course Russia, where the Tsarist state engaged in large-scale development of infrastructure and built industries with capital borrowed from foreign stock markets. The crucial outcome of this was that an autonomous capitalist class did not develop in Russia, and that the proletariat – though small in total – was concentrated in a few large industries in a few large cities, surrounded by peasant villages. Generalizing from this case, Trotsky (2017 [1930], 5) argues that ‘[u]nevenness [is] the most general law of the historic process’ and that this historical process unfolds through the dialectical interaction between the multiple uneven societies or social formations. Hence, this combination of unevenness between different societies has to be taken as the start-

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ing point for understanding their particular trajectory (cf. Anievas and Nişancioǧlu 2015, 45; Makki 2015, 483). However, Trotsky further emphasized that capitalism’s inherent contradictory nature together with its equally inherent tendency towards expansion not only provokes the universalization of social and economic relations but at the same time also their differentiation, and that uneven and combined development hence gains intensity under capitalism. Thus, in order to catch up with advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe, Tsarist Russia had no choice but to seek capitalist development of its backward agrarian economy. This (as Trotsky called it) ‘whip of external necessity’ did not produce alike structures and experiences of capitalist development in Russia (and never does anywhere else) because, among other reasons, the ‘privilege of backwardness’ allowed late-developers to skip developmental processes, to draw on the technologies already developed elsewhere and combine them in unique ways with their pre-existing social and economic configurations. Trotsky’s conceptualization has been criticized for failing to acknowledge the fundamental feature that the mode of production determines social formations, and also for emphasizing exchange at the cost of production and thus resembling bourgeois economics in this regard (Romagnolo 1975).¹ However, it influenced – together with Luxemburg’s analysis of imperialism – at least Marx-inspired proponents of dependency theory, such as Baran, Sweezy, and Gunder Frank (cf. Chilcote 2009). They shared with liberal-conservative dependency theorists like Prebisch and Singer, who brought up the notion in the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America in the 1950s, the insight that the underdevelopment of the ‘Third World’ stemmed from its asymmetric relationship with ‘the West’ established through imperialism. However, they were highly critical of the ability and willingness of nationalist bourgeois classes in Latin America’s dependent economies to pursue progressive development policies such as agrarian reforms (cf. Gunder Frank 1974). Nevertheless, as Fouad Makki (2015, 475–6) argues, dependency theorists in fact failed to account for the often starkly differing trajectories of capitalist development among different dependent peripheral countries, that is, for the fact that some manage to leap forward and others not. The same has been argued for

1 The historian Jan Romein emphasized, in contrast to Trotsky, the ‘handicap of a head start’ that early developers faced, and he did so in defense of Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ strategy that had been attacked by Trotsky on the grounds of his theory of uneven and combined development as well as the theory of permanent revolution based on it (van der Linden 2007, 153–5). According to Trotsky, industrial workers in a backward economy were well capable of launching a socialist revolution, if they succeeded in drawing the support of the peasantry, and if they could carry it into other countries as well, and thus turn it into a permanent revolution. The latter was essential because in a backward economy alone socialism would not be able to sustain itself (Löwy 1981).

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Wallerstein’s world-system theory that lumps together regions as diverse as China, Algeria, and Cuba in the semi-periphery, theorizing them as a buffer that supposedly stabilizes the exploitative relations between centre and periphery despite the fact that the major anti-systemic revolutions originated in this sphere (Washbrook 1990, 484–5). Since the 1980s, several Marxist geographers, in particular David Harvey (2006 [1982]), inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s work, developed a paradigm of ‘uneven development’ that allows for a nuanced understanding of the production of spatial unevennesses across the globe. Harvey’s concept of the ‘spatial fix’, that is, recurrent capitalist expansion into non-capitalist spheres in response to capitalism’s recurrent crises of over-accumulation, shows not only once more the integral role that unevenness plays for capitalism, but also how this unevenness is constantly (re‐)produced on a variety of scales. Drawing on Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism, Harvey (2004, 137–82) further shows that over-accumulated capital is invested in establishing infrastructure and industries in erstwhile peripheral places, only to devalue them later on and to create new assets for surplus capital to seize, as in the case of the privatization of public-sector industries (Smith 2008 [1984]; Dunford and Perrons 1983, Massey 1995 [1984]; cf. Strümpell 2014). Despite the obvious achievements of this historical-geographical materialism, it has been widely criticized on various grounds (Peck 2016). The most important one for our concern in this volume is the critique of its almost exclusive focus on capital and of the passive role assigned to labour (Kasmir and Carbonella 2008; cf. Herod 1997). We argue that a return to Trotsky’s concept allows us to address many of the shortcomings of dependency theory, world-system theory, and the uneven-development paradigm. Thus, the strength of Trotsky’s approach vis-à-vis dependency and world-system theory lies in its ability to explain differences in the ways a particular mode of production manifests itself in particular societies. This was demonstrated already long ago by such scholars as George Novack (1972) or Ernest Mandel (1963, 1970) in their respective studies on capitalist development and class politics in the US, Latin America, Belgium, and several other cases. As van der Linden (2007, 147) argues, central to Trotsky’s conceptualization of variation between cases of uneven and combined development is the importance he assigns to the ‘economic and cultural capacities’ of regions or countries involved (Trotsky 2017 [1930], 3; cf. Makki 2015, 484–5). However, van der Linden (2007, 161–2) cautions that Trotsky’s conceptualization of these capacities, or more generally, of the circumstances in which specific cases of uneven and combined development unfold, is still too vague to call the concept a ‘law’ as Trotsky did. We agree with van der Linden in this regard, and we also agree with him that it describes a kind of mechanism, a ‘frequently occurring and easily recognizable causal pattern’, and that its explanatory power can be increased through studies that explore in general terms

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the particularities of unevenness and combination in single cases. In this volume, we follow this call and focus on the general conditions in which particular industries expand or relocate from one setting to another, how an industry expands or relocates, what sorts of social and material factors determine its trajectory, and what are the political ramifications of this process in a given setting, especially for the role workers play in them. Kasmir and Gill (2018, 356) emphasize that central to Trotsky’s theorizing was an accounting for the historical fact that the first successful socialist revolution was carried out by the proletariat in backward Russia, where the bourgeoisie had been too weak to launch a bourgeois revolution against the absolutist Tsarist state, which was then widely considered the precondition for a subsequent socialist one. Trotsky, by contrast, argued that in a late and combined developing capitalist country that was still not mature, such as Russia, the urban proletariat was radical enough to spearhead a revolution thanks to its concentration in large factories, but it could only succeed in alliance with the peasantry (cf. Munck 1984, 80; Löwy 1981, 52–4).² There is a rich tradition of anthropological research on peasants and the radical politics they sometimes (or that some sections of this heterogeneous category) pursue, most notably Eric Wolf’s (1969) Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, but also the work of Tom Brass (2000), Gavin Smith (1989, 2020) as well as Gavin Smith and Susana Narotzky (2006). In this volume, by contrast, we shift the focus to industrial labour.

Zooming in and zooming out: Industrial labour and uneven development For some time now, anthropologists have been analysing the situation of industrial labour across the world. The first serious anthropological studies of industrial labour date back only to the post WWII period, which has to do with both anthropology’s more general reluctance to engage with life in modern societies and anthropology being put into the ‘savage slot’ (Nonini and Susser 2020,10) within the academic division of labour at the time. With the more general shift towards Marxism in the social sciences, and the rise of the ‘Manchester School’ in anthropology, in the 1960s, this perspective changed. As a result, the conduct of fieldwork in industrial estates became a new site for ethnographic exploration to make more

2 Similar arguments about the class relations in dependent, not fully capitalist economies have been raised independently by others as well, e. g., by the Peruvian organic intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui, who greatly appreciated Trotsky, as indeed many did in Latin America (Löwy 1981, 191 footnote 4; Mayer 2016, 155).

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general claims upon processes of large-scale social transformation. It is noteworthy in this regard that the early research focus was largely on industrial miners. This early research began to unravel the local histories of miners and mining industries, amongst which the Zambian Copperbelt (Gluckman 1961; cf. Ferguson 1999) and later the Bolivian tin mines (Nash 1979) became the most prominent cases in anthropology. Such early studies were largely concerned with the extent to which industrialization presented a vector of modernity and the extent to which it replaced or co-existed with allegedly traditional patterns of behaviour. Thus, they foregrounded the different ways of life of Zambian miners in the Copperbelt vs. their home villages (Gluckman 1961, Ferguson 1999), and the role that gender and indigeneity played in the exploitation of tin mines in Bolivia (Nash 1979). These early engagements did not really focus on work: among the first who undertook a serious labour process study of industrial work and workers was Michael Burawoy (1979, 2000). The latter conducted detailed studies on the labour process and industrial factory regimes in the US, followed by further studies also on the Zambian Copperbelt (1979, 205–16) and in Hungary (1985). This unique comparison between labour regimes under both a capitalist and a socialist economic system revealed the naivety entailed in earlier assumptions that industrial production revolves exclusively around the conflict between capital and labour (see Bravermann 1974). Instead, Burawoy’s works highlight the importance of the politics at the point of production, and the ways that social relations and experiences of work are made on the shop floors. Recognizing the importance of the centrality of the workplace, he famously coined the notion of ‘relations in production’ that are of course shaped by but not fully determined by the ‘relations of production’, and that therefore require separate analytical attention. Undoubtedly, this focus on the workplace has been guiding ethnographies of industrial labour ever since. Indeed, it is fair to say that one of Burawoy’s legacies in the early formative years of industrial anthropology was to shift attention to the social relations on the shop floors of industries, and this led to a general emphasis on ‘zooming in’ to industrial factories in subsequent work. Subsequent scholars, however, have also further developed Burawoy’s approach by taking into focus also social relations beyond factory floors, that is, in labour colonies, schools, etc. This ‘zooming out’ of the factory then became the yardstick for measuring the ethnographic quality of industrial anthropology in subsequent works. For example, De Neve’s work (2005) on the Tiruppur garment industry in Tamil Nadu, South India, highlights how members of a specific caste turned into influential industrial textile barons in town, but also showed how they frequently appeared as patrons and sponsors of town festivals, and how such neighbourhood patron-client relations played out at the shop-floor levels of

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the Tiruppur garment industry. Similarly, Mao Mollona’s work on the steel industries in Sheffield engaged with how a specific section of the workforce – elderly artisanal workers in contrast to the younger proletarian ones – made ends meet by also engaging in the illicit and informal economies of the neighbourhoods (for example, by engaging in drug-trafficking, etc.). Such striking insights, then, not only challenged Burawoy’s strong focus on the workplace, but also made a case for the embeddedness of the factory space in its wider social surrounding, or what we may call an urge to ‘zoom out’ at a modest scale from the factory workplace. In this light, it seems fair to suggest that ‘zooming out’ is necessary to capture the sometimes simultaneous, sometimes autonomous forms of uneven and combined development that occur outside the factory gates. Zooming in but also simultaneously out of the industrial workplace helps us to better understand the various scales not only of unevenness but also of processes of combination. And indeed, we are not alone in this endeavour, as some of the authors within industrial anthropology have already begun to address questions of uneven and combined development. A good example is June Nash’s comparative ethnography of high-tech defence industry workers in the US (1989). Nash was particularly interested in workers’ political subjectivities; Bolivian miners were much more aware of their position in the global political economy and hence of capitalism’s uneven and combined development than workers in the US. Similarly, Jonathan Parry (2020) compares his findings on the historical process of structuration (in Giddens’ sense) of industrial workers in one industrial town in India into different classes with ethnographies of other, similar industrial sites in India and beyond. Third, Malika Shakya’s exploration of the ‘death’ of Kathmandu’s garment industry in the early 2000s frames the situations of Nepalese garment workers in the context of global inequality, and highlights the centrality of the Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) between the US and Nepal in the early 1990s, a lifeline for the growth of the textile industry, but also an important reason for its decline in the early 2000s after the MFA agreement was cancelled (Shakya 2018). Her theoretical concern is how forms of uneven development impact upon an ‘industrial ecosystem’ in Nepal, a view that, however, analytically blurs the unevenness between different actors within the country’s garment industry. This is where we stand, and we now aim to contribute to a more systematic understanding of such differences between different industries that have developed in different regions and at different historical junctures by consciously engaging with the concept of uneven and combined development. We zoom into sites of industrial production to unravel how management, workers, and unionists engage with broader uneven developments and their combination, and deal with them on an everyday level. At the same time, we zoom out to understand and record un-

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even developments that may be at the periphery of the everyday life, interest, and attention of industrial workers. We are convinced that Trotsky’s concept offers a particularly suitable vantage point for such enquiries for at least three different but related reasons. First, we believe that the concept compels us to a more temporal and spatial understanding of industrial labour. That is to say that the concept of uneven and combined development invites the researcher to think through his/ her ethnographic data at a specific industrial site vis-a-vis other uneven developments elsewhere. Of course, some might argue that such interconnections between the local, regional, national, and global may evolve in any case from a thorough evaluation of fieldwork data, but we suggest that the concept facilitates a more spatial understanding and more effectively does justice to local understandings of the embeddedness of industrial labour. Second and closely related, we find that the concept of uneven and combined development provides a useful tool to compare industrial labour at different sites of the world. Undoubtedly, we suggest that it is not the only tool but should be regarded as one of many different conceptual tools to understand such global processes (the other ones being global political economy). Finally, it is also a concept that forces us to think about the political consequences of industrialization processes through an emphasis on what Trotsky calls the ‘combined’: it is a concept that invites the researcher to examine under what conditions local articulations of the working class form an alliance with other social and political formations or, vice versa, to explore the vested interests that hinder such alliances from occurring. More specifically, we are particularly interested in the ways uneven and combined development shapes industrial settings in one or more of four ways: (i) On macro- and meso-levels, how do strategies of accumulation pursued by capital (but also by states) create terrains of uneven and combined development through the establishment of industries in ‘frontier’/‘industrially underdeveloped’ regions and the closure of industries elsewhere? (ii) How is uneven and combined industrial development understood at the ‘point of production’, within single factories or industrial sectors? For example, how do workers, industrialists, and development agents frame and/or strategically use the uneven and combined nature of development to make claims and/or legitimize practices? (iii) How do unions address forms of uneven and combined development to make claims on behalf of workers? How do discourses of uneven development feed into trade union politics, both in the everyday politics of a union and in their long-term strategies (Kesküla and Sanchez 2019)? (iv) How is industrial development linked to other forms of uneven and combined development (e. g., in agrarian relations, in urban real estate markets, etc.)

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and how do these linkages shape the trajectories of industries and the position of working classes in them?

Ethnographic insights from industrial labour and uneven and combined development What emerges from this anthropological approach to the concept of ‘uneven and combined’ development is a very fine-grained view of how different actors along the industrial hierarchy understand uneven development and how they use such understandings to advance their own agendas (‘to combine’). In Chapter Two, Michael Hoffmann studies the situation of industrial labour in Nepal through the lens of two particular food-processing factories, one at the urban margins of a western lowland town bordering India, the other located at the urban margins of a mid-hill town in central Nepal. Though the two towns differ in terms of ethnic composition and religious affiliation, as well as in their general atmospheres, what they share is the way members of Maoist-affiliated unions have substantially challenged the trajectory of labour: they achieved the task of unionizing a substantial part of the workforce and hence obtained the much desired permanent contracts. Although such a victory came with certain costs (in one of the towns, the low castes were excluded from these benefits), it should be noted that gaining permanent contracts for even just some sections of the workforce represents a remarkable deviation from the general trend of increasing precarization of labour across South Asia and much of the world, as permanent contracts allow workers to embark on different ‘life courses’ than casual work. Hoffmann then goes on to show that such union achievements are nevertheless currently undervalued due to the steeply rising costs of living in urban Nepal effected by skyrocketing prices of urban real estate and building materials. These rises have ultimately been caused by the influx of capital accumulated by the affluent segment of Nepali labour migrants to the Middle East and because the local tourist industry caters to Western visitors, that is, it is a result of the combination of capitalist development in Nepal and elsewhere. Hoffmann concludes that the blindness of unionists in Nepal to the adverse effects of urban gentrification shows that the current predicament of industrial labour needs to be situated within broader forms of uneven and combined development than the ones pertaining to the sphere of production. Julia Soul’s chapter investigates the emergence of a transnational workers council in the globalized steel industry. She looks at the case of the TG Group – a multinational steel corporation originating in Argentina – and the ways TG steel workers organize themselves and help to organize others in both Argentina and Guatemala. She discusses how the corporation pursues the homogenization

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of the TG workforces across national boundaries by instilling a TG corporate culture while at the same time carefully exploiting – by means of combination – the unevenness between the different production sites that has grown between Argentina and Guatemala since the countries’ colonial transition to capitalism. Soul shows that the politics pursued by organized labour mirrors these strategies, that the global council pursued by workers from Argentina and Guatemala (and other countries as well) also rests on the homogenizing work of ‘real abstraction’ in order to compare the different situations and develop a common standard, a platform of moral positions, from which joint unionism can be performed. Her account remains pivotal for our understanding of uneven and combined development for at least two reasons: first, it discusses labour’s role in uneven and combined development. If capitalism increasingly operates globally, and the management of multinationals takes advantage of unevenness, then workers within global multi-nationals may qualify as potential vanguards of an emerging global working class, as they are the ones that are most likely to engage in moral discussions through ‘real abstractions’ surrounding the unfolding of global capitalist wealth extraction schemes. Second, Soul’s discussion also highlights how the new international unionism occurs not in concrete bounded institutions, but in multiple spaces and factories, where different interventions scale up to form broader working-class powers. By doing so, Soul actually contributes new understandings of what ‘unionism’ really means in practice, highlighting the informal character of much of the new global worker’s councils. While outsiders might view such informal global unionism as a weakness due to the lack of formal mediation structures, her account shows that such informal interventions may work precisely because they remain informal, as management has a more difficult time controlling labour in such arrangements. Umut Kuruüzüm’s chapter continues the discussion of the interplay between class, ethnicity, and overall kinship through a focus on steel plant workers in the border region of Turkey and Iraq. Here we have a case where Kurdish migrant steel workers commute between a Kurdish-owned steel mill in northern Iraq and their Kurdish native villages in Southern Turkey. By exploring their commuting between uneven yet combined regions and their social formations, the chapter documents how the growth of flexible shop floor and labour arrangements in the steel mill has been bound up with the pre-existing kinship-based relations and domestic economy in their native villages. Kuruüzüm’s account shows that the articulation of domination, freedom, struggle, and ultimately the economic geography of capitalism are woven beyond the shop floor, right into the circular movements of labour and value between their homes (run by their fathers in Southern Turkey) and the steel mill (run by men of their fathers’ generation). Strikingly, the workers in Kuruüzüm’s account show little political resistance to the labour regime in the

Introduction

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mini steel mill near Erbil, but most of them get into conflicts or disagreements with their fathers – who expect a share of the profit – back home in their villages of Turkey. Given that the bosses of the mill and the fathers are from the same background and seem to be in cahoots, this may not be so surprising. But the case illustrates clearly how patriarchal structures outside the factory walls may function to smooth out labour politics in the mill, while unevenness can be reproduced through patriarchal structures back in the workers’ home villages. Katerina Ivanova discusses in her chapter the consequences of combining the uneven economies of capitalist West Germany and formerly socialist East Germany through the prism of a Volkswagen-owned car manufacturing plant in eastern Germany. The workers in Zwickau, the provincial East German town where the plant was located, had high hopes of becoming equal members of the VW workforce in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin wall. They were ready to engage in militant action in the early 1990s to fight for their claims to get on equal footing with their West German colleagues. This sense of strong militancy culminated in a major strike in the early 1990s, which created much solidarity among VW workers in Zwickau, and although it did not result in equal pay with their west German colleagues, it created secure jobs in Zwickau and decent pay by local standards. However, at the same time, these achievements by the workers at Volkswagen increasingly separated them from the rest of the working classes in Zwickau, including in other automobile plants where workers were employed on less secure contracts and suffered from precarious working conditions. As Ivanova’s ethnography shows, this new division between VW workers and others was often understood through idioms of envy. Hence her account shows how the struggle between VW and its workforce effectively reproduced unevenness and combinations between West and East Germany on a more local level. The importance of uneven and combined development within a country comes once more to the fore in Andrea Tollardo’s chapter, which focuses on a stone extraction industry in Trentino, a northern Italian province situated in the Alps. Here we have a chapter that examines both historically as well as ethnographically the ups and downs of the porphyry industries in the region. Tollardo highlights the fact that uneven developments in the Trentino region date far back in time, and that since the mid-nineteenth century they have effected complex migration patterns related to unevenness inside and outside of Italy. These migration patterns served to combine uneven labour relations in the Trentino stone extraction industry. Importantly, Tollardo shows that the industry thrived in the early days because of the criminalization of labour in a post-World War II environment. Yet, the gains reached by the Italian labour movement as a whole during this period later benefitted workers in the stone quarries in the 1970s. The success of the industry enabled some entrepreneurs to branch out into other businesses,

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and they brought in workers facing unemployment in post-socialist former Yugoslavia. Yet with competitors rising outside of Europe, the stone quarry industry in the Alps once again collapsed, leaving the workers to become ‘footloose labour’ (Breman 1996) hunting for wages as clandestine migrants, now in far-away places like Switzerland or Germany. Tollardo closes his discussions with a perspective on future trajectories of the industry, which highlights that the current global COVID19 pandemic is likely to become another important ‘critical junction’ (Kalb and Tak 2005) in the history of this industry, as in its wake the demand for Italian stones has been on the rise once again. Suravee Nayak introduces another extractive industry, the coal mines of Talcher in eastern India. She focusses, too, on the historical changes in the ways the uneven and combined development shaped the labour forces in the coal industry since the late colonial period and emphasises the importance of the divide between formal and informal labour relations in this regard. Thus, whereas the railways employed many workers, such as loco drivers, mechanics, etc., formally, granting them certain rights and privileges, workers in the Talcher coalfields, which had been opened for the functioning of the railways, were almost exclusively employed only informally. It is well-known that following India’s independence, labour in industries that were vital for the new government’s ambitious development programmes was widely formalized in the 1950s. As Nayak shows, in the mining sector labour was only formalised on a large scale in the early 1970s after coal mines were nationalised. However, even then informal labour never ceased to exist, but was confined to low-skilled manual labour. Furthermore, the distinction between formal and informal labour largely overlapped with local social inequalities in terms of caste and gender. Nayak also shows how the situation began to change again from the 1980s onwards when India liberalized its economy, opened up many sectors to foreign investment and casualised labour on a large scale in all industrial sectors. As Nayak shows, in its wake unevenness among the mining labour force was re-combined. The sons of formal mine workers have now also entered the ranks of informal workers, but thanks to their relatively high social standing and good political connections they earn (relatively) well and are only sporadically called to work. By contrast, those who lack such standing and connections, such as migrants and local low-caste workers, form the bottom of the informal mining workforce. Given these divides, Nayak concludes, it is not surprising that the scope for political solidarity among the workforce is limited. Andre Weißenfels, in his chapter on a French electronics manufacturing plant in a Tunisian special economic zone, reminds us of two closely related aspects that overtly structural approaches to capitalist development tend to neglect. The first is that ‘development’ is a polymorphous concept that takes on different meanings for different actors or at different historical times, and the second aspect is that it

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(perhaps therefore) tends to disappoint many ardent believers. The Tunisian workers in the electronics equipment plant that Weißenfels studied are convinced they have good jobs because, by local standards as well as by the Chinese standards about which they have heard, they are relatively well paid and because their shiny factory resembles a textbook site of efficient, orderly modernity. Nevertheless, they are equally convinced that they do not have a good life because, with some family resemblance to the situation in Nepal described by Hoffmann, these jobs still do not pay enough to afford the promised amenities of modern urban life: a house, a car, and a marriage. In order to reconcile their desire for a ‘good life’ with the material realities of post-colonial development in Tunisia (Lordon 2014), they therefore take on second jobs or try to invest in their own skills, such as learning a new language to migrate abroad, such as to France, where workers of the ‘parent company’ earn up to nine times their wages. The sense of being ‘privileged but stuck’ that Weißenfels observes among Tunisian offshore workers reflects their positionality in a specific instance of uneven and combined capitalist development, of which they are also well aware. Furthermore, Weißenfels also reveals that the discontent their situation and awareness provokes is not so much directed against their French employer or the Tunisian state, but against even more marginal classes in Tunisia, as their passivity toward and, in fact, repudiation of the revolutionary upheavals in 2010 shows. The following chapter by Arnaud Kaba indeed takes us to France, to glass workers in the Pays de Langstross in the French border region to Germany. The Pays de Langstross developed into a European hub of glass production already since the early 18th century thanks to its rich forest reserves and deposits of silica, and thanks to the skills of Venetian master craftsmen that were attracted to France under Louis XIV. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, a glass factory could be found in almost each village whose products were widely exported. However, from the mid-20th century onwards changing bourgeois dinning tastes and, more importantly, changes in production technology rendered the artisanal skills of local glass blowers largely obsolete. When Kaba started his research in 2020, only a few of them were still in employment, but they were now employed in the handful of workshops and museums into which some of the old factories had been turned to cater to the needs of glass artists and to attract tourists. The main product they sell to the latter are Christmas ornaments that they often produce in live performances to show off their skills. However, such Christmas ornaments are already produced cheaper in India on whose glass industry Kaba also has undertaken longterm ethnographic research. Hence, although workers in Pays de Langstross remain overall critical of their position as heritage-ised workers they feel compelled to constantly emphasise their skills as deeply embodied heritage to ward off global competition. Although Kaba argues that the travails of the glass industry present a

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clear instance of uneven and combined development involving several locations and working classes he likewise warns us that this theory does actually not engage enough with micro levels to help us grasp everyday labour relations and practices in their full complexity. In the last chapter of this volume, Christian Strümpell and Hasan Ashraf situate the exorbitant rise of the Bangladesh ready-made garment industry over the course of the last forty years in the country’s changing position in uneven and combined development on global, regional, and local scales since British colonialism. They highlight several transformations that the ready-made garment industry has undergone since the early 1980s and focus especially on the latest one, which is characterised by an increasing concentration of production in mega-factories, by the relocation of production to the outskirts of the metropoles Dhaka and Chattogram, and by an increasing investment in labour-saving technologies. They argue that these changes are grounded in Bangladeshi garment producers’ concerns about their competitiveness with newly emerging producers in Africa, and hence – similar to the Nepali unionists in Hoffmann’s case – in their understanding of processes of uneven and combined development. In their analysis, Strümpell and Ashraf especially focus on the social consequences these transformations entail for ready-made garment workers and how, vice versa, some of these changes are partially driven by workers’ politics. The workers employed for the new computerized production processes are better educated and more urban than other workers; they identify more with a middle class than with the working class and they have been so far less militant than other workers, and – despite the industry-promoted narrative of a predominantly female workforce – they are largely men. Strümpell and Ashraf thus show how the development of the global garment industry in Bangladesh combines and thereby exacerbates the unevenness between cities and countryside, as well as the inequalities among genders, and how the way they are combined is subject to historical changes.

References Anievas, Alexander and Kerem Nişancioǧlu. How the West Came to Rule. The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2015. Brass, Tom. Peasants, Populism, and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Braverman, Harry. Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974. Breman, Jan. Footloose Labour. Working in India’s Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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Burawoy, Michael. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labour Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Burawoy, Michael. The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism. London: Verso, 1985. Burawoy, Michael. Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Chilcote, Ronald H. “Trotsky and Development Theory in Latin America.” Critical Sociology 35,6 (2009): 719–41. Conrad, Sebastian. What is Global History? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Cooper. Frederick. “Globalization.” In Colonialism in Question. Theory, Knowledge, History, edited by ibid., 91–112. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. De Neve, Geert. The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working Lives in India’s Informal Economy. New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2005. Dunford, Michael and Diane Perrons. The Arena of Capital. London: Macmillan, 1983. Eckert, Andreas. “Why All the Fuss about Global Labor History?” In Global Histories of Work, edited by ibid., 3–22. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Gluckman, Max. “Anthropological Problems Arising from the African Industrial Revolution.” In Social Change in Modern Africa, edited by Aidan Southall, 67–82. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Stanford: University of California Press, 1999. Gunder Frank, André. “Dependence is Dead, Long Live Dependence and the Class Struggle. An Answer to Critics.” Latin American Perspectives 1,1 (1974): 87–106. Harvey, David. The Limits to Capital. London; New York: Verso, 2006 [1982]. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Herod, Andrew. “From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor’s Spatial Fix and the Geography of Capitalism.” Antipode 29,1 (1997): 1–31. Kalb, Don and Herman Tak. Anthropology and History Beyond the Cultural Turn. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. Kasmir, Sharryn and Lesley Gill. “No Smooth Surfaces: The anthropology of unevenness and combination.” Current Anthropology 59 ,4 (2018): 355–77. Kesküla, Eeva and Andrew Sanchez. “Everyday Barricades: Bureaucracy and the Affect of Struggle in Trade Unions.” Dialectical Anthropology 43,1 (2019): 109–25. Löwy, Michael. The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development. The Theory of Permanent Revolution. London: New Left Books, 1981. Lordon, Frédéric. Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. London, Verso Books, 2014. Makki, Fouad. “Reframing Development Theory: the significance of the idea of uneven and combined development.” Theory and Society 44 (2015): 471–97. Mandel, Ernest. “The Dialectic of Class and Region in Belgium.” New Left Review I/20 (1963): 5–31. Mandel, Ernest. “The Laws of Uneven and Combined Development.” New Left Review I/59 (1970): 19– 38 Mariátegui, José Carlos. Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. Originally published as Siete Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana (Lima: Editorial Minerva, 1928). Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band. 1867. Reprint, Berlin: Dietz, 1973.

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Massey, Doreen. Spatial Divisions of Labour. Social structures and the Geography of Production, 2nd edition. (London: MacMillan 1984; Houndmills: MacMillan, 1995). Citations refer to the Houndmills edition. Mayer, David. “Mit Marx im Gepäck: Lateinamerikanische Vorläufer im Versuch (post‐)koloniale Bedingungen zu denken.” In Marx und der Globale Süden, edited by Felix Wemheuer, 145–69. Köln: PapyRossa, 2016. Mollona, Massimiliano. Made in Sheffield: An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics. New York: Berghahn, 2009. Mollona, Massimiliano. Brazilian Steel Town: Machines, Land, Money, and Commoning in the Making of the Working Class. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Munck, Ronaldo. Revolutionary Trends in Latin America. Occasional Monograph Series N. 17. Montreal: McGill University, 1984. Nash, June. We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us. Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines. 1979. Reprint with new preface by the author, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Nash, June. From Tank Town to High Tech. The Clash of Community and Industrial Cycles. New York: State University of New York Press, 1989. Nonini, Don and Ida Susser. The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux. London: Routledge Press, 2020. Novack, Georg. “The Law of Uneven and Combined Development and Latin America.” Latin American Perspectives 3,2 (1976): 100–6. Parry, Jonathan (in collaboration with Ajay T.G.). Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town. Delhi: Social Science Press, 2020. Peck, Jamie. 2016. “Uneven Regional Development.” In International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology, edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael Goodchild, Weidong Liu, Audrey Kobayashi and Richard Marston, 7270–7282. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Romagnolo, David. “The So-called ‘Law’ of Uneven and Combined Development.” Latin American Perspectives 2,1 (1975): 7–31. Shakya. Malika. Death of an Industry: The Cultural Politics of Garment Manufacturing During the Maoist Revolution in Nepal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Smith, Gavin. Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Peru. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Smith, Gavin. “Interrogating the Agrarian Question Then and Now in Terms of Uneven and Combined Development.” In The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux, edited by Donald M. Nonini and Ida Susser, 153–75. New York: Routledge, 2020. Smith, Gavin and Susana Narotzky. Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. 1984. 3rd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Strümpell, Christian. “The Politics of Dispossession in an Odishan Steel Town.” Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 48,1 (2014): 45–72. Trotsky, Leo. History of the Russian Revolution. 1930. Translated by Max Eastman. Reprint, n.p.: Kollektiv Yakov Perelman, 2017. van der Linden, Marcel. “The Law of Uneven and Combined Development: Some underdeveloped thoughts.” Historical Materialism 15,1 (2007): 145–65.

Introduction

Washbrook, David. “South Asia, the World System, and World Capitalism.” The Journal of Asian Studies 49,3 (1990): 479–508. Wolf, Eric. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

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Uneven and Combined Development in Nepal: Industrial food-factories, unions and the urban anticipation economy Introduction Today, massive labour migration from Nepal to the Middle East and Malaysia is fundamentally changing the nature of work in the country and several important trends have emerged over the past few years. Traditional work in agriculture has become increasingly stigmatized and looked down upon, especially by younger workers who see little opportunity in the countryside (Childs and Choedup 2019). Simultaneously, the uneven development between Nepal and other countries has created a growing tourism economy, which offers many new opportunities for employment, for instance as trekking guides or hotel workers. As Bennike (2019) recently reported, even in remote places like the Nuri Valley in the Himalayas, we are now seeing how the money earned through the international market for locally sourced yarsa gumba (a ‘caterpillar fungus’ prized in Chinese medicine as an aphrodisiac) is being reinvested into the region’s tourism industry. This chapter examines the changing labour landscape in Nepal due to its increasing integration into transnational labour flows and the different markets that are being created by the uneven and combined processes of capitalist development. I focus on how trade unions operating in industrial settings are approaching these rapid developments in order to make claims on behalf of the workers they represent. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic field study that were conducted over different periods between 2013 and 2020, this chapter shows how discourses of unequal development are feeding into trade union politics in two modern food factories: one on the rural outskirts of Nepalgunj in the lowlands of Nepal, and the other in the industrial area of Pokhara in the mid-hills of Nepal. In both places, I argue, trade unions conceive of unequal and combined development not as the transnational division of labour between Nepal and other countries, but as the division between permanent and casual work within their local factory settings. This approach, I argue, is also the reason why trade unions have been only partially successful in their efforts to make such unequal developments ‘more even’. However, as this chapter further shows, the union struggle against labour exclusion in both cities is being overshadowed by local ‘economies of anticipation’ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-003

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(Cross 2015). The private food factories considered in this chapter exist on the fringes of rapidly changing cities in which certain assumptions about the future are driving economic decision making.¹ For different reasons, residents assume that in the ‘near future’ both cities will experience strong immigration and growth, an attitude of expectation that has led in recent years to widespread speculation and astronomically rising land prices. Because of these urban changes, and despite some successes by the trade unions, industrial workers are experiencing a devaluation of their work as their wages stagnate and their purchasing power declines. This environment of increasing precarity is a major influence on the status of workers and their outlook for the future. On a theoretical level, this chapter examines the still relatively unexplored gaps between unionism, unequal development, and urban transformation. At the core of my discussion is the broader question of what happens to work when cities grow rapidly or are transformed into ‘global cities’ – processes that are being increasingly considered in the social science literature of South Asia (see for example Goldmann 2015). It is important that the changes in the city should not simply be conceptualized as external transformations to the landscape. Instead, I propose to complexify urban development by including changing moral concepts in the discussion about urban change. For example, it is important to focus on increasing land speculation by urban citizens in order to better understand how such dynamics affect work as well as workers’ understanding of their own future in the peripheral industrial areas. This unique perspective foregrounds a certain idea of the future when discussing urban change, one that can be broadly conceptualized as the ‘not-so-distant future’, and is generally consistent with Arjun Appadurai’s idea of ‘the future as a cultural fact’ (Appadurai 2013,1). In contrast to recent ethnological works (Cross 2015, Weszkalnys 2014), such future-oriented discourses in Nepal are not dictated from ‘above’ by state or transnational actors, but are, in the cases discussed in this chapter, visions of the future that are generated both from ‘above’ and ‘below’. This is mainly because the unequal development of transnational labour markets has led many emigrants who return from the Middle East or Malaysia to put their savings into land, thus influencing the future value of land from ‘above’. At the same time, many citizens in Pokhara and Nepalgunj are aware of these investments and are creating a ‘bottom-up’ economy of expectations, which in turn is changing the possibility for upward mobility within the class

1 See also Bennet (1976) and Adams (2009) for a more general discussion of the notion of anticipation.

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structures of the city and directly impacting on the lives and prospects of urban industrial workers. Before I start to analyse this complex relationship, I would like to point out some of the differences between industrial workers in Nepal and in neighbouring India. In India, two unequal developments are affecting trade union activism. First, there is widespread ‘accumulation through dispossession’ (Harvey 2004), which forces workers into contract work or even makes them redundant. Second, there is rampant expropriation of public space by private national and multinational corporations. Michael Goldman’s work (2015) on these two tendencies shows that work can develop less and less. However, the ethnographic material presented here points to a different kind of unequal development in Nepal in which labour struggles are solidly fought but the forms of urban gentrification are disadvantaged. Thus, there is no double ‘accumulation of dispossession’, but a one-sided one. The chapter concludes by questioning the value of labour activism when it remains limited to the workplace while simultaneously neglecting the forms of uneven development that are rapidly evolving outside the factory gates. Let me begin this exploration by briefly laying out a broader history of uneven industrial development in Nepal before diving deeper into the local ethnographic context.

Uneven industrial development in Nepal The history of Nepal’s industrial development is relatively short, going back to 1936 when the Nepal Companies Act was formulated and the Biratnagar Jute Mills were established. This inaugural instance of industrialization was followed by other industrial ventures in the 1930s and 1940s that either fared badly or had to be shut down quickly. This first phase was followed by the establishment of a few more government-owned industries in the 1950s and 1960s, often with the support of either China or the USSR.² During this brief period of democracy, between 1950 and 1960, the ruling Nepali Congress Party formulated five-year plans for industrial development in the country, and by 1960 there were sixty-three different industrial companies registered across the country. From 1960 to 1990, the country witnessed the rule of the Panchayat regime. During this period few industries were established in the country. This may seem surprising, as throughout this time, other ‘developing countries’ embarked on courses of import-substituted industrialization. Such a course led to mass indus-

2 See also http://countrystudies.us/nepal/44.htm, accessed on 10 October 2021.

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trialisation in neighbouring India (Khilnani 1997). In Nepal, however, the ruling royal family remained averse to industrial development for a number of reasons: first, the royal family itself favoured the development of tourist industries over industrial capitalism, as they were themselves involved in tourism (see Liechty 2017) and preferred to syphon off hefty profits from the industries established throughout that period. The industrialist Binod Chaudhary (Chaudhary 2014) formulated the climate of industrialization as follows: apparently, for every industry being set up, two taxes had to be paid: the official one and the one for the royal family, who often wanted to have a fifty per cent partnership in any new industry. This in turn gave little incentive to the landowning elites to transition into small-scale industrialists or for large-scale capitalists from abroad to invest in Nepal. Second, the lack of industrial development in Nepal at that time should be considered in light of the Cold War as well. Neither the USA nor the USSR had an interest in developing Nepal, as both saw Nepal as a comfortable cushion between the emerging powers of India and China. For instance, Narayan Khadka writes about US aid during the Cold War period, by which America supported Nepal’s development efforts, but also helped Nepal maintain its independence and neutrality (Khadka 2000). It was only when the Panchayat regime came to an end after Nepal’s first Jana Andolan (People’s Movement) in 1990 that industrial development in Nepal really took off. While this process is little understood due to lack of research, two ethnographies provide some insight. First, Malika Shakya’s illuminating work on the rise and fall of Kathmandu’s textile industry shows how a treaty between the USA and Nepal granted quotas to Nepal for garment exports and helped to stimulate a large industry in the capital that employed tens of thousands of workers in the 1990s. Second, my own previous work on the Kailali district area shows that brick kilns were only starting to be established in the mid-1990s (Hoffmann 2018). Most industries established across the country in the early 1990s were located either in the lowland area of Nepal or in urban centres in the hills. The reason for this restriction was that large parts of the country were and remain unsuitable for industrial development due to the difficult hilly or mountainous terrain. Despite this disadvantage for industrial development, the idea of an ‘industrial future’, also called the ‘transition from an agricultural-based economy into an industrial society’, has been a central promise of a number of politicians from a broad spectrum in Nepal. Its core idea that Nepal can industrialize despite its geographical location goes back to a 1930s study by a Swiss team of geographers surrounding the Swiss geologist Tony Hagen. Hagen argued that Nepal is ‘rich’ in natural resources, particularly energy reservoirs, that can be exploited to start the industrialization process (Hagen 1969). This uneven distribution of industrial development faced another challenge when Maoist insurgents fought a guerrilla war against the state between 1996

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and 2006. Throughout the insurgency several industries were firebombed, industrialists were kidnapped for ransom, and chanda (volunteer donations) were demanded from industrialists to keep the war effort going. Some industrial labour became entangled in the conflict between the Maoists and the state, while others used the opportunity to press their demands at sites of small-scale production such as brick kilns (Hoffmann 2014). In the wake of the insurgency, industrialization was stalled; many in the country were suspicious about the fragile peace until the dissolving of the people’s army and its integration into the Nepal royal army in 2011. Hence it is not surprising that so little industrial development has taken place across the country. According to a 2011 survey undertaken by the Bureau of Statistics of the Government of Nepal, approximately 250,000 people worked in the manufacturing economy in Nepal. The food and beverage, tobacco, and textile industries made up a large bulk of the workplaces within Nepal’s manufacturing landscape (See Gautam 2018,40). The construction sector was found to be the largest part of the informal economy. Obviously, such industrial and urban sites of employment did not exist evenly around the country, but occurred at certain nodal points: in or around large and mid-size cities and along stretches of the highway or close to border towns in the lowland area. This is because in such places there are larger markets and a growing urban middle class that consumes the few locally produced or processed goods. This is also reflected in the literature on labour in Nepal, which largely focuses on issues related to out-migration to other places rather than industrial areas in the country. Nevertheless, there is a small set of literature that considers different parts of Nepal’s industrial landscape (Kondos 1991; Kondos et. al 1991, 1992; Seddon et. al 2002; Shakya 2018; Hoffmann 2018a). Importantly, as found in most of the literature, the owners of the industries are mainly Nepalis or Indian Marwaris (Hoffmann 2018a) who are often portrayed as agents that set up factories in ‘frontier’ markets to maximize their profits by exploiting untapped regions. Such conceptions mirror earlier works on processes of industrialization in other countries that emphasize the industrialists as self-made agents and the local workforce as the passive recipients of a slow industrialization process. In contrast, the notion of uneven and combined development suggests interconnectedness between different developed industrial regions. Conceptualizing uneven and combined development as a social phenomenon, I use it as a starting point to explore in more detail Nepal’s emerging industrial landscapes and the ways in which unions have reacted to these shifting regimes of labour. At the centre of my exploration in this chapter is how unions view uneven development in the food industry.

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The field sites: Pokhara vs. Nepalgunj Although there are occasional comparisons between industrial relations in Nepal and the Middle East in newspapers such as The Kathmandu Post, it is unusual in the social scientific literature on South Asia to compare industrial relations within a country, and even rarer to find analysis of a particular industrial sector across the entire South Asian region. The reason often given for this is that caste, class, and gender can be understood differently in one region of South Asia as compared to another. However, this chapter tries to break with such approaches by examining the industrial relations within the food-producing sector at two different factories located on the periphery of two different cities. As a starting point I would like to highlight the differences between the two cities. The city of Pokhara, located in Kaski district in the midwestern hills of Nepal, ranks among the country’s most developed and prosperous towns. The city has witnessed spectacular growth from a remote village with a few thousand inhabitants in the 1960s to Nepal’s second largest city with an estimated population of 402,000. Over the same period, the city also developed a massive tourism industry; early tourists were adventurous foreigners arriving in town via the famed ‘magic bus’ tours along the hippie trail. Others followed, and by 2000 an estimated 100,000 tourists visited every year. One of the most striking elements of Pokhara for a visiting tourist is the cleanliness of the streets, which may be unique in Nepal. Unlike Kathmandu, Pokhara has never been a centre of Nepali politics. Its residents engage mainly in tourism, trade, or self-employed businesses, and hail from a large variety of religious, caste, and ethnic backgrounds. In terms of religion, many of the inhabitants are Hindus, alongside some Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims. In terms of caste and ethnicity, the dominant groups are those from the traditional Nepali higher castes, such as Brahmins and Chhetris as well as those from the Gurung and Magar ethnic communities that reside in the rural villages around the city. Throughout the Maoist insurgency – also called the ‘people’s war’ or the ‘Maoist conflict’ – the town witnessed hardly any of the bomb attacks or other spectacular forms of violence that were frequent in other Nepali towns, such as Tikapur (Hoffmann 2018a) and Nepalgunj (Hoffmann 2018b). Often residents describe Pokhara as a city ‘where all kinds of people can live together peacefully; it is like a little Switzerland’. However, the innocent image of ethnic harmony conveyed by such statements has not always been totally accurate. Although there has not been a major violent inter-ethnic conflict as in Nepalgunj, a group of activists from the Gurung ethnic group fought for the establishment and recognition of an autonomous Tamuwan region in the aftermath of the Maoist Rev-

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olution. In 2012, activists from this group even held a conference in Pokhara,³ which ended with the demand for a separate Gurung state, and in the following years, at least one strike was held by Tamuwan activists, and a road junction was decorated with Tamuwan insignia. But the activities of Tamuwan activists have been largely forgotten after the restructuring of the Nepalese state into different zones. Few who are old enough to remember the group’s activities like to talk about the Tamuwan idea, especially if they are from upper caste Hindu communities. Nepalgunj, on the other hand, ranks among the poorest of Nepal’s cities. It is known in the wider area for its predominantly Muslim population, the famous Madheshi uprising in the aftermath of the revolution, and its local community of gold smugglers who ply their trade across the nearby border to India. Not known for its scenery, the central feature of Nepalgunj is its main artery road strewn with rubbish, lined with shops, businesses, and half-built concrete buildings, with roads leading off into residential areas on both sides. It falls in the district of Banke, which is one of the five districts in western Nepal where the kamaiya system of bonded labour existed until 2000. The population is a mixture of Adivasi groups (Madheshi, Tharu) and Hindu and Muslim communities. The town is also known for its trading community and its small industrial corridor along the highway from Nepalgunj to the neighbouring city of Kohalpur. A city with a predominantly Muslim population is unique in Nepal and locals refer to the Muslim neighbourhood of Eklaini as ‘little Pakistan’. There are many local rumours that the town hosts a number of international security specialists who carefully watch the Muslim community and its madrasa schools for signs of Taliban or other extremist activity. Despite these differences in location, I discovered an axis of comparison between the Ronda food-processing factory in the industrial area of Pokhara and the Agrawal food- processing factory on the outskirts of Nepalgunj that became more interesting as my inquiries progressed. In both cities, Maoist unions had continually challenged the distinction between contract and permanent labour. While the food processing factories were initially run with mostly casual labour, it was only after the Maoist unions began to enter the factories and to convert members from the already existing unions that the prevailing industrial labour relations were seriously challenged. 3 This only relates to national politics. In terms of ethnic politics, Pokhara became the centre of the Tamuwan movement. For example, a three-day conference of indigenous nationalities held from 29 April in the city of Pokhara in western Tamuwan region concluded by issuing a 12point Tamuwan declaration (available at https://aippnet.org/nepal-indigenous-nationalities-comprehensive-conference-concludes-with-a-12-point-declaration/).

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From precarious to permanent work in industries at the fringes of Nepalgunj Nepalgunj is a city with a slightly Wild West atmosphere, and labour migration to distant places in the Middle East and Malaysia, as well as smuggling and cross-border trade with nearby India, are probably far more important economic activities than the employment of industrial workers. Nevertheless, on the outskirts of Nepalgunj, along the road leading from Nepalgunj to the neighbouring city of Kohalpur, there are a number of industrial plants, including food factories, a pharmaceutical plant, a cement factory, and brick kilns. The biggest employer in this industrial milieu is a modern food factory, which is clearly distinguished from the surrounding area by its clean premises. It is the site of the food processing company Agrawal⁴, which belongs to the large Agrawal Group, founded in 1996 by a Marwari industrialist, and employs about five hundred workers on site. My field research in Nepalgunj focused mainly on the work within this food company, although I also visited other companies. While the city is known for its large Muslim population, almost all the workers in the local factories are Hindus, forming three different groups: Indians, predominantly from the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; lowlanders (Madheshi) from the Banke district; and indigenous workers from the Tharu ethnic group, who come from central and distant western areas, where they were previously used as forced labourers. The managers, trade unionists, and workers I met during my field research usually did not speak of asamantah bikash (uneven development) but simply of development. It is important to distinguish that development here had different meanings. First, during discourses on bikash (development), international labour migration to other countries was often mentioned. It is important to point out that Madheshi workers often had relatives working in the Middle East or Malaysia, while the Tharu workers came from villages in western Nepal and frequently travelled to India for work. This was because many Tharu families did not have the assets (land, capital) to participate in the more lucrative labour migration to the Middle East or Malaysia. On a visit to their villages in Bardiya district in February 2014, I learned that many of the male villagers were working in India, but few were going to the Middle East or Malaysia. Only a few Tharu women had worked in the Middle East as domestic help, and they had mostly been smuggled there il-

4 All company names in this article have been anonymized in order to protect the privacy of my informants.

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legally and suffered from severe over-exploitation in the households that employed them. Second, the discourse on bikash refers to the historically uneven development between the Pahad (highlands) and the Tarai (lowlands) in Nepal. As I (Hoffmann 2018) and other scholars have described in detail elsewhere (e. g., Rankin 1999; Guneratne 2002; Fujikura 2007), when the high-caste Pahadi outsiders began to migrate in large numbers to the lowland region of the Tarai, the local Tharu community experienced land loss and displacement. The educated Pahadi settlers managed to become the land-owning elite of the region, while many of the mostly uneducated Tharu had to work their agricultural lands as kamaiya (bonded workers) to earn a living. While a few Tharu succeeded in becoming landowners, most of the relations between landowners and tenants were strongly ethnicized. In this context, asamantah bikash refers to the historically unequal and strongly ethnicized development in the western lowlands. Third, there is a discourse on development in Nepalgunj that is strongly related to the division between casual and permanent workers in factories and how the union has dealt with this. Work in the food industry has become safer for the Madheshi labour segment in recent years. In addition, a minimum wage has been introduced for this ethnic group, and unlike the situation elsewhere in the region, workers are now represented by the leaders of their own social class. In my previous work I have shown how these changes in the labour situation are a result of the Maoist revolution and the pressure that the company’s Maoist trade union was able to exert on the management – in short, a consequence of the broader political context. But, as I further argued, these results of Maoist activism have also protected the workers from the intensification of work that neoliberal conditions have promoted elsewhere. This multiple significance of the uneven development in connection with the food factories in Nepalgunj then raises the crucial question: how do trade unionists understand their work against this background of multifaceted uneven development? The trade unionists I met in the factory were aware of the various forms of unequal development, but in their actions, they mainly referenced the unequal relationship between the permanent and contract workers. Ironically, the action of the union led to a consolidation of ethnic divisions in the workplace. But as the Muslim Maoist leader of the union in Agrawal always stressed, this unequal development was not the fault of the union, which he said was fighting for the ‘working class’; the union had ‘invited’ the casual workers of the Tharu to join their struggle, but they were too scared of repercussions from management and did not dare to join the fight for their labour rights. During a visit to a large mela (festival) in the city, I witnessed such an invitation by the union to the contract workers, but the Tharus remain unorganized even today.

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So, for the trade union in Agrawal, the concept of uneven development largely referred to the separation between contract work and permanent staff. Yet this was not only the case in Agrawal, but more generally in the trade unions in the other industries in the area. Of course, such labour struggles against the precarization of work were not always successful. As I pointed out earlier, in other factories most work was casual rather than regular, and minimum wages were still not paid. This was the case, for example, in some of the nearby factories where the Unified Communist Party of Maoists in Nepal (UCPN) had not yet been able to organize itself. However, where it was able to organize, labour pressure was able to improve the situation for workers.

Challenging precarity in Pokhara Pokhara, situated in the lower foothills of the beautiful Annapurna Mountains, is mainly known as a tourist destination. But on the eastern edge of the city there is also an industrial zone. This was built by the Nepalese government in the early 1970s, and at the time of my fieldwork, seventy-six private companies had settled there. The largest of these companies were food production plants, water bottling plants, carpentry, and the steel processing industry. The main advantage of settling in the industrial zone was that land was very cheap to rent and had good access to water and electricity. In addition, the industrial zone on the outskirts of the city provided access to the growing market in the western highlands and to a labour force from the surrounding, mainly Gurung and Magar, villages. The factory that I got to know best was the Ronda Noodle factory in the middle of the industrial zone. It consisted of two separate factory buildings and employed a total of 342 workers. Among them were 173 men and 169 women (the reason for the large number of women is the one per cent reduction in social security tax when a company hires more than one hundred women). All the workers on the company payroll were permanently employed, and the company complied with the provisions of the Nepalese Labour Code, which required all workers to be given a permanent contract after a six-month probationary period. Exceptions to this rule included the six workers who worked in the factory canteen, six security guards, and twelve loadmasters. These posts were subcontracted by the company to external contractors. My ethnographic research at the Ronda noodle factory (see also Hoffmann 2022) revealed striking similarities to the political process that occurred at the food factory in Nepalgunj. Before the arrival of the Maoist trade unionists at the factory after the end of the Maoist uprising from 1996 to 2006, the workers were organized by a union affiliated to the Communist Party of Nepal UML (Uni-

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fied Marxist Leninist). This union was less active in combating the precarious working conditions in the factory, which is perhaps not surprising since the factory owner himself was a leading politician within the UML. It was only with the arrival of the Maoist trade unionists in 2006 that labour policy began to change, and the workforce has won many victories over the last decade, including the reorganization of almost all workers, except for the outsourced security guards, the canteen workers, and a few loaders. In my conversations with managers, workers, and trade unionists in the factory, I learned that asamanta bikash, like in Nepalgunj, was equated with the separation between permanent and contract workers. Therefore, immediately after the end of the conflict, the Maoist trade unionists organized labour committees and participated in numerous demonstrations with the Maoist party leadership outside the factory. One senior manager recalled this period of Maoist activism: ‘the time after the Maoist insurgency was even worse than the conflict. Even I did not want to go to work. Many workers did not come to work. They took part in the demonstrations or action committees. But then they wanted to get paid despite not having worked’. This period of strong militancy by the union was short-lived. With the dissolution of the PLA, there were fewer and fewer demonstrations in the city, and the union became less and less militant. The times when people left their workplaces in the factory to attend a rally and then demanded compensation for their absence are now definitely over. Due to the changing political context, the dismissal of militant leaders, and the continuing hostility between the unions, labour activism in the industrial zone is now limited to a few larger factories. In other factories within the industrial zone, Maoist trade unionists hardly intervened at all, despite the precarious working conditions that prevailed or the occasional non-payment of minimum wages. This situation reflected that of Pokhara’s hotel industry, where recent research (Baral 2018) indicated that only the larger hotels were organized by trade unionists, while small hotels remained largely unorganized. As a result, Maoist activism has remained limited to the larger workplaces. The union at the Ronda Noodle factory addressed only this form of unequal development. Other forms of unequal development, such as migration to the Middle East or Southeast Asia, or the unequal development between urban and rural areas, were not considered. This was already the case in Nepalgunj, but in the following I would like to take a closer look at the unequal development between town and country, a distinction which is becoming more and more important in the daily lives of the factory workers.

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Urban ‘anticipatory economies’ and the devaluation of labour Much of the ethnographic data presented here is embedded in a context of rapid urban change. This is obvious for the fast-growing city of Pokhara but also true for the western lowlands of Nepal as a whole. As a recent study noted for the region: ‘Urban cover quadrupled since 1989, expanding by 256 km2 (460 %), largely as small scattered settlements. This expansion was almost entirely at the expense of agricultural conversion (249 km2)’ (Rimal et. al 2020,1). Against this broader context of rapid urbanization, it may be unsurprising that cities such as Pokhara and Nepalgunj, as well as their rural hinterlands, have witnessed a steep rise in urban land prices over the last fifteen years, construction businesses are booming, and new processes of gentrification are beginning to emerge in both cities. How do such new forms of unequal development between urban and rural areas affect trade union activism at the sites of modern food production? To find an answer to this question, it is useful to step back from the ethnographic context and look at recent anthropological research on the concept of the future. In the context of his discussion of special economic zones in India, British anthropologist Jamie Cross recently coined the term ‘anticipatory economy’ to describe industrial life under the new and changing neoliberal regime in India. At the heart of Cross’s outstanding monograph was an attempt to show how discourses about a vision of the future have a direct impact on everyday practice in the present. In a similar vein, German anthropologist Gisa Weszkalnys’s recent work (2014) explores how the anticipation of oil production on the small island of Gomorrah affects the current practices of the islanders and influences their economic decision making processes. These two works on the concept of the future allow for a better understanding of urban change in Pokhara and Nepalgunj; the behaviour of the inhabitants of both cities is strongly influenced by their anticipation of a more urban future, which in turn influences their current economic behaviour and has direct consequences for the value of work in the industrial plants under consideration. If, as the anthropologist Laura Bear and others recently noted, ‘(s)peculation fuels, and is fueled by, a heightened state of anticipation in which routines of calculation are often suspended’, (Bear et. al 2015,2) then what are the social processes that are motivating the emerging ‘anticipation economy’? First, it must be said that in Nepal in recent years a more general thinking has emerged that devalues rural life. Many of my informants feel that life in the countryside is backwards compared to life in the city. City life is perceived as more desirable because it offers

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better education and employment opportunities. The reasons for these expectations are manifold and the massive circular migration from Nepal to other countries has certainly contributed to this outlook. But such perceptions of the city can also be found in ethnographies that take place in the remotest corners of the Himalayas. It is therefore not surprising that many Nepalese have moved to the cities and land prices have risen dramatically over the past fifteen years. According to official statistics from both Nepalgunj and Pokhara, land prices have risen by a factor of between twenty and forty, with some properties now costing over one million euros. Second, this urban anticipation economy is often accompanied by large construction projects (see also Hoffmann 2021). These developments change the aesthetics of urban space and embody the modern character of the city for residents and visitors. As a worker in Pokhara described it to me: ‘thirty years ago, the differences between rich and poor in the city were not so visible. Now you can see it immediately’. He was referring to the fact that some parts of Pokhara – such as Lakeside or Sarankot – are considered rich. But if one takes a closer look at the city’s landscape, one can see that many buildings in Pokhara are empty. Following Pelkman’s (2003) concept of the ‘social life of ruin’, these empty hotels have social meaning, as many city dwellers see them as sure indicators of a rich future. The hotels in Pokhara, and the empty houses in Nepalgunj, are linked to hopes for quick wealth. Third, the urban anticipation economy is characterized by visible and constant change to the landscape. This was not slowed by the earthquake of April 2015, as both cities were largely spared serious damage and little of the disaster relief funds flowed into the region. Thus, it is mainly the development of new infrastructure that is raising expectations; in Pokhara, the construction of the new airport is fuelling expectations of rapid urban development. In Nepalgunj, residents assume that the proximity of the new regional capital of Kohalpur will help their own urban development. These are future developments that carry heavy expectations and many city dwellers hope that soon ‘money will fall from the tree’. In summary, the increasing migration to the cities, the construction boom, and the development of important infrastructure projects form a sense of optimism for the future, especially among the middle class. But the reality is of course somewhat different. The industrial workforce is devalued and increasingly precarious and even the most conservative estimates from my informants predict that rents will rise from twenty-five to forty per cent of incomes in both cities. Food prices have also risen in Nepal in recent years. This means that workers have less money to spend, which creates certain uncertainties that I discuss in the next section.

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Uncertain industrial futures The previous section showed how the uneven and combined development of the construction industry and urban real estate market in the two cities has further devalued the position of the industrial working classes within Nepal’s class hierarchy. Hence, it is not surprising that workers in the two food-processing factories also expressed various uncertainties about their futures. In Nepalgunj, in teastall conversations among themselves, many of the Tharu workers wondered how long they would be able to endure the hard working conditions in the Agrawal food-processing factory, or whether they would be able to get a ‘land certificate’ near a city when the prices were rising so quickly. They often felt that it was becoming increasingly difficult to get a foothold in the urban economy, which is where they saw the greatest possibility to either get a job or build a small business. When asked about their future, workers often expressed that their life was ‘sukhadukha’ (happy and sad) and related a mixture of optimism and anxiety for their prospects. In Pokhara, the devaluation of the work of industrial labourers through the urban anticipation economy was equally felt. Workers in the Ronda food-processing factory voiced similarly mixed emotions about their futures. As nearly all of them had permanent positions and were organized within the union, they were less worried about losing their jobs than their counterparts in Nepalgunj. But the increasing prices of food and housing in town made them fear that their wages would not cover their living expenses and they would see less in their wallets at the end of each month. While it is possible that some of the workers at the Ronda factory also engaged in land deals within the town – for example, by taking out a loan from a bank or with the help of remittances sent back from a family member working abroad – the fact that saving rates were extremely low made it unlikely that they were getting into the real estate market bubble. Importantly, the workers were not the only ones that worried about the future. The management in Nepalgunj, for example, became very anxious when the profits of the oil mill in the factory went down. To make the mill profitable, they invited a consultant of ‘Vastu Shastra’ (a practice of geomancy) and reconstructed the entire factory according to its principles (see Hoffmann 2023,70–86). Equally, the management of the food factory in Pokhara worried about the future. In their case, they worried most about the competency of the Nepali government, and about developments nationally. Management was perfectly aware of the dynamics between wages earned abroad and in Nepal. They knew that the growth of their country depended on how wages were developing elsewhere.

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How should we deal on a more theoretical level with such expressions of multiple uncertainties arising from uneven developments outside the factory gates? In their book ‘Uncertain Futures’, Jens Beckert and Richard Bronk (Beckert and Bronk 2018) consider how economic actors visualize the future and decide how to act in conditions of radical uncertainty. Debunking the myth that economic actors always act rationally, they argue that ‘in conditions of uncertainty, economic actors combine calculation with imaginaries and narratives to form fictional expectations that coordinate action and provide the confidence to act’ (Beckert and Bronk 2018). This applies well not only to the actions of management in the two factories described, but also for the workers. Here I refer to an article by Don Kalb (Kalb 2017), in which he suggests that uneven development might also shape the personhood and body of workers. Kalb speaks of ‘worthlessness’ to describe how workers experience such uneven developments. However, I think it is rather more accurate to speak of a broad array of emotions that workers experience; for some, uneven development makes them feel worthlessness, others feel ‘sukha-dukha’ (happysad), others might feel happy to have a job. Importantly, the experience of uneven development creates feelings of uncertainty that are experienced dynamically and contextually. But, I speculate, feelings of uncertainty in the industrial context might reflect the hierarchy of labour inside the factory. That is to say that, in conditions of uncertainty, management and workers visualize the future and decide how to act in quite different ways. While management can draw on different narratives or invite occult Vastu Shastra consultants to their factory to address a perceived crisis, workers have far fewer resources with which to counter the many uncertainties arising from uneven capitalist development. This inability to control their circumstances in the context of rapid, potentially lucrative growth generates a very mixed emotional experience that is captured in their expressions of ‘happysadness’.

Conclusion: the limited scope of union activism in Nepal In contrast to the bombing of a Coca-Cola-owned bottling plant in Kathmandu during the Maoist revolutionary period (Times of India 2001), this chapter highlights the more subtle ways in which unions deal with forms of uneven development. Driven by the heated political climate following the signing of the peace treaty between Maoists and the state in 2006, Maoist unions began to organize workers in industrial factories in the post-war years. Their well-organized and often militant unionists turned their attention to the fight against the precarization of labour.

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This was not a nationwide industrial action, but it did lead to permanent contracts for precarious workers in some food factories. As I have described in another article (See Hoffmann 2022), this militant union activism decreased in the years following the insurgency for various reasons, mainly because the unions no longer had the support of the People’s Army, which was either dissolved or transferred to the State Army after 2011. The various victories of the Maoist trade union movement must, however, be viewed critically. Maoist activism in Nepalgunj, for instance, had an ethnic specificity that undermined their statements of class solidarity, and such struggles took place against a background of increasing urbanization, in which the cost of living for workers was constantly on the rise. The explosion of land prices in the cities underlines the serious devaluation of labour in sites like food factories. Surely such problems are not new, but have long been part of the lives of industrial workers in Nepal. But as my chapter has hopefully shown, the growing ‘anticipation economy’ in the cities is now fuelling the growing social inequalities. These rises have ultimately been caused by the influx of capital accumulated by the comparatively affluent section of Nepali labour migrants to the Middle East (or Malaysia) and by in the local tourist industry catering to Western visitors, or by the combination of capitalist development in Nepal and elsewhere. Following Sherry Ortner’s (2016) more general call for an anthropology that is not only about the ‘dark’ realities of the world today but also hopeful about the possibility for change, I conclude this chapter with a policy suggestion. Given that this chapter has shown how urban anticipation economies undermine applaudable victories of Nepal’s labour movement, how should unions react? I suggest that the ethnographic material in this chapter clearly shows that the current predicament of industrial labour needs to be set in broader forms of uneven and combined development than the ones pertaining to the sphere of production in order to make work in the industrial zones and factories more valuable again. But as the most recent corruption scandal of the new Communist Party in Kathmandu shows, such political initiatives are currently anything but anticipated.

Literature Adams, Vincanne, Michelle Murphy, and Adele Clarke. “Anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality.” Subjectivity 28,1 (2009): 246–265. Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. New York: Verso Books, 2013. Beckert, Jens and Richard Bronck. Uncertain Futures. Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculation in the Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

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Bear, Laura, Ritu Birla, and Stine Simonson Puri. “Speculation: Futures and Capitalism in India.” Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East 35,3 (2015): 387–391. Bennett, John W. “Anticipation, Adaptation, and the Concept of Culture in Anthropology.” Science 192,4242 (1976): 847–853. Bennike, Rune Bolding. “Himalayan futures: tourism and the anticipation of development.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 40,1 (2019):110–126. Chaudhary, Bhinod. Making It Big: The Inspiring Story of Nepal’s First Billionaire in His Own Words. Delhi: India Portfolio, 2016. Childs, Geoff, and Namgyal Choedup. From a Trickle to a Torrent: Education, Migration, and Social Change in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Cross, Jamie. Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India. London: Pluto Press, 2014. Cross, Jamie. “The Economy of Anticipation Hope, Infrastructure, and Economic Zones in South India.” Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East 35,3 (2015): 424–437. Fujikura, Tatsuro. “The Bonded Agricultural Labourers’ Freedom Movement in Western Nepal.” In Political and Social Transformations in North India and Nepal, Volume 2, edited by Hiroshi Ishii, David Gellner and Katsuo Nawa, 319–59. New Delhi: Manohar, (2007): 319–59. Gautam, Meera. “Role of Manufacturing Industries in Nepalese Economy.” Management Dynamics 21, 1 (2018): 36–45. Goldman, Michael. “With the Declining Significance of Labour, Who Is Producing our Global Cities?” International Labor and Working-Class History 87 (2015): 137–164. Guneratne, Arjun. Many Tongues, One People: The Making of Tharu Identity in Nepal. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2002. Hagen, Tony. “Report on the Geological Survey of Nepal: Preliminary reconnaissance”, Denkschriften der Schweizerischen Naturforschenden Gesellschaft. Zürich: Orell Füssli, 86,1 (1969): Harvey, David. “The ’new’ imperialism: accumulation by dispossession.” Socialist Register 40 (2004): 63–87. Hoffmann, Michael Peter. The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal. New York: Berghahn Publications, 2018. Hoffmann, Michael Peter. “From Casual to Permanent Work: Maoist Unionists and the Regularization of Contract Labour in Industries in Western Nepal.” In Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject, edited by Chris Hann and Jonathan Parry, 336–354. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018b. Hoffmann, Michael Peter. “From Bonded- to Industrial Labour: Precarity, Maoism and Ethnicity in a Modern Industrial Food processing Factory in Western Nepal.” Modern Asian Studies 52,6 (2018c): 1917–1937. Hoffmann, Michael Peter. “Digging for sand after the revolution: mafia, labour, and shamanism in a Nepali sand mine.” Dialectical Anthropology 45,2 (2021): 117–133. Hoffmann, Michael Peter. “Work, precarity and militant unionism in an industrial Area in the mid-hills of Nepal”, History and Anthropology 33,2 (2022): 263–278. Hoffmann, Michael Peter. Glimpses of Hope: The Rise of Industrial Labor at the Urban Margins of Nepal. New York: Berghahn Books, 2023. Kalb, Don. “Regimes of Value and Worthlessness: How Two Subaltern Stories Speak.” In Work and Livelihoods: History, Ethnography and Models in Times of Crisis, edited by Narotzky, Susana; Goddard, Victoria, 123–137. New York: Routledge Books, 2017.

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Kalb, Don. “Trotzky over Mauss: Anthropological Theory and the October 2017 Commemoration.” Dialectical Anthropology 42,1 (2018): 327–343. Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1997. Kondos, Alex. “A preliminary study of the private sector of Nepal’s manufacturing industry.” Contributions to Nepalese Studies 18,1 (1991): 29–39. Kondos, Alex, Vivienne Kondos, Indra Ban, “Some Sociocultural Aspects of Private Industrial Capital in Nepal.” Contributions to Nepalese Studies 18,2 (1991): 175–197. Kondos, Alex / Kondos, Vivienne / Ban, Indra. “Nepal’s Industrial Capitalist Class: ‘Origin’ and ‘Behaviour’.” South Asia 15,1 (1992): 81–103. Liechty, Marc. Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Ortner, Sherry. “Dark Anthropology and its Others Theory since the Eighties.” Hau- Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6,1 (2016): 47–73. Pelkmans, Mathijs. “The Social Life of Empty Buildings: Imagining the Transition in Post-Soviet Ajaria.” Focaal 41 (2003): 121–136. Rankin, Katherine. “The Predicament of Labour: Kamaiya Practices and the Ideology of Freedom”, in Nepal: Tharu and Tarai Neighbours, edited by Harald O. Skar, 27–45. Kathmandu: Biblioteca Himalayica, 1999. Rimal, Bhagawat et. al. Patterns of Historical and Future Urban Expansion in Nepal. Kathmandu: Remote Sensing, 2020. Seddon, David, Blaikie, Pierre and Cameron, James. 2002. Peasants and Workers in Nepal. Delhi: Adroit Publishers, 2002. Shakya, Malika. Death of an Industry: The Cultural Politics of Garment Manufacturing during the Maoist Revolution in Nepal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Times of India. “Maoists bomb Coca Cola plant in Kathmandu.” (2001), Available at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Maoists-bomb-Coca-Cola-plant-inKathmandu/articleshow/345352758.cms Weszkalnys, Gisa. “Anticipating oil: the temporal politics of a disaster yet to come.” The Sociological Review 62,1 (2014): 211–235.

Julia Soul

Workers and Transnational Unionism in a Latin American Steel Corporation Introduction In November 2013, I attended the First International Meeting of workers of TG, an Argentinian-based transnational corporation producing steel – the basic input for industries such as construction, automotive, and household appliances – and a wide variety of pipes supplying the energy industry in various sites across Latin America and the world. The meeting was held in San Nicolás de los Arroyos – the Argentinian city where the former state-owned steel mill is located – and it was organized by the local section of the Argentinian Metalworkers Union (Union Obrera Metalúrgica, or UOM), with the support of the National Committee and the IndustriALL Global Union, the latter actively promoting the aggregation of local unions in global networks and councils. After dinner, Luis¹ and Alejandro – both Argentinian delegates – and I were chatting and smoking at the doors of a downtown restaurant with Wally, a worker and unionist from the TG plant in Guatemala. In the first session of the day’s meeting, Wally had told us that he and other workers who were attempting to organize SITRATERNIUM – their union – had been fired through legal subterfuges and manipulations. Jorge – the coordinator and one of the more enthusiastic promoters of the meeting – soon joined our conversation. Luis: Wait, wait, wait: are you saying that you have ONE union with ONLY twenty members? Wally: Yes, we were getting more members, but the managers fired us, and many fellows are afraid now. They support us, they walked out when we were fired and so on. But now they don’t want any problem. That’s why we’re fighting for union recognition, that’s the kind of support I’m looking for… Alejandro: Yes, but, I don’t understand yet… You mean that you have – let’s say – one factory next to another factory, next to another factory; and those factories don’t have the same union? They are all separate unions?

1 During fieldwork, I reached different presentation arrangements with different individuals. I am respectful of these pacts as far I can be. The names of most of those who have no public responsibilities or roles have been changed, while I use the real names of those who are public leaders or persons (because, as one of the leaders told me, ‘[I] have nothing to hide’). The corporation is referred to by its acronym. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-004

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Wally: Exactly. There’s a union at each plant. And in many factories there’s no union at all… Jorge: Excuse me, let me say something: one of the things that is more difficult to explain to Argentinian fellows is about unions in other countries. Here, unions are everywhere, they have lots of members, they are more powerful than in other places, organizers are not repressed and persecuted. Sometimes it is difficult for Argentinian guys to fully understand the situation, the problems and the obstacles that their brothers face in other places.

Luis and Alejandro looked puzzled. Both are steelworkers and shop floor delegates in their fifties. To them – as to many Argentinian industrial workers – the job in the steel mill and union membership are two faces of the same coin; they come together without question. Until this moment, they were not aware of daily conditions for labour organizing in Guatemala, and were really convinced that their own experience as workers and as union delegates was common to all the corporate facilities, regardless of their location. Almost the same was assumed by Wally, who was really surprised by the familiarity and proximity between managers, delegates, and union leaders, which were evident to us during a guided visit to the plant. The chat went on to touch issues related to their daily lives; Jorge helped to identify differences and similarities, and their mutual understanding grew. These sorts of conversations among workers/delegates from different places multiplied during the breaks and in the meeting. Many of them involved fellows coming from foreign locations for the first time, enthusiastically asking and answering questions about unionism and labour relations topics, but also about issues concerning daily lives: housing, family, kids, schools, or local customs and habits. During the chats, questions, explanations and stories expanded mutual knowledge. The situation of SITRATERNIUM was particularly shocking to most of the delegates in the meeting, not only because of the hard repression the union was suffering, but also because the management policies seemed to be quite different from those in Argentina, Brazil or Mexico. The next day, delegates from TG plants in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina who attended the international meeting enthusiastically approved the launching of a solidarity statement and a support campaign. Both had been proposed by Jorge, who at the same time had agreed upon them with the IndustriALL secretary of the Latin America and Caribbean Office (one of the six IndustriALL regional offices) and with some of the UOM national leaders. The launching of a solidarity campaign with Guatemalan workers triggered a set of multi-scalar interventions by a multiplicity of actors framed and coordinated by the regional office of IndustriALL and by Jorge, the coordinator of the meeting. At the same time, the meeting was the first step towards forming a Global Workers’ Council of TG to bring together delegates and leaders representing unions framed by different institutional and historical processes. These different ex-

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periences of unionism did not prevent the Global Workers’ Council from emerging among steel workers from the same company. To my fieldwork, the First International Meeting was the opportunity to enlarge the observation towards the ‘global dynamics’ of labour organizing, and to have a closer approach to differences among working classes as well as to the examination of the various ways they deal with those differences by coming together and setting their own demands within a transnationalized social space shaped by the corporation. Hence, after the meeting, I focused my fieldwork on the fabric of multi-scalar, multi-located and multifaceted interactions, communications, and activities forging the necessary common ground for the success of both – the solidarity campaign and the Global Workers’ Council. I recorded the practices promoted by the corporation and the global union. I then went on to explore a multiplicity of places where Global Workers’ Council-related activities took place – such as the Union’s headquarters in different countries, conference rooms, hotel meeting rooms, video calls – and the sources that were part of its activity – such as mailing lists, common reports, etc. I supplemented the insights gained in these contexts by interviews with national and local leaders, shop-floor delegates, and international leaders and representatives. I also conducted participant observation in three of the six meetings held by the Global Workers’ Council (2013 in Argentina, 2014 in Brazil, 2018 in Mexico) and in two Southern Cone meetings of steel workers, run by the South American and Caribbean regional Office of IndustriALL. This fieldwork raised the question of the transnational dimension of labour, not merely as it is posed by the corporate organization but as it is forged through the daily multi-located practices and interactions of workers, leaders, and activists. This proved methodologically challenging as well as productive, since it prevented me from presuming to inquire about ‘the global’ through a privileged institution performing it (Lins Ribeiro 2001; Bellier 2002) and instead oriented my attention to the political and social mechanisms structuring the contested dynamics of labour organizing at a transnational scale. In this chapter,² I make a case for the solidarity and cooperation relationships framed by the Global Workers’ Council – with a focus on Argentinian and Guatemalan unions – to analyse the complex interplay between ‘global’ and ‘local’ agents of labour and capital in the configuration of a transnational scale for labour organ-

2 This chapter comprises part of a broader research project interrogating Latin American working classes making and (re)making themselves under ‘neoliberal hegemony’. PICT 2019–04181. A previous version of this chapter was discussed in the workshop Uneven Development and Industrial Labor. I am grateful to the comments and suggestions by Massimiliano Mollona and, especially, Christian Strümpell and Michael Hoffmann. I also thank Kristina Pirker for the orientation on Guatemala bibliography.

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ization. It raises two questions: the first is about the heterogeneous foundations of capital and labour transnationalism. While corporate transnationalism is itself apparent in production regimes, communication devices, and global decision-making dynamics, labour’s transnational networks and bodies – such as the Global Workers’ Councils – are not so apparent. Moreover, they are unevenly appropriated, developed and supported by leaderships and unions in different countries. Therefore, the second question is about the role that global unions’ strategies and dynamics play in the contemporary (re)organization of labour as a political formation (cf. Carbonella and Kasmir 2014). Considered from this perspective, the problem of labour transnationalism engages with three themes of current debate in the anthropology of labour. First, it connects with the debate on uneven and combined development, which allows for understanding the historic configuration of these uneven groups of workers as the outcome of specific contested processes of capital accumulation (Kasmir and Gill 2018) and for discussing the types of connections shaped by the constitution of a transnationalized space of accumulation – that is, the TG concern – and labour organization – that is, the Global Workers’ Council – that brings ‘within’ hitherto alien groups of workers. Current scholarship on uneven and combined development points to the setting of time-space dimensions for understanding capitalist reproduction as a process driven by multi-scalar and multi-localized labour-capital struggles underpinning the ‘internalization’ of social groups to particular capitalist dynamics (Kasmir and Gill 2018; Kalb 2018). Concerning the ‘time’ dimension, uneven and combined development refers to historical, long-term processes of labour subsumption that configure particular working classes. Scholarship on labour in Latin America highlights how colonial forms of labour subsumption, prolonged in manifold labour arrangements and multiple paths to waged relations, accomplished the insertion of Latin American countries into the world market (Leite Lopes 1979; Bergquist 1988; Roseberry 1989; de Souza Martins 2010). Concerning the ‘space’ dimension, the uneven and combined development approach pays attention to the insight that labour practices and strategies are actively performed on varying scales of social relations. They are thus able to confront capitalist trends in both their ‘global’ consequences (Herod 2001) as well as in the situated sociological amalgamation that results in local and regional particularities (Kalb 2018). Consequently, the approach points to the concrete dynamics of assimilation, appropriation, resistance and contestation through which former ‘external’ groups, institutions, social meanings and practices became ‘internal’ and constitutive of the renewed capitalist configurations. Second, the chapter engages with recent insights on the relations between working classes and unions to underscore the relevance of these organizations in the production of labour’s ‘transnational’ dimension. The institutional perspec-

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tive (Hyman 1975) on membership has been enriched and expanded by anthropological research showing the active role performed by unions in the building of commonality (Lazar 2018) and the complex interplay and mutual interdependence between unions and the workers’ politicization and socialization (Durrenberger and Reichart 2010; Hoffman 2014; Durrenberger 2017; McNamara and Spyridakis 2020). These latter anthropological insights allow for understanding the representation of workers, which is held by unions, as embedded in socio-political and cultural relations, rather than as a mere institutionalized bond. Third, I interrogate the mechanisms of homogenization and simultaneous differentiation at a transnational scale, to understand those that labour politics put in motion. I then draw on the notion of ‘real abstraction’ to argue about the shaping of citizenship as the terrain on which the transnational politics of unions aims to perform. The notion of ‘real abstraction’ (Sohn Rethel 2001) points to this dimension of social relations structuring social practices and epistemic approaches to reality, even if subjects are relatively unaware of this. I draw on this notion and the relationships it entails to argue that citizenship, as a real abstraction, structures the field of transnational labour relations as it sets the scope for labour homogenizing dynamics. In sum, this chapter focus on labour transnationalism and on the dynamics it spurs to shape a contested terrain of labour relations. I draw on ethnographic data to describe how corporations and unions deploy simultaneous homogenizing/differentiation trends on uneven workers’ collectives. I explore the conceptual links between uneven and combined development underlying particular processes and factors mediating the historical configuration of working classes (Leite Lopes 2011; Sanchez and Strümpell 2014; Durrenberger and Doukas 2018) and the homogenizing trends shaped in the real abstraction terrain. To conclude, I discuss the set of relationships establishing citizenship as the terrain that grounds the strategy of global unions, and the role it plays in the production of labour power in uneven contexts.

Uneven and combined development in Latin America and the TG Corporation As a region, Latin America was inserted into the world market as a supplier of raw materials and primary products. The broad array of labour subsumption and dispossession forms that underlie current variegated social formations rely on longterm processes of transition to full-fledged capitalist insertion into the world market. Cardoso and Perez Brignoli (1979) identify three key mechanisms that charac-

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terize these processes among Latin American regions across the nineteenth century. First, slavery abolition, mainly in Brazil and in ‘plantation economies’; second, liberal reforms, mainly in regions where colonial structures relied on the subordination of indigenous labour and communities, such as Mexico and other Central American countries, including Guatemala; and third, empty areas colonization, in places like Argentina or Uruguay. In Guatemala, liberal reforms became the driving force towards capitalism by spurring private property in land on a large scale during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The state, in conjunction with agrarian capitalists and landowners, expropriated lands from the Catholic Church and also pushed indigenous Mayan communities away from their lands. The latter then ended up in agricultural estates producing for export, their labour subsumed through waged relations, as well as through peonage or debt peonage. Nowadays, waged relations combine with ‘commercial arrangements’ between families or communities and global agri-food corporations. The dispute over land (dis)possession or occupation, and labour mobilization and displacement, underlies the history of Central American countries, a history marked by frequent wars, preceded or followed by foreign interventions and a constant repression of labour movements (Rojas 2018). When peace agreements were reached in the 1990s and formally democratic governments and institutions were established in Guatemala, it embarked on a process of export-oriented industrialization that reproduced maquila conditions, that is, low wages, precarious labour conditions and super-exploitation of a feminized labour force devastated by war (Reygadas 2002; Nash 2009). In this context, state and corporate policies aim to prevent labour organizing, either through direct repression of activists and grass root militants or through the manipulation of labour regulation. Cardoso and Perez Brignoli (1979) describe as ‘empty zones’ the territories – such as Argentina or Uruguay – where colonial settlements and structures were weaker and massive migration was needed to shape the labour market and the labour force for lands that had been already appropriated by capitalist elites. Consequently, the transition occurred through production of cattle, leather, meat, and grains in extensive estates, directly linked to renewed commercial circuits with England and the US. Both trends paved the way for the early concentration of working classes in a few urban centres, and for a productive network of small industrial enterprises around strategic nodes of capital and commodity circulation and labour mobilization such as mills, railways, and docks. Furthermore, this concentration of labour around strategic nodes fostered the organization of urban workers. This gained them considerable social and political weight already in the first decades of the twentieth century, and this was reinforced by the early rise of a national centralized labour movement with strong branch unions. The lat-

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ter preserved shop floor bodies called ‘internal committees’ and ‘delegate boards’, which secured the unions’ daily presence at workplaces. Thanks to its firm roots in production sites and working-class communities, the labour movement in Argentina successfully resisted attempts by employers and dictatorial governments to ban delegate boards and internal committees as well as centralized branch structures. Therefore, the presence of delegates and internal committees at the shop floor has reached almost 60 per cent of the main manufacturing plants – although it is weaker in small and medium plants as well as in service sectors (Soul 2018). As this shows, the historical uneven processes of transition to capitalism effected also an uneven configuration of Latin American elites and working classes. In Argentina, by the mid-twentieth century, the national state-controlled coal, oil and gas exploitation, steel production, railways, and electric energy (among other strategic nodes of production). With the consolidation of neoliberal hegemony during the 1990s, that state-owned industrial structure was privatized and restructured and TG has been a key actor in this process. The corporation played a relevant role in leveraging the setting of regulations and government interventions in the market, and as one of the main beneficiaries of the privatization processes. Based in Argentina since the Second World War, TG became a transnational corporation by the mid-1990s, especially through two steel companies (one specialized in flat steel and the other in pipes), a civil engineering company, and investments in oil exploitation and subsidiaries and service companies engaged in outsourcing and subcontracting processes. PTG, TG’s pipes company, expanded first to Italy – the native country of the owners’ family – and then spread over five continents, both buying up existing units and establishing new plants. Also, FTG, TG’s flat steel company, took advantage of privatization policies and acquired state-owned steel mills and their subsidiaries across the globe. SOMISA, the Argentinian state-owned steel mill in San Nicolás de los Arroyos, was the company’s first acquisition in 1992. In due course, plants in Venezuela and Mexico followed. In 2008, it took over IMSA, a Mexican steel group with facilities in the US and Guatemala. The latter plant lies in an industrial estate close to the capital Ciudad de Guatemala, where it was established by local industrialists in 1986. The acquisition and the operation of the Guatemalan plant have been eased by national and regional laws and regulations granting accurate conditions for industrial investment – such as special tariffs and tax holidays, or energy and infrastructure subsidies – as they are in many periphery countries and regions. When TG ‘swallows up’ the purchased plants across national boundaries and regional differences, it combines the unevenness prevailing among them, in terms of labour regimes, wage levels, etc. Thus, a survey conducted by Jorge during the First International Meeting of the Global Workers’ Council revealed that in Guatemala a TG blue-collar employee had to work twelve hours to pay for the electricity

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bill, but in Argentina an employee had to work only two hours. Regional wage levels are lower in Central America than in the Southern Cone (ILO 2017). These quantitative differences are the monetary expression of the different ‘sums of the means of subsistence’ socially and regionally set as necessary, as well as of the uneven power achieved by the labour movement to fight for wages – either through the collective bargaining system or through collective action. Furthermore, it also reproduces and exacerbates such unevenness by promoting large-scale redundancies, the lowering of wage levels, prolongation of workdays, arbitrary labour relations, and anti-union policies in certain regions and states, which in turn improve profits within the global accumulation space. At the same time that TG thrives on and reproduces such unevenness in local contexts, it also deploys a set of interventions that aims at homogenizing its transnational workforces. TG is keen to mould and shape the relations between the company, the workers, and the community, intertwining them by means of what they call ‘the TG culture’ (Soul & Rivero 2014) with local institutional, cultural, and symbolic dynamics. Through these means, persons living and working in Argentina, Guatemala, Brazil, the US, and Mexico are incorporated into an increasingly transnational network of steel mills, distribution centres, and raw material and input suppliers commanded by a central administrator, located in Luxembourg. This set of relationships performs a global social space of accumulation. The corporation manages the bonds and links between its facilities and their workers in an attempt to build a sort of corporate commonality and to achieve workers’ involvement and identification with corporate goals. Both PTG’s and FTG’s internal communication devices – such as magazines, WhatsApp groups, work team meetings, training days – connect workers from distant locations. They are presented as a uniform group: the homogeneity in work clothes, equipment, and facility environments highlights common attributes, and the implementation of methods like ‘just in time’, ‘internal supplier-client’, or ‘continuous improvement’ promotes common behaviours towards common labour processes. As Fer, a human resources manager, summarized it: ‘What we want is a behavioural change (…) We say to each worker: “Hey, you are here to add value to those steel plates. You’re responsible for that, you can help us to improve it”.’ TG culture embeds daily work within moral content related to proactivity, collaboration, and responsibility, and links it to goals the corporation and its workers allegedly share. The operation of complex machines entangles with ‘management’ tasks, related to the control and recording of productive performance of men and machines; data collected and stored concerns productivity rates, scraps and waste, and process interruptions, among other things. Through these devices, the corporation measures and compares the performance of each production centre, triggering competition between locations. In this way, local performance and productive

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operations are engaged in an increasingly internationalized field of indicators and measurable variables that are the basis for deciding on managerial policies and productive methods and relations at a transnational scale (Toulan 1997; Soul and Rivero 2014). As mentioned above, the uneven and combined development approach sheds light on particular configurations of class and labour by placing them from the start in transnational contexts. This is especially helpful for an accurate perspective on how the transnational forces that neoliberal globalization has unleashed during the last decades unfold. Transnational corporations and global unions – among other institutions – are central in making a transnational field of labour relations and, I argue, of combination. Corporations take advantage of unevenness when making their investment decisions, seeking cheap labour, new markets, or to displace competitors (Ciolli, Naspleda and García: 2020; Van der Linden: 2008). By doing so, they spread at the same time a broad array of practices, which are appropriated, adapted, incorporated, resisted, and contested by workers, unions, governments, and other institutions (Trotsky 1930; Kasmir 2014; Torres Mejía 1991).

The unevenness among TG workforces and their unionisms The transnationalization of the TG corporation paved the way for the organization of the Global Workers’ Council briefly described at the start of this chapter (see Soul 2018; 2019). This transnationalization of TG workers’ politics is part and parcel of a broader attempt by labour to organize more globally and more effectively, through the organization of Global Workers’ Councils and Networks and the reconfiguration of its organizational structure. By 2012, three international federations (the Metalworker Federation, the Chemical, Energy, Mine Federation, as well as the Textiles, Garment, and Leather Federation) merged into the IndustriALL Global Union, to organize global supply chains instead of industrial branches as had been done up to that point. The headquarters are in Geneva, nearby those of the ILO – the core of ‘labour global ruling’ – in the ‘Global North’ (Soul and Anigstein forthcoming; Caruso and Stagnaro 2017; Ferreras, Caruso and Stagnaro 2018), but the regional offices are distributed across the ‘Global South’³ where contingents of precarious industrial workers engaged in global chains concentrate. During fieldwork, it became apparent to me that neither the relationships between IndustriALL and 3 For further information, see “Regional Offices,” IndustriALL Global Union, accessed May 12, 2023, https://www.industriall-union.org/where-to-find-us/regional-offices.

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its affiliated national or local unions nor the relationships between it and the other transnational bodies it promotes are uniform and homogeneous. The conversation quoted at the beginning of this chapter was firmly rooted in a social terrain shaped by the transnationalization of the labour movement, where different experiences of unionism stemming from inherently uneven social formations are brought together. Without taking into account those different ‘unionisms’ and the uneven terrain where they are performed, the dynamics of labour’s transnational organizing is barely understandable. These different unionisms, rooted in workers’ militancy, are to a great extent consolidated through laws and regulations. When Jorge explained the differences between unions in Guatemala and Argentina, the conversation went on about ‘what the law permits’ or ‘what the law mandates’. I have observed that ‘the law’ – including labour provisions, regulations, laws, collective agreements, and internal agreements, among other norms – informs daily activities in the field of unionism: the unions’ staffs include labour lawyers and administrative technicians who advise and discuss interventions and actions; legal regulations mould industrial action – strikes may be ‘illegal’ – as well as the formulation of claims and grievances. Moreover, legal provisions also limit the effective ability of representation and the scale of organization. The differences in the legal systems of labour relations pertaining to different and uneven national spaces are themselves the outcome of specific historical struggles and demands. Argentinian law grants the ‘monopoly of representation’ to industrial-based national organizations and to their local bodies. Thus, as shop-floor delegates, Luis and Alejandro are part of a highly centralized national structure that has been forged since the 1930s, when some local skill-based unions merged into national branch-based unions; today it represents more than two hundred thousand workers, organized in hundreds of shop-floor committees, in fifty-four local sections and in a national board. Each of these bodies has duties that are clearly defined legally, responsibilities and activities that reinforce this centralized top-down dynamic. The Guatemalan Labour Code, by contrast, establishes four bases for unions (professions, productive facilities, companies, and industrial branches) and contemplates a plural representation. Hence, SITRATERNIUM, the nascent union Wally and his partners formed, is a company-based union that aimed to represent the 180 workers in the TG plant of Villa Nueva. In turn, SITRATERNIUM is part of FESTRAS, a national federation grouping together the unions of several industrial branches. The different scale of organizations is replicated in the character of collective agreements: while Wally and his co-workers organized in SITRATERNIUM must discuss a whole agreement with the company, in Argentina, a committee appointed by the national board is in charge of negotiations and Luis and Alejandro are not directly involved in it.

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This relevance of ‘the law’ to the ‘unionisms’ performed by the delegations attending the First International Meeting can also be assessed as it intertwines with the political dynamics constraining the relationships within unions as well as those between unions and their members. As was stated, Luis and Alejandro were the second generation of union delegates in a steel mill in a national environment where unions and labour organizing are firmly rooted in daily social and political life. Wally, by contrast, was just attempting to organize the union for the first time in an environment where unions are fiercely repressed by employers in collusion with government agents, and where unionists routinely risk their livelihoods, often even their lives. It influenced the ‘unionism’ they each respectively performed: Luis and Alejandro’s union relies on the daily (re)production and appropriation of practices, feelings, moral values, and knowledge in their homes, on the shop-floor, and in union headquarters. The local General Secretary – who has been in charge for forty years – embodies the historical continuity of the organization at the local and the national level. This lasting tradition is rooted in the early social and political weight Argentinian industrial workers and their unions gained since the beginning of the twentieth century (Rojas 2018; Iñigo Carrera 2017), which manifests itself also in relatively high membership rates compared to other Latin American countries, even today (Tomada et. al. 2018) By contrast, the ‘unionism’ of Wally and his comrades seems to stem more immediately from the experience of rough labour conditions and low wages during the few years he worked in the plant. As he told us, ‘it was not the will to organize, but the infuriating accumulation of injustices and arbitrariness that made us react’. Rather than on the shop floor, they found support and inspiration in neighbours’ solidarity networks and in elder leaders and activists from other plants and sectors. Wally recalled especially the first chats about organizing a union with his comrades in a nearby Pepsico plant. Just like them, he had to learn how to survive lack of livelihood, unemployment, repression, political persecution, and death threats. Political violence and repression are a lasting characteristic of social struggles in Guatemala, rooted in land disputes and dispossession dynamics that labouring people historically faced in rural areas, where 54 per cent of the population lives. These dynamics triggered the organization of peasants’ confederations, rural workers’ unions, and the indigenous Maya population around communities (Rojas 2018; Alonso Fradejas 2014; Nash 2009). Consequently, industrial and rural unions reach barely 2.2 per cent of the workforce (Solano Barillas 2013). Political violence underlies another relevant difference concerning anti-union policies in both countries. A presentation to the UN on Argentina by Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, or CELS, a human rights entity working with unions and confederations, denounces the criminalization of labour protest and labour organizing and the collusion between corporations and governments in neglecting col-

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lective bargaining proceedings. Rather than on unions, employer’s repression focuses on the autonomous rank and file organization – often repelled also by the leaderships – through arbitrary dismissals (CELS 2018). The situation in Guatemala is quite different. According to a report by the Movimiento Sindical Indígena y Campesino, or MSIC, roughly fifty union leaders were assassinated between 2005 and 2010. Most of the assassinations occurred shortly after they started to organize workers and unions. The same report denounces the fact that an overwhelming majority of unions has been destroyed even before being recognized by the government or the employers, most of them during the same period (MSICG 2010). These data indicate an intertwining corporate state that combines different tactics and practices to repress workers’ organizations. These tactics and practices range from contracting disarmed para-military corps to harass and threaten leaders of unions or communities and the neglect and inattention of government agencies, to the circulation of ‘blacklists’ among the employers pointing out union activists and organizers to prevent their employment, the collusion between corporate management and labour authorities to prevent the attempts to organize unions, and contracting lawyers and advisers to destroy unions through legal subterfuges and ‘human resource’ policies. Consequently, in contrast with the trust his Argentinian comrades demonstrated in interventions by the Labour Office and by Labour Justice, Wally and his co-workers faced subterfuges, cheating, and misleading on the part of authorities. Thus, while steelworkers from Argentina rely on firmly grounded and long-standing traditions of collective bargaining and labour-relations provisions and regulations, in Guatemala unionism is associated with vulnerability, insecurity, and repression, and even the potential threat of being killed due to one’s own activities. These diverse institutional and political backgrounds also condition uneven connections to international organizations. The Argentinian Union Obrera Metalúrgica (UOM) has been a member of the International Federation of Metalworkers for more than fifty years, and of IndustriALL since its foundation in 2012. National Board members – the Secretary of International Relations – and some staff employees are in charge of these relations, and deal with an intense agenda of international contacts and activities, calling for local leaders or delegates when it is necessary. In fact, Luis and Alejandro were not as accustomed to participating in international meetings as some members of the local UOM committee. By contrast, SITRATERNIUM activists managed to contact the international union only thanks to the private help of a Guatemalan labour lawyer working in Canada – who in turn is the son of the lawyer granting legal advice to SITRATERNIUM workers. Thus, the network connecting SITRATERNIUM to Canadian United Steel Workers (USW) and to a broad network of organizations advocating for labour rights in Latin America relied on a broader transnational fabric of labour militancy.

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In sum, rather than being accidental or fortuitous, the differences revealed by the conversation between Luis, Alejandro, and Wally relate to the formation of uneven working classes in Latin America. Notwithstanding these differences, SITRATERNIUM and UOM are involved in the organization of a Global Workers’ Council with other steel worker unions. The Global Workers’ Council aims to connect unions representing TG workers all around the world. During the last three decades, TG and unions shaped a transnationalized terrain of contestation and struggle, linking workers and unions from different historical, political, and cultural backgrounds. The differences are rooted in the regional uneven development of capitalism, and while TG takes advantages of those uneven configurations by combining homogenizing practices in the terrain of productive processes with differentiating ones in labour relations and human resources policies, the building of global labour power by IndustriALL and the unions it organizes depends on building solidarity to overcome differences that, at the same time, impose uneven constraints on unions’ actions. That raises the question of how a global union body such as the TG Global Workers’ Council deals with the unevenness constitutive of workers’ collectives crossed by the simultaneous trends of homogenization-cum-differentiation performed by the same corporation. I argue that union transnationalism performed by the Global Workers’ Council triggers its own dynamics of homogenization and differentiation to shape the global commonality underpinning its power. In the next section, I describe the practices of transnationalism deployed in the context of the solidarity campaign with SITRATERNIUM to show the types of relationships they mobilize.

The solidarity campaign and the reproduction of workers’ homogenization and differentiation At the end of January 2020, I was chatting with Jorge, who had retired by then but who was still coordinating the TG Global Workers’ Council. He told me that there had been some progress in Guatemala and that a collective agreement was ready to be signed. Two days later, I talked to Wally. He was euphoric but cautious, for if it was true that legal stratagems to refuse the agreement were over for the company, its lawyers and managers had made huge efforts to delay it. Finally, the collective agreement was signed, although it took another ten months until Guatemalan labour authorities certified it. I talked again with Wally and other union members after the signing. They were, of course, very happy and repeated: ‘This is wonderful, Julia, this is wonderful. It is really a global victory! We defeated TG!’ We said

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goodbye, promising a comrades’ toast in the coming meeting of the Global Workers’ Council. After the conversation, I kept thinking about Wally’s perception of a global victory. If it is apparent that the signing of the agreement and, in its wake, the recognition of the union were achieved because of the intervention of global actors, like the TG Global Workers’ Council, it is also relevant to understand the kinds of relationships and mechanisms performing the global commonality that underlies the TG Global Workers’ Council. In this section, I describe three types of transnational practices underpinning the victory of the Guatemalan SITRATERNIUM union as they are shaped within the global space of the Global Workers’ Council. When Wally introduced himself at the First International Meeting, he told about how he and some co-workers had embarked on the organization of the union SITRATERNIUM to fight low wages, long workdays, and mistreatment by managers. They had been fired and the Guatemalan Labour Ministry had dismissed the Union registration under legal subterfuges. The nascent Global Workers’ Council committed to prioritizing solidarity with SITRATERNIUM. Those were the initial steps of a six-year-long process that combined legal and lobbying tactics with direct action until the signing of the collective agreement was finally achieved in 2019. The broad array of interventions framed by the campaign were eloquent in the way they spoke of the multi-scalar converging practices resulting in union power. At the same time, it entailed the incorporation of Wally and his coworkers into a field of practices, technical knowledge, and management–union relationships largely performed by their comrades of the Global Workers’ Council at their places of work, and broadly promoted by the leadership of IndustriALL. The first support gesture TG unions offered to the SITRATERNIUM – besides its incorporation into the Global Workers’ Council – happened during the First International Meeting in November 2013. On the morning of the second day of the meeting, the leaders of the Argentinian UOM in San Nicolás had invited the international delegation to a guided visit to the local steel mill. The day before, some local leaders met the managers: they wanted to arrange access to the steel mill for Wally with the rest of his colleagues – although he had been fired on the grounds of his direct confrontation with the company. Danny – one of the local delegates – told me about this negotiation, although he did not know if it had succeeded. Neither the ‘problem’ nor the ‘negotiation’ were announced in the meeting, although most Argentinian delegates knew it was taking place. These charlas (talks) or conversaciones (conversations), are neither really official nor entirely secret types of union-management interactions that involve local, national, and international representatives and leaders; they are part of daily relationships and cover a broad array of issues that go beyond the institutionalized ones. Some of them have consequences for the issues to be negotiated, some for daily practices and norms,

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whereas yet others just solve personal or individual problems. In those conversations, union representatives and managers reach agreements, focus on problems, or listen to each other. This sort of interaction increases with the consolidation of the unions and, for leaders and representatives, it indicates how influential the organization can be. The morning after, we gathered in the meeting room, where a retired engineer and a labour relations employee – a team from the ‘Community Relations’ department – made a presentation about the corporation, the steel mill, the productive processes, and the technological innovations incorporated in them. Then we boarded a company mini-bus that took us to the plant. At the gates, a delegation of Human Resources Department staff kindly welcomed the international delegation, shaking hands with everybody. Edgard – one of the local leaders who had been negotiating the day before – introduced Wally to the company delegation, saying: ‘Wally is in trouble with your colleagues in Guatemala. Let’s do something to solve his situation!’ The local managers smiled, murmured something I could not understand, tapped Wally on the shoulder and wished him ‘good luck!’ In contrast to the negotiation the day before, this conversation took place in front of the international delegates, who were awaiting the managers’ reaction. The whole delegation saw this public act as one of UOM’s solidarity and commitment to Wally and to SITRATERNIUM. This public commitment happened because the conversacion played out the day before had succeeded. Not only was Wally able to access the plant with the rest of us, but he also went back home with the promise of a conversation between Guatemalan and Argentinian managers that could strengthen SITRATERNIUM. As was mentioned, most of the non-Argentinian delegates were amazed by the familiarity and proximity between local leaders or delegates and managers, engineers, or chiefs. Inversely, union leaders from San Nicolás de los Arroyos were surprised by the repressive and disloyal practices that Guatemalan managers deployed, and described them as being ‘Mexican style’. To them, Mexican managers were rough and severe, and many Mexican union leaders were also violent and harsh people. These views are rooted in common sense notions about Mexico as a place crossed by ‘Narco violence’ and populated by unskilled as well as undisciplined workers or union leaders. Thus, ‘Mexican Style’ management refers to a set of more authoritative and arbitrary behaviours and attitudes towards workers within an equally violent and rough context. I have recorded similar culturalist or nationalist explanations when asking about wages and collective bargaining. To frame behaviours and attitudes in cultural or national peculiarities is part of the common sense of union leaders as well as workers. Handling Wally’s case as a cultural and moral one, rather than assessing it in the broader political context of Guatemalan unionism, allowed the Argentinian leaders to talk to Gua-

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temalan managers on behalf of their partners. They, as well as the IndustriALL cadres and SITRATERNIUM leaders, expected to mobilize the political influence they believed they held by virtue of being from the ‘core’ plant of the corporation and by the ‘excellent relations’ they had with managers. By the time the Second International Meeting of the TG Global Workers’ Council took place in 2014, Wally had been reinstalled because of a resolution of the Guatemalan Supreme Court. Nevertheless, two days before the meeting, TG fired him again, together with another co-worker. This time, he was reinstalled almost immediately, but the conditions for organizing the union were worsening. To confront the renewed attacks on the part of the company, Jorge, Fernando (one of the IndustriALL), and some other leaders decided to launch solidarity demonstrations via social media and to hold a meeting of the Global Workers’ Council in Guatemala. In the first place, different IndustriALL members – not only metalworkers, but also mining and energy unions – took photographs and videos of signs with slogans or union leaders giving short speeches in support of SITRATERNIUM. The photos and videos were specially circulated among SITRATERNIUM colleagues. Finally, the meeting of the TG Global Workers’ Council in Guatemala took place in 2017. The international delegation gathered for a demonstration at the gates of the company and talked to the workers who were going in or out of the plant. Delegates introduced themselves as members of the Global Workers’ Council and expressed support and solidarity with the union. In contrast to the kind and polite attitudes that managers showed in Argentina, Guatemalan managers refused to receive the international delegation and took photos from the windows to intimidate the delegates. Neither the support demonstrations nor the conversaciones and lobbying activities deployed by union leaders in daily communication with TG managers and staff prevented repression and persecution of the Guatemalan union. Thus, IndustriALL representatives proposed to the Global Workers’ Council to scale up its intervention and send a complaint to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Again, a broad array of multilocated actors performed the intervention: the Global Workers’ Council coordinator and the regional representative of IndustriALL discussed this action with the directive board of SITRATERNIUM. The complaint was filed in Luxembourg – because it is a member of the OECD and because the TG headquarters are located there – backed by the Canadian USW (Union of Steel Workers), IndustriALL, and SITRATERNIUM, and managed by Lilly, who is part of the staff of IndustriALL in Geneva specialized in issuing complaints to OECD. The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises – the former Code of Conduct – contains in Chapter Five a set of ‘voluntary principles and standards for responsible business conduct’ that multinational corporations are expected to enforce in the countries where they operate. Since the 1970s, the International Confederations (now International Trade Unions Confederation,

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ITUC, and World Federation of Trade Unions, WTF) targeted the improvement of these mechanisms to confront what was considered the abusive attitudes of companies (Soul 2018). According to Wally, the OECD complaint was a key resource in the enforcement of collective bargaining regulation by the labour authorities that finally certified the final agreement. Paralleling lobbying and leverage interventions, the Global Workers’ Council also helped to establish the contents to be negotiated in the collective agreement discussion. On a meeting held in 2014 in Brazil, Wally discussed this with some of the attendants, who encouraged him while advising him to be responsible and patient. Wally argued that the content to be included in the agreement had been democratically discussed with his co-workers. However, some Argentinian delegates devoted to collective bargaining understood that those were not responsible demands. One of the delegates, said: ‘You can’t go [to the negotiation meeting] and try to get everything, because you get nothing. You need to have some goals and to set some strategy: what do you want get this time, what are you going to demand next time.’ Two different senses of negotiation ‘timing’ underlay the conversation between Argentinian, Mexican, and Guatemalan delegates: the first sense relied on steady and consolidated labour relations that tactically assessed priorities and the technical formulations of the provisions; the second sense, driven by the feeling that their position was precarious and uncertain, made delegates anxious for the immediate inclusion of the working and wages provisions they had been fighting for. After the Second International Meeting, the Global Workers’ Council became involved more actively in the bargaining process. Delegates from Mexico and Argentina – two of the more consolidated metalworkers’ unions in Latin American – with experience in collective bargaining travelled to Guatemala to train Wally and his co-workers for the collective agreement discussion, and advised them during the whole process. One of the first lessons was to dedicate more time to studying the proposals and goals of the managers, the better to shape union demands and negotiation strategies. Danny, an experienced Mexican leader who worked side by side with Wally, told me he was proud of this collaboration, which he felt was a recognition of his union’s bargaining strategies – famous in Mexico for breaking the limits the government imposed on wage increases (Soul 2019). Through this sort of transmission of experience, Wally and his fellows were incorporated into the lasting institutionalized labour movement tradition of collective bargaining as unions’ raison d’être. The importance of transnational collaboration and joint work for SITRATERNIUM reveals yet another dimension of the global victory announced by Wally, which is the sharing of collective ‘expertise’ to better negotiate with the company. This common background in turn set a trend of homogenizing labour, based on pursuing common conditions for labour relations

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and common content to be negotiated. This entails the spread, appropriation, and re-contextualization of a set of practices and social meanings constituting not just the Argentinian or Mexican labour movement, but also a dominant stream underlying the reproduction of industrial unions. The core meanings I recorded include the already mentioned consideration of legal and normative provisions as a labour terrain to be defended and enlarged, and a notion of responsibility directly linked with raising feasible demands (most of the time, the field of what is ‘feasible’ is given by management initiatives and by the ‘general economic situation’) and a technical approach to the content to be negotiated, which, in turn, entails specific training and education trajectories by leaders or the incorporation of technicians to the union’s staff – not only lawyers, but health and safety technicians, engineers, even business administrators. These also mobilize structures of feelings (Williams 1977), especially around the notions of justice and dignity associated with negotiated, agreed labour conditions as a collective matter and with the union leadership as embodying the workers’ collective as part of the wider community that puts in motion the production process every day. Therefore, the support campaign launched by the Global Workers’ Council entailed a twofold dynamic: on one side, local, national, and international bodies of labour organizations built a multi-scaled terrain of confrontation with the corporation, (re)making the bonds linking dispersed workers’ collectives on the basis of solidarity and mutual support rather than on mutual assessment on a competitive basis. On the other side, the making of this contested terrain amounts to a shaping of common practices and social meanings – some expressed in technical and bureaucratic languages – that tends to homogenize union dynamics and demands at their multiple locations. It raises questions about the relationships that make it possible for unions to display this ‘homogenizing dynamic’.

Global trade unions, the citizen-ification of labour politics, and ‘real abstraction’ To address this requires a critical approach to unions and their relationship with working classes. If it is feasible for the complexity of the relationships linking workers and unions to be grasped in local contexts, the analytical and methodological challenge is to identify the content of international or global labour organizations. Scholarship in the academic field of industrial relations sheds light on historical and socio-political processes conditioning the institutional architecture and the politics of the international labour movement (Van der Linden 2008; Hyman 2005). It also discusses the potential of new institutional arrangements

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for strengthening workers as well as the ‘local’ appropriation of ‘global’ organizing policies (Galhera 2015; McCallum 2013; Fox-Hoddess 2020). While these scholars provide important insights for the question at hand, they still leave unaddressed the question of what types of relationships constitute global unions’ representation. Assessing it allows for a better understanding of the ways international labour organization is linked to working-class formations. Social labour research conceives unions as one of those persistent workers’ organizations that, despite their undeniable decline and the limits they have shown, maintain important connections in the daily lives, collective identities, and welfare horizons of huge groups of workers (Katznelson 1986; Durrenberger 2010). Constant struggles for unionizing alongside fierce employers’ repressive anti-union tactics substantiate these claims (McNamara and Spyridakis 2020; Vogelmann 2017; Ness 2014). While relevant and crucial for the improvement of millions of worker’s living conditions, it is necessary to retrieve the partial character of the representation that unions display, which stems straight from the contradictory determinations inherent in waged labour. In ‘Unions and Councils’ (1919), Antonio Gramsci highlighted the contours of trade union representation: unions concentrate on workers’ property (labour power) to ‘impose prices and hours’, through a crowd of ‘administrative personnel (…) capable of stipulating contracts, of assessing commercial vagaries, of initiating economically useful operations.’ Gramsci’s assertion allows for the understanding of the dual character of waged workers, as they are at the same time both sellers of labour power and direct producers. This duality parallels another one, stemming from productive processes: cooperation/competition, for production under capitalism entails expanded interconnections between workers’ collectives and increasing competition between groups – historically structured through cleavages based on, among other things, skill, ethnicity, gender, or age. The notion of unions as a collective barrier shaping labourmarket competition was posed by Marx and Engels in their initial approaches to working-class dynamics (see Soul 2020). It correlates with the ‘administration’ function of union bureaucracy pointed out by Gramsci, and with the setting of institutional labour relations and collective bargaining systems in the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, Gramsci (1919, 1981) assumes that citizen-to-citizen relations stem from the commodification of labour power and market relationships within which workers are engaged. Unions concentrate labour power as a commodity, and leaders can handle this collective force and set forms of limiting its use and its price on the part of employers. The setting of those limits, as well as their institutionalization and crystallization in laws, norms, and provisions configure what Gramsci (1920) calls the ‘industrial legality’, which is an outcome of struggle and conflicts – and because of that, it is temporary and ephemeral.

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Through national labour relations, the sellers of labour power engage as citizens in the institutional sphere of social relations, which means the configuration of a set of rights and regulations constraining the waged-labour mobilization – a strategic form of social labour mobilization in capitalist social formations (Wolf 1982). Rooted in de-localization of production since the 1960s, international labour movement dynamics pursued the expansion of this citizenship sphere as a path to stop increasing labour precariousness and super–exploitation. It did so by stating a set of rights (to free association and unionization, to collective bargaining, to strike) to be defended and enforced by representative democratic governments as well as promoted and warranted by supranational bodies at a global scale. These were the discourses and arguments mobilized in the interventions related to the recognition of the TG union in Guatemala, outlined by a multiplicity of actors within the institutional field of the global union. In turn, the global union – alongside other ‘global’ agents – pursues the prevalence of national and supra-national regulation over the pure arbitrariness entailed by corporations’ expansion. Because of the practices oriented to – and by – institutionalized circuits and the relevance granted to technical knowledge and bureaucratic tactics, these interventions contribute to the reproduction of social meanings about labour-capital relationships as an institutionalized field, where changes take place through negotiated processes and unions hold the voice of waged workers, making claims for their influence on corporate and government decisions. The IndustriALL global union advocates and promotes its members’ commitment to these goals. In this context, the building of global union power spurs social mechanisms of workers’ organizations’ empowerment within the transnational terrain performed by corporations. The understanding of capitalist expansion as a matter of uneven, located struggles for labour subsumption places the question about the trends arising from the compulsion to labour abstraction entailed by full-fledged capitalist relations (McNally 2020; Mollona 2020). Sohn-Rethel’s (2001) elaboration on ‘real abstraction’ highlights the character of abstraction not as a product of mere intellectual activity, but as a real social relation shaping social practices and specific social dynamics embodied by monetization. As such, it structures social practices – as much as the approach to reality – even if subjects remain unaware of it. Sohn-Rethel argues that the act of exchange has historically performed the real abstraction structuring the whole epistemological approach in capitalist social formations, as they are societies based on commodity exchange. Some scholars argue that the core of capitalist exchange relies on a specific form of labour abstraction – as wage and value (Milios 2020). Gramsci directs attention to unions as collective labour power sellers that group workers in market relationships. Therefore, unions perform real abstraction

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as they stem from, and fix labour to, its (abstract) commodity form and workers to their condition as citizens-cum-sellers of labour power. This abstraction involves a complex set of consequences, one of the most important being the translation of the skills, knowledge, training, and effort workers put in motion in the productive process and of the ‘sum of means of subsistence to a monetary/abstract expression (Marx 1999: 4; see also Mollona 2020: 44–50). Another consequence of this abstraction is that power and authority on social labour mobilization and organization remains in the hands of ‘capital’ and the capitalist class. As was mentioned, this is an ongoing trend, inherent to the capital struggle for labour subsumption that unfolds unevenly and through struggles and contestation. One of the paths for labour abstraction is the homogenizing trend introduced historically by corporate management, which translates effort, skills, rhythms, tasks, costs, etc., into a field of measurable indicators to reproduce and expand the subsumption of labour to its waged form. Unions stem from this abstraction, relying on citizenship as a relationship that dismisses unevenness in favour of of general and homogeneous rights. The recent accelerated global reproduction of capital set a transnational terrain for the expansion of common demands shaped as labour rights – involving at the same time expectations, moral values, and structures of feeling.

Conclusions: unevenness, real abstraction and labour organizing This chapter has explored the transnational dimension of labour organizing, as it is forged by struggles against corporate labour policies in uneven social spaces and particular contexts. The expansion of transnational corporations, spurred by the internationalization of productive processes, draws more and more workers and territories into ‘globally’ commanded labour processes and exploitative dynamics. The increasing subsumption of labour to capital triggers uniformity and homogenizing trends shaping productive processes. At the same time, it reproduces labour differentiation concerning wages, benefits, contractual conditions, control, and disciplining policies. The TG corporation pursues practices and behaviours structuring the workers’ collectives as direct producers. The homogenizing trends are rooted in the social dynamics of labour abstraction at a global scale, and do not contest constraints set by uneven development. As was described, TG reproduces either arbitrariness, super-exploitative labour conditions, and repressive practices or steady, agreed, and negotiated labour relations. These differences have been analysed as a product of uneven and combined capitalist development, and of partic-

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ular regional dynamics of accumulation. The disparities between TG labour relations policies in Guatemala and Argentina are better understood in the light of the long-term struggle for labour subordination rooted in dispossession processes crossed by armed violence and political repression over popular organizations in Guatemala. The shocking figures about unions that have been destroyed are telling enough about the obstacles and difficulties that Guatemalan unionists face. More generally, uneven development in Argentina and Guatemala entails uneven dynamics of ‘production of labour power’. The relative social weight and political power that urban, industrial wage-workers have enjoyed in Argentina since the mid-twentieth century contrasts sharply with the relative political weakness of industrial workers from dispossessed rural communities in Guatemala overwhelmingly labouring in the informal sector. This, in turn, entails historic and culturally specific configurations of monetized and non-monetized conditions and social articulations dealing with dynamics of capitalist abstraction. In this respect, the provisions in national labour relations systems also trigger the (re)production of internal differentiation in working classes – between rural and urban, native and foreign, registered or non-registered workers, and more – and in the delimitation of ‘unionizable’ workers. From this perspective, the renewed global labour movement organizations – and the union networks supporting them – can be considered as the response of organized labour to increasingly internationalized corporate structures. As such, international leaderships aim to concentrate power to confront and dispute the value of labour power and productive consumption of a broader contingent of workers. This goal means to forge a sort of global social space, grounded on the rights of waged workers – to form unions, to bargain collectively, and to strike. It is in this terrain where uneven groups of workers, mediated by the unions, combine to forge the ‘transnational dimension’ of labour through the appropriation, adaptation, and re-contextualization of social meanings (such as social dialogue, responsibility, labour rights, human rights), institutional forms (such as collective agreements, or collective bargaining), and political practices (such as those entailed by rank and file representation, or by shaping claims to state institutions, etc.). As was mentioned, the raising of such a transnational field of labour rights – and human rights – is part of the broader contestation scenario rooted in the expansion of representative democracies, which involve labour relations systems, and productive transnationalization spurred by ‘neoliberal globalization’. Andrew Herod (2001) argues that the historical juncture of the fall of the Berlin Wall is the breaking point to grasp the displacement of geopolitical cleavages and the emergence of geo-economic and broadly democratic concerns. This historical juncture meant, at the same time, the fall of an emancipation horizon for labour, the

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path for the organization of enormous masses of workers incorporated into waged labour in transnationalized companies during the 1990s and the profound disorganization of working classes under unleashed market forces governing their lives. As the case of SITRATERNIUM demonstrates, while formally democratic institutions were consolidated in Guatemala after Peace Agreements in 1996, the fabric of relationships undermining labour organization remains powerful. The expansion of labour organization at a global scale contributes to forging the connections to incorporate the labour power exchange and its use – as a commodity – into a set of constraints and limits performed by the unions and shaped as rights. I argue that this is possible because the global union policy relies on the citizenship dimension of the labour power seller: it aims to set abstract homogeneous conditions for labour force bargaining and productive consumption at national and transnational scales. However, this transnational field of labour power sellers-citizens entails the ‘hidden side’ of capitalist reproduction. From this perspective, the role of unions in the (re)making of the working classes depends on their ability to engage with workers’ practices, organizations, and struggles pushing for surpassing labour abstraction.

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Katznelson, Ira. “Working class formation: Constructing cases and Comparisons.” In Working–Class Formation: Nineteenth–Century Patterns in Western Europe And The United States, edited by Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg. 3–42. Princeton: Princenton Universtiy Press, 1986. Lazar, Sian. “A ‘Kinship Anthropology of Politics’? Interest, the Collective Self and Kinship in Argentinean Unions.” Journal of the Royal Anthropology Institute 24,2 (2018): 256–274. Leite Lopes, Jose Sergio. Mudança Social no Nordeste: a reprodução da subordinaçãol. Río de Janeiro: Editora Paz e Terra, 1979. Leite Lopes, Jose Sergio. El Vapor del Diablo. El trabajo de los obreros del azúcar. Translated by Andrea Roca. Buenos Aires: Editorial Antropofagia, 2011. Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo. “Planeta Blanco: Diversidad Étnica en el Banco Mundial.” Estudios Latinoamericanos sobre Cultura y Transformaciones Sociales en Tiempos de Globalización 2, edited by Daniel Mato, 103–118. Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2001 Marx, Karl. “Wage Labor and Capital.” Marxist Internet Archive, Accessed May 5, 2012. Originally published as “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung April 5, 8 and 11, 1849. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ Milios, John. “Value Form and Abstract Labor in Marx: A critical review of Sohn Rethel’s notion of Real Abstraction.” In Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory. The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, edited by Angel Oliva, Antonio Oliva, and Ivan Novara, 25–40. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. McCallum, Jamie. Global Unions Local Power. The New Spirit of Transnational Union Organizing. Ithaca Cornell University Press, 2013. McNally, David. Blood and Money. War, Slavery, Finance and Empire. New York: Haymarket Books, 2020. McNamara, Thomas and Manos Spyridakis. “Introduction: Trades Unions in Times of Austerity and Development.” Dialectical Anthropology 44,2 (2020): 109–19. Mollona, Massimiliano Brazilian Steel Town. Machines, Land, Money and Commoning in the Making of the Working Class. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Movimiento Sindical, Indígena y Campesino Guatemalteco. “Segundo informe: Guatemala. El costo de la libertad sindical.” Accessed: May, 8: http://www.msicg.org/descargas/2do_Informe_gcls.pdf Ness, Immanuel. New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism. Binghamton: PM Press 2014 Organization for Economic Co–operation and Development. OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. OECD Publishing, 2011. Rojas, René. “The Latin American Left’s Shifting Tides.” Catalyst 2,2 (2018) Accessed August 14, 2020 Roseberry, William. Anthropologies and Histories. Essays in Culture, History and Political Economy. Rutgers: The State University Press, 1989. Sanchez, Andrew and Christian Strümpell. “Sons of Soil, Sons of Steel: Autochthony, Descent and the Class Concept in Industrial India.” Modern Asian Studies 48,5 (2014): 1276–1301. Sohn–Rethel, Alfred. Trabajo Intelectual y Trabajo Manual. Critica de la Epistemología. Anonymous Translator. Barcelona: Barcelona Ediciones, 2001. Originally published as Geistige und körperliche Arbeit: Zur Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Synthesis (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp). Solano Barillas, Nestor. “Actual situación organizativa del movimiento sindical Guatemalteco.” Bachelor thesis, Universidad San Carlos de Guatemala, 2013 Soul, Julia and Cecilia Anigstein. “Global Unions and Transnational Labor.” In Research Handbook on the Global Political Economy of Work, edited by Maurizio Atzeni, Dario Azzellini, Alessandra

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Umut Kuruüzüm

In the Web of Movements: Floating Industrial Labour between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan Introduction This chapter is an ethnographic contribution to the revival of interest in Trotsky’s so-called law of uneven and combined development that traces the relations of domination and exploitation of labour beyond the point of industrial production, thus shifting the focus to include the domestic economy as it meets and articulates with the contemporary capitalist mode of production. Based on ethnographic fieldwork between May 2014 and May 2016, the study focuses on Kurdish migrant steel workers moving between the Turkish town Şemdinli and the Iraqi town Erbil under the conditions of flexible work arrangements in the rolling mill and the wider war economy of the region. It examines how a specific labour form arose from the intersection of the Kurdish rural and cultural landscape with the proliferation of steel mills, which produce iron bars from war scrap alongside the expansion of war and destruction in the region. In doing this, the chapter sheds light on the specific value creation and accumulation process of industrial capitalism built around Kurdish migrant wage labourers moving between distinct but combined social organisations and landscapes, and ultimately weaving an uneven geography of capitalist growth. The analysis here will be built on the ‘cohabitation’ of different modes of production, rather than ‘succession’ (Meillassoux 1981[1975], 96), as an element in the simultaneous exploitation and socialisation of labour-power outside the shop floor, right within the movements between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. Marx (1990[1867], 932) observed in the last chapter of the first volume of Capital that ‘capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things’. Capital expands through weaving multidimensional relations in the wider ‘mode of life’ (Kalb 2015, 14) while manufacturing a process of labour and class formation, domination, unevenness, and inequality around the globe. As Herod (1997, 3) explained, labourers, including non-wage workers, are not passive products of these multifaceted processes but active constituents of the making and unmaking of economic and social landscapes and their inherent unevenness. That is, the spatial formation and social relations of capitalist growth are not only marked by the dominating capital, but also shaped under the prolehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-005

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tariat’s consciousness and action in promoting their own self-interested agenda for life while contributing to the economic geography of capitalism. More specifically, the chapter will focus on how the simultaneous socialization, struggle, and exploitation of labour is established and perpetuated beyond the shop floor in the wider politics of labour (Kasmir and Gill 2008), which is submerged in kinship and domestic economies (Meillssoux 1972, 1978, 1981[1975]). Under what conditions can flexible steel production and low-cost labour arrangements be sustained? In what ways did the movement of industrial labour and the flow of remittance cash shape household governance structures and affective hierarchies? How are the process of becoming a wage labourer and class woven along with the travels between work and home? How do industrial workers move under various forms of different and combined processes of domination and what are their strategies in furthering their life projects? The chapter begins by focusing on the semi-flexibilization of steel production in the rolling mill and the semi-casualisation of a specific group of Kurdish migrant steelworkers in a private steel mill (hereafter referred to as the KSM) under the conditions of the war economy. Following this, it explores the travels of migrant steelworkers together with the flow of their remittance cash from Iraqi Kurdistan to the southeast of Turkey in times of enforced unpaid leaves. Finally, the last section reflects on the process of becoming a wage labourer, the contradictory articulation of domination and freedom, and the construction of combined unevenness, as a collaborative work of the movements of capital and labour.

Flexibility in a steel mill The KSM is situated in the Hiwa district of southwest Erbil, forty-five miles east of Mosul and ten miles from Gwer (Quwayr), a border town between what was ISISheld and Iraqi Kurdistan roughly between 2014 and 2017 when I conducted ethnographic research in the region (see Map 1). The Hiwa district was previously located close to an outpost established by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France shortly after the 1991 Gulf War to protect the Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south from Saddam’s regime. The district has recently been caught in the middle between fighting ISIS, material destruction, and the inflow of refugees. With a capacity of 240,000 tons per year, the steel mill has been one of the region’s most visible heavy-industry ventures, making iron bars from recycled war scrap obtained largely from Mosul, thus feeding on the region’s war economy and wider destruction. The KSM is the region’s first steel mill. It was completed in 2006 and commenced steel production in December 2007. In 2014, the mill smelt-

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ed scrap metal to generate about 600 tons of steel each day and had a market share of roughly seven per cent in Iraqi Kurdistan in steel production. As a result of cheap and abundant war scrap reserves, steel mills sprouted up across the region like mushrooms. The total production of steel in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq exploded from virtually non-existent in 2006 to nearly 3 million tons per year in 2014, which created a billion-dollar scrap-recycling business, while the number of steel mills expanded from one in 2006 to ten in 2014. The iron bars, as an end product manufactured by these steel mills, were extensively used in the rehabilitation of infrastructure and housing development in the Kurdish cities of northern Iraq that were now spared by the war but had been damaged in previous cycles.

Map 1: Location of the KSM. Source: The Author.

As the war escalated and ISIS invaded Gwer near the edge of Erbil in the summer of 2014, the construction industry went into recession in Iraqi Kurdistan. Expats returned to their homelands, demand for housing declined, construction came to a halt, and refugees flocked into the half-finished, abandoned buildings. With the invasion and continuous threat of ISIS in the area southwest of Erbil, steel mills have not only seen a drop in sales but have also been negatively affected by the shifting business of obtaining war scrap from Mosul and the surrounding region, which was then coming under ISIS control. In the first months of the turmoil, steel mills in the region relied on their already stocked scrap metal resources. Those with extensive scrap metal yards and reserves fared better in the early months, making money by selling scrap at a high price to other enterprises with

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limited scrap metal surpluses. Nevertheless, in general, steel output began to fluctuate, and flexibility was more aggressively integrated into the production phase in the wider conditions of war with ISIS, political instability, and macro-economic recession since the summer of 2014. Compared to traditionally state-developed integrated steel mills that make steel by utilizing raw materials, such as coke and iron ore, melted down in massive blast furnaces, steel mills that utilize electric arc furnaces and recycle scrap metal are more resilient and adaptable to production cutbacks and market fluctuations. The steel platform consists of two primary induction-heating electrical furnaces for chemically reducing scrap metal and physically converting it into liquid iron. The steel platform in the KSM together with the power plant and scrap metal yard was subcontracted to an Indian company for running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with no interruption except for maintenance due to the high costs and production losses incurred when recharging idle arc furnaces. These subcontracted units were operated by around four hundred skilled migrant workers from India who had been recruited by the Indian subcontracting firm and brought into the region for work according to a non-flexible schedule of six-day work weeks and twelve-hour days in two shifts per day under two-year contracts.¹ Once the steel slabs cast in the steel platform have been left to cool, they are then ready to be re-heated in the rolling mill and rolled in a series of successive roll stands into thinner and longer steel bars, the end product of the KSM. Steel slabs can also be traded and exported as an intermediary product, allowing them to be reheated at other steel mills abroad when the domestic demand for iron bars is depressed. This structure allows the rolling mill to operate in a more flexible manner, while the demand for iron bars is met through existing stocks, cutting the cost of operations in the rolling mill. As a result, unlike subcontracted inflexible units, rolling operations and steelworkers in the rolling mill may be exposed to flexibility to compensate for the inflexibility of scrap melting in the steel platform. The Indian labourers in the rigid units are also mobile migrants, but once they arrive, they are placed in strict immobility and operational rigidity, while shorter-distance migrant steelworkers from the nearby Kurdish town in Turkey remain largely mobile and more independent. Hence, mobility and immobility are contradictorily integrated in the flexibilization of the steel mill under the glob-

1 With the rise of war scrap reserves and steel-making in Iraqi Kurdistan, Indian migrant steel workers who are subcontracted are in high demand, linking the declining public steel sector in India and a reserve army of skilled yet cheap steel workers with the steel-making industry in Kurdistan. See Strümpell (2014) for how the restructuring of India’s first public-sector steel company resulted in the creation of a steel labour reserve force and job losses for its employees, and in what ways steel workers cope with work-related dislocations and dispossessions in an Indian steel town.

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al processes of the war economy. For the case at hand, what remains is the issue of making steel workers adaptable too, specifically the question of how the number of skilled steel workers recruited for the rolling mill is reduced and then increased in accordance with the flexible working conditions required in this section of the steel mill in order to minimize costs and boost profits. In order to clarify this, a closer examination of the rolling mill is required. The shop floor at the rolling mill was dominated by approximately eighty Kurdish migrant workers aged 18 to 40 from Şemdinli, a town located north of the steel mill on the Turkish side of Kurdistan, a nine to ten-hour trip by bus. Mr Salih, the entrepreneur and one of the key shareholders of the steel mill, who is also from Şemdinli, was known to be keen to provide employment to young men from his hometown, which was the main reason for the large number of migrant workers from Şemdinli. He created opportunities for young Kurdish men in the town, and later, new migrant labourers could follow in a chain, packing their belongings and leaving home to work at the steel mill. In order to find work, the majority of Kurdish workers used their kinship and ethnic connections. Thus, Kurdish migrant workers at the rolling mill were either related by kin or knew each other from their hometowns. I met childhood friends working side by side at the rolling mill, kin groups eating together in the company cafeteria, and brothers sharing the same room for sleeping on the factory compound. One of the workers even arranged his marriage with his workmate’s cousin on the shop floor. I went to his joyous wedding ceremony, which was also attended by several of his migrant co-workers and supervisors from the rolling mill. Hence, apart from the long hours of bus trips, Şemdinli is indeed located even closer in the minds of the Kurdish migrant steelworkers, since the ethnic and kinship relations carried to the steel mill continued to encapsulate their social and emotional life as well as work arrangements in the rolling mill. Most also relied on patriarchal networks of support in the form of advice, childcare, and finances, not to mention emotional support and household solidarity, in times of periodic, yet also unforeseen unpaid leaves, as we shall see below.

Floating Kurdish steelworkers In the Kurdish case, the key managerial mechanism ensuring profitability is that of rotation of the Kurdish migrant workforce between home and work. If, say, there is a low demand for iron bars, then the steel mill can cut back on production and labour costs at the rolling mill. In other words, the KSM can temporarily reduce the number of uncontracted Kurdish steelworkers, as the rolling platform can be stopped and restarted again at little cost whenever necessary. During periods of low

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demand, uncontracted Kurdish migrant workers are sent back home to Şemdinli on unpaid leave (furlough) based on the rotation system, whereby they would spend around a month or two with their families at home. This unpaid leave allows for workforce reductions prompted by market fluctuations, so as to temporarily reduce operating expenses without going through the complications of a layoff or risking a permanent loss of workforce. The works at the rolling mill required some level of experience, and the steel company would face significant transaction costs were a new recruit to be hired. In this way, a worker could be away from his job while still retaining his work status and the steel mill could keep an experienced worker on reserve. In periods of low domestic demand, the steel-making platform, operated by the lower-paid Indian workers, continued to convert liquid iron from a blast furnace and steel scrap into iron slabs, which could be cooled down and stored for the next stage, the casting process, at a later time.² In the meantime, demand for iron bars was met from existing stocks. The organization of production and work arrangements here translates into an interconnection between ‘rigidity’ and ‘flexibilization’ at the steel mill. On the one hand, we have the stable and secure work, albeit lower-paid, of Indian labourers, contracted on the steel platform, where production continues day and night, and scrap metal is melted non-stop. On the other hand, we have flexible work at the rolling mill, which adapts to market conditions. For the managing board, the low demand for iron bars is not as bad as a rupture in the supply of scrap metal, which can halt production and drive the steel mill and the subcontracting firm to shut down. When demand climbs back up, the number of working hours and workers from Şemdinli can be increased to meet higher production requirements, and the stored metal slabs are reheated and transformed into an iron bar for sale. In earlier years, the management had thought of replacing some of the workers at the rolling mill with Indian subcontracted migrant workers in order to lower the cost of labour. However, although the wages of Indian labourers were much lower than those of the Kurdish labourers, the managing board realized that keeping a number of workers from the region who retained connections with their rural homes and lands was more efficient in view of the rapidly changing business cycles in the region. Recruiting

2 In the steel mill, the typical wage paid to a Kurdish steelworker in the rolling mill from Şemdinli was around $1,000–$1,200 a month, compared to a skilled Indian labourer recruited in the steel platform, who was paid around $400–$600. When I inquired why Indian steelworkers were paid less, despite the fact that they were more experienced and worked under more difficult conditions and longer hours, one of the firm managers informed me that the value of their wage creates a fortune when transferred to India.

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an Indian worker through an agency and bringing him all the way from India would cost more than recruiting a Kurdish worker from Şemdinli, given the fluctuations in production over time. Hence, the rotating system embedded into the rolling mill served as an effective mechanism, placing Kurdish steelworkers from Şemdinli in a position between somewhat permanent and casual employment, allowing the rolling mill to operate as a flexible industrial site. Most of the uncontracted Kurdish migrant steel workers live in extended families of parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all near each other or in the same household in Şemdinli. For this reason, loss of income for a month or so was tolerable; workers could feel financially protected, depending on other breadwinners in their extended families. In some cases, Kurdish workers themselves asked to be granted unpaid leave for a month or longer for events such as planning a wedding, expecting a baby, arranging funerals, or offering support to the family. During such breaks, most workers took time for leisure, trips, sleeping in late, and social activities with friends back in their hometowns. Furthermore, some of the migrant workers would use the idle time to further their family businesses, such as working seasonally in the family’s agricultural fields. During these times, Kurdish migrant steelworkers did not regard themselves as idle, but rather as taking a ‘holiday from hard labour’ or ‘taking some time off for oneself’ while being away from the routine of steelwork, getting reacquainted and socializing with the rest of the family and relatives in Şemdinli. The unpaid leaves were, of course, welcome, but only if they did not last too long. Such periods of joblessness would not last longer than eight weeks. During that time, Kurdish workers often felt confident that they would eventually be recalled, based on their personal contacts and kinship networks in the steel mill. For this reason, none of the Kurdish workers from Şemdinli looked for other employment upon being given leave. When they left the rolling mill, they would even leave some personal belongings in their rooms, which they saw as proof of their moral claim upon their return. For Kurdish migrants, if the steel mill did not plan to recall a migrant worker, it would ask him to collect all his personal belongings from the labour camp. In the following section, we will look beyond the steel mill and explore these breaks from the perspective of Kurdish migrant workers who make the journey. As we will see, it is via their movements and the circulation of remittance cash that not only domination but also some type of freedom and capacities are woven.

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The never ending house and the wife left alone One evening after work in September 2015, Mr Zoro, the human resource manager of the steel mill, called Ferman on the phone and asked him to take an unpaid leave of absence for a month. Ferman was one of the around eighty Kurdish migrant workers from Şemdinli on the rolling mill shop floor at that time. Without hesitation, he quickly packed his bags that night and called me to spend some time in Erbil before he took his bus the next morning to Şemdinli. He was not at all upset about Mr Zoro’s decision, as he was also planning to take a break and to see his wife in Şemdinli after having worked for four months without interruption. He was planning to help his father build an apartment house to provide a home for his three sons and their families under the same roof. Mr Zoro held the discretionary power to enlist migrant workers from Şemdinli for employment at the steel mill. He had to be very careful, though, in dealing with the working schedules of the Kurdish migrant workers in order to be what he called ‘a good mentor and a fair boss’. He told me that he knew very well that, for a worker, staying too long at the parents’ house could cause problems, so he had to make small talk and arrangements to make the system work in a way that was both effective and somehow sensitive to workers’ needs. Mr Zoro often presented himself as the guardian of the Kurds from Turkey and as the head of an informal Kurdish labour brotherhood in the absence of a formal labour organization at the steel mill. Mr Zoro, who is himself Kurdish, was making efforts to keep the young Kurdish workers in the steel mill, which to some extent increased job security for Kurdish migrant labourers. Ferman left the next morning with presents he bought from a shopping mall we visited that night in Erbil, looking forward to the pleasure and privilege of spending some time relaxing at home in Şemdinli. He looked stressed and concerned when I saw him on Thursday evening. I later learned that he was carrying a large sum of money, about $4,000, which included not only his own two months’ salary but also the salaries of his two brothers. Many times during the evening he looked in his wallet to make sure the cash was still there. He was inevitably worried that others would realize that he had so much money on him or that he could accidentally misplace it. He wore a money belt under his clothes to avoid having to carry any more cash than usual in his pockets. However, he was still stressed and recited all the verses he knew from the Qur’an the whole evening long to ward off being pickpocketed. Some Kurdish steelworkers can travel to Şemdinli along the road near the Qandil Mountains, which involves a shorter travelling time and a combination of bus, private car, and walking; but when they carry their remittance

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Map 2: The Location of Şemdinli. Source: The Author.

cash, they prefer to travel by bus and cross directly through the international Ibrahim Khalil Border Gate at Silopi (see Map 2). Being a steelworker in Iraqi Kurdistan was a profitable activity for Kurdish migrants from Şemdinli. When converted into Turkish lira in 2015, the average wage paid to a Kurdish steelworker was around $1,000 per month, nearly triple the minimum wage rate for an average worker in Turkey. Furthermore, while at work, workers’ living expenses were covered by the KSM, helping them to save more and to better finance their families. Though work at the mill was largely seen as uncertain, migrant labourers – and their families – chose to stick with the steelwork, mobilizing their ethnic and kinship ties and contacts to keep employment there as stable and as long as possible. Usually, the remittance would be collected in the hands of the father, who would make the financial expenses and investments for the whole larger family. Ferman’s monthly salary was around $1,200. He kept $200 for himself and sent the rest to what he and his brothers referred to as the total family income pool. His father, Mahmut, was in charge of the entire family’s income pool and, together with his wife Fatma, managed the ultimate responsibility of arranging marriages and providing housing for his sons, their wives, and current and future children living in Şemdinli. According to Fer-

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man’s estimates in June 2015, he and his two brothers handed over around $4,000 to their father, which is a significant quantity of money in the context of a rural town. For Ferman, his monthly wages belonged to his family and were, therefore, kept separate from his own money, taken out and counted from time to time, and carried back home with almost ‘ceremonial solemnity’ (Pine 2002, 85). The wages which had to be carried back home were the most prestigious symbol of ‘being a breadwinner’ and ‘caring for the family’. In return for these efforts, Ferman’s father had promised to build a flat for each of his sons in Şemdinli with the remittances he received. Ferman had no time to oversee the long building process, which necessitated the permanent presence of a trustworthy person – often a father or an uncle in Şemdinli – to supervise the expenditure of cash for building materials. Although Ferman had been sending almost all of his wages to his father each month for the past three years, like his brothers, his father had not managed to finish Ferman’s house. When Ferman returned from Şemdinli a month later, he told me that only a small portion of the house had been built. Ferman inquired during one of our conversations about what happened to the money he earned. Where is that money if it isn’t being used to fulfil his father’s promise? Ferman could not see any progress in his promised house over the preceding two years, although his father did show him the plans of the house and had placed some bricks in front of the main house. Ferman put these bricks under a tent to keep them out of the rain, but he found them back in the garden when he returned. He phoned me with a bit of regret and explained that he later realized the bricks were not for his future house but were instead stepping stones to help walk through the muddy waters of the garden after the rain. He started to question what his father was doing with his wages that he remitted each month. Ferman called his father on one evening and explained that he would like to use a portion of his wages to invest in a plot of land in Erbil. His father did not like the idea and became immediately angry and defensive on the phone without even thinking about the point being made, as Ferman told me after the conversation. After quarrelling with him on the phone, Ferman’s father accused him of being unfaithful to him and asked Ferman to remove his wife from the house in Şemdinli, if Ferman did not want to send his wage back home: He told me ‘Sana hakkımı helal etmem’ [I will not give my blessings to you] if I do not send cash back home … and clarified that I should better leave home with my wife … and never come back again. He is erasing us from his life because of money, you see? Look, he is making me, his son, his own enemy. He knows that I cannot take my wife to the camp here. He is threatening me. While we give him big money, he only gives us a little pocket money. My brothers cannot say anything because they are afraid of being sinful by standing against

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him. He is always saying ‘sana hakkımı helal etmem’, but what he is doing is unfair and Islam stands for justice and commands us to speak out against injustice.

Ferman did not send his wages to his father and asked his wife to go to her mother’s house in Urmia for a time until he found a place to bring her near him. However, Ferman’s mother, Fatma, did not allow her daughter-in-law to leave the house and instead supported her staying in the house. In the meantime, Fatma explained to her son on the phone that his wife, Naza, might get ‘bored at home’ alone, perhaps resulting in actions that would diminish her namus (honour) as a woman and that of her family. Therefore, she should never be left home alone if Ferman ever were to rent a home near the steel mill and bring her there. As King (2008, 324) has shown in the context of Iraqi Kurdistan, leaving a wife alone at home can be considered a risk that may reduce the honour of the woman and of her husband’s family and ancestry. For this reason, newlywed women in particular were preferably not left alone at home. Broadly speaking, the bride’s social life is passed around her household and kin; any woman who needs to travel usually has to be accompanied by her mother-in-law, sister-in-law, aunt, or some other relative from the immediate family (King 2008, 324). For Ferman, too, it was risky. In Şemdinli, his mother and father ensured that if his wife went somewhere, she did so with kin, and her public life revolved around the vicinity of her household and immediate neighbourhood. However, should she have joined her husband near the mill, she would have been alone in a house away from her kin while Ferman was at work. In fact, Ferman had great trust in his wife, and as he told me, he was in love with her in a romantic way. He was sure that she would never do anything that could harm their love if was she to stay at home alone. However, his mother warned Ferman that he should not trust their romantic love, but that he should put his trust in his mother instead, as she had a great deal of life experience and was always looking out for her son’s well-being. After speaking with his mother, Ferman became quite indecisive and did not know what to do. In the meantime, one of Ferman’s workmates, Hasan, was laid off, the first of several workers who were forced to leave the steel mill due to the depressed housing market in Erbil. Hasan was an assistant floor supervisor and was laid off after working in the same place for more than four years. ‘The reason he was laid off is just plain bad luck’, Ferman explained. Lack of job security and guaranteed income meant uncertainty for Kurdish migrant workers, leading to anxiety. Many Kurdish workers were unable to calculate their futures because they had no fixed hours of work or no savings on hand. Once situated between push-andpull market forces that generate migration networks, migrant labourers easily become vulnerable, a fact that had a significant impact on the consciousness of

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young Kurdish workers. As uncertainty set in, a profound feeling of insecurity weighed down on Ferman; he, too, felt anxious due to the fluctuations. In these times, patriarchal networks based on the economy of affection and wages once again turned out to be vital for workers. In one of our conversations, Ferman explained, ‘You have to sustain good relations with the people back in the village because you have to have a house somewhere.’ Whenever Kurdish steelworkers come to see wage-earning as an insufficient means to support oneself and one’s family independently, they fall back on the economy of affection to survive, fulfilling demanding family obligations and supporting the household budget whenever possible and needed. In October 2015, a reconciliation took place between Ferman and his father, and patriarchal relations were restored, as Ferman sent part of his wages back home with his brother, providing a favourable pretext. Ferman’s mother, Fatma, called her son, and after talking a few minutes, she handed the phone over to her husband. Mahmut was kind and helpful on the phone, Ferman told me. He talked about how he continued to suffer from his back pain and other ailments and then asked Ferman if he needed anything from Şemdinli, such as clothes or homemade food. Ferman remained on the phone for a long time listening to his father talk about his illness, after which he asked his father to take a rest. His father said that he was old now and wanted to see his grandson in his arms. In return, Ferman explained to his father that the family’s wellbeing was more important than his aspirations. Following the conversation, his father decided to send Ferman’s wife, Naza, to Topzawä, where his older son Mehmet lived together with his wife and Mahmut’s second wife. Ferman spent some time with Naza in Mehmet’s house, where he was welcomed by his wife every night with affection and Şemdinli-made food, as Ferman explained. When Mehmet and his wife went to Iran to visit their relatives, Ferman called his mother to come to Topzawä to remain with Naza, who was now alone. He told me that Naza was really afraid of being alone in the house when Ferman was at work. Ferman’s mother spent three weeks there and then returned to Şemdinli with her daughter-in-law. When Ferman’s wife was in Şemdinli, he vacated the house for his brother Mehmet and his wife, who had returned from Iran, and returned to his room in the labour camp. Shortly thereafter, Ferman heard that his wife was pregnant.

In the web of movements In our case, the KSM achieved flexible and secure production by establishing a rotation system that mobilized and relied on rural and kin-based relations beyond the shop floor. The circulation of labour together with the wage absorbed in the

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extended household through patriarchal and gendered hierarchies assisted in the exploitation of labour, while obstructing its full proletarianization. That is, far from industrialization serving to dis-embed workers from their pre-existing social hierarchies and kin-based social relations, the flexible production regime in the Kurdish steel mill came to exploit and reproduce the embeddedness of these workers, similar to what Chandavarkar (1994, 122) showed in relation to the expansion of industrial capitalism in India. In the Bengali context, Chakrabarty (2000, 206– 208) also demonstrated how jute-mill workers of Calcutta remained embedded in the kin-based relations of peasant communities in non-transitional ways. Like the Chinese factory workers described by Ngai (2005), who were kept in a constant state of job insecurity due to restrictive migration and ethnic procedures, Kurdish migrants are turned into floating workers suspended between the rural and the industrial together with the individualism and the traditional collectivism of rural life in Şemdinli. Mandel (1963, 8) has written about how the abundant reserve army of Flanders sustained the combination of low wages and advanced industrial technology, resulting in Belgium’s historically rapid capitalist development; and in the context of neoliberalism, Neveling (2015, 181) showed how the domestic economic sphere subsidized the expansion of export processing zones around the world, allowing for labour super-exploitation. The combinations of different social organizations and landscapes that these writers are discussing are particularly brought to our attention by Meillassoux, who had a significant impact on the development of Marxist and historically-informed anthropology through his long-term ethnographic engagement in Africa. A recurring theme in Meillassoux’s (1972, 1978, 1981[1975]) writings has been how rural refuge and migration have been an integral component of maintaining a cheap labour reserve for industrial areas. By focusing less on the development of capitalist countries, but more on the impact of this development on the colonised areas, his core theory on the growth of capitalism has focused on the articulation and coexistence of diverse modes of production, rather than succession. His extensive fieldwork and review of the anthropological literature, concentrating on selfsustaining agricultural communities in Africa before colonisation and their contact with and response to capitalism, showed how the super-exploitation on which the expansion of capitalism depended came not only from ‘the wage-earner himself’, but also from ‘the labour of his kin group’ (Meillassoux (1972, 102). For him, migrations between the capitalist industrial sector and a non-capitalist rural one was a socio-economic formation that provided wage-earners with a degree of security in the absence of old-age pensions, sick leave, or unemployment compensation. In this way, the agricultural communities and rural kinship ties maintained as reserves, along with the reproduction of cheap labour, are both absorbed and maintained at the same time. In this configuration, the capitalist mode of production

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blends with agrarian kin-based household economies, resulting in a stable coexistence with a degree of mutation. With the industrial wage flowing into the family’s hands from working sons, Ferman’s father, who had previously been engaged in farming and beekeeping with the support of his sons, began to rent the lands for relatives and produced honey only for domestic consumption. ‘My father is retired and now taking care of his grandchildren back in Şemdinli,’ Ferman explained. When Ferman got married, his wife settled directly in a room in her father-in-law’s house. Ferman’s wife’s needs were fulfilled while he was working in the labour camp by means of the remittances collected by his father. Ferman did not want to have children immediately after marriage but was constantly encouraged to do so by his family. After Ferman’s wife became pregnant, family support was enhanced, and once his twin infants were born, they were cared for by close relatives. Ferman would be able to see his children for a few months a year. Meillassoux (1972, 101) argued that self-sustaining agricultural and kin-based domestic economies rely less on the control of the ‘means of material production’ and more on the ‘means of human reproduction’, particularly through the control and domination of women. In rural landscapes where agricultural production is largely dissolved and the livelihood of the extended family is shaped through industrial wage earning by the migrant working son, social reproduction proceeds (in our case) through the control of the life and unpaid work of the daughter-inlaw, creating the next cycle of value creation and accumulation. The “domestic community’s social reproduction is not a natural process”, according to Meillassoux (1981[1975], 46), “nor is it, as in earlier social systems, the result of war abduction and kidnapping” but “[i]t is a political enterprise”. Elders, who feed younger generations, encourage kin reproduction to gain access to industrial wages through the control and dominance of a daughter-in-law who waits for her working migrant husband suspended between precarious insecure industrial work and the patriarchal family house. Van der Linden (2007, 150) explained how elements from advanced culture can prolong the life of a pre-existing culture that absorbs the advanced culture’s product, which is the fruit of labour, industrial wage labour in our case. Undoubtedly, remittance cash being showered on the male elder regenerates traditional kin-based domestic relations and strengthens affective hierarchies and patriarchal domination. One day, the patriarchal privileges of the male elders will be passed down to the young working migrant males of the family ‘within their average life expectancy’, and they will have access to the accumulated capital through inheritance, as Meillassoux (1981[1975], 79) explained. The never-ending house project serves as a symbol of this future transition as well as a reminder that there is still a long way to go in recovering the product of Ferman’s labour. Furthermore,

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where this money goes and how it is spent, as well as whether or not it will be available in the future cycle, is a source of concern. This configuration places women into unpaid domestic work and sustained proletarianization beyond the point of production and wage-earning, ‘where the primary exploitation in the production process’ is supplemented by the secondary exploitation and proletarianization of domestic workers (Novack 1976, 105), whose lives are still shaped by capital despite being outside the circuit of commodity production. As Eckert (2016, 4–5, 22) highlighted, the male wage labourer is only one of many other categories of the process of proletarianization that grow as a result of dispossession, expropriation, and radical dependence on the market. In our case, Naza, Ferman’s wife, is kept under patriarchal control not for the constitution of the farming community, as showed in Meillassoux (1972, 100–101), but for the control of a wage-earning son and the circulation of remittance cash. In this configuration, not only the body of the male wage earner but also the body of his wife is dominated under the combination of industrial capitalist production and affective domestic economy. In this geography of capitalism characterised by the combination of semi-domestic community and capitalist relations, the steel mill provides access to cheap workers through agricultural and kin-based relations, while incorporating these relations into the industrial production regime. Kinship ties that have stretched to the rolling mill and beyond have also shaped the steel mill. Instead of hiring a formally educated engineer, the director of the rolling mill was specifically recruited from Şemdinli; he had no formal education but had the backing of the migrant workers. Mr Keko, the steel mill’s human resource manager, is a Kurd from Turkey with no formal education. He also was recruited specifically because of his strong links and bonds with workers and their families from Şemdinli. Many of the workers from Şemdinli are distant relatives or associates of the factory’s creator, Mr Salih, who is himself from the same town. The workers’ families live in Şemdinli with some of Mr Salih’s older relatives, and their links are still strong. These rural and kin-based traditional bonds and contacts can be used to seek employment for a son in the steel mill. Furthermore, if a worker from Şemdinli is fired, elders may intervene to ease the situation and ensure the steelworker’s re-recruitment. Workers from Şemdinli have strongly been represented on the company board of directors and have some influence in making decisions. For example, when Yazidi refugees fleeing the Sinjar massacre were hired in the steel mill to replace some Sunni Arab workers who had supported ISIS during the insurgency, migrant workers from Şemdinli blocked them from joining the new labour camp due to their non-Muslim affiliation. For some Muslim Kurds from Şemdinli,

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Yazidis, who were nicknamed ‘devil-worshippers’,³ should live with Indians, who were nicknamed ‘elephant worshippers’ or ‘cow worshippers’ because they are non-Muslims and believe in non-monotheistic religions. Yazidi refugee workers had to settle in the already overcrowded Indian labour camp.⁴ The role of workers as active participants in the making of an economic and social landscape is relatively muted in Meillassoux’s (1972, 1978, 1981[1975]) account, even as he unravels the historical integration and coexistence of diverse modes of production and uneven development of capitalist growth. Kasmir and Gill (2018, 356) wrote that ‘unevenness is politically momentous’, highlighting the fact that capitalist development is multilinear as a result of not only the action of capital but also the struggle of labour. In this sense, Kasmir and Gill’s (2018) approach is more of an encouraging theoretical framework for investigating the role of labour in unevenness. In the concrete realities of history, workers consciously and unconsciously become active participants in making and unmaking economic geographies (Herod 1997; Kasmir and Gill 2018). The creation of value and accumulation are actively woven right into the liminal landscape shaped by the movements of working migrant men between work in Iraqi Kurdistan and extended family households in the southeast of Turkey, under the wider structures of domination and inequality. In our case, the distinct development of historical phenomena and qualitatively different sets of relations commingle through the movements of workers. Becoming a labourer is not a process of exploitation alone imposed from above, by the factors of production or the exchange value of abstract labour. As White (1994, 4) argued, it is also one of ‘socialization to become’, as in our case, a breadwinner, father, son, and husband in the wider mode of life. In this context, exploitation occurs simultaneously through consent in addition to structural coercion. With the movements of migrant workers together with the circulation of their industrial wages, they are becoming not only exploited labour, but also actors seeking and claiming social locations that will enable them to succeed the privileges of the male elders and recover the product of their work within their expected lifecycles. In return, by using ethnic and kinship networks inside the steel mill, the workers act upon their own kinship connections and rural belongings to cope with dislocations and instabilities built into the vulnerability of their positions in global capitalist industrial manufacturing. 3 This is because Yazidis pray to Melek Taus, since non-Yazidis have associated Melek Taus with Shaitan or Satan. 4 While Yazidis and Indians spoke different languages, the Yazidis shared the same Kurdish traditional culture and language with the Kurdish workers (Yazidis speak the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, which is similar to that of Kurds from Turkey).

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Graeber (2001, xii) argued that value should be taken as ‘the way in which actions become meaningful to the actor by being incorporated in some larger, social totality – even if in many cases the totality in question exists primarily in the actor’s imagination’. Kurdish workers are well aware of their positions in the wider combined and contradictory totality and they actively incorporate their interests and plans into their environment. Kurdish steel workers know what they are doing; they want to escape the domination and abuses of kinship networks and liberate themselves via industrial labour and wage. Nevertheless, they are thrown back into the world of kinship because industrialisation does not keep its promises. Their freedom as well as their domination are woven, by their own consciousness and actions, right through their embraced movements between industrial work and the domestic economy. Vigh’s (2009, 429) call for ‘setting the landscapes in motion’ is quite useful here for theorizing the landscape at hand as ‘a moving landscape’ that is wavering and unsettled under global capital. Yet, migrant workers here ‘move’ as well, which can be conceptualised as ‘motion within motion’ in Vigh’s (2009, 420) terms; that is, global capital engages and moves workers as they move along. In this way, workers contribute to the formation and reproduction of economic geography and to the uneven and combined development of capitalist growth in the concrete realities of history.

Conclusion Analysis of industrial production as a conversion of scarce resources into valuable output falls short of explaining ‘the social embeddedness of capitalist forms of livelihood’ (Mollona 2009, xvi; 2005, 543–544). In order to document the social embeddedness of value creation and accumulation, this chapter attempted to move beyond the point of industrial production into the study of the integration and co-existence of the diverse modes of social organisation, particularly the domestic economy in the southeast of Turkey and the industrial production in Iraqi Kurdistan. In this way, the spatial formation of combinations and unevenness in capitalist expansion as a process of domination and proletarianization is revealed beyond the commodity production circle and wage-earning labour. In his seminal article on ‘dialectics of labour’, Cohen (1974, 241) described modern large-scale industry turning the worker, formerly chained to the land and rural relations, thoroughly into a proletarian. For him (ibid., 255), the dialectic that spans pre-capitalist society, in which labour is absorbed into pre-established social and economic relations, and modern capitalism, where labour is alienated from the social and material means of rural life, seems to materialize ironically in a socialist future. Seen from this teleological standpoint, the transition from a pre-capitalist

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to capitalist society corresponds to discrete versions of labour. Yet, the ‘freedom of detachment’ (separation of works from their social and material means) that Cohen (1974, 239) sees as a violent but a necessary step for the advance of economy and human consciousness towards modern communalism does not materialize in our context, as wage workers continue to rely partly on the domestic economy and kin-based relations under contemporary capitalism in Iraqi Kurdistan. As Makki (2015, 489) argued, capitalist development ‘operates through the complex contemporaneity of its unevenly combined social forms’. The contemporary global capitalist time and local time are contradictorily combined here and manufacture a plural, uneven, and interwoven temporality rather than transition. As Novack (1976, 106) wrote, industrial production is not the only method of exploitation available to capitalists, and there are diverse methods of ‘extorting wealth from the backward peoples of the earth’. Through the movements of migrant workers between the landscapes of southeast of Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, a combined social organisation emerged, in which previously existing kin-based and domestic economies are combined with more advanced industrial modes of production. In this historical configuration, exploitation and domination move beyond the point of industrial production and exploitation of wage earners into the wider proletarianization and exploitation of non-waged individuals together with their kin and social relations. In Luxemburg’s (2003[1913]) framework, Marx’s primitive accumulation is not only a one-time, one-place phase in the history of capitalist development but also a continuous and integral part of every attempt of capital driven to growth, which De Angelis (2001, 4) termed ‘inherent-continuous primitive accumulation’. In this continuous process, capital penetration articulates with previously existing social relations and results in ‘the creation of spatial unevenness’ where not only devaluation but also struggle and resistance by labour is performed (Kasmir and Gill 2018, 356). In our case, the struggle that these Kurdish steelworkers are launching is directed more against their patriarchal fathers than at their employers. Seen from the company compound, there is hardly any coordinated movement of Kurdish steelworkers, in a stateless terrain with no employment contracts, social benefits, or legal protection under the broader conditions of war with ISIS and processes of political disintegration from the Iraqi state and laws. For young Kurdish men who did not attend university and are unable to find work other than working in agricultural fields with their fathers, leaving the rural village, living in the suburbs of a thriving capital city, and receiving a monthly wage in dollars provides opportunities for being relatively independent and furthering their life goals, which are primarily aimed against patriarchal control. Unevenness is the space that ‘is always in a state of flux, constantly being made and unmade’ (Herod 1997, 9). Under combined and uneven regimes of dom-

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ination, devaluation, and struggles of people, capitalism does not follow a uniform course of evolution but appears in multiple socio-spatial endings. In this process, capital does not only expand geographically into a new landscape but carves its own socio-spatial environment oriented towards accumulation in relation to preexisting social relations and political formations. Certainly, neither becoming labour nor the conscious and unconscious contribution of labour into the making and unmaking of the geography of capitalism are passive processes of capital expansion. As seen in our case, industrial capital and migrant steel labour work together in manufacturing a combined geography of capitalism in which they move and grow around securing a living, albeit one characterised by uneven capacities, tools, and resources.

References Cohen, Gerald A. “Marx’s Dialectic of Labor.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 3,3 (1974): 235–261. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Rethinking Working-class History: Bengal 1890–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. De Angelis, Massimo. “Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of Capital’s Enclosures.” The Commoner 2,1 (2001): 1–22. Eckert, Andreas. “Why All the Fuss About Global Labour History?” In Global Histories of Work, edited by Andreas Eckert, 3–22. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016. Graeber, David. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Herod, Andrew. “From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor’s Spatial Fix and the Geography of Capitalism.” Antipode 29,1 (1997): 1–31. King, Diane E. “The Personal is Patrilineal: Namus as Sovereignty.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 15,3 (2008): 317–342. Kalb, Don. “The Concept of Class.” In Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice, and Inequality, edited by Don Kalb and James G. Carrier, 28–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kasmir, Sharryn and Lesley Gill. “No Smooth Surfaces: The Anthropology of Unevenness and Combination.” Current Anthropology 59,4 (2018): 355–77. Lackner, Helen. “The Social Organisation of the Peasantry: The Economic Basis of Kinship.” In Relations of Production, edited by David Seddon, 159–170. New York: Frank Cass, 1978. Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. Translated by Agnes Schwarzschild. 1913. Reprint, Calgary: Theophania Publishing, 2003. Makki, Fouad. “Reframing Development Theory: The Significance of the Idea of Uneven and Combined Development.” Theory and Society 44,5 (2015): 471–497. Mandel, Ernest. “The Dialectic of Class and Region in Belgium.” New Left Review I/20 (1963): 5–31. Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes. 1867. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 1990. Meillassoux, Claude. “From Reproduction to Production.” Economy and Society 1,1 1972: 93–105.

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Meillassoux, Claude. “The Economy in Agricultural Self-Sustaining Societies: A Preliminary Analysis.” In Relations of Production, edited by David Seddon, 127–158. New York: Frank Cass, 1978. Meillassoux, Claude. Maidens, Meals and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Originally published as Femmes, Greniers, and Capitaux (Parix: Librairie François Maspero, 1975) Mollona, Massimiliano. “Factory, Family and Neighbourhood: The Political Economy of Informal Labor in Sheffield.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11,3 (2005): 527–548. Mollona, Massimiliano. “General Introduction.” Industrial Work and Life: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Massimiliano Mollona, Geert De Neve and Jonathan Parry, xi-xxviii. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Neveling, Patrick. “Export Processing Zones and Global Class Formation.” In Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice, and Inequality, edited by James G. Carrier and Don Kalb, 164–182. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Novack, Georg. “The Law of Uneven and Combined Development and Latin America”. Latin American Perspectives 3,2 (1976): 100–106. Ngai, Pun. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Pine, Frances. “Dealing with Money: Zlotys, Dollars and Other Currencies in the Polish Highlands.” In Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Post-socialism, edited by Caroline Humphrey and Ruth Mandel, 77–97. Cambridge: Berghahn, 2002. Strümpell, Christian. “The Politics of Dispossession in an Odishan Steel Town.” In Contributions to Indian Sociology 48,1 (2014): 45–72. Van der Linden, Marcel. “The ‘Law’ of Uneven and Combined Development: Some Underdeveloped Thoughts.” Historical Materialism 15,1 (2007): 145–65. Vigh, Henrik. “Motion Squared: A Second Look at the Concept of Social Navigation.” Anthropological Theory 9,4 (2009): 419–438. White, Jenny B. Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Katerina Ivanova

From Militancy to Cooperation: Uneven Development and Labour Struggles within the Automotive Industry in East Germany Introduction After the rapid economic growth of the 1990s (achieved at significant social costs), the economy of eastern Germany has been gradually stagnating since the turn of the millennium (Blum 2019). Contrary to the promise of ‘blossoming landscapes’ made by Helmut Kohl after German reunification, East-West unevenness persists in various forms, including but not limited to wage income. Recent pandemic and global economic trends are threatening a second wave of deindustrialisation in eastern Germany. One of the reasons why the crisis might hit workers in the East particularly hard is the lack of corporate headquarters in the East, as most of the enterprises there are merely involved in manufacturing, while headquarters, as well as research and development centres, remain in the West. The situation is aggravated by the weakness of the trade unions in the East compared to western Germany, which is particularly pronounced in Saxony.¹ One line of reasoning for the lagging economy in the East is similar to the rhetoric of ‘hostile environments’ for capitalist development, described by Loperfido and Pusceddu (2018) in the case of uneven development in Italy. The narrative of ‘hostile environments’ in the case of the former GDR emphasises socialist path-dependency, lower productivity and demographic developments as the main reasons for stagnation, often concluding that the gap between East and West will eventually disappear with time and generational change. In this narrative, the lower productivity of former East German enterprises is often projected

1 According to a study by Hans-Bö ckler-Stiftung, published in 2019, Saxony has the lowest rate in Germany of employees paid in accordance with a collective wage agreement (39 %). See https:// www.boeckler.de/pdf/p_wsi_studies_19_2019.pdf. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Christian Strümpell and Michael Hoffmann for their extensive and kind comments on this chapter. I am also thankful to the participants of the virtual workshop “Industrial Labour and Uneven Development” in March 2021 and to my colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) for their helpful comments during the seminar where I presented an earlier draft of this paper. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-006

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onto the workers themselves, as they are constructed as lazy, inefficient and lacking initiative, ‘spoiled’ by the permissive work discipline of the socialist regime. In this chapter,² I would like to dismantle the dichotomous representation of East and West by focusing on their interrelation and putting forward the idea of uneven and combined development. I argue that unevenness, being a ‘lifeblood of capital accumulation’ (Kasmir and Gill 2018: 356), is ingrained in the East-West relationship through processes of capital accumulation. It is due to the relationship of uneven and combined development that the gap between East and West persisted for over thirty years after German reunification and is likely to be sustained in the near future. As argued by Hoffmann and Strümpell (this volume), by returning to Trotsky’s ideas and putting emphasis on combination as well as unevenness, we can explain the differences in the ways a particular mode of production manifests itself in a given society. While focusing on unevenness places my fieldsite within the framework of global capitalism, the focus on combination does justice to local contexts and particular combinations of people, places and pre-existing socio-political relationships in Zwickau. In this way, the interplay of unevenness and combination can help explain various amalgams of social forms, or, as Kasmir and Gill (2018: 357) phrased it, the ‘messy, actually existing social relations that ethnographers encounter in the field’. By zooming in and out from my field site and studying the confluence of local and global processes as ‘critical junctions’ (Kalb and Tak 2006), I strive to uncover the relationship of the local working class to larger fields power. In this chapter, I also show how uneven development on a country-wide as well as a global scale translates into further fragmentation and reproduction of unevenness on a local level. The focus on combination alongside unevenness also accounts for the more active role of labour (trade unions and workers in general) and allows us to investigate how production regimes are negotiated and transformed in the process of labour struggles. Not only capital alone, but also state and labour participate in reproducing unevenness (Kasmir and Gill 2018: 364). Therefore, the strength of the present analysis rests upon its focus on both capital and labour within the process of uneven and combined development. Following Kasmir and Gill (2018: 356), I see Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development as politically momentous. In the following sections, I discuss labour struggles in Zwickau’s automotive industry over time in order to understand the role of labour in the making of unevenness, after which I turn to the ways in which un2 This chapter is based on PhD research focused on industrial labour and social transformations in the eastern German industrial town of Zwickau. It is based on ethnographic data collected during one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Zwickau, including observations and ethnographic interviews with automotive industry workers, white-collar employees and trade union members.

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evenness is experienced on the ground and, finally, I sum up my findings in a brief conclusion.

Automotive workers in Zwickau in the 1990s: militant unionism Zwickau has been a site of automotive production for more than a hundred years. August Horch opened his first car factory in the town in 1904. Later he left the enterprise, and due to a legal fight with the investors, he lost the rights to the original name ‘Horch’ and had to come up with a new name, ‘Audi’. From then on there were two car factories in Zwickau and two groups of automotive workers: Horcher and Audianer. During GDR times, in 1958, the former Horch and Audi plants were united under the name VEB³ Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau. Sachsenring then became famous for the iconic GDR car: the Trabant (Trabi), which was produced up until the 1990s with only slight changes and improvements throughout its development. By 1989, about 11,500 people in and around Zwickau, a town of 120,000 inhabitants then, were employed in the car industry, mostly in the production of the Trabi. German reunification and the collapse of the socialist economy brought hopes for a better future, but also fears of unemployment for many automotive industry workers in Zwickau. Most of my interlocutors in Zwickau confirmed that they had no illusions that the Trabi would be able compete with the Western cars (especially used cars) that were then flooding the market. However, they were hoping that an investment from the West would guarantee the safety of their jobs. As was the case with many other GDR enterprises, the fate of Sachsenring was then in the hands of the Treuhandanstalt, the federal organisation set up for privatizing eastern German state enterprises.⁴ Recent studies suggest that ‘Treuhand’ became the ‘Bad Bank’ of German reunification, as it became a symbol of Western domination and industrial decline (Böick 2020).

3 VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb – ‘publicly owned enterprise’) was the main form of ownership of industrial enterprises in GDR. 4 Die Treuhandanstalt (short Treuhand) – the ‘trust agency’ established in 1990 with the purpose of privatization of East German publicly owned enterprises (VEB).

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The West German Volkswagen had already set foot in East Germany before the Wende ⁵ with a joint venture project with Sachsenring. In 1988, four-stroke engines for the VW-Polo were produced in the Barkas-Werke plant in Chemnitz, and they were also installed inside the Trabant 1.1 model. In 1990, VW announced the beginning of production in one of the former Sachsenring plants in Mosel, a suburb of Zwickau. Amid massive deindustrialization, Volkswagen’s investment in the region was seen as an act of salvation for the Zwickau car industry and its workers. However, apart from sentimental ties, VW’s investment was to a great extent motivated by state subsidies and tax discounts, as well as the pool of highly skilled but cheaper and less organised workers which Zwickau had to offer. Big hopes were associated with Volkswagen’s investment, as the workers wished for a smooth transfer from Sachsenring to VW. Most workers were happy to get a job at VW with its new shiny halls, machines and uniforms, as well as its solid reputation as a good employer. Only a few of the now-retired workers that I spoke with refused to apply to VW out of principal: ‘Zu Kommunisten gehen wir nicht!’ (‘We won’t go to (work for) the communists’). Their main concern was the transfer of old ‘communist’ elites (die Bonzen) into managing positions at VW and their decision-making power in the hiring process. Unfortunately, the hopes of many Sachsenring workers for a seamless transition to VW were disappointed. Whereas Sachsenring employed about 11,500 people before the Wende, the newly established VW plant only employed about 2500 by 1993, and the supplier industry was also growing very slowly. Sachsenring itself was divided into many small firms by Treuhandanstalt, mostly former factory divisions, some of which were bought without any intention to continue production. Some of the former Sachsenring workers employed in such firms had to participate in the demolition and utilisation of their own former workshops. Some of the firms continued to exist, mostly becoming automotive suppliers. Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau (SAZ), the heir of VEB Sachsenring, implemented massive redundancies. By the time the production of the Trabant was terminated in April 1991, the workforce was already reduced to about 1600 workers (Swain 2002). As the anxieties concerning layoffs piled up, the workers organized a protest in order to urge Treuhand to set up an employment and training agency, or in fact to come up with any solution that would provide a safety net for the soon-to-be-laid-off workers. Treuhand, however, was reluctant to waste its funds on such organisation; but after a sit-in protest including over a thousand

5 Die Wende (‘the turning point’) was the process of socio-political change 1989–1990 that led to the end of socialist rule and the turn to parliamentary democracy, as well as to the reunification of western and eastern Germany.

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workers in May 1991, the management of the plant agreed to establish the Sächsische Aufbau- und Qualifizierungsgesellschaft (SAQ)⁶ as a bridge for the workers who lost their jobs at Sachsenring, after which Treuhand also finally changed its position and agreed with the establishment of SAQ. The tension between the workers, SAQ and Treuhand during this process of restructuring cut across the lines of workplace relationships. One of my informants, Frau Fuchs, was appointed to work for SAQ after the Wende. She had formerly occupied a leadership position in Sachsenring and was well connected with both managers and workers. Due to her connections, Frau Fuchs managed to help find jobs for quite a few of her former colleagues and subordinates. Meanwhile, her husband was working for the opposing side – the Treuhandanstalt. Although, as she told me, they managed to separate work and family relations and had no conflicts around the topic between the two of them, communicating with some of their friends and acquaintances became difficult due to tensions regarding the actions of Treuhand, which continued long after Treuhand was dissolved. At the initial stage of the downsizing, SAQ took over 3600 employees and 550 trainees and was considered a successor of Sachsenring’s works council and IG Metall⁷ (Swain 2002). Legally, it was a one-hundred-per-cent Sachsenring subsidiary. The workers who lost their jobs were then re-employed by the SAQ, which offered some training opportunities and provided some assistance in finding a new job. However, jobs were scarce and the trainings on how to better sell your labour and write a good resume were regarded by the workers with a bit of irony. What SAQ did provide, however, was financial support. Most of the workers at SAQ could apply for Kurzarbeit Null ⁸ and continued receiving a salary despite not working for a few months while they looked for a new employment. Some union activists that I spoke to emphasised the role of this early win as crucial for building trust in the union in the region. This was especially important because of the socialist legacy of the union, as in the GDR the unions were seen as purely nominal institutions concerned with the allocation of holiday packages rather than actual representation of the workers’ interests. Ironically, while it was at first meant as a

6 SAQ – Saxon Development and Qualification Company. 7 IG Metall is the German metalworkers’ union, part of the German Trade Unions Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, or DGB). Most of the automotive industry workers and the supplier industry workers are represented by this union. 8 Kurzarbeit is a social security measure, including a reduction of working hours, which is meant to prevent lay-offs and allow companies to keep their employees even in a difficult financial situation. The money for the missing working hours is paid by the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit). Kurzarbeit Null means a complete reduction of working hours to the point of workers have having no work at all.

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bridge into permanent employment, SAQ fully departed from its initial function and now operates as a temporary employment agency for precarious workers. The IG Metall strike of 1993 marked the next milestone in the history of the capital-labour struggle in Zwickau’s automotive sector. VW workers in the suburbs of Zwickau were employed by a Volkswagen subsidiary company, VW Saxony, unlike their western colleagues, who were employed by Volkswagen AG. That meant that while their western colleagues were paid according to a company-level agreement (Haustarifvertrag), Zwickau workers entered the Saxony metal industry collective wage agreement. That is why Zwickau VW workers joined the 1993 strike, which was meant to bring the eastern German metal industry workers (of which the automotive industry is part) up to the level of their western colleagues. According to the collective wage agreement signed in March 1991 between the IG Metall union and the employers’ association Gesamtmetall, wage parity between East and West was supposed to be gradually achieved by the year 1994. However, already in autumn 1992, the employers’ association attempted to break this agreement. IG Metall then called for a strike in spring 1993 in order to protect the agreement (Wentzel 2018). As a response to the strike warning, the management of Volkswagen offered an immediate pay raise of up to twenty-six per cent (as was agreed upon earlier) in the form of a plant premium (an instant pay raise), as an alternative to the slow but steady process of bringing wages up gradually to the western level. This would create a rift between the workers of VW and other metal industry workers, despite the fact that both groups of workers came under the same industry-wide collective agreement, since VW was reluctant to introduce a company-level agreement in Saxony. A large plant with strong union membership like the Volkswagen plant in the suburbs of Zwickau was considered extremely important for the success of the whole strike by IG Metall Saxony headquarters in Dresden. Therefore, the union made sure to communicate to the workers and the works council that the strike would bring better results in the long term than the plant premium offered by VW for an uncertain duration (Turner 1998: 70–71). The strike went on for three and a half weeks and about 2000 out of 2500 workers in Mosel took part in it. The results remain crucial for the workers of the metal industry until today, but back then they were not as great as the workers had hoped for: VW’s offer of a twenty-six per cent pay raise was no longer in place and the full wage parity between the East and the West was postponed from 1994 to 1996. However, the strike meant a lot for the solidarity of the workers, and the level of approval of the strike results could also be observed in the rising IG Metall membership at the VW plant in Mosel – from seventy-four per cent before the strike to ninety-one per cent after (Turner 1998: 72). The workers I talked to who remembered the strike of 1993 described it as a moment of great solidarity, and

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took pride in the fact that it managed to protect the gradual adjustment of wages to the western level, despite its delay until 1996. The 1993 strike as well as other experiences of my interlocutors showed that the first few years after the collapse of socialism were especially difficult for the union and the workers at VW, as they had to employ militant strategies and had to ‘fight for every little thing’, as one of my interlocutors described it. Many of my interlocutors noted that the first few years of VW seemed like a challenge, as the management tested the waters on how much pressure would be tolerated by the workers. Klaus, an active IG Metall member, who became a VW shop floor worker after a few months out of work at the SAQ, told me about the militant unionism of the early years at VW: In 1993 they tried to stop us from striking. They said ‘you shouldn’t strike, we have to work, the customers are waiting for their cars, this will harm the site (Standort)’ and they demonized us [the striking workers]. And they took in people to work illegally so that they could keep working. The western managers drove those replacement workers in their cars through the gates as we were striking. We tried to stop those cars and topple them, but one [bodyguard] held a gun in front of our faces and said: ‘let me through’. This wasn’t fun [kein Spaß] back then, but we did it right.

Paradoxically, I could not help but notice the sense of nostalgia with which the unionists described to me this first militant phase of industrial relations in Zwickau. They also complained about the younger workers, who got everything ‘on a silver platter’ and did not appreciate the efforts of the older generation of workers. Despite the difficulties, there was a strong sense of empowerment behind these struggles, which seems to have disappeared with today’s labour-management relationship, characterised by cooperation.

The struggle for a 35-hour working week An unusual protest from the side of the union caught my attention during my fieldwork in May 2019. A group of IG Metall trustees (Vertrauensleute) gave the chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen, Herbert Diess, a promissory note (Schuldschein) for sixteen million working hours during his visit to the car plant in Mosel. A photo of Diess, standing next to the large-format promissory note but refusing to take it, appeared throughout the media on the next day. Sixteen million was the number of hours which, according to the union, the workers in the East had provided ‘as an advance’, since they had worked three hours per week more than their colleagues in the West since 1990. Those union trustees who were not wearing their working overalls wore red T-shirts with one of the 35-

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hour week campaign slogans ‘35 reicht – keine Zeit für neue Mauern’ (35 is enough – no time for new walls), referencing the gap between the East and the West. The working time equalization campaign goes back to 2003 and represents one of the largest defeats in IG Metall’s history, which marked the union’s first strike failure in fifty years. Although the initiative for the equalization of working times existed since the early 1990s, it constantly fell behind other agendas and was often postponed in the name of crisis and the importance of helping the local economy in transition. However, in light of the 2004 eastern EU-enlargement, IG Metall leaders believed that 2003 was the final opportunity to resolve the working time inequality (Raess 2006). The reason behind this judgement was that the position of the union was in danger of becoming much weaker due to the competition coming from low-wage Eastern European regions. Thirteen years after German unification, the union believed that the time was ripe for ending the inequality between the workers in the East and the West.⁹ The employers, on the contrary, considered that the timing was wrong, especially because of the upcoming EU-enlargement, as they focused on the ability of German workers to compete with Czech and Polish workers, who worked forty hours per week. Therefore, the main arguments against the 35-hour week were the costs and regional competition. A 38-hour week was presented as an advantage of the East, which was supposed to compensate for the productivity gap between the East and the West and make the location attractive for the employers. The productivity gap was also mentioned by Volkswagen management as an argument that it was too early for equalization between the East and the West. The inferior working conditions in the East have also been used to weaken the bargaining power in the West (Raess 2006). As a former politician and the head of Jenoptik, Lothar Späth, famously said, ‘the East is the anti-tank dog [Minenhund] of the West’, emphasising that working conditions in the East and the West would eventually equalize, but not in the way the unions anticipated. On the contrary, workers in the West would have to wave goodbye to their ‘privileged’ position. There was a fear that aggressive employers’ organisation strategies would be tested on the eastern terrain with its weaker union power, and then transferred to the West as well (Artus 2018). The union therefore used the possibility of a worsening of conditions in the West as a driving force to promote support for the campaign among West German workers who already had the advantage of a 35-hour week. However, the actual solidarity from the western German automotive industry works council members was rather questionable (Höpner 2004). Due to the strike

9 ‘Die Zeit ist reif’ (‘The time is ripe’) was the campaign slogan of IG Metall during the strike of 2003.

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in the VW plant in Chemnitz and the strike in Zwickau/Mosel, where some parts for the production of Golf and Lupo in Wolfsburg were produced, the workers in Wolfsburg had to go on Kurzarbeit, as the production stopped for two days shortly before the end of the strike in June 2003. At the meeting of the leading unionists in the car industry on June 23 in Frankfurt, the western German works council members, instead of showing solidarity with the strikers, expressed harsh criticism towards the union, because of the influence that the strike was going to have in the West (Raess 2006). The Saxony employers’ association VSME (Verband der Sächsischen Metallund Elektroindustrie) played a major role in shaping public opinion through the media, which consequently contributed to the strike’s failure. Not only did the association manage to portray the strike as irrational and harming the ‘site’ (Standort), but it also worked out a strategy that ensured the victory of the employers. VSME’s strategy was focused on offering an easy exit out of the association for those companies, which could not withstand the pressure of a strike (Raess 2006). For example, the drive shaft plant GKN Driveline, which also previously belonged to Sachsenring, was under a lot of pressure, since it was on the verge of failing to supply its clients (mostly large automotive producers) if the strike were to continue. Therefore, instead of exerting pressure on VSME to comply with IG Metall’s demands, it left the association rather unceremoniously and introduced a company-level agreement (Haustarifvertrag), a part of which was a gradual reduction of working hours up to 35 by 2009. Although the union members got what they ultimately wanted from GKN, the long-term results of the agreement were far less desirable – with the exit of almost a thousand GKN workers, collective bargaining (Flächentarifvertrag) in Saxony was further weakened and the labour movement became even more fragmented. In June 2003, the president of the IG Metall union, Klaus Zwickel, announced that the four-week strike ended in failure. In 2004, VW Saxony left the employers’ association VSME, as VSME’s aggressive campaign against centralized wage agreements discredited the company in the media¹⁰ and went against the so-called Volkswagen model, based on codetermination and cooperation with the workers’ union. The collective industry-wide agreements have proven more advantageous for large corporations like VW than for small and medium-sized enterprises like GKN. This is also the reason why VW opted against the company-level agreement (Haustarifvertrag) in Saxony, which proved to be rather costly in Wolfsburg. Therefore, in contrast to GKN, which introduced a company-level agreement after leav-

10 In Wolfsburg stehen bald die Bänder still. Manager Magazin, 25 June 2003, https://www.man ager-magazin.de/unternehmen/artikel/a-254526.html (accessed 03.05. 2020).

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ing VSME, VW Saxony (with all three of its plants in Saxony: Zwickau, Chemnitz and Dresden) joined another employers’ association of Berlin-Brandenburg – VME (Verband der Metall- und Elektroindustrie in Berlin und Brandenburg) and stayed committed to an industry-wide agreement. As a result, VSME lost one of its most important members, but also the institution of collective wage agreements in Saxony was further weakened, which drew the line, once again, between the workers of Volkswagen and the others in the region and further ‘disembedded’ the plant and its workers from the local terrain. More recent developments seem to have strengthened the tendency of disembedding already mentioned above. In December 2019, a few months after the end of my fieldwork, another round of negotiations between the employers’ organisation Gesamtmetall and IG Metall (Berlin-Brandenburg-Saxony district) concerning the shortening of working times ended without a result. The IG Metall leaders decided to end the negotiations, as the employers tried to take back some advances from the previous rounds of negotiations. At the beginning of March 2021, the union gave up the goal of a 35-hour week in the East for the time being, while it concentrated on a few selected companies from the automotive industry, including VW Saxony and BMW and Porsche in Leipzig, where the union had enough members ready to strike.¹¹ Meanwhile, the works council of VW Saxony began negotiating for the inclusion of VW Saxony into Volkswagen AG in Wolfsburg, by which it would assume a company-level agreement (Haustarifvertrag) separate from the rest of the industry in the region. What this means for the region and the industry is, first of all, further separation of VW workers from other automotive enterprises and its suppliers and another stage of weakening of the collective bargaining agreement in the East. In the meantime, the gap between the VW workers and the rest of the workers in the region, in terms of both job security and working conditions, continues to grow.

New arrangements: labour-management cooperation Eastern Germany is often singled out among other postsocialist states, as it presumably adopted a more ‘humane’ version of capitalism – the western German so-

11 IG Metall gibt den Kampf um die 35-Stunden-Woche auf. Der Tagesspiegel, 10 March 2021, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/streit-um-arbeitszeit-ig-metall-gibt-den-kampf-um-die-35stunden-woche-auf/26989688.html (accessed 19.03. 2021).

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cial market economy. However, such perspectives can miss the ways that neoliberalism crept into German social and economic life through German reunification in the 1990s (Gook 2018: 44) and through the neoliberal reforms of the labour market in 2003–2005.¹² As Späth’s statement above already indicated, instead of simply assuming the robust industrial relations agreements which existed in the West, the eastern German labour market became a testing ground for more precarious production regimes (Buck and Hönke 2013). With the rebuilding of its economy and its weaker unions, eastern Germany was seen as a perfect laboratory and a tabula rasa for trying out new work practices. From the negative discrimination of eastern Germans as lazy, passive ‘Jammerossis’¹³, the discourse shifted towards constructing East Germans as perfect neoliberal subjects: flexible, innovative and adaptable actors on a labour market, role models for the smug, stagnant and high-maintenance western workers (Buck and Hönke 2013). As the narrative goes, the experience of transformation made eastern Germans develop the competence of dealing with abrupt changes (Umbruchkompetenz). The willingness of eastern Germans to put up with longer working hours, worse working conditions, lower wages and long commutes brought them the reputation of ‘Ostdeutsche Arbeitsspartaner’ (‘Spartans of work’) (Behr 2000). Up until the 1990s, the German automotive industry functioned according to the principles of ‘diversified quality production’, with a focus on stable and highly skilled workforces (Krzywdzinski 2021: 509). There was a hope at the time that the German model could successfully compete with the Japanese model, represented by Toyota’s ‘lean production’. However, the publication of the MIT study ‘The Machine that changed the World’¹⁴ (Womack et al. 1990), as well as the fall of the Iron Curtain and the threat of competition from the lower-wage countries, persuaded the German automotive industry to try out switching to the Japanese model (Krzywdzinski 2021: 511). The production facilities in the former GDR provided convenient terrain for testing these new models. Moreover, by dividing Sachsenring into small units, Treuhand prepared the perfect ground for lean production due to its reliance on external networks among firms, rather than a single large enterprise (Swain 2002). The Opel plant in Eisenach, formerly known for production of

12 In line with the Hartz IV reform, the social benefits for long-term unemployed workers were lowered dramatically. The reform got its name from Peter Hartz, head of the reform committee and a human resources executive at Volkswagen AG. 13 A pejorative term which can be translated as ‘whining easterners’. 14 The study was focused on the future of the automobile and compared the mass and lean production methods. It showed that the European car manufacturers were falling behind their Japanese competitors (namely Toyota) and argued for the superiority of lean production. The study was crucial for the rise of the ‘Japanese model’ in the West.

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Wartburg cars, along with the Volkswagen plant in Zwickau, became the first automotive plants in Germany to implement the new production regime. Lean manufacturing, also known as a just-in-time production, is generally oriented towards minimising waste in a very broad sense, which includes waste of time, space and other resources. Lean management, as an integral part of lean production, includes such aspects as teamwork, process optimisation, standardisation of work, and performance management (Krzywdzinski 2021). Concerning the efforts to optimise processes, sociologists and other researchers were participating actively in the factory in the early stages of lean production, handing out questionnaires and using stopwatches to measure the time taken for specific tasks. One of the workers who remembered the time told me with a sarcastic smile: ‘We didn’t like people like you, the sociologists, that much.¹⁵ If they were measuring something, it meant that they were looking at whose work was not needed anymore or at how we could do things faster and work more intensively’. What is also crucial for the case of the Zwickau automotive industry is that lean production relies on flexible labour. While VW itself does not employ precarious workers directly in Zwickau at the moment, flexibility is often outsourced to the supplier companies, such as those producing seats or wheels. All the additional services, such as the factory canteen, for example, are also operated by external firms. At the VW plant itself, the majority of workers have embraced the variation of the Japanese work organization model that is offered by Volkswagen. Some of them saw continuities between the socialist work organization and the new model, for example, between the teams and socialist brigades. One of the characteristics of the Japanese model is the participation of workers and strong labourmanagement cooperation, an example followed by GM’s Saturn plant. Co-determination (Mitbestimmung) is also one of the main goals for the trade unions and the Betriebsrat (works council). Although the union managed to block some of the unwanted motions regarding lean production, such as the outsourcing of some work processes, the ‘Zwickau model’ of implementing the lean production method was rather successful. IG-Metall is more powerful at Volkswagen than it is, perhaps, in any other company in the region. In the case of VW, co-management, rather than co-determination, is often spoken of to highlight the decision-making power of the works councils, which goes beyond what is legally required from the employer. However, the works council became largely disconnected from the shop floor and took over

15 This particular prejudice towards ‘sociologists’ mostly did not pose a threat for my positioning in the field, thanks to the fact that I had no affiliation with the management and established contacts with the workers through other channels.

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some of the management tasks, as some of the works council members even compared their activities to those of the HR department. One of the things which contributed to this disconnect was the opportunity for more of the works council members to be exempted (freigestellt) from shop-floor work. On the one hand, it was desired by some unionists that the works council members could concentrate fully on representing the interests of the workers. On the other hand, it contributed to the disconnect between the shop floor and the works council. Not only did informal ties become more difficult to establish due to the lack of common activity at the shop floor, but also some shop-floor workers covertly despised the works council members for being ‘idle’ and privileged, and doubted the actual amount of work that they had to do. The scandals involving the top works council chairs at VW as a whole in 2005¹⁶ also contributed to the lack of trust in the works council and in the co-management strategy as such. The strategy of the management, which, after meeting strong resistance from the workers in the 1990s, began to slowly shift to a more peaceful model of coexistence with the union, was coming closer to the one which existed in the West. The younger generation of workers was also less ready to strike and more prone to self-exploitation. And, as some of the unionists told me, they were increasingly more interested in the smaller day-to-day issues than the less immediate, but more substantial problems, such as a 35-hour working week. Volkswagen’s ‘partnership approach’ to labour-management relations was also evident in the ways the more recent protests were carried out. The strikes seemed to lose their militancy and took on more of a performative character. One unionist described the more recent strikes to me as we were standing in the works council room at the VW plant looking out of the window: We dress in red, all of us IG-Metaller, and we stand here at the entrance and we do the fighting. Here is the high building, the management sits there and looks upon us, and sometimes they even come by and we greet each other. So, you are not afraid anymore to take action. Because Volkswagen knows that we do it and since 1993 it is obvious that when we go on strike, we secure our facilities so that nothing breaks. So that when the strike is over, we can go back to work seamlessly. It doesn’t help the employer if his technical systems break down. So you wouldn’t want to harm the employer and yourself and that’s why there is an agreement – we switch off collectively and in an orderly manner, then go fight, make some noise and show that we would be willing to do more and then we go back in an orderly manner to our workplace.

16 The scandal revolved around the top works council representative, Volkert, who was involved in corruption and received personal favours from the HR director Hartz. See Dombois (2009) for a discussion of the implications of the scandal for the co-management model in Germany.

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It seems that, in return for a partnership, the unions have paid their price by taking conflict out of the equation, as the members of the works council become comanagers, often more concerned with the competitive potential of the Standort than with the immediate struggles of the workers. ‘Economic efficiency (Wirtschaftlichkeit) and employment security (Beschäftigungssicherung) are two sides of one coin, these are two equally important goals here at Volkswagen’, said Jens Rothe, the representative of the works council of VW Saxony in the general works council of Volkswagen group.¹⁷ The proximity of the works council and management often sparks dissatisfaction among the shop-floor workers with both the works council and the union. One of my interlocutors, a former VW worker, associated the works council with the elites, who ‘are there for their own interests’ and who have lost touch with the everyday work on the shop-floor and its challenges. He also complained to me about the pressure to become a union member as soon as you become a VW worker: ‘It’s like it was with the Party [SED]. Before you had to be a member of the party and now you have to be a member of the union. Especially if you want to move up in your career’. Partly due to this pressure, the union membership at the VW plant in Mosel has reached almost ninety-eight per cent, but this number might not be representative of the actual support rate for the union at the plant. In the case of the Saturn plant in Tennessee, where a similar labour-management cooperation approach was adopted, the unions were often accused of ‘being in bed with management’ (Kasmir 2014: 222). In Zwickau, similar accusations have been formulated by the workers, as the works council members were accused of becoming the management. These accusations were reinforced through certain associations with the former position of the trade union within the socialist system. This also involves rumours and complaints about family members of the council monopolizing certain job openings. A rather disturbing sign for the union happened in 2019, when for the first time in the elections for the works council a non-member of the trade union received enough votes to participate in the works council. Although he was the only non-union-member among thirty-five works council chairmen, the fact that this happened for the first time since the creation of the works council in 1991 has marked an important shift within the plant and a diminishing trust towards the union. One of the works council members shared with me that ‘everyone knows’ that this non-member of the union is also openly right-wing and is involved with the

17 Cited in an interview in the book Spurensuche – 25 Jahre Volkswagen Sachsen,, released in honour of the 25-year anniversary of Volkswagen Saxony.

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Deutsche Patrioten party¹⁸ in Zwickau. It seems that the anti-elite sentiment of the right-wing populists tends to translate into anti-union rhetoric within the factory, which also reflects political polarisation in the region as a whole. Right-wing movements that strive to construct exclusive solidarity and the challenges they pose for the unions in Germany have been recently discussed by some authors (Dörre, Bose, Lütten, and Köster 2018). A new right-wing trade union, Zentrum Automobil, created in 2009 and based at Daimler in Stuttgart, is also threatening to compete with IG Metall in Zwickau. The union describes globalisation as the ‘virus’, condemns co-management, and has recently supported the Querdenker ¹⁹ movement. At the time of my fieldwork, the representative of Zentrum Automobil spoke on the stage at one of the central squares in Zwickau during Labour Day celebrations and accused the traditional union for being corrupt and betraying the interests of the workers in favour of the management.

Everyday experiences of unevenness The unevenness among VW workers at different plants and locations is reproduced also on a mundane level, not only in times of conflict as in 2003. Among other VW plants, the difference in treatment of the workers in Zwickau and those working at VW in other German locations was rather obvious from the start, even though some of them did smooth out significantly over time. VW Saxony, being a full subsidiary of VW AG, did not automatically assume the companylevel collective agreements (Haustarifvertrag) which applied to the western ‘Konzern’ employees in VW plants in Wolfsburg, Emden, Hannover, Salzgitter, Braunschweig and Kassel. There is another smaller Volkswagen plant in western Germany which does not belong to Konzern (AG) and is not included in the Haustarifvertrag – a plant in Osnabrück. Similarly to the case of Zwickau, VW ‘saved’ the jobs in Osnabrück by taking over the former Karmann manufacturer, which went bankrupt in 2009. However, the plant was rarely mentioned to me by my interlocutors in Zwickau. Rather, the workers emphasised the difference between those working for Konzern in the West and those employed by the subsidiary in Saxony. This is how Wolfgang, an assembly line worker at a Zwickau plant, described it to me: 18 Awakening of German Patriots (ADPM); the party is considered to be a more radical branch of AfD and uses the cornflower as its symbol (a secret symbol of Austrian Nazis in the 1930s). Its leaders are also predominantly former AfD activists. 19 The Querdenker (lateral thinker) movement is a group opposing coronavirus-related restrictions and vaccination in Germany.

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We don’t belong to the seven domestic [inländische] plants. We are always exploited a bit more than they are. They get, for example, a bonus for twenty years of work, we don’t have that. Or the car leasing option for the employees, we didn’t have that. We got it only because once fax came from the West and they made a mistake. It shouldn’t have come to us, but the secretary just took it and hung it on the wall outside of the office. So many employees read it. But then somebody noticed that it doesn’t apply to us and put it away. But the workers who read it went to the works council and asked ‘What’s that? They said it was so, but then suddenly not anymore’. And then the works council negotiated with the management and they had to introduce this here as well. So, it is like everywhere else, they always try to … press … as long as possible. So, you have to fight for everything.

The rhetoric of the eastern German plants still being part of a symbolic ‘Ausland’ (abroad) was repeated by some other VW workers from Zwickau as well. As Wolfgang complained to me, some managers who came from the West received a socalled ‘Buschzulage’ (bush allowance): ‘They receive the Buschzulage, like if they were going to China or England. They consider this here as if it was a foreign country. Still, even thirty years after, some have the contracts like that’. ‘Bush allowance’ was a special bonus payment paid in eastern Germany in 1990s to civil servants from the old federal states in addition to their western salary as an incentive to relocate to the East. My interlocutor, however, used the word less literally, to describe the bonus which VW managers received for relocating and working ‘abroad’, which he found rather humiliating. A competition between the plants also divides the workforce in different locations. Golf production, which is crucial for VW, was located in three plants at the beginning of the 1990s – in Wolfsburg, Zwickau/Mosel and Brussels. Having the plant in Wolfsburg as an internal competitor has weakened the bargaining power of the works council in Mosel. The fear of the loss of jobs in the ‘mother’ plant in Wolfsburg (‘Stammwerk’) caused the slowed-down development of the Mosel II plant and the underuse of its capacities in the early stages of investment. The main motive among the VW managers at the time was: ‘We can’t let the children devour (auffressen) the mother!’ (Hessinger, Eichhorn, Feidhoff, Schmidt 2000; Turner 1998). Apart from the different collective agreements, unevenness is perceived through the lack of control on the local level, since the main decisions are ‘taken in the West’. Although the middle-level management has been increasingly recruited from the locals, the top-management has always been appointed from the West. According to Wolfgang, only a few of them have had a connection to the site (‘Verbindung zu dem Standort’); among them was the first managing director of Volkswagen Saxony, Dr. Gerd Heuss:

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He had a nickname – ‘Papa Heuss’. It shows a very different relation to the people here. When he came back from a work trip to Wolfsburg in the evening, and then the night shift was starting, as you went out of the dressing room, he would start a conversation with you and asked if there are any problems. And he would take care of that always. He was walking around the shop floor and talking to people. Today there is no such thing anymore. … Now they [the managers] are also trying to integrate somehow here, but you notice that they are here just to make a ‘career jump’. They come for a few years, look at what they can optimize quickly, but they don’t think about the long-term planning. Heuss used to say ‘I am not interested in today, I am looking into the future’, and now it seems like the opposite. They come here so that they can get to the Board of Directors someday.

The feeling that ‘all decisions are made in the West’, together with the lack of trust in the local management on site, makes the workers believe that nobody ‘up there’ is committed to the success of the plant in Mosel in particular. Most of the workers that I talked to did not perceive relocation of production as a real threat in the near future – it would hurt the image of the company, and it had invested too much in the site already. However, many perceived the choice of the Zwickau plant for producing exclusively electric cars as ‘outsourcing the risk to the East’ and had a fear that if the demand for electric cars did not grow fast enough, the plant would have to downsize or close down. While for direct VW workers the job guarantee and internal marketing of electric cars have weakened these fears, for the workers in the supplier industry, and for other locals, the fear of phasing out of car production in Zwickau due to low demand exists. Such a threat is taken very seriously, especially considering the lack of other large employers in the region. Although not at the level of VW workers, the VW supplier industry workers are still occupying a privileged position in the region, especially when it comes to wages. As it was in other domains of work organization, many of the suppliers also copied Volkswagen’s partnership approach to labour-management relations. However, there it was often done without a strong union organization and in an even more non-conflictual manner. The cooperation in some enterprises was particularly close: the works council at the VW engine plant in Chemnitz, for example, was opposed to joining the strike of 1993 and was excluded from the strike list by IG Metall (Turner 1998: 75). The idea of a crisis of postsocialist transition has been used by the employers to promote cooperation and a high level of involvement by the workers in the company’s success. This also drew a line between the Volkswagen workers who could ‘afford’ to strike and their suppliers, for whom the danger of harming the enterprise was perceived as higher. The level of labour organization in the supplier companies is always lower than at VW including its subsidiaries. Some of the supplier companies still do not even have a works council. Furthermore, at VW subsidiaries the use of preca-

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riously employed ‘leased workers’ (Leiharbeiter) could ultimately be prevented, but not in the supplier companies. Thus, in 2016, due to the effects of the emissions scandal, which erupted earlier in 2015,²⁰ management at the VW plant in Mosel laid off all six hundred of the Leiharbeiter it had temporarily employed through the firm Autovision GmbH. This harmed the image of the plant’s union, as it failed to protect these lease workers from losing their jobs, and it cost the union many members. Since then, there have been almost no temporary workers at the plant in Mosel, which can be mostly explained by the lack of necessity for them, since there was an excess in the already existing permanent workforce at the plant. The works council at VW also tries to prevent situations in which those working side by side are paid according to different wage agreements and having different working conditions. However, as I was told by some workers, it still happens on some parts of the line, where a few workers inside the VW plant are employed by a logistics company. Most of the supplier companies, by contrast, heavily rely on the flexibility of precarious labour to match VW’s expectations of flexibility and also to discipline and divide its workforces. The ability to strike is also weakened through the use of precarious labour, as the leased workers are not able to strike against the company, where they are not employed (their employer is a temporary employment agency). Whenever a strike happens, however, they are usually also cut off from their workplaces, but in contrast to the regularly employed, they do not receive the strike money (Streikgeld). Instead, they either continue receiving their usual payment or get transferred to another client-company, which is something most temporary workers prefer to avoid, since they would like to preserve the little stability that they have. Despite being ‘in the same boat’ in terms of interdependence in production, workers in the supplying plants are also often covered by a different collective agreement with employers (Tarif ) – if they have a collective wage agreement at all. For example, the workers of the car seat plant are paid according to the textile industry’s collective agreement and not that of the metal and electro industry, as with VW Saxony, which also means that their wages are usually much lower. As mentioned earlier, VW Saxony left the organization of employers in Saxony and joined the Berlin-Brandenburg association in 2004, which also sets it apart from the workers in the supplier industry, as they now negotiate their collective agreements separately. 20 The Volkswagen emissions scandal (Abgasskandal) erupted in 2015, when United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation of the Clean Air Act to Volkswagen Group. The agency had found that Volkswagen had intentionally programmed turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines to activate their emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing.

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Due to the complete dependency of some supplier companies on VW, the workers there can also hardly rely on secure employment. For example, the suppliers producing seats and wheels ‘just in time’ for Volkswagen do not have any other clients. As one temporary worker who was formerly employed at VW and laidoff during the 2015–2016 crisis told me: You can also make good money at a supplier company, and you can get a permanent contract there, so you know you can do it your whole life. But the problem is, the supplier is depending on the producer. And the prices are negotiated every year. So, this year you may have the contract and the next year they might find something cheaper. So, I’m not sure if the permanent job at a supplier company is much more secure [than temporary employment].

The contracts get renegotiated every few years, and the outcome of these negotiations often depend on the ‘grades’ which VW awards its suppliers during the evaluation. As such a renegotiation happened at the time of my fieldwork at a seat-producing plant, the workers were waiting impatiently for the results. When the contract was renewed for the next few years, they breathed a sigh of relief. In this case, once again, the conflict between management and the workers was obscured by the common interests of retaining existing contracts with the client company. While unevenness exists among various groups of automotive and supplier industry workers in Zwickau, it is even more evident when the automotive workers are compared to rest of the population working, for example, in services or care. Whenever VW workers go on strike, the local population of Zwickau is often annoyed: ‘They are doing better than anyone else here! What else do they want?’ With their job security and above-average wages, Volkswagen workers in Zwickau have become a source of envy and bitterness among the locals. One worker from a VW supplier company expressed to me the common sentiment that ‘their problems are luxury problems. They have everything, but people are never fully satisfied. If I had what they have, I would be happy’. A taxi driver also once complained to me emotionally in our conversation as we passed the factory: ‘Where does all the money go?’ He then answered his own question: ‘Not all to the workers … But still … Do you know they get a huge bonus every year? It’s crazy, nobody else gets such a bonus over here. But it’s not because they care about the workers so much, no-no. It’s because their bosses want to evade taxes, so they throw all the extra money at the workers at the end of the year.’ The confrontation between VW workers and other locals is rarely overt, although sometimes it does result in an open conflict. Because of VW’s special car-leasing offer for employees, those who used the company’s leasing would have Wolfsburg registration plates. The three letters WOB on the car plates often provoked hostility among the local population. As I was told by trade

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union activists and some VW workers, your car was much more likely to be scratched or otherwise vandalized if it had these three letters on a number plate. Dieter, another VW assembly line worker, also complained to me about the negative image of the VW workers among the outsiders of the factory: When I started there [in VW] in 1993, I was still proud to work in VW. But at some point, it changed. I don’t know if it’s because we [the plant] became so big … But it’s also about the external image of the VW employee. Some say, ‘I have so much money’, and don’t behave nicely towards others … And somehow it changed. You still like working here, but you don’t necessarily want to mention it to others. Because you get a bit of envy from the people. Because we earn some money, it’s very secure also. Here in Zwickau, everything which is not VW is very different.

At the time of my fieldwork, the average wages in Zwickau were slightly above the average in Saxony and amounted to around €2400 before taxes, whereas a shop floor worker in VW earned around €3400. There were no precarious workers at VW and, as one of my interlocutors noted, VW-workers enjoyed a status almost like the civil servants (Beamter ²¹). Many of the ‘outsiders’ that I met also admitted that the spending of VW workers in the region on ‘cafes and fitness studios’ constituted a crucial contribution to the local economy. Many, however, felt that the privilege of VW workers was not justified. This has also been aggravated by the fact that the factory has become a sort of a ‘closed club’ in the past years. One young VW worker told me that the only possible way to ‘get in’ was to be there from the start through an apprenticeship. Due to the emissions scandal of 2015 and, later on, the transition of the factory towards electro-mobility, the plant has also hardly needed any ‘fresh blood’ and put hiring on hold. The average age of VW workers in Zwickau is 43 years and the number of older workers is rather high. In light of the restructuring of the plant for electric vehicle production, the workers at VW have received a ten-year employment guarantee until 2029. A moderate downsizing is then set to be achieved through retirement and early retirement of the workers. Apart from their privileged position, VW workers (as indeed many factory workers in general) are often disembedded from the rest of the local community through space and time. The plant is located in Mosel, just outside of Zwickau, at the green field site, and most of the workers commute to the plant by car or factory 21 The status of a civil servant, or Beamter, in Germany is considered rather advantageous, especially in terms of job security. As a Beamter, one can hardly get fired, but can be relocated instead. The Beamter also earn rather high salaries due to the fact that they are exempted from social insurance contributions. In return for these advantages, Beamter are expected to show loyalty to the state and are not allowed to strike.

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bus. As the shift ends, the workers hurry back to their cars and drive back home. There is little infrastructure surrounding the factory, no pubs or restaurants, no reason to linger on after the shift ends. Also for some of them, a long commute lies ahead before they are back home again. Such spatial fragmentation facilitates sharper boundaries between factory life and everything else that lies outside factory walls. Apart from the long commutes for some of the workers, the three-shift system also desynchronises the life rhythm of the factory workers and the rest of the local population, which also manifests itself within the family relationships. As my friend and a VW assembly line worker Dieter described it: ‘When my son still lived with us, I almost never saw him. In the morning I slept, then he was out at school, then when I came back from work, he was already in bed. There were always weeks when we had no contact at all, only with my wife. She stayed awake longer and waited for me to return. There was a pause in the relationship every few weeks. And it is the same with friends’. Another of my interlocutors, Jonas, a middle-aged supplier industry worker, complained about a similar thing, although in his circle the consequences of such disembedding were even more serious: ‘It’s hard, one week is one way and another week is different. Many people also commute and don’t spend enough time with their families. The divorce rate here is for sure around ninety per cent. You can ask anybody here at the conveyor belt if they managed to keep their relationships. Almost everybody is divorced’. Most of the automotive industry workers I came in contact with in Zwickau were male. Their wives, some of whom actually also used to work in a factory before the Wende (some even at Sachsenring), mostly transitioned to professions seen as more traditionally female: midwife, physiotherapist, accountant. Many of them were employed as caregivers. Naturally, these jobs were less stable and less well paid than the factory jobs of their husbands, but were seen by the wives as more enjoyable. The adult children of the workers often received higher education and left Zwickau in search for better jobs in Leipzig, Dresden, or in the old Bundesländer.

Conclusion Amid the growing uncertainty and precariousness which followed the postsocialist transformation and deindustrialization in eastern Germany, the VW plant in Zwickau has emerged and remained over the past thirty years an island of relative job security and a decent income. With above-average wages and with more than ninety per cent of the workforce unionized, Volkswagen has positioned its waged workers to become the local ‘aristocracy of labour’. By using the lens of uneven and combined development (Kasmir and Gill 2018), I have shown here how regional

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and spatial inequalities translate into local hierarchies that can be captured within the scope of ethnographic fieldwork. Namely, by offering privilege to selected segments of the working class, VW contributed to the fragmentation of the local working class as well as the maintenance of the lower status of the workers in Zwickau, compared to those working in the West. In line with Kasmir (2018), the aim of this chapter was not simply to describe these inequalities, but to determine ‘how distinctions among labourers are made, unmade, and remade, through ongoing struggles among workers, capital, and the state’. Capitalism is paradoxically thriving on the production of both difference and homogeneity (Harvey 2001). The homogeneity can be observed, for instance, between such distant places as Germany and India, where, despite their different manifestations, similar processes of informalisation/precarisation of labour take place (Mayer-Ahuja 2017). In her analysis of insecure work from a global perspective, Mayer-Ahuja (2017) discusses this tendency towards the erosion of ‘normal employment’ (Normalarbeitsverhältnis) in Germany as well as elsewhere in the world over time. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s discussions about ‘normal employment’ in Germany included issues of decent income and working times, collective wage agreement and representation of interests, more recent definitions of normality are reduced to any working relationship of more than twenty-one hours a week and which includes unemployment, health and pension insurance (Mayer-Ahuja 2017: 275). As Breman and van der Linden (2014: 938) argued, ‘whatever their size and wherever located, the working classes are trapped in a trajectory of exploitation and forced together into a race to the bottom’. However, this common downward tendency must not distract us from the unequal standing of different groups of workers in different places, but should rather draw our attention to the fact that the difference is not always produced by the introduction of neoliberal strategies or increased flexibility, such as in the case of precarious labour. On the contrary, sometimes fragmentation and unevenness are promoted by offering privileges to certain groups who enjoy a ‘Fordist’ style of employment, with higher wages and job security. These types of advantages are then treated by capital as a privilege and a luxury, and not as a right. As argued by Kasmir (2014: 206), ‘capital captured for itself a greater share of the total social product not only through bald and sometimes violent attacks on labour, but also by offering privilege to select segments of the national working class’. The stable employment at the core is made possible by the use of precarious labour at the margins, which furthers exclusive solidarity and polarisation between the groups of workers (Mayer-Ahuja 2017: 290). Mollona (2014; 2004) discusses how a separation is forged within industrial capitalism between formal and informal, skilled and unskilled, casual and permanent labour, between workshop and home/neighbourhood, between production

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and reproduction. This very separation, often embedded in the local cultural constructs and values, is misleading and obscures the interplay and the relations of mutual dependence which exist between these realms. That is why, according to Mollona (2014: 206), the political opposition between business and community unionism is self-defeating. In a similar vein, through the history of automotive labour struggles in Zwickau I have shown how, by using a cooperative approach, the union within VW managed to win certain benefits for the permanent workers of the plant, which further reified the separation between the VW factory workers and the rest and led to weakened solidarity and union power within the regional industry as a whole. In this regard, an approach focused on uneven and combined development has not only theoretical importance but also political potential, which can be put into use by the unions. Eastern Germany, and the highly industrialized Saxony region in particular, has been hit by a sort of ‘double crisis’ (Loperfido and Pusceddu 2019) – globally, the model of capital accumulation and the decline of the Fordist model, and domestically, the uneven development of the East and the West. Both crises, I argue, are closely intertwined, strengthening each other. By focusing on combination as well as unevenness, I have attempted to show how wider global struggles are combined with local histories and contexts, such as, for example, the socialist legacy of the unions. Although the unions have been fighting for more equality between the workers in the East and West, even some unionists are concerned that the results of such equality will mean a lack of incentive to keep production in the East going. Therefore, unevenness and the exploitation of difference become the very premise for maintaining jobs in the region. This way, the unions are confronted with a dilemma of choosing between the universalism of fighting for workers’ rights and the particularism of local interests (Kasmir 2014; Narotzky 2016). The need to stay competitive on the global level then becomes a priority not only for company management but for the unions as well, making poorer working conditions and lower wages a competitive advantage and a necessity.

References Artus, Ingrid. “Tarifpolitik in Der Transformation: Oder: Das Problem ‘stellvertretender Tarifautonomie’”. In Möglichkeiten und Grenzen in Zeiten Der Transformation, edited by Detlev Brunner, Michaela Kuhnhenne, Hartmut Simon, 151–68. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2017. Behr, Michael. “Ostdeutsche Arbeitsspartaner.” Die Politische Meinung 369 (2000): 27–38. Blum, Ulrich. “The Eastern German Growth Trap: Structural Limits to Convergence?” Intereconomics 54,6 (2019): 359–68. Böick, Marcus. “Vom Blitzableiter Zur Bad-Bank.” Zeitschrift Für Politikwissenschaft 30,3 (2020): 473– 82.

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Breman, Jan, and Marcel van der Linden. “Informalizing the Economy: The Return of the Social Question at a Global Level.” Development and Change 45,4 (2014): 920–40. Buck, Elena, and Jana Hönke. “Pioniere Der Prekarität – Ostdeutsche Als Avantgarde Des Neuen Arbeitsmarktregimes”. In Der “Ossi”: Mikropolitische Studien über einen symbolischen Ausländer, edited by Rebecca Pates and Maximilian Schochow, 23–53. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2013. Dombois, Rainer. “Die VW-Affäre – Lehrstück zu den Risiken deutschen Co-Managements?” Industrielle Beziehungen / The German Journal of Industrial Relations 16,3 (2009): 207–31. Dörre, Klaus, Sophie Bose, John Lütten, and Jakob Köster, “Arbeiterbewegung von Rechts? Motive und Grenzen einer imaginären Revolte.” Berliner Journal Für Soziologie 28,1 (2018): 55–89. Gook, Ben. “Backdating German Neoliberalism: Ordoliberalism, the German Model and Economic Experiments in Eastern Germany after 1989”. Journal of Sociology 54,1 (2018): 33–48. Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Hessinger, Philipp, et al. Fokus und Balance: Aufbau und Wachstum Industrieller Netzwerke. Am Beispiel von VW/Zwickau, Jenoptik/Jena und Schienenfahrzeugbau/Sachsen-Anhalt. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2000. Höpner, Martin. “Der Organisierte Kapitalismus in Deutschland Und Sein Niedergang. Unternehmenskontrolle Und Arbeitsbeziehungen Im Wandel”. In Politik Und Markt, edited by Roland Czada and Reinhard Zintl, 300–321. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004. Kalb, Don, and Herman Tak. Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. Kasmir, Sharryn. “The Saturn Automobile Plant and the Long Dispossession of US Autoworkers”. In Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor, edited by Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella. 203–49. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Kasmir, Sharryn. “Precarity.” In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (2018). Accessed April 3, 2021. doi:10.29164/18precarity. Kasmir, Sharryn, and Lesley Gill. “No Smooth Surfaces: The Anthropology of Unevenness and Combination.” Current Anthropology 59,4 (2018): 355–77. Krzywdzinski, Martin. “Lean Production in Germany: A Contested Model” In The Cambridge International Handbook of Lean Production. Diverging Theories and New Industries around the World, edited by Thomas Janoski and Darina Lepadatu, 507–528. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Loperfido, Giacomo, and Antonio Maria Pusceddu, “Unevenness and Deservingness: Regional Differentiation in Contemporary Italy”. Dialectical Anthropology 43,4 (2019): 417–36. Mayer-Ahuja, Nicole. “Die Globalität unsicherer Arbeit als konzeptionelle Provokation.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43,2 (2017): 264–96. Mollona, Massimiliano. “Gifts of Labour: Steel Production and Technological Imagination in an Area of Urban Deprivation, Sheffield, UK”. Critique of Anthropology 25,2 (2005): 177–98. Mollona, Massimiliano. “Community Unionism versus Business Unionism: The Return of the Moral Economy in Trade Union Studies.” American Ethnologist 36,4 (2009): 651–66. Mollona, Massimiliano. “Informal Labour, Factory Labour or the End of Labour?” In Workers and labour in a globalised capitalism: Contemporary themes and theoretical issues, edited by Maurizio Atzeni, 181–209. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

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Narotzky, Susana. “‘Spain is the Problem, Europe the Solution’: Economic Models, Labour Organization and the Hope for a Better Future.” In World Anthropologies in Practice, edited by John Gledhill, 19–39. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Raess, Damian. “Globalization and Why the ‘Time Is Ripe’ for the Transformation of German Industrial Relations.” Review of International Political Economy 13,3 (2006): 449–79. Swain, Adam. “Broken networks and a tabula rasa? ‘Lean production’, employment and the privatisation of the East German automobile industry.” In Work, Employment and Transition: Restructuring Livelihoods in Post-communism, edited by Al Rainnie, Adrian Smith and Adam Swain, 74–96. London: Routledge, 2002. Turner, Lowell. Fighting for Partnership: Labor and Politics in Unified Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Wentzel, Lothar. “Der Streik der IG Metall zur Verteidigung des Stufentarifvertrags in den neuen Bundesländern im Jahre 1993”. Gewerkschaften im deutschen Einheitsprozess: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen in Zeiten der Transformation, edited by Detlev Brunner, Michaela Kuhnhenne and Hartmut Simon, 169–180. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2017.

Andrea Tollardo

Eating Rocks: Multi-scale Confluence of Industrial Expansion and Mobile Labour in an Italian Alpine Extractive Industry I will be 62 tomorrow. We always ate porphyry. Since I was born. —Local ex-quarrymen 3

Introduction This chapter contextualizes the boom and bust of a stone extraction industry in Trentino, a northern Italian province situated in the Alps. Adhering to the approach outlined by Hoffmann and Strümpell in the introduction to the present volume, I will address the question of how uneven development has been and still is continuously combined in the north Italian stone industry by repeatedly zooming in and out of my fieldwork site. I will do so by following the suggestion of the historian Jaques Revel to “play with scales” (1996). When talking about the usefulness of combining micro- and macro-historical approaches, he suggested that, “it is the variation principle that counts, not the choice of a particular scale” (Revel 1996, 19, cited in Zanini 2015, 42). Finding his suggestion useful in clarifying the processes related to uneven and combined development in Trentino’s stone extraction industry, I apply the principle to my case study. It is for this reason that I find it necessary to jump from local to more general dynamics throughout the chapter. Based on research in online and offline archives and on intermittent ethnographic research in Trentino and especially in the five municipalities of Albiano, Baselga di Piné, Cembra, Fornace and Lona-Lases,¹ I show how the stone extraction industry is embedded in broader developments of uneven and combined development operating on various scales ranging from that of the European alpine region down to intra-Italian and up to global ones. I briefly describe the historical context of the region, highlighting how the Trentino region has been affected by uneven development for a long time. I then present how the complex migration patterns that resulted from unevenness inside and outside of Italy contributed to combine uneven relations. I explore the significance of the Trentino stone quar-

1 Fieldwork was conducted in two distinct periods: the first was between October 2015 and February 2016; the second began in October 2020 as part of a PhD research project at the University of Milan-Bicocca and was still ongoing as of this writing. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-007

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ry industry, and particularly the ways that workers have experienced more recent changes in the industry in this region. I argue that the once abundant job opportunities in the industry have become increasingly precarious and scarce and labour has begun to find employment elsewhere, effectively turning the Trentino stone quarry industry for some workers into a springboard for other employment in Switzerland or Germany. For those who stayed, by contrast, the decade-long crisis that began in 2008 translated into a perceived degradation of the collective horizon of opportunities and hopes for a better life. Moreover, the chapter shows how the situation of labour in the Trentino stone quarry industry has not only been affected by “uneven developments to multiple” (Glick-Schiller 2016, 5) but also inhabits a history of the combination of labour. At certain historical junctions, labour in the stone quarry industry has united across divisions, but with little success from a more longitudinal perspective. I will then turn towards a more speculative outlook on the future of the situation of labour in the Trentino stone quarry industry and the ways in which actors in the stone quarry industry foresee future uneven and combined development.

The longue durée of an alpine region: the search for semi-autonomy in a not-so-hidden frontier region The Province of Trent lies in the Northern Italian Alps,² bordering Austria. Its topography is entirely constituted by mountains, and its only densely populated areas lie at the bottom of the wider and better-connected valleys. One of the most important characteristics of the area relates to the varied and complex history of property relations in the Alps. Various instances of what Eric Wolf (1957, 1986) called the “closed corporate community” are widely attested in the whole of the Alpine Crescent. The establishment of autonomous or semi-autonomous communities provided with self-governing rights arose both in opposition to nobles’ rule (especially in Switzerland) or was promoted by the ruling elites all over the Alps³ (Cole and Wolf 1974; Viazzo 1989). In the Bishopric of Trent, these communities took the name of Comunità (‘community’) or Regole (‘rules’) (Nequirito 1995). These communities 2 Italy is divided into 21 regions, each one of them divided into various provinces. The TrentinoSouth Tyrol region is the only one in which special autonomy powers are not granted to the regional entity, but to the provinces inside of it. 3 The reference in the paragraph title is to John Cole and Eric Wolf’s Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (Cole and Wolf 1974).

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used to elect annually various officials with assignments related to the management or protection of undivided properties like higher pastures, woods, or other fragile natural resources (Capuzzo 1985). The area under analysis was characterized by an especially widespread capillarity of these Comunità, which, although modified throughout the centuries, remained in place until Napoleon’s administrative revolution (Nequirito 1995). However, even the new Napoleonic administrative unit of the Comune, maintained by the Austrian Empire, kept in place numerous prerogatives of the ancient Comunità, including the election of officers assigned to similar or identical tasks as before, until the First World War. These communities – including the Magnifica Comunità di Piné, in which most of the municipalities of the porphyry industry were included until the late nineteenth century – were called upon since the Middle Ages to mediate between, on the one hand, the central rule of the Bishopric of Trent and, on the other, the centrifugal drive to self-govern and manage the community’s undivided resources. Different alpine communities and different eras were characterized by various levels of community closure to outsiders regarding access to mountain resources. But for most of them, a detectable normative and institutional continuity is identifiable, if not in the forms – which changed especially after the French Revolution – then at least in the principles of protection from and exclusion of strangers. The area now covered by the Province of Trento roughly corresponds to previous territorial entities provided with governing powers and some degree of autonomy since the late Middle Ages. The two most important entities that exercised power in what is now the Trentino province were the Bishopric of Trent (1027– 1803) and Tyrol County (1259–1667, later under the direct rule of the Hapsburgs). Trento maintained some autonomy under the Tyrol and thus Hapsburg rule due to the institutional importance of the Bishopric and a strict, although ambiguous, tie with the Sacred Roman Empire that for a long time was held by the Hapsburgs. In 1803, after Napoleon’s invasions of German and Italian states, the Bishopric was dissolved, and after a brief annexation to the ephemeral Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy (1810–1814), the territory of the Bishopric was annexed and completely dissolved into Tyrol County under direct Hapsburg rule. The dissatisfaction of the ruling Trentino elites led them to complain and lobby the Hapsburg Empire to grant the area autonomous governing powers inside the new restoration monarchy or even demanding outright independence from Tyrol (Ganz 2001). Even if the Hapsburgs began granting more autonomy based on linguistic rights to the empire’s nationalities after the 1848 insurrections, representation to the former Bishopric inside the Tyrol Diet remained very limited (Garbari 2003). Rising centripetal nationalisms and the delicate balancing of forces inside the multi-nation state of the Dual Monarchy meant that the process of granting autonomies to linguistic mi-

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norities inside the Empire went back and forth between repression and appeasement. An important aspect of Hapsburg’s rule in Trentino regards the economic policies it promoted during the nineteenth century, in particular the technical agricultural modernization programs and the financing of structures and public works to improve coordination and production efficiency. Sources of access to the market and to money spread among a propertied peasantry dedicated to mixed cultivation between subsistence and market goods and also improved commercial integration inside the Empire (Lorandini 2005). In the meantime, the build-up and expansion of nationalist tensions played an important role in triggering the later Austro-Italian conflict in World War I. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, unsatisfied by the Hapsburgs’ frustration of their autonomist aspirations, Trentino’s bourgeois-liberal population, along with a minority of socialist Italian nationalists, coalesced in the Irredentist movement already diffused in Italy. The movement sought to complete national unification by the annexation of what Italian mythological nation-building discourses called the irredente (‘unredeemed’) cities of Trento and Trieste. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the linguistic cleavage, pan-Germanist sentiments diffused in the German-speaking part of Tyrol, to the point that some even proposed Germanizing all of the Italian-speaking population of Trentino (Gatterer 1986). World War I ended with the annexation of Trentino to Italy, cutting off its previous source of currency, which disappeared because the entire empire’s internal market collapsed together with the state. Although not the main front, the province was a war zone and experienced extensive destruction, requisitions, and temporary deportations by both the Austrian and the Italian states. Both the war and the post-war recession generated a profound economic crisis in the area. On top of that, a financial crash of the regional banking institutions was caused by the change of currency and the breakdown of commercial ties with Central European and Austro-Swiss capital (Leonardi and Pombeni 2005). The nationalist and autonomy question completely reversed after the annexation of Trentino and the part of Tyrol south of the Brenner Pass, now controlled by the Italian state. The new Italian region included Italian-speaking Trentino in the south and a slightly less populated area of German-speaking South Tyrol. Contrasting, although allied, fascist ideologies also played a crucial role in the subsequent history of the Italian fascist colonization of South Tyrol cities, with industrialization projects that called in Italian workers to the detriment of Tyrolean ones, while also neglecting Trentino’s economic recovery. Later, Nazi Germany showed a special interest in the area, first with a plan to relocate South Tyrol inhabitants to the Reich and to the newly German-colonized Eastern Europe (Euregio 2013),

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and then by the brief direct control by the Third Reich of Trentino and South Tyrol in the Alpenvorland Operational Zone (1943–1945).

Long-term continuities of Italian capitalism: the use of migrant labour from early liberalism through fascism to the trente glorieuses Zooming out of the region and adopting the Italian national scale, it seems now relevant to point to the recent historical research on Italian internal migrations. It reveals how during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Italian agricultural bourgeoisie used and promoted labour mobility for their purposes (Gallo 2012). Seasonal labour migrations inside of the Italian peninsula date back to at least the early modern age, and the phenomenon probably constituted the widest and most intense of its kind in Europe until the turn of the twentieth century (ibid., 16; Lucassen 1987, 117). The post-unification Italian political and economic élites made use of these trends to enhance competition between workers and to contrast the power and claims of the emerging local leghe ⁴ of agricultural labourers. In this context at the turn of the twentieth century, the main source of social conflict in the vastly predominant agricultural sector assumed the form of labour mobility, opposition to outsiders, and physical defence of one’s perceived own territory (Gallo 2012, 45–7). The position of the leghe and socialist organizations in relation to these trends soon became the unification of all agricultural labourers, promoting since the last decade of the nineteenth century mass strikes and a state-wide federation of agricultural workers (ibid.). The profound Italian economic and political crisis that followed World War I precipitated social conflicts and led to the so-called biennio rosso of 1919–1920. Owners’ increasing use of migrant labour and disregard of mediated deals led to strikes, land and factory occupations, and violent clashes of owners’ thugs with workers in both the rising industrial centres and the still predominantly agricultural production areas. It is in this context that agricultural owners doubled down, organizing violent squads (squa-

4 Lega (sing.) literally means ‘league’. Nineteenth and early twentieth century leghe (pl.) were mostly locality-based left-wing unions of agricultural workers, mainly located in the Po Plain in the north and in the southern fertile plains. Not to be confused with the political movement of the Leghe that emerged in the 1980s and later coalesced in the Lega Nord Party. The latter were right-wing separatist, xenophobic, and anti-migrant movements created and supported by the middle to lower bourgeoisie and professionals in the north of Italy.

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dracce) that soon came to constitute an important part of early fascism (ibid., 55, 89). Since the unification of Italy in 1861 and until the 1950s, ruling élites despised the idea of fusing the rural population entirely to the monetary wage relationship (ibid., XVI). The above-mentioned use of previously widely-established migratory patterns, in fact, predominantly involved agricultural work. Industrial policies of liberal and then fascist Italy were instead focused on avoiding rampant metropolitan industrialization, instead favouring continuity with conservative and traditionalist agricultural ways of life through the use of part-time and seasonal peasant-workers. This strategy was pursued in order to contain wages and social conflicts, in a fashion very similar to the case outlined by Mandel (1963) for the Flanders region in Belgium. At the same time, this strategy also made it possible for an industrial latecomer such as Italy to contain the initial expense of industrialization with a scarcity of capital, thanks to the exploitation of systems of social reproduction that did not require finding the means of subsistence on the market and therefore could provide sufficient wages for the purpose (cf Narotzky and Goddard 2017; Smith 2022). Preference was thus granted to industries such as small textile mills, light steel factories, or small mining centres (Gallo 2012: 68) that could be decentred in small and mid-sized cities, and to artisanal productive activities that mostly drew the surrounding agricultural population into precarious and often seasonal work, instead of attracting long-range immigrants into stable employment. In fact, contrary to the Flanders case, the intention in Italy was to favour the establishment of industries in smaller urban centres characterized by a surplus of agricultural labour (Gallo 2012, XVI, 67; Bätzing 2005; Ghezzi 2016), and not to favour mobility with cheap transportation systems as in Belgium (Mandel 1963, 14). During the fascist period (1922–1943) a policy of promoting artisanship, unparalleled in most industrialized countries, continued the process that began during the liberal period of small industrial production (Longoni and Rinaldi 2010; Carmignani and D’Ignazio 2011; Ceccagno 2017: 46). Migrant agricultural work continued to be managed by agricultural owners’ employment networks. But a new layer of fascist bureaucracy was added. Fascist bureaucracy compiled lists of formally fascist and client workers for employers to choose from, while completely abolishing the leghe, socialist organizing, and trans-local labour federations. By repressing collective labour and their organizations, fascism subordinated geographical labour mobility to formal loyalty towards the Fascist Party. The translation of class conflict into geographical conflict was one of the main tasks of the newly established fascist union established during the dictatorship. This was done through constantly stressing divisions between localities and promoting a supposed defence of local workers by the bureaucratic separation of mobile and non-mobile

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labour (Gallo 2012, 98; D’Attorre 1998, 132). The fascist ideological link was provided by an idealized image of a harmonious but strongly hierarchical countryside, organically bonded to one’s birthplace. This ideal excluded, in principle at least, the possibility of migrating out of an Italian countryside characterized by increasing relative overpopulation due to the slow but steady increase of agricultural mechanization (Gallo 2012, 92–4). The already diffused concept of the foreigner as disruptive of labour arrangements and of the precarious ways of accessing the means of subsistence was thus depoliticized and deprived of its complexity of class relations and became internalized in a corporatist and patriarchal understanding of the locality. In continuity with the policies of the previous liberal period, various laws were thus produced to strongly limit the influx of immigrants into all Italian cities, most explicitly in the anti-urbanization law of 1939 (ibid., 129–130). The law was not abolished until 1961. At the end of fascism and of World War II in 1945, it was first even extended to include all Italian municipalities. But the law could not contain the enormous migration wave that generated what has been called the Grande Migrazione Interna (‘Great Internal Migration’) that began soon after the end of the war. Enthusiasm for the end of the war, an urgency to leave places of extreme poverty, and the desire to reactivate pre-existing migratory patterns, fuelled by collective desires and expectations of prosperity, all contributed to breaking down the barriers in an overpopulated countryside that began to shed an enormous amount of population (ibid., 148). One-third of all Italian municipalities lost population towards both internal and external destinations during this period (ibid., 143). The great shift of Italian demographic distribution in productive sectors thus happened late compared to other industrializing European countries, and only after the Second World War, during what Eric Hobsbawm called “the great leap forward” of world economy of the post-war years (1995, 18, 222). Mechanization of Italian agriculture increased nearly tenfold from 1938 to 1963 (ibid., 148), while the industrialization of the so-called triangolo industriale (‘industrial triangle’) of Milan, Turin, and Genoa in the north-west exploded. An estimated total of four million Italian peasants, primarily from the southern regions but also the economically depressed north-east and the alpine municipalities all over the mountain range, abandoned rural areas to migrate to Italian cities. The anti-urbanization law effectively divided the workforce into legitimate workers and blackmailable migrant illegal workers (clandestini), these again used by capital

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to depress general wages, similarly to the pre-fascist agricultural epoch (Gallo 2012, 157).⁵ After the war, the Democrazia Cristiana party (Christian Democracy, or DC) was soon voted into power and remained in parliamentary majority until the party’s demise in the early 1990s. For more than a decade, DC rule was decidedly rightleaning, so much so that in 1960 it even joined in a brief alliance with a direct descendant of the former Fascist Party, the MSI. It is against this backdrop that the continuity with the previous fascist period, in terms of internal migrations and attitudes towards urbanization and the breaking down of traditional social relations, acquires intelligibility. The tectonic changes occurring in Italian society fuelled widespread protests in response to the blatant fascist continuities of the 1960s DC-MSI government. Social unrest caused the government’s fall, a shift to the left inside of the DC Party, and the beginning of two decades of social protests and conflicts. In 1961, immediately after this turn to a centre-left style of government, the anti-urbanization law was abolished, and a strong push towards the social-democratic period of Italian history effectively began. Within this different background with respect to the 1950s, a second phase of the Grande Migrazione Interna is clearly discernible between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Characterized by a greater political awareness of especially southern Italian migrants, more solid migratory networks, and a higher level of education than the first phase, the second phase caused migrations to peak again, before an almost total collapse in the second part of the 1970s (Gallo 2012, 184–186). The exhaustion of migration fluxes was influenced by numerous factors. First was the near depletion of the surplus population employed in agriculture, and then the progressive convergence of economic and wider material and social conditions between the north and the south of Italy. The Italian context, in fact, shows one of the starkest examples of geographical polarization among the early industrial countries (Eckaus 1961; Schneider 1996; Berti 2008, 16, 30; A’Hearn and Venables 2013; Felice and Vecchi 2015; Gabbuti 2020; Ashman 2009). It has been demonstrated that post-war internal migrations were clearly related to the economic conjuncture of north-western Italy (Berti 2008, 20), and the slowing down of the extraordinary growth rate of that area from the 1950s to 1970s meant a reduction of incentives to leave southern and north-eastern regions. Homogenizing processes began to take hold during the leap forward thanks to both the social-democratic shift of the DC and (especially) the pressure of collective labour. Ambitious infrastructural projects and new industrial facilities opened in

5 This is quite similar to the marginalization of migrant labour through the hukou system in contemporary China (Fang 2018).

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the south of Italy. Educational infrastructures diffused throughout the country alongside the rise of education quality (Berti and Zanotelli 2008, 37–38). In 1969 the so-called gabbie salariali (‘wage cages’), which formalized structural geographical labour inequality by fixing wages to the regional cost of living that was much lower in the south, were abolished, causing an (at least formal) equalization of wages. The anchoring of wage increases to national inflation in 1975 created the conditions for an even greater wage homogenization process throughout the country (Pirrotta and Zen 1992). Finally, the creation of a national health system in 1978 helped to equalize and spread free access to healthcare and health and sanitary conditions in the workplace. Reaching these goals contributed to the consciously pursued objective by organized labour to homogenize Italian workers’ conditions and rights, thus reversing the long-term production of unevenness and taking advantage of it by capital. Moreover, it seems relevant to point out how the post-war shift in the global balance of power towards the United States meant that the application of the Marshall Plan in Italy privileged a focus on productivity and Catholic and paternalistic corporatism that favoured Catholic unions and explicitly opposed socialist and communist ones (D’Attorre 1985; McGlade 1996; Coli 2002; Sacchetto 2004; cf. Blim 1990; Kalb 2017). This fact combines on the intra-Italian scale with the fact that, during the second half of the twentieth century, the Italian political landscape has been characterized by a stark polarization between two geographical nuclei of political-ideological strongholds. These were the red Italy zone in the centre-north,⁶ where the communist and socialist parties held a vast majority of votes, and the white Italy zone in the north-east,⁷ where the DC party ruled without contenders. The south and the north-west (where the triangolo industriale lies) were instead characterized by either a balance between the two sides or leaning one way or the other in an unstable manner (Diamanti 2003). This geographical ideological divide remained impressively stable for more than fifty years, and inside of this arrangement of forces, the Trentino region in the north-east of the country has always firmly belonged to the ‘white’ area. It is for this reason that the constitution in the post-war years of a National Committee for Productivity under the Marshall Plan, where Catholic paternalistic principles found application, have been particularly efficacious in north-eastern regions (Sacchetto 2004). Even if Marshall Plan money was hardly used at first in Trentino, an early example of these policies can be found in a training tour to the United States organized by the 6 Umbria, Tuscany, parts of Marche, Emilia Romagna. Interestingly, these were the areas where the above-mentioned socialist agricultural organization took place during the pre-fascist liberal period. 7 Friuli Venezia Giulia, Veneto, Trentino-South Tyrol, and most of Lombardy, excluding Milan.

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regional section of the CISL Catholic union in the summer of 1953.⁸ However, these policies and trends actually became more relevant and bore fruit later, when a shift from the highly industrialized north-western regions to the small-scale industrialization of central and north-eastern Italy took place at the end of the trente glorieuses.

Zooming in: the conditions for the creation of a stone extractive industry It is now time to zoom in again on the five stone-extraction mountain municipalities of Trentino. The porphyry stone extraction sector developed from deposits of stone slabs regulated as a public good for the use of the inhabitants of the previous Magnifica Comunità di Piné, in what is now central-eastern Trentino. These deposits were used for the collection of material suitable for roofing or building walls. It was only at the end of the 1920s and after Italy’s annexation of Trentino that this asset began to be exploited in a capitalist and industrial way by construction companies from outside the region. The profound economic crisis of Trentino after World War I pushed the new administration to respond by implementing a policy of incentives and attraction of companies from the outside. These policies were in line with the economic programs of late-liberal and then fascist Italy discussed above and were aimed at completing the reconstruction and allowing for economic recovery. Patchy industrialization of the kind discussed above ensued in Trentino’s wide and well-connected Adige Valley floor. External companies were interested in the use of cheap hydroelectric power coming from the newly built dams, and also in the positioning of Trentino in the main trans-alpine commercial route. But the fascist interest in the Italianization of South Tyrol north of Trentino diverted most of the resources for the region to the industrialization of its northern Germanspeaking mid-sized and small cities (Bonoldi 2005, 459) to favour the movement of Italian workers there. Against this background, the first stone quarries in Trentino’s porphyry municipalities were contracted to construction or mining companies from Turin and Milan with long-term contracts, in some cases up to thirty years. These companies employed local workers dedicated to the above-mentioned mixed agricul-

8 I.P. ‘Son tornati dagli Stati Uniti gli operai mandati dalla CISL.’ L’Adige, July 30, 1953. Talking about the entirety of the north-east of Italy, Sacchetto (2004, 194–5) shows how this approach towards industrial re-education in an anti-communist perspective has been explicitly engineered by the US government, Italian capitalists, and the CISL union.

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ture that returned to poor subsistence crops after the post-war crisis. The loss of sources of money by these propertied peasants, whose cash crops were no longer profitable, pushed many inhabitants of the porphyry area toward seasonal piecework-wage jobs and harsh working conditions in the stone quarries. This industrial period was characterized by high labour intensity and very little mechanization, while the industry quickly came to employ about one thousand local workers (Angheben 1994b) in an area inhabited by a total of just over eight thousand people.⁹ The Italian reconstruction after World War II and the economic boom of the 1950s pushed the construction enterprises to strongly increase their activities. In 1955, the industry nearly doubled the 1930s median levels of production and employment, which reached two thousand workers (ibid.). The end of the war, the return of democratic and community decision-making, together with an increase in production, employment, and labour intensity caused an increase in conflicts between workers and the local population on the one hand, and external extractive companies that exploited the local population and plundered a community resource on the other. Even though moulded in forms of struggle influenced by socialist and communist movements in the rest of Italy, social anger was catalysed more by the previously existing ideals of a community enmeshed in organicist Catholic subsidiarity autonomously managing the collective property than those of class conflict. Indeed, in the five municipalities of the porphyry industry, nearly eighty per cent of votes went to the DC party during the 1950s. This same trend is in fact applicable to all of the Province of Trento, almost invariably characterized by a very strong adhesion to parties linked to Catholic institutions (Vareschi 2006). This context, combining the habit of access to market money by work in small family properties on the one hand and undivided and collective ownership managed through corporatist institutions on the other hand, made the process of building a local extractive bourgeoisie easier when the external companies departed from the area. With the increase in conflict, the large external companies sought to disengage from the direct exploitation of the quarries. They promoted, instead, the creation of cooperatives mostly modelled on Catholic associations of direct workers who would then sell the material to the large companies that monopolized the porphyry stone market (Ferrari and Andreatta 1986). When the thirty-year contracts for the exploitation of the most important quarries expired in 1963, municipalities strongly interested in regaining possession of the common good reduced the duration of the concessions, exercising a clear preference for local companies. This period led to a race for the best lots by former local workers and a strong in-

9 Data retrieved from the 1931 ISTAT census for the municipalities of Albiano, Cembra, Fornace, Lona-Lases, and Piné.

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dividualization of quarry work, while the product continued to be marketed through the large construction companies. The period saw some uncertainty in the sector, with production and employment somewhat stagnating after the peak years of the mid-1950s (Angheben 1994b). A phase of selection and concentration of micro-companies ensued, in which those who managed to appropriate the best lots and market the product under more advantageous conditions ended up absorbing other lots, especially when, in 1970, the sector entered a new boom phase.

The formation of a local bourgeoisie: mechanization, the surge of foreign demand, and the combination of multiple scales of unevenness The so-called golden years of capitalism (Hobsbawm 1995, 295) came late to Trentino. In fact, it was only in the later years of the 1960s that the Province of Trento began to experience its economic ‘leap forward’ (ibid., 18, 222), making it reach the average per capita income of the rest of northern Italy – which had been more advanced up to that moment – only in 1981 (Bonoldi 2005, 468). Trentino’s early industrial complexes remained limited to well-connected and easily accessible urban sites in the main Adige Valley floor from the 1930s to the mid-1960s. In fact, after World War II, outside capital even lost interest in the province, preferring instead to concentrate in the triangolo industriale, while technology levels and fixed capital were left to stagnate (ibid., 472). Moreover, South Tyrol, weary of industrial policies used as instruments by the previous fascist government, opposed industrialization of the region and projects heading in that direction (ibid., 474). A special autonomy for the region was granted in the post-war Italian Constitution of 1948 due to delicate international negotiations with Austria regarding the administration of South Tyrol. However, up to 1972, the special autonomy remained unfulfilled in practice, both due to the already mentioned strong disagreements with the more developed and already industrialized province of South Tyrol and to conservative interpretations by the central government in Rome. A second version of the autonomy was thus granted in 1972, which completely separated the two provinces. The availability of new resources and planned economic projects that reached more peripheral valleys than the Adige Valley, combined with the general advance of the economy of the north-east of Italy of the same period, rapidly reversed the trend in Trentino’s economy of lagging behind. Various programs promoted expanding and investing in already existing industries and providing

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generous financial incentives for new ones¹⁰ (Bonoldi 2005, 476). These programs also focused on expanding the service sector, both in the continually growing mountain tourism, as in the public services. Later, employment in the two service sectors managed to compensate for the general reduction in the industrial sector during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1970, porphyry quarry production doubled in just one year (ibid.), thanks to the beginning of strong demand from abroad on the one hand, and to the first real mechanization of the industry on the other. The advent of the first stone dicing machines and the first diamond saw stonecutters, together with a generalized extension and improvement of the transport infrastructure that took place in the previous decade, greatly improved hourly productivity. The new roads allowed both the transport of machinery to the quarries as well as larger volumes of material to be moved from the mountains to the north-south route of the Brenner railway and motorway¹¹ in the nearby valley floor of the central Adige Valley. In the 1970s, local enterprises thus began to sell porphyry stone on European markets at increasingly attractive prices in exchange for foreign hard currency. By the end of the 1970s, the export share reached almost seventy per cent (Federazioni 1980, 24). This happened also thanks to Italian currency devaluation policies aimed at maintaining competitive prices on external markets while allowing Italian industrial entrepreneurs to access valuable currencies and shielding them from rampant inflation of the lira during the whole second half of the twentieth century. The conditions for an extremely rapid accumulation of capital by the emerging bourgeoisie were thus all in place. The new enterprises (about one hundred) that came out of the selection process of the 1960s thus became stabilized and organised on an almost lineal descent base, similarly to family firms in the Italian silk industry studied by Yanagisako (2002; 2013; 2019). The 1970s productive expansion of Trentino therefore attracted the first internal immigrant workforce, which in this period was composed of the second phase of the Grande Migrazione Interna. In 1979, about one-third of the workers in the porphyry municipalities came from the south of Italy (Federations 1980: 6). In this decade, even though located in the ‘white Italian’ zone, a new wave of protests fomented by the wider Italian social unrest outlined above developed not only in the areas of the previous Fordist factories of the main valleys of the province (Bonoldi 2005, 477), but also against the nascent extractive bourgeoisie of the porphyry area, thanks to the influx of unionized and radical migrant workers. Unionization

10 The incentive programs began in 1960, but they gained steam in the following decade. 11 The motorway was completed in 1968, almost exactly one century after the completion of the railway, the first direct railway crossing of the Alps (Bätzing 2005, 174).

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expanded throughout the province, including the stone quarries of Trentino. The effects of these conflicts were seen as early as 1973, with the obtaining of the first provincial collective agreement for the extractive sector. Wages increased drastically both in the whole of Italy and specifically in the porphyry extractive industry, where they even surpassed wages in the industrial complexes of the lower valleys and the north-west of Italy. Another zooming out is again necessary, though. In Italy, the 1970s were characterized both by the peak of workers’ struggles (especially in the triangolo industriale) and, since the second half of the decade, by the beginning of a shift of industrial capital from the north-west (under attack here by increasing labour conflictuality) to the more politically appealing ‘white Italy’ in the north-east of the country. Stagnation and decline in big industrial complexes (especially in the north-west, but also throughout Italy, including Trentino since the 1980s) gave way to a contextual rise of a new kind of industrialization in north-east and central Italy that has been called Terza Italia (‘Third Italy’) (Bagnasco 1977; Blim 1990; Ceccagno 2017), together with the rapid increase of services at the expense of industry. Composed of small and medium-sized enterprises, the new small-scale industrial surge, especially in the north-east, made heavy use of low-wage, non-union workers, often based on kin exploitation and in a social landscape that was very receptive to the above-mentioned corporatist and pro-Catholic industrial policies of Marshall Plan derived institutions. This new kind of low-wage industrialization increasingly exploited the loopholes on labour rights that were often only valid for the big employers of the industries in the north-west, while it also pushed to increase undeclared and illegal work. Small-scale industrial production and capital thus increased in the whole of the north-east of Italy, including Trentino and the porphyry stone industry. This acted as a sort of ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey 1982) when the previous use of geographical unevenness by capital through internal migrations was not usable anymore due to the above-mentioned exhaustion of migrations, politicization of migrants, and homogenization of conditions throughout Italy. An increase in employment levels in the Terza Italia area – previously much lower than the rest of the north-west of Italy – ensued, calling for both old (but waning) internal and new international immigrant workers. Immigration policies in Italy from the 1980s on unsurprisingly retraced the logics showed above for internal migrations. ‘The introduction of labour-power with reduced contractual power in the lower sectors of the work hierarchy allowed for a net reduction of costs for companies. … the substitution of centralised productive models with flexible models of delocalization granted a new economic role to minor cities … and made Third Italian areas jump on top of the migration increase’ (Gallo 2012, 196–197).

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Zooming in again, in Trentino, the application of provincial legislative autonomy also in the field of mineral resources led to the promulgation of a provincial law that aimed at regulating the disordered and fragmented mining sector of the province in 1980. Despite its aims, the law had a paradoxical effect. It ended up crystallizing the power relations existing in the porphyry area at the time, by confirming through law the de facto perpetual access of local stone entrepreneurs to publicly owned quarry lots and formally closing the period of shorttime concessions. Much of the restrictions and regulations introduced with the law remained almost completely unfulfilled due to counterweights and quibbles that left wide discretion to entrepreneurs and municipalities (Gottardi 2007), which, in any case, were almost all governed by the porphyry entrepreneurs and local DC branches or the right-wing autonomist party. The ultimate de facto appropriation of the stone sources by the entrepreneurs and the continuous rise of internal and especially foreign demand pushed company owners to invest in new means of production, mainly for movement of material, to prepare for the next phase. After a few years of slight reduction, employment in the sector again increased from the second half of the 1980s. Meanwhile, from the end of that decade Italy definitively transformed from a country of emigration to a country of immigration. A new entry into the extractive area of workers from outside was thus rendered possible. Between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the first immigrant workers from the Albanian-speaking north-west of the Republic of Macedonia – later also from North Africa and, since the 2000s, a few from China – arrived in the mountain valleys of an apparently peripheral area. Yet, as in the period of internal immigration in the 1970s, the impossibility of fully controlling the “living carriers” of labour (Bellofiore 2012, 24) demanded by the porphyry entrepreneurs led to another phase of conflict during the new expansive period of the 1990s. A convergence between local workers who were socialized to the conflict between labour and capital from the previous generation that radicalized in the 1970s, and the arrival of foreign workers, precipitated a phase of struggle against the imposition of a regressive collective agreement. We said, it should be us [local workers] that … should make a path of mutual knowledge [with foreign workers], of awareness, of awareness of what’s the work here, the sector, the job contract, right? We proposed even Italian lessons, we helped them read the paycheques. … These people of the first migratory wave were willing to give themselves regarding the [working] conditions, no? I would say that they surely understood better than our local workmates, no? The necessity not to bend under certain blackmails, etcetera, no? If you want, they were the most unionized workers of the sector. When we did union meetings it was them who gave energy to these moments, no? … Maybe more the Albanian-Macedonians, but, es-

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pecially at the beginning, there was a good energy also from workers from Morocco and North Africa. (Local ex-quarrymen 1 and long-time militant in workers’ struggles)

The struggle was partially successful with the signing of the 1998 contract, which led to better contractual conditions than those proposed by trade unions and owners. But the process of restructuring the labour market, both in the sector and in the rest of Italy, caused this victory to be already overcome by the rapid expansion of fake artisanship and self-entrepreneurship contracts that were exempted from collective agreements and of illicit labour and precarious employment. In the meantime, in fact, the gradual global rolling back of workers’ rights began to sweep through Italy starting in the 1980s and especially with the acceleration of the beginning of the 1990s. In 1994 the Lega Nord party rapidly rose to the majority in many ‘white Italy’ regions now orphaned by the demise of the DC party. New laws pushed by the Lega party in centre-right coalitions granted wide incentives and tax cuts to enterprises, particularly favourable to the small and middle enterprises of the north-east and the Terza Italia entrepreneurs (Fana and Fana 2019) that composed a good part of the Lega. In the Trentino porphyry sector, unlike during the 1950s and 1960s, the new wave of self-employed or organized micro-enterprises no longer had direct access to the resource, which remained firmly in the hands of the entrepreneurial families that had emerged from the earlier period. Rather, they were totally dependent on the purchase of raw materials from the parent companies in the hands of the entrepreneurial families. These outsourced the central stages of processing to the self-employed and the micro-enterprises, which in turn then sold the finished products back to the parent company, according to prices imposed by the latter. The continuous increase in porphyry stone prices¹² encouraged the competing enterprises to increase the extraction, while the personnel of immigrant origin was pushed towards the most outsourced, flexible, and irregular areas of the sector (Gottardi 2007, 69). Similar to the previous phase of Italian migration, from the end of the 1990s to the beginning of the 2000s, between one-third and one-half of the workforce was made up of immigrant labour, depending on the estimates and processing stages. In the four porphyry municipalities, an average of fourteen per cent of the resident population appeared to be born abroad (at the provincial level, the foreign population in the same period was 8.5 %, while it was 7 % in Italy as a whole). 12 Istituto di Statistica della Provincia di Trento (ISPAT). Serie storiche – Cap XII, TAV. XII.03 – Produzione delle cave di porfido (1976–2019).; Istituto di Statistica della Provincia di Trento (ISPAT). Serie storiche – Cap XII, TAV. XII.05 – Produzione delle cave: quantità prodotta e valore unitario, per materiale (1976–2019).

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In the 1990s, on-site outsourcing was also accompanied by a rush of Trentino’s stone entrepreneurs to invest in porphyry quarries in the Global South, in Eastern Europe, and in China, from which large quantities of processed or semi-finished material was imported to Europe at prices much lower than local ones (ibid., 113). The increase in internal competition in Trentino’s porphyry sector is the premise for a continuous expansion that ended up saturating the market and, for the first time after decades of increases, bring prices down starting from 2003; this was years before the global crisis of 2008. Upon the arrival of the latter, the deflation of the specific bubble of the porphyry sector disastrously combined with the Great Recession. This combination became especially pernicious after the evolution of the global crisis from the collapse of the North Atlantic interbank lending system to a European debt crisis (Tooze 2018, 315–435).

The present: between privileged expectations and the ‘traumatized worker’ The sharp inversion from the pre-crisis global real estate expansion period to that of recession and austerity caused the entire Trentino porphyry extractive sector to collapse. Production tonnage, value, and employment levels plunged to between half and a third of pre-crisis levels. The crisis led to the bankruptcy of many quarries, even of the largest ones that invested in overseas diversification of supply, which in turn led for the first time in more than half a century to the loss of a more or less stable source of income for the population (native or not) that inhabits the area.¹³ The effects have been particularly dire, especially for those who did not own their home or did not have alternative sources of income. This has meant that it was above all immigrant families who had to leave the mining municipalities. The crisis pushed for the activation of migrant networks of co-national relatives already settled in countries such as Germany and Switzerland since the period of the German Gastarbeiter agreements. Those networks acted as a sort of springboard for better employment (cf. Hoffmann 2021) once wages and working conditions in the porphyry sector became unsustainable, although only for those who had access to such networks, and especially for those who didn’t have dependent school-age children, which made moving harder.

13 Although the boom-and-bust cycle typical of mining is also identifiable in the porphyry sector (with at least three crises and booms), the sector has maintained employment levels of over one thousand workers since at least the 1950s. In 2019 only 510 are officially counted.

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A lot of quarries closed down and mostly people [from Macedonia] came here to work in the quarries. … Actually most of them emigrated again. That is, they went to Switzerland, Germany, France, some, just a few actually, to Austria. … Those who lose their jobs have it hard. For an immigrant it is even harder, due to the fact that you do not stay here to pay a rent if you do not have a job. … On the other hand, those who lost their jobs and managed to find something else hardly found work in the quarries, so they also changed the type of job. (Macedonian exquarryman’s son, in his twenties) Before [the crisis] there were a lot of immigrants here. Nowadays, well, there are fewer and fewer. Because between the crisis and less pay… (Macedonian quarrymen 1, still employed in the quarries)

The latest disengagement of capital from the area thus caused the re-emigration of people who lost access to wages and who could only rarely find work elsewhere in the province, due to the above-mentioned de-industrialization process that anticipated the extractive industry by two decades and by chronic unemployment in the whole of Italy due to the Great Recession. Young people in the porphyry industry are almost absent today. The few I met confirmed that they can count themselves on one hand, and for now they consider this work only as a temporary period of employment while waiting to find something else, more stable and less dangerous. Besides, very few older workers ever even considered letting their children work in the quarries. You told your children: don’t you dare come in the quarry, you know? … We [quarrymen fathers] are the first to tell them. … No way you’ll come here [to work]. I also worked in construction companies … but there’s no comparison. It’s hard work. (Local ex-quarryman 2 and ex-union delegate) In the quarry? Never! I wouldn’t suggest that even to an enemy of mine. Because in the quarry you learn nothing! You’re never good enough for the owner. … What do you learn in a quarry? Nothing. A donkey you enter, a donkey you get out. Thank goodness they don’t come. It’s hard work. (Macedonian quarrymen 1).

Among the very few young porphyry workers in the area, two Trentino-born workers in their twenties aptly expressed the present condition of job shortage and uncertainty in the sector: You don’t have prospects as in the past, like when my father began [to work in the quarries], it seemed something that would last forever. Now you are always with one foot in and one foot out. (Local quarryman 2, 23 years old) In the 70s, 80s, 90s, they extracted, extracted, extracted. And now look: the quarries are finished. Compared to the past, they profit so little that in five years’ time there will remain no one extracting here. … For young people like us it’s a matter of staying there for one, two, three years. Enough to find some other employment. (Local quarryman 3, 20 years old)

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After twelve years of crisis, most of my informants now believe the sector is doomed. Ideas of the degradation of porphyry slab deposits in the area are widespread. Thus, quarrymen I talked to emphasized, for example, that ‘mali [defects in slabs that make the stone fragile] are more and more common’, or that the ‘quality is one-fourth’ of what it had been. But opinions actually vary on this matter. In fact, it seems that nowadays even high-quality, non-fissured slabs are often sent to be processed as ballast or gravel due to market demand, as will be explained later. Moreover, quality is a contested concept between workers and owners, due to the fact that lowering the quality of the material sold, motivated by a rush to dominate the market, is seen by both workers and entrepreneurs as one of the reasons for the bursting of the bubble in the early 2000s. Talks of improving the quality of the material sold, in order to regain the market share that was eroded in those years, are pervasive in the sector. But this implies unloading the contradiction on workers by applying a stricter quality threshold to finished products, meaning a piecework quota harder and harder to reach. In fact, over a certain minimum amount of porphyry cubes or tiles cut out of raw slabs, those workers that are directly employed by the quarry enterprises are paid by piecework. Outsourced workers in ‘artisanal’ micro-enterprises, which buy raw rock to re-sell as finished pieces to the quarry owners, were even more reliant on a piecework regimen.¹⁴ Marx already talked about the convenience of piecework wage for capitalists (Marx 1982, 692–696), and since its inception, the porphyry industry used piecework by leveraging it on an ethic of hard work widespread in Trentino, as Stacul (2003)¹⁵ well pointed out. At any rate, workers for a long time relied on piecework or exceeding a minimum union-negotiated tonnage for good wages now often unattainable. Before it was easier because they gave you better material [the rocks blasted out of the quarry walls]. … [Nowadays] There are workers that can’t get to the minimum for the union wage. … Before it was nearly eighty per cent, now it’s ninety per cent of the rock that goes to waste. … This year [2021] it’s even worse. … They take the waste to a grinder [and sell it as gravel]. … They [recently] bought a new grinder, who knows how much it costs… (Macedonian quarryman 2)

A few informants also told me that the worsening quality of the extracted rock was sometimes manufactured by purposefully extracting rocks of lower quality and 14 Most of the workers in externalized micro-enterprises were comprised of immigrant workers (Bressan 2013) that were the first hit in the crisis. Outsourced micro-enterprises simply did not receive the raw material anymore or could not sell it back. 15 Stacul’s work is based on extensive fieldwork in the nearby Vanoi Valley in the 1990s, on the other end of Trentino’s Lagorai mountain range out of which porphyry is extracted.

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giving worthless raw material to workers who could thus not reach the minimum piecework tonnage of high-quality finished products. With this tactic owners avoid paying piecework-related extras to workers while in periods of low demand. Also, the stratagem was used to make it appear as if the quarry was of lower value to inspectors, in order to pay lower taxes. Whatever the reasons for, and accuracy of these ideas, they do indeed resonate strongly with the description of the social outlook of the area by almost everyone I met. If you look in the towns of the area you will see that there is a part [of young people that are the] children of the entrepreneurs that are well-off, and go away to study, and will settle with a good position. … Then you have a small part of people that is not rich but is not in misery either. That study and tend to go away. To go away from the valley. These [young people] abandon the valley. The most intelligent abandon the valley. … At the other end, there is a good chunk [of young people] of the lower strata that remains. Maybe they manage to work a bit here and there… And they end up in groups that live on petty drug dealing, that consume [drugs]. (Local ex-quarrymen 2, long time militant in workers struggles) Here one of the bad things is a low education. … And also, here someone with a degree is cut off because to use your arms you don’t need to be a graduate, you understand? He’s someone who has other world visions, he wants to go outside. But there are not that many. The other ones are here. Those that are here can’t really find a job. They don’t give you a job. And they do nothing. They stay at home. … It is a fucked-up town here. (Local ex-quarrymen 3, long time militant in workers struggles)

And yet, a new phase of concentration of stone quarries seems to be taking place at the present moment through curious mergers where bigger enterprises buy out lesser or failing ones with access to quarry lots, only formally including the previous owners in the new ones. In fact, should the failing companies renounce the licence to extract on their lots, they would need to return that right to the community, as the rock in the municipalities formally remains a commons controlled by its inhabitants. It is not yet evident what this means for the future of the industry, as it is not clear what role will porphyry play in the international market of building materials. Anyway, the current phase of concentration of extractive companies will most likely lead to a greater degree of mechanization. According to the president of an institution for the development of the porphyry sector, the products required by the Italian market lately seem to be a product previously considered as waste. Railway ballast and gravel for asphalt and cement are in high demand, but they sometimes require expensive grinding machinery. The international market, instead, so far keeps demanding valuable material such as stone tiles, even if only a strongly reduced amount, at least up until very recently. In fact, an informant in an entrepreneur association told me that the global shortage of shipping containers that characterized the spring and summer of 2021 caused a spike in maritime transport prices and temporarily made overseas

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stone unavailable. This led to a rise in requests for paving and building stone in Europe and a surge in Trentino’s porphyry sales. Moreover, various massive trillion-dollar investment plans, such as the European Union’s NextGenerationEU, of which Italy is the first beneficiary, the initiatives of the European Green Deal, or the United States’ Build Back Better plan, all include extensive infrastructural projects that seem to open up the possibility of a change of direction in spending prospects with respect to the past long phase of austerity. And some of those entrepreneurs that remained in the industry are watching the next developments carefully. Some companies are already beginning to complain of a shortage of workers, while a sizeable fraction of those that are still employed are set to retire in the next five years. It is therefore not yet clear what the future holds for the area. In the event of an actual restart of extraction and a new surge in labour demand due to a new boom phase, entrepreneurs may resume already tried and tested strategies of attracting labour from outside. Considering the current level of deregulation of the labour market and job and existential precariousness, especially among the young and among immigrants, it would be unsurprising to think that a new wave of recruitment could be inserted again at the periphery of the central companies, now more concentrated than before. Outsourcing of production phases and artisan/micro-enterprise contracts is still ongoing, while direct employment in the main companies with the right to extract from quarry lots still pays higher wages and grants better employment conditions, although not as much as in the pre-crisis period. The worldwide process of traumatizing the workers (Bellofiore and Halevi 2010, 7–9, also Friedman 2007) seems to have been so thorough thanks to the fact that ‘the battles of the 1970s and 1980s had been won’, that ‘[f ]or all the centrist hand-wringing about “populism”, class antagonism was enfeebled, wage pressure was minimal, strikes non-existent’ (Tooze 2021, 30). Hence, in Trentino’s porphyry stone sector, while still uncertain about the industry’s future, entrepreneurs – shielded by wealth accumulation through financial and real estate investments¹⁶ – seem to look with hope at new opportunities, absent relevant labour contestations. Inversely, the horizons of opportunities that workers or ex-workers talk about appear shrouded in fog, with more crises to come. Further industrial col-

16 Many entrepreneurs invested heavily in the built environment of the urbanized valleys of Trentino, buying warehouses and high-rises to rent, or in foreign real estate. One example that rose to the headlines of local newspapers is the case of one of the most prominent porphyry entrepreneurs who bought properties of historic value in Russia and elsewhere (Gianfranco de Bertolini, et al. ‘I signori del porfido’, Questo Trentino n. 6, giugno 2019; Fraccaro ‘Porfido: question time su “conflitti di interesse”’, Trentino, July 2, 2017).

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lapse, emigration of both previous immigrants and young locals, and episodes of organized crime infiltrating the industry are all topics that emerge every time my worker informants talk about the future, indicating a ‘“normalization” of the abnormal’ (Bryant and Knight 2019, 76).

Conclusion Uneven and combined development profoundly shaped the porphyry stone industry since its beginnings in the 1920s. Late liberal and then fascist strategies of capital accumulation operated on the intra-national (and especially northern Italian) meso-level by promoting small-scale industrialization in rural areas and small cities, including Trentino’s porphyry industry. They purposely did so in order to take advantage of a flexible rural population able to take care of most of the necessities of social reproduction and therefore of low wages and a very flexible workforce. The process of economic degradation due to the macro-level shattering caused by the world-spanning event of World War I contributed at the micro-level to the pauperization of the porphyry area’s rural population used to produce for a market that did not exist anymore. The combination of meso- and macro-level processes caused a stark increase in production in Trentino’s stone extractive industry during the 1950s, as the Italian reconstruction and economic boom followed another such world-spanning event, World War II. A wave of local workers’ contestations followed, thanks to an understanding of this combination at the point of production in the terms of the violation of the alpine closed corporate community by external companies that plundered the local resources and exploited the inhabitants. The 1970s in Trentino’s porphyry industry was characterized by a complex moment of the combination of unevenness. Immediately after the Second World War, intra-Italian unevenness between especially the north-west and the south of Italy, combined through the Grande Migrazione Interna that granted especially Italian capital in the north-west a means to blackmail labour, made it more flexible and compressed wages. The general advance of labour thereafter and the deliberate push by organized labour to increase class conflict succeeded in countering the use of unevenness by capital and homogenizing worker’s rights and conditions. By the 1970s this translated into more politicized and organized internal migrants during the second phase of the same Grande Migrazione Interna that reached Trentino precisely in the moment of its rapid, although late, industrial catching up. This meant greater unionization and radicalization of local workers whose contestation to the now locally grown capitalist class remained until then somewhat muffled

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due to the obscuring of social stratification allowed by the corporatist understanding of the community, piecework wages, and the ethic of hard work. A phase of economic and especially industrial expansion in the Trentino region was rendered possible by the granting of special administrative, planning, and financial autonomy to Trentino, in combination also with the indirect economic boost caused by the shift of capital from the north-west to the north-east of the country as a ‘spatial fix’ to the advance of labour in the ‘red Italy’ zone and the triangolo industriale. In the porphyry industry specifically, this expansion was realized thanks to direct access to international markets and a seemingly inexhaustible demand for stone. The new access to markets was rendered possible by international monetary policies that made the stone convenient for mainly German, French, and Swiss buyers, and extremely profitable for the emerging porphyry bourgeoisie. The favourable situation for the stone industry continued even during the general, macro-level process of the de-industrialization of North American and Western European states, among which – even if to a lesser extent and due to partially different reasons – Italy, and the tertiarization of their economies. Together with other nationalities that characterized migrations towards Italy in the 1990s and 2000s, it was especially north-eastern Macedonians that arrived in the Trentino stone quarries during that time. This happened because of the convergence between a retrenchment of collective labour and regressive labour laws in Italy, and the meso-level process that caused Yugoslavia’s collapse. A new combination of unevenness then occurred. Italian capital – including the Trentino porphyry bourgeoisie – used similar strategies as before with regard to immigrant labour. They tried and succeeded again in taking advantage of uneven development (and de-development) through the mobility of people caused by the impossibility of maintaining access to the means of subsistence. This time it was mostly in the small enterprises of the Terza Italia (instead of the big Fordist factories), including the porphyry stone industry, mainly by taking advantage of the processes of Yugoslavia’s state disintegration. Better international conditions for capital mobility then permitted access to quarries in the Global South and the use of another kind of globalized differential, mainly for competition purposes inside Trentino’s porphyry industry. The Great Recession, European austerity, and the saturation of the European stone market combined disastrously in Trentino’s quarries, causing a re-emigration of many immigrant workers that made use of mostly kin-based migratory networks towards Germany or Switzerland to face a new lack of access to the means of subsistence. In the five porphyry municipalities of central-eastern Trentino, uneven and combined development is currently being experienced by stone workers and ex-workers mainly as a closing down of opportunities and a normalization of

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crisis. The most relevant aspect of life in the municipalities today is tied to the Great Recession and the specific near collapse of a local extractive industry that granted a substantial amount of employment and wealth in the area for more than three generations.

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Suravee Nayak

Uneven and Combined Development and the Politics of Labour in an Eastern Indian Coalfield: Shifts and Changes from Late Colonialism to Neoliberalism Introduction Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development has been discussed extensively in the literature on extractive industries in the Global South. The debates originated in studies on Latin America but they are equally relevant for any other country of the Global South. In the Indian context, on which I am focussing in this chapter, the development of extractive industries such as coal mining rests on, reproduces and constantly re-combines unevenness between India and other countries as well as within the country. This was the case when large-scale industrial mining began in India during the colonial period, primarily for railways, such as the East Indian Railway, and for local industries and export trade (Ghosh 1977). Mining continued to set the trajectory after the country gained Independence in 1947, when the state expanded the extraction of coal to feed its ambitious project of rapid industrialization in the name of ‘development’. Both, the ‘temples of modern India’ – as the first Prime Minister Nehru called the large integrated steel mills – and the large coal mines were concentrated in the subnational states in central and eastern India, such as Odisha, Jharkhand (formerly part of Bihar) and Chhattisgarh (formerly part of Madhya Pradesh) (Das 1992; Adduci 2012; Adhikari and Chhotray 2020). As is well known, the expansion of open-cast coal mines entailed a plethora of environmental degradation as well as the large-scale dispossession and displacement of usually marginal agriculture-based communities and the dismantling of their agrarian structure (Nayak 2020; Noy 2020). The changing industrial policies since Independence also re-created and re-combined unevenness in the labour regimes, first by expanding the formalization of the erstwhile almost exclusively casual mining labour forces and later on by re-informalizing them.

Acknowledgements: This chapter has immensely benefited from the comments received on an earlier draft presented during the virtual workshop Industrial Labour and Uneven Development organised by Michael Hoffmann and Christian Strümpell in 2021. I am especially grateful to Rebecca Prentice, Jonathan Parry and Christian Strümpell for their critical engagement and suggestions. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-008

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In this chapter, I focus especially on the question of how the uneven and combined development of India’s coal industry since the late colonial period shaped its labour forces. As Kasmir and Gill (2018), as well as others (cf. Herod 1997), emphasise Trotsky’s notion in understanding these questions, the theoretical concept of uneven and combined development is particularly helpful for that purpose, because it conceptualises unevenness as emerging from struggles between capital and labour, and hence focuses also on the role that labour plays in the process, not only capital. Taking as an example the Talcher coalfields in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, where I conducted ethnographic research between 2015 and 2020,¹ I show in this chapter how uneven and combined development has led to the fragmentation of the local labour forces along the way. In particular, I argue that the character of unevenness and their combination has changed from the late colonial to the current neoliberal period and that these changes are reflected in labour formations as well as labour politics in the Talcher coalfields. The development of the coal economy and the labour formations it triggered were uneven and combined at two spatial-temporal scales, first; between labour formations in coal mines and the railways during the colonial period, second; labour formation within the mine level itself during the current neoliberal period. In the six following sections, I first present an overview of extractivism and uneven development debates in the Global South (with particular reference to the Latin American context) followed by the second section explaining the uneven development created by the different coal economies in India. This section also gives an overview of the study area. The third and fourth sections discuss the uneven and combined labour formation at two spatial-temporal scales. It further shows how the uneven and combined labour formation occurs at the mine level in the form of formal-informal labour relations. The fifth section concludes by reflecting upon the implications of the evolving dynamics of labour fragmentation on collective action and the emergence of variegated labour politics in uneven spaces, such as Talcher, in the Global South. The conclusion presents an overview of the main findings.

1 The data discussed in this chapter derives from two rounds of fieldwork carried out for four months in 2015 and over eighteen months during 2018 to 2020 in Talcher. Primary fieldwork involved survey questionnaires and semi-structured interviews in three villages and other secondary sources in the first round. In subsequent rounds, 200 ethnographic interviews with different groups of coalminers (that is, permanent workers), contract and manual workers, either from dispossessed and other local communities or migrants from other parts of the state Odisha or from other Indian states, with former and current trade union leaders, mining supervisors, managers, and general managers, and local state administrators. Wherever necessary, I use pseudonyms for the names of the villages, mines as well as interlocutors.

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Extractivism and uneven development The uneven development brought by extractivism² in Global South countries dates back five hundred years with the initial colonisation of several countries for raw commodities. This mode of accumulation as part of the capitalist system in Global South countries includes not only the extraction of minerals, but also other natural resources, such as forests, fisheries and agricultural products (Acosta 2013). Scholars have widely discussed the uneven and unsustainable development pathways of extractivism in the Global South in terms of exploitation of local resources and labour, environmental degradation, low and temporary value generation, deterioration of labour conditions and inability to provide livelihoods for local communities³ (Spronk and Webber 2007; Veltmeyer 2012; McKay 2017; Gudynas 2018; Bowles and Veltmeyer 2020). With some regional differences, these commonalities shape the trajectories of uneven and combined development under extractivism in different regions (Ye et al. 2020). Among the differences, the distinct pattern of uneven and combined development and labour formations in various contexts of the Global South is noteworthy. In India, particularly, some mineral extractions are mainly for domestic consumption rather than for export as in Latin America (for example, iron; see Saes and Bisht 2020, coal; see Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The central and eastern parts of India have been the centre stage of extractivist projects in the country, which has led to climate crisis, dispossession and displacement of local communities, precarious labouring opportunities and no investment in community-centric regional industrialisation. Minerals such as coal and iron have been major drivers of extractivism and uneven development in the country, and this has caused many land and environmental conflicts and resistance movements (Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Kroger 2021).

2 Extractivism as a term has existed in particular reference to Latin American natural resource extraction and uneven development discussions since the 1970s. However, the discussions took a major turn after 2000 with the increase in the extraction of mineral, metal and agro-food products, and exports of these resources in raw commodity form. 3 The discussion in this section has been limited to Extractivism as a regime in the Global South; however, debates on neo-extractivism have not been included since the focus of the chapter is restricted to mineral extractions and labour formations. Though there are linkages between extractivism and neo-extractivism, the process of investment of surplus revenue from extractivist projects in reducing poverty reveals a resource-based development politics (Burchardt and Dietz 2014); however, those discussions are not attempted here.

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India’s coal economies and the coalfields of Odisha Among other minerals, coal has been identified as the national symbol and a mineral for capital accumulation in post-colonial India. It becomes complex, as India has four visible coal economies, namely national, neoliberal, (non-legal) statecraft, and (illegal) subsistence (Lahiri-Dutt 2016). Lahiri-Dutt distinguishes these four different coal economies based on the actors, values and norms guiding them. The national coal economy is mined by the public-sector company Coal India Limited (CIL) – an undertaking of the central government founded in 1975, which focused on formalising the casualised coal-mining workforce and making fresh appointments to formal permanent jobs. However, there has been increasing informalisation within this economy through subcontracting since the 1990s. Neoliberal coal is mined by private companies for captive purposes. Statecraft coal is produced in the north-eastern state of Meghalaya under non-legal norms. Subsistence coal is produced by small-scale village collieries and would include coal scavengers. However, this chapter views the ‘national coal economy’ as being deeply embedded in neoliberal policies and having strong ties with capitalists, including the subcontractors, in the functioning of this coal economy. At present, coal extraction has been exponentially increasing, which puts the country far behind the energy transition.⁴ Moreover, there is a new coal geography, which has created a fifth coal economy in coastal states of the country where huge coal imports are changing the spatiality, leading to similar land acquisitions and affecting the livelihoods of communities for the purpose of building a coal importing infrastructure (Oskarsson et al. 2021). These five coal economies create their own distinct trajectories of uneven and combined development in the Indian context. In this endeavour, this chapter tries to understand the uneven and combined development of the national coal economy, focusing on labour formation. Odisha is a mineral-rich state with the largest reserves of non-coking coal in India and with more than 79 billion tonnes of total coal reserves (Coal Controller’s Organisation 2019). Its two major coal-bearing areas are the Ib valley coalfields and the Talcher coalfields. In particular Talcher has a high ratio of coal to non-coal strata and, thus, high quarrying potentiality (MCL 2016). The Talcher coalfields belong to the Angul district in central Odisha, and this district is identified as one of

4 Rather, there is an ‘energy mix’ instead of moving away from carbon economies (Roy and Schaffartzik 2021).

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the districts with the highest dependency on coal mining in terms of the direct jobs the industry creates, its pensioners and the revenues it generates (Pai 2021). The Talcher area that spreads over 353,360 acres is one of India’s fastest growing industrial centres. Until very recently, however, agriculture was the most important activity here. In 1981, 68.30 % of the main workers were engaged as cultivators (Directorate of Economics and Statistics 1995). In 2011, Talcher had a total population of 97,968, of which 53 % were male and 47 % were female (Census 2011). Out of that, only 6.4 % were engaged as cultivators and around 9 % were working as agricultural labourers. The region is composed mainly of upper-caste Hindus and Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Around 19 % are Dalits, and 9 % are Adivasis.⁵ After the formation of Coal India Limited (CIL) in 1975, the public sector mining company, all coal mines in Odisha were first under CIL’s subsidiary Central Coalfields Ltd (CCL), then shifted to South Eastern Coalfields Ltd (SECL), which was newly formed in 1985, before the formation of Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd (MCL) in 1992. MCL currently operates eight opencast and one underground mine in Talcher, and two more opencast mines are in the planning stage.⁶ Coal mining in Talcher dates back to the 1920s. However, coal was found in the region before 500 BCE near the banks of the river Brahmani at Gopal Prasad.⁷ Coal is locally called chara pathara, which literally translates as ‘fire stone’.⁸ On 21 March 1838, Lieutenant Markham Kitto discovered a coal seam at Singoda Nulla, Gopal Prasad, Talcher (Memoirs of GSI, 1859). Due to the inferior quality of the coal found and due to the lack of proper infrastructure for transportation, the coalfield was not further explored.⁹ In 1906, Kishore Chandra Birabar Harichandran, the king of Talcher, got a good quality sample of Talcher coal tested at Calcutta and invited applications for leasing mines of coal, mica and iron ore in the local

5 Historically, the village social structure has been divided into different castes which has shaped occupational hierarchy and residential patterns. The residential area is divided into different castebased segments, such as Brahmin sahi or ‘Brahmin colony’, Pan sahi or sahi of the ex-untouchable caste Pan, Chasha sahi or sahi of the middle-ranking ‘peasant’ caste Chasha, etc. 6 Information collected from the MCL office in Talcher in September–December 2018. 7 One of the coal seams was exposed and had caught fire due to continuous contact with the oxygen present in the atmosphere. However, local people were of belief that the stone possessed some spiritual powers, and hence they were using coal for religious purposes only, especially for the worship of the local goddess ‘Hingula’. 8 Compiled from interviews conducted with Prabhu Das, Bibhuti Ranjan, Kadam Moharana, Ranjan Pani Soubhagaya Sahoo in September 2018. All names of the interviewees presented in this chapter are pseudonyms. 9 Report on two specimens of Cuttack Coal from the Talcheer Mines forwarded by E. A. Samuells, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol- XXIV 1855, 240–241

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newspaper ‘Gadajata Basini’.¹⁰ In 1921, Talcher state granted leases for opening underground coal mines. M/s. Villiers Ltd. opened a colliery at Handidhua (Senapati and Sahu, 1971). Later in 1923, Talcher state opened a captive coal mine at Gopal Prasad for the palace power house. Subsequently, in 1926 and 1928, two railway companies, the Bengal Nagpur Railway and the Madras South Maratha Railway, opened mines at Deulbera and Dera respectively (MCL 2007, 1.11). However, the spatiality started to change significantly when opencast coal mining started in the 1960s. A total of 126 villages have been affected due to the opening and expansion of eight opencast coal mines in Talcher (see Table 1). As of September 2015, Mahanadi Coalfields Limited (MCL) had acquired around 8994 acres of government land and 14,840 acres of private land in Talcher through the Coal Bearing Areas (CBA) Act of 1957 and the old colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Among the acquired land were the agricultural lands of more than 5,000 families, and 7000 families were displaced and relocated to other places in Talcher (As of September 2015). Table 1: Details of Land Acquisition (in acres) under the Coal Bearing Areas Act and Land Acquisition Act in Talcher (September 2015). Mines

Number of Villages affected

Total Govt. land acquired

Total Private Number of af- Number of land acquired fected famiDisplaced famlies ilies

Lingaraj Opencast Project

23

436

1,506.500

3,125

1,134

Kaniha Opencast Project

8

366.230

1,072.880

0

562

Bhubaneswari Opencast Project

16

617.440

1,085.960

34

1,062

Ananta Opencast Project

16

1,885.630

1,318.445

124

316

Jagannath Opencast Project

7

183.760

559.885

46

550

10 Journey of Talcher Coalfields published by Mahanadi Coalfields Limited.

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Table 1: Details of Land Acquisition (in acres) under the Coal Bearing Areas Act and Land Acquisition Act in Talcher (September 2015). (Continued) Mines

Number of Vil- Total Govt. lages affected land acquired

Total Private Number of af- Number of Disland acquired fected families placed families

Bharatpur Opencast Project

13

1,114.480

1,981.115

165

751

Hingula Opencast Project

22

2,087.780

3,157.630

169

721

Balaram Opencast Project

21

2,302.691

4,157.600

1,386

1,978

126

8,994.011

14,840.015

5,049

7,074

Total Source: Fieldwork, 2018.

Underground mines and combined labour formations under the colonial regime The development of the coal economy and the labour formations it triggered were uneven and combined at two spatial-temporal scales. First, the labour formations that were found in the coal mines of Talcher and that of the railways during colonial period. Second, the uneven and combined labour formation was found at the mine level itself in the form of formal and informal labour relations during postcolonial period¹¹. Elaborating on the first spatial-temporal scale of uneven and combined labour formation, it is to be noted that the coal that was produced was consumed by the railways during the colonial period. However, the labour arrangements were better at the railways. The interconnectedness of coal and railways from the colonial period is well known; however, the uneven and combined labour formation as an analytical lens has not been explored so far in understanding the entangled labour

11 Discussion on this second form of uneven and combined labour formation at the mine level has been provided in the following section.

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relations at these two spatial scales¹². The uneven and combined labour relations were found in the commodity circuit of coal. Broadly, there were three different labour recruitment systems in the coal mines during the colonial period: the zamindari system, the contract system, and the sarkari system. In the zamindari (‘estate’) system, the zamindari rights of coal-bearing land and other surface land were acquired by the coal company. Under this system, all labourers belonging to the zamindari were forced to work in the coal mines. In the contract system, so-called raising contractors, labour contractors, and coal cutting contractors in conjunction organised workers for exploitation in the coal mines. Among them, raising contractors who brought mostly migrant workers and workers from local villages constituted one of the prominent contract systems found in the coal mines during that period. In the sarkari system, companies recruited a segment of their workforce directly; the salaried staff held responsibility recruiting workers and transporting them to the worksites. Some of them used to directly contact the village headmen for hiring workers from the villages. During the colonial period, there were three kinds of workers working in the Indian coal mines: locals, settled immigrants and long-distance oscillating migrants (Ghosh 1977). Many locals commuted daily between their villages and the mines, either on foot or by local trains, and others returned to their villages only once per week. Locals were very closely situated and looked after their agricultural production. Settled immigrants were the workers who were settled on the mines and would go back to their homes only during agricultural harvest seasons in the summer months July and August or in the winter. The third category of workers were long-term migrants who would go back to their villages only once a year (Simeon 1996, 89–91). The unevenness of labour formation in the coal mines was drawn along the lines of caste and gender. The mining workforce was mostly comprised of Adivasis and Dalits (Simeon 1995), and women miners significantly contributed to the coal production (Lahiri-Dutt 2001). In 1920, women formed 37.5 % of the coal-mining workforce (Simeon 1998). Women from lower castes were working in significantly higher numbers than women from the higher caste community (Seth 1940). Only widows or women who had no financial support worked in the coal mines. Women’s employment was mostly associated with family production (Alexander 2007, 206). However, after the 1920s, women workers were gradually withdrawn from underground coal mining due to a ban on women’s employment in the underground coal mines (Lahiri-Dutt 2012).

12 One at the coal mines and another, at the railways.

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In Talcher, the mining community mostly consisted of migrant workers from the Gorakhpur region in northern India who were recruited through the Coalfield Recruiting Organisation (CRO)¹³ and of Dalit men from Talcher.¹⁴ Both male and female migrant workers used to work together in underground mines at Talcher. The local upper-caste Odia were afraid of working in the coal mines because they believed that the goddess Hingula resided in the coal mines and would eat the people. They found their anxieties confirmed whenever there was a lethal accident in the mines, which happened quite frequently.¹⁵ The coalmine’s management and contractors used to visit the nearby villages often to persuade the local people to work in the coal mines. For the first time, Dalit men from the local Odia community, in particular ‘Pan’ sub-caste men, started working in the coal mines; for this reason the first underground coalmine was often locally called ‘Pan colliery’. However, none of the Odia women ever worked in the underground coal mines during the colonial period. Gradually, other OBCs caste men also started working in the coal mines in the years following the opening up of the mines. An underground coal worker earned a weekly wage of four anna (or 0,25 rupees); the payment was made on Fridays and also some groceries were provided every week, but a charge for the groceries was deducted from those four anna. ¹⁶ The migrants were provided with living quarters, locally known as dhowra, that were situated on the coal-mining site’s periphery and had poor sanitation and drinking water facilities. Underground coal mining involved manual labour, including cutting, hauling, and coal loading. Mining in those days was a manual activity done mostly with picks and shovels. The coal extracted was loaded into the baskets and carried out manually. The working conditions of the coal miners were deplorable, including low wages, long hours of work, and forced labour beyond duty hours (Murty and Panda 1988). Frequent accidents and precarious labouring conditions existed in Indian coal mines during colonial period, which came to be also known as

13 About 30,000 Gorakhpuri labourers were employed in various coal and iron ore mines, mainly in the states of West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa (Special Correspondent-EPW, 1973). 14 Coal mines served as an escape route for the local Dalit community to free themselves from the exploitation of feudal lords and oppression in the form of caste discrimination. They were often called ‘Chora Khanta’, that is, thieves, as also mentioned in the Orissa District Gazetteer-Dhenkanal Gazeteer (Senapati and Sahu 1971). 15 Compiled from interviews conducted with Prabhu Das, Bibhuti Ranjan, Kadam Moharana, Ranjan Pani in September, 2018 16 Compiled from interviews conducted with Prabhu Das, Bibhuti Ranjan, Kadam Moharana, Ranjan Pani in September, 2018

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‘slaughter mining’ (Nite 2019). The informal labour relations in the coal mines constituted the core of surplus value extraction by capital.

Post-colonial capital, open-cut mines and combined labour formations After Independence, the post-colonial state started searching for various important mineral resources as raw material to speed up the accumulation of capital. Along with the move to bringing the coal mines under state control, there was a shift in the production process of coal from underground to open cast coal mines, primarily after the setting up of NCDC. The Handidhua coal mine in Talcher was handed over to the state government in 1947 and the railway mines in Talcher, Dera and Deulbera came under NCDC in 1956 (Murty and Panda, 1988). Thereafter, the first opencast coal mine was started in 1960 (South Balanda), an underground mine was opened in 1962 (Nandira), and another open cast coal mine was opened in 1971 (Jagannath).¹⁷ Since then, a total of eight opencast coal mines have opened up, which consumed huge tracts of agricultural and homestead land. This rate of capital accumulation has led to the Talcher coalfields being one of the major coalbearing regions of the country. The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1948¹⁸ and simultaneously passed acts such as the Coal Bearing Areas (CBA) Act¹⁹ and the Mines and Mineral (Development and Regulation) Act²⁰ (both in 1957), paved the way for rapid coal extraction by directly vesting power in the hands of the state. Along with this, the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 fulfilled the state’s land requirements for infrastructure, such as offices and residences. The nationalisation was done in two phases between 1971 and 1973. Finally, the Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act was passed in 1973. However, it was also argued that the nationalisation of coal mines was an act of strengthening the interests of state capitalism rather than socialism (Kumar 1981). Subsequently,

17 Currently there are eight opencast mines and one underground mine operating at Talcher (based on data accessed from MCL office, Talcher, 2018). 18 The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1948 ‘laid down that all new undertakings in coal are to be in the public sector except where, in the national interest, the Government wishes to secure the cooperation of private enterprise’. 19 The Coal Bearing Areas (CBA) Act, 1957, provides the power to the state to acquire any land which contains or likely to contain coal deposits or any matter connected therewith. 20 The Mines and Mineral (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957, states: ‘It is hereby declared that it is expedient in the public interest that the Union should take under its control the regulation of mines and the development of minerals to the extent hereinafter provided’.

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Coal India Limited (CIL), the world’s largest coal-producing company, was established in 1975, and it currently contributes eighty per cent of India’s coal production. Along with bringing the coal mines under state control, there was a shift in coal production from underground to open cast coal mines after Independence. The share of coal production by underground coal mines in India started to decline from 1961 onwards, from 86 % in 1951 to 80 % in 1961 (Statistics of Mines, various issues). However, even after nationalisation and the move towards mechanised opencast coal mines, the uneven development in coal-bearing regions manifested in a combination of labour formations carrying out skilled technical and unskilled manual work separately. The informal workers coexisted alongside the formal workers. Though the number of contract labourers was reduced in the post-nationalization period, the working conditions remained worrisome. The contractors received full-time wages ranging from 25 % to 75 % of the amount entitled to the workers (Murty and Panda 1988). Though the contract system was abolished in 1948 and the National Coal Wage Agreement III of 1983 also stipulates that contract labour should not be engaged in a permanent or perennial nature, it was still not implemented (Murty and Panda 1988). In 1982, piece-rated workers were 23.7 %, badli were 3.5 %, and casual labourers were 0.9 % of the total workforce in Talcher coal mines. Half of the workers were Dalits, and one-third of the workforce were Ganjami and Gorakhpuri (ethnic and indigenous populations). As one of the prominent union leaders of the Talcher coal mines, Dharmachandra Mishra, now 87 years old, recalls, We had permanent workers, but we also had piece-rated workers, badli and other casual workers working in the underground mines, and this certainly influenced the labour arrangements in opencast mines as well. Despite regularization of informal workers after NCDC took over the mines, informal workers continued to work. In opencast mines, there were also piece-rated and casual workers hired for many activities.

Later, many workers were also recruited through contractors known as ‘labour supply’ in the coal industry, for various kinds of construction work in and around opencast mines, for menial jobs like cleaning the shovels, pumping water in opencast mines, coal processing in coal handling plants and washeries and other casual labour. One of the former contractors, Maiti Pradhan,²¹ who provided labour for carrying out different manual activities in open cast coal mines, said: I started supplying labour in the year 1978. I supplied more than 150 workers to various coal handling plants. In coal handling plants, coal from opencast mines was cleaned, broken to

21 Interviewed in October, 2018.

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pieces, and my workers filtered stones. I used to recruit both men and women who were locals and also settled immigrants – Ganjami and Munda, who used to live in their colonies, known as ‘hutting’. I use to pay six rupees eight anna per worker in those times. Many of my workers also became permanent in 1984 when mass regularization happened in Talcher coal mines. Labour officers asked me to maintain attendance and make a list of workers who worked for more than 190 days.

Permanent workers did the coal production and overburden removal in opencast mines using machinery; many informal workers were hired as helpers to assist the permanent workers in various activities, mostly the manual work. The informal labour relations existing in Indian coal mines in the colonial period continued even after the nationalization of coal mines. With an increase in opencast coal mines, the informality grew in piece-rated and casual labour recruitments through contractors, primarily in works that required manual labour to facilitate the coal production. This led to the mass regularization of informal workers in the 1980s. This period marked welfare schemes through modernity projects such as coal mining towns and steel towns under Nehruvian Developmentalism (Parry 2020; Strümpell 2014). The formal employment ensured better wage rates, safety nets, housing and other welfare schemes. The uneven and combined development in coal bearing regions led to complex and combined labour relations through the coexistence of both formality and informality in the coal mines in the post-Independence period. A continuum of informality and unevenness was reproduced in the labour relations through a combination of formality and informality even after the nationalisation of coal mines in the post-colonial period. There was a stark difference in the ways that life and working conditions were experienced by the formal and informal coal miners, and there was a separation of skilled technical and unskilled manual labour among the workers. The separation of unskilled manual labour and skilled technical labour through this uneven and combined formation of formal and informal labour was gradually ruptured by the expansion of subcontracting since 1990s in the state owned coal mines of India. After the Nationalisation Act, the government issued a notification prohibiting the contractual system from increasing the loading of coal and overburden removal; however, subcontracting²² has been expanding since the 1990s as a major move to increase privatization in the coal mines (Roy 2003). Coal India Limited – the public sector company – has been attempting to 22 The outsourcing or subcontracting observed in the Indian coal mines is primarily activity subcontracting where various activities which are part of coal production processes, such as overburden removal and coal extraction, are outsourced. Later this moved to the outsourcing of the entire production process.

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bring subcontracting or ‘outsourcing known in the industry’ into its coal production processes subjected to neoliberal policies. A major push was given by the conditions put forwarded by the World Bank for granting a loan to CIL, to overcome the financial crunch suffered between 1990 and 1995 (Chandra 2018). With an increasing number of private companies and local contractors, together outsourcing and labour supply constitutes an invisible ‘shadow or hidden economy’ of informal workers booming within the national coal economy (Lahiri-Dutt 2016), suggesting complex labour regimes in the Indian coal mines (Nayak 2022). More than sixty per cent of the contract workers were engaged in mining activities on average in 2019, such as coal extraction, overburden removal, transportation of coal, or wagon loading in Talcher coalfields. An average of twenty per cent of the contract workers worked as security guards, and the remaining twenty per cent were working in construction and electrical and mechanical works, and other activities, in the last three years. The uneven and combined labour formation took place at the mine level itself in the post-Independence period as opposed to the two spatial scales in the colonial period.

Implications for labour politics The uneven and combined labour formation taking the shape of formal-informal labour relations led to fragmentation within the working class in the Talcher coalfields. A difference is marked by the material rewards of the jobs and the security and employment conditions of permanent and contract workers, as evident in the huge wage differentials between them despite carrying out the same work of coal production and transportation. A category I majdoor belonging to the permanent workforce earns around Rs 30,000 per month, whereas contract workers earn around Rs 15,000 per month. The insecurity of their employment also leads to the contract workers’ readiness to operate at low capacity using unsafe technology, which is a major safety concern for permanent workers and divides them further. In a different context of agrarian labour relations, the difference in types of employment and caste also created fragmented classes of labour (Lerche 2010). The segmentation of the workers into formal and informal categories was further complicated by intersections of social relations, such as caste, gender and ethnicity, and resulted in multi-layered fragmentation of workers. In Talcher, currently ninety per cent of the permanent workers are from local dispossessed and displaced communities (primarily from dominant caste groups) as a result of com-

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pensation in exchange for land for the coal mines.²³ However, women from local communities are few in number and are employed in specific work categories that help facilitate coal production; they are not considered to be coal miners (Nayak 2020). Among them, Dalit women face multiple vulnerabilities in the formal workforce. Dalit women within the regular workforce are excluded from the majority of coal mining works by virtue of their caste and also gender because of the industry’s hyper-masculine nature. Even within the contract labour relations, there is fragmentation between local and migrant workers (Nayak 2022). The local dispossessed people were initially not employed by the private companies/subcontractors. However, due to local dispossessed people’s continuous protests, and with help from local political leaders, the public sector company and its subcontractors (private companies) had to finally sign an agreement stating that the private company would employ a minimum of fifty per cent of its workforce from local dispossessed communities. Also, the recruitment of migrants in the contract workforce has led to fragmentation among the contract workers. The labour market fragmentation can be seen along the lines of wages differences between local and migrant workers (PrasadAleyamma 2017). In this case, the employment itself is the root of fragmentation between local dispossessed and migrant workers in Talcher. Although Massey (2011) calls migration another form of dispossession and suggests solidarity between the land-dispossessed and migrants, each of these groups sees the other as a threat to their livelihoods in Talcher. One of the migrant workers from West Bengal doing technical work shared with me his memory of the harassment they faced at the hands of local people: They came to the camps and started hitting our doors and windows with lathis [batons] and threw stones. They shouted and asked us to run away from here. For them we are all Biharis and we are taking their jobs. Since then, I never interacted much with any of the locals.

As Mantu, a twenty-year-old man working as a helper for a private company, a jami hara worker, asserts: We have lost our land, our livelihood. My father is an employee in the coal mines, but what about me? I have studied upto 10th standard, and I thought I would get a job in the mines like my father. When this private company came, we thought it would employ local people, and many of the unemployed boys from our village would get a job. But to our despair, they brought people from outside. Our village leaders decided to block the mining operation; we stood in front of all the machines. Finally, police, mine officials, our local political leaders

23 The management does not have any data on the landless Dalits affected and displaced during the land acquisition process.

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came and resolved the issue. The private company and MCL were made to sign an agreement that they have to employ fifty per cent of the workers from local villages. I work as a helper now, I don’t do any work, most of my friends don’t do any technical work as well, we sit and play cards under a tree most of the time. Sometimes when supervisors ask us to help the other workers, we do. We get 12,000 rupees per month.

At present, migrants come from other parts of the state of Odisha, from other Indian states such as Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh, and also from other nation-states such as Nepal. Around fifty per cent are employed from the local and dispossessed communities for mining activity alone. The migrants from outside the state said that they are under constant surveillance in the camps, with cameras installed; however, the locals can go to their homes whenever they want. There is a constant tension between the migrants from outside Odisha and the locals, leading to less interaction between the two groups. The locals have recently mobilized and started, under the leadership of a local political leader, an Association for Contract Workers for addressing their issues. The Odia migrants have registered themselves with the association; however, non-Odia migrants have not joined the association; instead, they prefer to either resort to the workers from their state or to their supervisors, who they call ‘Bhaiyas’ (brothers). More within insecure employment, the spatiality and temporality of uneven and combined development shows how the casual workers recruited for bottommost manual labour are distinct from the above-mentioned permanent and contract workers. Landless Dalits and Adivasis from the western part of Odisha are the contemporary unskilled manual workers in the coalfields of Talcher. They are recruited for sanitation, coal cleaning, construction work and other allied activities. They earn hardly Rs 250 per day, which is insufficient for their social reproduction. Hence, they do coal scavenging, which has offered them a stable source of income for survival. These various unevenness and combination in formal labour relations as well as informal labour relations and between both sets of relations has fractured the scope of solidarity and working-class labour activism. Consequently, lower caste Dalits, women, and migrants among the coal mine workers have a variegated sense of labour politics.

Conclusion This chapter has shown the trajectory of uneven and combined development unleashed by extractivism by zooming in on the labour formation in late colonial and

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current neoliberal India. Historically, the central and eastern part of India followed pathways of uneven and combined development that were distinct from the rest of the country. Coal in particular has led to uneven and combined (re‐)production of capitalistic spaces in the country. In particular, the chapter argues, drawing from the coal mining region in Odisha, that coal extraction since the colonial period has led to uneven and combined labour formation in these regions. However, the uneven and combined labour formation in the colonial period took place at the level of two spatial scales. The colonial period saw an entanglement of coal mines and railways as producer and consumer, where precarious and informal labour relations were found in the coal mines; however, in comparison better labour relations were found on the railways (Bear 2007). The chapter further argued that the uneven and combined labour formation saw a turn in the post-colonial period where the uneven and combined labour formation was found at the mine level itself in the form of formal and informal labour relations. This in turn led to contemporary multi layered fragmentation among coal mining workers in India. Unevenness emerges from the struggle between capital and labour and from the historically specific ways that they configure social space (Kashmir and Gill 2018, 1). The present-day fragmented coal mining labour is a manifestation and reproduction of the unevenness and combination of the local coal industry at large (Kalb 2018). The struggles between the state, capital and labour produce the social space where labour is an active agent and contributes to the production of capitalist social space (Herod 1997). The workers are segregated into various intersecting mechanisms in the coalfields of India. The coal miners are not only separated into formally and informally employed workers but also into (partly overlapping) categories of men and women, upper castes and lower-caste Dalits and Adivasis, as well as locals and migrants, which also leads to a new turn in labour politics. These evolving dynamics of fragmentation of labour raise pertinent questions about working-class politics and collective action for improving the life conditions of workers. The fragmentation between permanent workers and contract workers and within each group ruptures solidarities and hinders a shared sense of exploitation. There is labour hierarchy between the fragments, and relations between the workers are shaped by the uneven power relations (Lerche 2010). Consequently, lower caste Dalits, women, and migrants among the coal mine workers have a variegated sense of labour politics.

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André Weißenfels

‘A Good Job But Not A Good Life’: Ambiguous Realities and Uneven and Combined Development in a Tunisian Factory Introduction ‘People around the world are in some way engaged with far reaching structures of power, and those engagements take more varied and complex forms than acquiescence or resistance’, write Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (Cooper and Packard 1997, 30). In other words, as Michael Hoffmann and Christian Strümpell have mentioned in the introduction to this volume, industrialization and global capitalism find their expression in different political formations. In this chapter, I utilize the concept of uneven and combined development to discern the complex engagements of Tunisian employees with the different configurations of power they encounter in a French electronic equipment factory in Tunis. This factory, called CERAT,¹ was established in 2003, works under Tunisia’s legal offshore framework established in the 1970s, and is both subsidiary and subcontractor of a French company. I conducted four months of participant observation at CERAT as well as interviews with employees inside and outside of the factory in 2017 and 2018. I will discuss the Tunisian postcolonial development project and then illustrate how people at the factory find themselves (objectively as well as subjectively) in an ambivalent position inside the uneven and combined effects of this development project. An uneven and combined development perspective helps us to understand how global capitalism and the Tunisian politics of development have created a particular constellation of chances and limits for the employees at CERAT. Therefore, uneven and combined development provides for different and, in the case of CERAT, messy realities. This chapter is a plea for analyzing in its complexity the notion of ‘development’ when debating uneven and combined development. I argue that development constitutes both material realities as well as ideas, expectations and sensitivities – especially in postcolonial contexts. I hold that we have a lot to gain from revealing those material and ideational effects of development as uneven and combined.

1 For reasons of anonymization all names have been changed. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-009

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I use the notion of uneven and combined development in this chapter as a descriptive analytical category through which I analyse different forms of social and economic unevenness in Tunisia. This unevenness is intrinsically linked to different political projects, individual imaginaries and desires, as well as numerous configurations of power. Such linkages are what the concept of combination describes. The organization of labour (or the lack of it) can be an important factor of empirical combination, but it is only one among different political projects and realities that help us to understand how global capitalism plays out on the shopfloor in a French factory in Tunisia.

Setting the scene The employees for the day shift arrive at CERAT between 7.45 and 8.00 am. Many of them live in a nearby neighbourhood, but many others travel to work from all over the city, which might take, in some cases, up to eighty minutes. Some are brought in by the company bus, while others arrive with public transport. Still others – mostly the employees who work in middle or upper management jobs – drive to work in their own cars and take some of their colleagues with them. Once at the site, the employees pass through a gate where their presence is documented and enter the factory either through the main entrance or, like most, through the side entrance, which leads to the locker rooms. There, they change into their working coats, which have different colours according to the department they work in. After they have changed, the employees enter the main production hall. The production hall is the busiest part of the factory because many different jobs intersect here: assembly lines putting together electronic parts, supply personnel providing the assembly lines with parts, quality management personnel examining the products and processes, technicians repairing machines, employees from the logistics department visiting the assembly line managers in order to discuss particular orders, people passing by when they go outside for a break or go to the toilet. Thus, the production hall is filled with the buzz of those different sounds mixing in an indistinguishable echo: pneumatic sounds of gates opening and closing, electronic sounds from drilling, cart wheels running over the floor, the clatter of people putting components into shelves, opening boxes, and stacking finished products. All those sounds are mixed with the latent humming of private and professional conversations, which creates an intense and blurred soundscape. In sharp contrast to that soundscape, visually the production hall is clearly structured. Lines on the ground demarcate how to move on and around the shop floor. Shelves are neatly in order. Most working stations and office spaces

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are tidy. Above them hang pictures of how every working space has to look at the end of the shift. On the walls hang signs that remind employees to be mindful of their health, telling them how to sit or how to lift things. Most employees appreciate the tidy and organized work environment. It contributes to their ‘peace of mind’, which is one of the main things that many employees, especially in the production lines, like about their job.² From the buzzing but orderly production hall, employees go to their work places. The manual personnel go either to their production lines inside the hall, to the Thermodur³ production hall or to the warehouse. Middle and upper management personnel go to their offices. Most offices face the shop floor, and passing from one to the other feels very fluid. While the employees in the production line leave their post only for breaks, the warehouse personnel and most management personnel move around a lot in the factory – the former to provide the production lines with materials, the latter to attend meetings, check on the progress of certain processes, solve issues wherever they occur, do audits, give training courses, and many other tasks. In the production lines it is mostly women working. The warehouse is a predominantly male domain. The middle and upper management throughout different departments has an even gender balance. The atmosphere between colleagues is generally quite good, both between direct colleagues who work together and between colleagues of different departments and positions. People chat about their private lives, discuss the latest news, and joke around. There is a tendency to socialize with colleagues of the same gender, but this tendency is far from a rule and the conversations and joking between women and men can be very friendly and intimate. The clearest distinction between genders can be seen in breaks. While many men spend their breaks in the smoking area outside, talking to each other or playing on their phones,⁴ women stay in their changing rooms or walk around the factory premises. The breaks also distinguish between the manual personnel and the management: the former have their lunch break before the latter and thus they seldom meet during breaks. Nevertheless, the employees I asked felt like the workforce at CERAT was not divided into different groups. On the contrary, many told me that the respectful and friendly interaction with colleagues was something that distinguished their work at CERAT from other jobs. Most employees agreed that the

2 Many employees at CERAT would use the words ‘bali murtah’, which translates into ‘my mind is at ease’. 3 Thermodur is a sort of lightweight concrete which is used at CERAT to produce cases for certain parts. 4 In 2018 it was hip to play Ludo on the phone with other colleagues, all clustering around one smartphone.

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atmosphere at work was respectful and socially enjoyable. Quite a lot of them have worked at the factory for the majority of their careers, some since CERAT’s opening in 2003. Many employees are overqualified for their jobs, and a middle management employee once told me that the atmosphere at CERAT was good because the ‘level’⁵ of people was so high. Many employees told me that their colleagues were well educated, motivated, diligent or disciplined. Nevertheless, most of them distinguish clearly between colleagues inside and friends outside the factory. While they enjoy each other’s company at the work place, only sometimes colleagues become ‘real’ friends with whom they could talk in what is considered an improper, cheeky way, meet regularly outside the factory or visit at their homes. The day shift ends at 5 pm. The employees leave the factory – again, using various forms of transportation. Some are going to have a coffee with friends (and sometimes, but less often, colleagues) before they return home. They still live in their parents’ flats, or live with their spouses and children. Others live on their own or even share a flat with friends (which is less common). To make ends meet, some employees have small side businesses. They produce foodstuffs, breed livestock, or sell different products. Some employees take night classes to get a university degree or learn foreign languages. While for some their job at CERAT is as good as it gets,⁶ others dream about getting a better job or building their own business to afford a better life. In this chapter, I tell the story of the employees’ lives as a story of uneven and combined development. The promise of development accompanies the employees at CERAT throughout their working day. It surrounds them in the shape of a tidy, organized, and disciplined work environment. It follows them home when they work in the evening to open their own business, study in evening classes, or learn languages that might help them to migrate. The development promise informs their hopes, fears and expectations. Those expectations provide a yardstick against which the employees assess and make sense of their lives inside the material reality of uneven and combined development. The postcolonial development project in Tunisia has created for them a particular constellation of chances and limits, of openings and blockages. While certain parts of the development promise have materialized for them, other parts seem out of reach. While many have what they would consider to be a good job, their salary mostly does not pay for a good life.

5 The word used was ‘niveau’ – conversation with the author. 6 As one employee who supplies production lines with parts told me in an interview: ‘That’s it, my limit is CERAT’ (interview with the author, 28.02. 2019).

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Development as a postcolonial promise in Tunisia Development is not only a socio-economic empirical category that can be measured statistically and depicted by charts. In Tunisia, it is also a postcolonial promise of a decent life for everybody and as such a central part of the postcolonial nation state project. This promise was centred around notions of formal employment, proper housing, industrialization, rationality and discipline – notions that are still reflected in the ideas about a good life that employees at CERAT hold today. After formal independence in 1956, the promise of development was part of the government’s strategy to contain various social forces. At the dawn of Tunisia’s formal independence in 1956, revolts in the south and west of Tunisia were challenging the legitimacy of the first independent government of the postcolonial state. Under the leadership of Salah Ben Yusuf,⁷ the so-called fellagha fought against Habib Bourguiba’s compromise with the colonizers to continue their military presence in Tunisia even after independence. Those revolts in the south and west of the country also challenged Bourguiba’s plan of a moderate transition from colonialism without an extensive redistribution of the means of production and land, thus jeopardizing the legitimacy of the government as well as its good relations with the US. Fearing a social revolution, the government crushed the revolts violently with the help of the French military (Ajl 2019, 168–185; 233; 261). In this rocky and violent postcolonial transition, development provided a narrative for uniting different societal groups under the umbrella of the nation. As Max Ajl has argued, development helped to contain social unrest and the demand for a more radical social revolution (Ajl 2019, 36). The government’s playbook was that all citizens had to join in the ‘struggle against underdevelopment’ and that they would all profit equally from the success of this struggle. The government regularly emphasized that class compromise was key to Tunisia’s development and thus linked economic policies intimately to the idea of social peace. This unifying idea that development and social peace were two sides of the same coin continued to provide a frame for Tunisia’s governments, even while actual economic policies changed. In the beginning of the 1970s, for example, a new government shifted from a ‘socialist experiment’ (see below) to a market liberal strategy. In a speech at the Tunisian employers’ organization during that time, prime minister Hédi

7 Ben Youssef, a former comrade of Bourguiba, was sentenced to death in 1958, fled to Germany and was assassinated in a hotel in Frankfurt in 1961.

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Nouira⁸ called on the workers not to demand the highest salary but only one that coincides with the ‘legitimate interests of other parties’ in order not to jeopardize the ‘long march towards development’: Like this, and only like this, will we avoid the turmoil, which always comes with regress – the latest history has proven it sufficiently. Like this, and only like this, will we avoid encountering each other in terms of class struggle to partake in the common interest and for the benefit of all in terms of social cohesion and unity.⁹

The same idea persisted around fifteen years later, when Tunisia started to implement a structural adjustment programme consisting – as in most countries (Klein 2007) – of deregulation of prices (and consequently inflation), privatization of state-led firms, and austerity policies like subsidy cuts (see below). In this context, social peace was portrayed as both the condition for and the result of development. As then-Prime Minister Rachid Sfar put it: Development cannot be envisioned without stability and security, just as security cannot be ensured without development and progress. (La Presse 1986/09/27)¹⁰

Thus, the notion of development was meant to generated compliance with a nation-state building project which, ultimately, re-organized Tunisian society as part of a postcolonial global capitalism (even if, at times, the government made use of socialist rhetoric). The government contained a social revolution and enhanced its legitimacy by connecting the experience of the anti-colonial struggle with a set of promises, often subsumed under the notion of ‘promotion de l’homme’ or ‘bien-être de l’homme’ (the ‘advancement of men’ or ‘well-being of men’): the promise of a decent life for everybody. This promise contained different material and non-material dimensions. In material terms, two central goals of the government’s first ten-year plan were to attain a minimum income of forty-five dinar per year for all Tunisians and to cre-

8 Nouira was a former anti-colonial militant and long-standing companion of Bourguiba. He had served in different high political offices until, in 1970, he became the face of the government’s turn away from ‘socialism’ and towards market ‘liberalism’. 9 ‘Ainsi et ainsi seulement l’on évitera les bouleversements qui s’accompagnent toujours de reculs, l’histoire contemporaine le prouve amplement. Ainsi et ainsi seulement l’on éviters de se rencontrer en termes de lutte des classes pour se situer dans l’intérêt commun et pour le bien de tous en termes de cohésion et d’unité’ (La Presse, 14.04.1972). 10 ‘Le développement ne peut se concevoir sans la stabilité et la sécurité, tout comme d’ailleurs la sécurité ne peut être assurée sans le développement et le progrés’ (La Presse 1986/09/27).

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ate accommodation units.¹¹ Thus, having a house and a proper income featured large in the promise of development; and the way to provide money and housing was supposed to be contractual wage labour. This is why the ‘struggle against unemployment’ was an integral part of the ‘struggle against underdevelopment’. As Rachid Sfar put it in a speech praising the structural adjustment plan in the 1986: We are going to take new steps in the struggle against unemployment, in harmonizing the imperatives of development with the improvement of citizens’ living standards and generally in the construction of a bright future for our young generations to strengthen their trust in the future of Tunisia.¹²

This promise of a job and a bright future was closely connected to the idea of education. The government in the beginning of the 1970s was particularly proud of its successful investments in the education sector during the first ten-year plan.¹³ At a congress of the Tunisian employers’ association on 4 February 1972, its president, who also was a high ranking member of the corporatist unity party Neo-Destour, mentioned that Tunisia was counting on its human capital to create wealth and that the country thus had denominated most resources ‘to advance the people through introducing inscription, education and career guidance’ (La Presse, 1972/ 02/05).¹⁴ This state-led project of educating Tunisian society effectively yielded a meritocratic promise which, as Mahmoud Ben Romdhane (2011) and Baccar Gherib (2017) have shown, was and still is central to the legitimacy of the regime. In sum, this was the very basis of a set of material promises the postcolonial government made to its people: well-educated Tunisians will work in contractual wage labour, making a decent living and residing in proper housing. Yet development was not only being portrayed as individual material improvement, but also as an improvement in the living circumstances overall. It was understood that the improvement of the ‘human condition’, whatever form it would take, needed to be orderly. Notions of rationality, statistics and planning set the stage for this development imaginary. Housing, for example, was not only discussed as an issue of individual wellbeing but also as a security issue and an issue of order and cleanliness in the city as a whole. In the 1970s, poor peoples’ 11 La Presse, 1972/04/06. 12 ‘Nous aurons franchi de nouveaux pas sur la voie de la lutte contre le chômage, l’adéquation entre les impératifs de développement et l’amélioration du niveau de vie des citoyens et de façon générale sur celle de l’édification d’un avenir radieux à nos jeunes générations pour que leur foi en l’avenir de la Tunisie s’accroisse’ (La Presse, 1986/10/18). 13 La Presse, 1972/04/06. 14 ‘Pour promouvoir l’homme, en généralisant l’enseignement, l’éducation et l’orientation’ (La Presse, 1972/02/05)

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shanty towns were being declared not ‘worthy of Tunisia’ and under the catchphrase of ‘degourbification’ – derived from the term gourbi, which describes a sort of North African poor dwelling – the government set out to replace these informal parts of the city with new housing projects. The idea of governing space through a rational order re-appeared in the 1980s when the government started a ‘campaign for cleanliness and for preserving the environment’, which was framed as a ‘struggle against anarchic construction’.¹⁵ Building on this campaign, the Ministry of Interior under the leadership of Ben Ali (who would later become president and authoritarian leader) launched a new initiative to make life more secure and calm. As the central commissioner of Tunis would tell La Presse, a prominent newspaper that often functioned as a mouthpiece of the government: The Ministry of Interior, he explained, has launched a campaign for hygiene and cleanliness. It was a success. It has been expanded and has become a full programme. It has reached a national scale. Its target: the protection of the environment. But the Ministry of Interior has a conception that is not limited to cleanliness. The tranquillity of the citizens and their security are important parts of this. Also, the Ministry of Interior has taken vigorous action in three directions: the struggle against noise, the protection of tourists and the intensification of interventions.¹⁶

Similar ideas about rationality and orderliness dominated debates around the use of statistics, planning, and ‘rational management’.¹⁷ In this way, in the state discourse notions of material wellbeing, wage labour, orderliness/cleanliness and social peace all collided in the idea of development.

Uneven and combined development in Tunisia The development promise laid the groundwork for different phases of actual economic development strategies. After an initial phase of an undecided and somewhat market liberal economic policy after independence, from 1956 to 1960, the de-

15 “ Lutte contre les construction anarchiques ” (La Presse 1986/06/06) 16 ‘Le Ministère de l’Intérieur, explique-t-il, a lancé une campagne d’hygiène et de propreté. Elle a été une réussite. On lui a donné de plus grandes dimensions. Elle est devenue tout un programme. Elle a éte étendue à l’échelle nationale. Son but: la protection de l’environnement. Mais de l’environnement le Ministère de l’Intérieur a une conception qui ne se limite pas à la propreté. La tranquillité du citoyen et sa sécurité en sont des composantes importantes’. Aussi le Ministère de l’Intérieur a-t-il lancé des actions énergiques en trois directions: la lutte contre le bruit, la protection des touristes et l’intensification des interventions’ (La Presse, 1986/08/13). 17 The state discourse would call it ‘gestion saine’.

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velopment policy of the Tunisian government in the 1960s has been called ‘socialist’ by some (Harik 1992, 224; Murphy 1999, 42; King 1998, 67) and ‘state capitalism’ by others (Gherib 2017, 219). It was based on import substitution industrialization (ISI) and a centralized agricultural cooperative system, which was supposed to ‘contain’ social unrest in the country (Bodenstedt et al. 1971, 27). ISI, at the time, was a fashionable post-colonial development strategy. The idea was to gain independence from foreign markets and capital by producing much of what the population consumed in the domestic market. Instead of importing consumer goods, this meant importing technology and know-how in order to build up domestic industries. The state would function as the investor and manager of these newly built industries. However, ISI and the cooperative system did not yield the desired results and faced popular and elite opposition.¹⁸ Thus, the so-called ‘socialist experiment’ was ended in 1969 and the Tunisian government in the 1970s started to pursue an export-oriented development strategy and left bigger parts of the economy to private investment. One legislative cornerstone of this shift in development policy was Law 72 from 1972, which established the legal framework for offshore production. Today, CERAT operates under Law 72 and in many ways the factory is a manifestation of Tunisia’s export-oriented development policy since the 1970s. In 1986, the Tunisian government agreed to the implementation of a structural adjustment programme as a condition for an IMF loan. The programme contained aset of policies often called the Washington Consensus: an austerity programme consisting mainly of opening up the domestic market for foreign goods and capital, privatizing state-led companies, welfare cuts and weakening legal entitlements of workers. Tunisia has often been portrayed as a ‘model of reform’ in this regard (Bellin 2002, 39), but nevertheless its trade balance remained negative, unemployment increased and its debt burden as well. This is why some have argued that the revolution in 2010 was a reaction to ‘neoliberalism’ (Radl 2017). However, it seems that after the revolution the policies of devaluing the Tunisian dinar, privatization

18 Different authors focus on different reasons for the failure of ISI in Tunisia. It seems that two concrete events triggered the general dismissal of the strategy: a harvest failure in 1969 (Bellin 2002, 23), which intensified discontent among the rural population, and the attempt of the government to nationalize property of the landed bourgeoisie, which turned an influential ally inside the party against the government (King 1998, 68). Those two factors put the nail in the coffin of an otherwise structurally flawed economic policy (King 1998, 68; Ben Romdhane 2011, 120–121). One general problem of the ISI policy was the small scale of the national market (Bellin 2002, 23). Also, the cooperative system was managed in a top-down way that alienated the rural population. Furthermore, the tax base of the Tunisian state remained small and Tunisia retained its trade deficit throughout the ISI period (Bellin 2002: 23). Nevertheless, this period saw the second highest increase in GDP throughout Tunisia’s post-colonial history (Ben Romdhane 2011, 164).

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and austerity policies continued to dominate the economic strategy of the Tunisian state (OTE 2017). While the different phases of development policies might have differed significantly in their strategies, the notion of development never ceased to be the reference point for them. At least to a certain extent, those policy shifts needed to address and fulfil the development promises that had played such a crucial role in the postcolonial nation building process. This is why even the neoliberal structural adjustment in 1986 had to be framed by then-Prime Minister Mohamed Mzali as ‘socialisme destourienne’.¹⁹ At the same time, the consecutive shifts in economic policy were increasingly unable to answer to the expectations the development promise had created. Gradually, the government excluded growing parts of Tunisian society from its development project, notably the poor, small-scale farmers, labour and, finally, university graduates when the government stopped providing them with suitable jobs. Furthermore, notwithstanding the government’s inclusive rhetoric, the development project had excluded a large part of Tunisian society right from the start. Because it opted for an industrially driven form of development (the ‘Soviet model’), smallscale farmers were neither part of the desired ‘developed’ future for Tunisia nor part of the conversations about it (Ajl 2019). Those forms of marginalization represent the unevenness of Tunisia’s development, an unevenness that is combined in character, because it is intrinsically connected with Tunisia’s positioning in global capitalist structures of production and distribution. One unevenness that the Tunisian development project (re‐)produced is the socio-economic gap between the littoral urban parts of the country and its interior parts, namely the west and the south. While the largely rural population of those regions have a long history of exploitation from the urban areas at the coast (Gherib 2017, 179–200), the postcolonial development project continued this marginalization, ascribing the former a role as the ‘traditional’ and ‘backward’ parts of society. Those people were portrayed as an obstacle to modernity; they had to be re-educated and made useful to the overall industrialization of the country (Ajl 2019). One telling example is the fact that the Tunisian government in the 1960s set prices for agricultural products extremely low, effectively devaluing agricultural labour in comparison to industrial labour (Harik 1992, 214). The export-orientation since the early 1970s has favoured the littoral areas even more. Money accumulated in the cities with access to harbours and other infrastructure necessary for export. The south and west of Tunisia, in contrast, had no ways to deal with international competition and inflation that resulted from the market liberal reforms. Ultimate-

19 La Presse, 1986/06/25 – The ‘socialist’ policy orientation of Tunisia’s single corporatist party, the Neo-Destour.

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ly, those regions are left with little to no prospects for a desirable future, and many of those who can afford it migrate to the cities on the coast (Amara and Jemmali 2018). It is, thus, not by chance that the revolution in 2010 started in those marginalized inner regions of Tunisia (Gherib 2017, 195–200; Boeddeling 2020, 108–119). Another uneven result of the way the Tunisian economy has been integrated into global markets is the difference between employees with long-term contracts and those on short-term contracts. In 1996 the government, the Tunisian employers’ organization and the Tunisian unions’ organization negotiated the introduction of short-term contracts into the Tunisian labour market, as part of the structural adjustment programme. The international competition created by the exportorientation of the 1970s and the structural adjustment policies since the 1980s made a ‘flexible’ labour force necessary. In those negotiations, while giving in to the legalization of short-term labour, the umbrella organization for Tunisian unions, the UGTT, succeeded in improving job security for employees with permanent contracts (Alexander 2001, 119–120). This created an important socio-economic gap between employees with permanent contracts and their colleagues on short-term contracts (Hibou 2009, 330). The deterioration of secure contract labour and the generational unevenness in the contractual conditions resulting from it are phenomena that we can observe in different industries and in different countries. They intensify a long existing dynamic in which ‘the security of some is dependent on the precarity of others’ (Parry 2018, 7). In general, the market-‘liberal’ development strategy that successive Tunisian governments have pursued has resulted in the emergence of mostly smaller and low added value industry (Ben Romdhane 2011, 129; Bellin 2002, 29–32; Radl 2017, 116; Hibou 2009, 337; Pfeifer 1999, 451). The focus on export and private investment had begun in the 1970s quite consciously and openly aiming at filling the niches of the European market. The prime minister at the time was Hédi Nouira, who as former minister of economy had often argued that sub-contracting was a good way to boost the Tunisian economy and a step towards producing finished products, a ‘snowball for the rest of the economy’ (La Presse 1972/02/01).²⁰ The idea was to find the right niche for Tunisian production to dodge international competition and develop further from there – as La Presse put it: ‘to render the economy complementary’ (La Presse 1972/03/15).²¹ Today, CERAT operates as a French-owned sub-contracting offshore subsidiary for its French mother firm, which shows how in certain cases those development policies have drawn exactly the kind of firms and international capital to Tunisia that it set out to attract. However,

20 ‘Boule de neige pour le reste de l’economie’. 21 ‘Rendre [l’]économie complémentaire’.

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those policies have also established a form of unequal exchange (Amin 1973) in which skilled Tunisian employees are paid much less than their colleagues in Europe. In 2008, technicians at CERAT were nine times cheaper than their counterparts in France.²² In other words, the ‘niche’ that Hédi Nouira had talked about, the comparative advantage of Tunisia, lies in the low wage sector and thus creates an unevenness in salary – which grant ‘super-profits’ (through super-exploitation) for international capital in the (semi‐)periphery (Amin 1974b, 180–222). Tunisia mainly provides the European market with the products and services that the Europeans cannot produce efficiently enough to keep up with international prices. These are mainly low-skilled jobs with a corresponding low salary. Thus, while the Tunisian export-oriented development strategy since the 1970s has attracted some foreign direct investment and jobs in sub-contracting firms, the nature of those jobs is an expression of the global uneven and combined development which perpetuates a centre-periphery dynamic and results into stark differences in salary. Nevertheless, as I will show below for the case of CERAT, those jobs can come in the shape of the development promise. While they might not pay for a good life, the work environment at CERAT speaks to the development imaginary and thus fulfils certain expectations about a good job.

Exploitation in the guise of development Even though many employees at CERAT find it hard to make ends meet, most of them like their jobs at the factory. When I started my fieldwork at CERAT, I was not expecting that. After all, I was looking at the lives of factory workers in a (semi‐)peripheral country and I expected to find a lot of hardship and contention at work. However, with time I understood that, even though people had their individual problems with their colleagues or management, the majority of them really cherished their work place. They would often say that they liked the jaw at CERAT. In modern standard Arabic, jaw means air, atmosphere or weather. In Tunisian dialect it is used to describe the (social) atmosphere or mood. One way of asking ‘how are you’ is to ask ‘jawwuk behi?’ which literally translates into: ‘is your atmosphere good?’ At some point, I started asking people what exactly they meant when they talked about good jaw at CERAT, and after a while I realized that much of

22 This information is from a short report in the French media about the factory in 2008. For reasons of anonymization I cannot reference the source here.

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what created a good atmosphere for people at the factory resembled the development imaginary that had been invoked by the state since independence. What I found is that what employees perceive as jaw at the factory describes a set of pleasant social relations that are often related to individual properties of colleagues (respect and discipline) and to specific ideas about orderliness and cleanliness. When I asked Rumaila M., who works as a quality supervisor at a production line, what she liked most about CERAT, she told me that the work was ‘tidy’,²³ that the work force was good and that she liked the ‘respect’²⁴ – she would deal with the production line workers ‘as equals’.²⁵ Even though Rumaila M. told me that she felt stuck in her career path and did not have much hope to find a better job or climb the ranks, she liked her work and the factory.²⁶ The notion of ‘tidiness’ came up regularly in interviews and conversations about CERAT. The work processes and the work environment inside the factory – both vastly regulated (as described above) – reflect these ideals of tidiness and order. They are perceived as something that separates the factory from the life outside of work.²⁷ Kareem L., a maintenance mechanic, once told me that he experienced this difference in orderliness as a contradiction: ‘here [in Tunisia] you live in contradiction’.²⁸ Tellingly, a sign in the hallway of the factory after the main entrance of the plant reminds those who enter: ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’.²⁹ Just as the things are in their place, the employees are as well. Most employees I talked to felt that their colleagues were disciplined and respectful and that this contributed immensely to the good atmosphere at work. Dalila F., a forewoman who has worked at CERAT since 2003, told me in a conversation that she liked the jaw. I asked her what she meant by that and she listed a number of aspects: the communication was good, the discipline was good, as well as the relations with the colleagues.³⁰ Discipline and respect were for many employees an important factor of the atmosphere at CERAT. In an interview, Ziad J., a quality management supervisor, told me that at CERAT ‘[t]hey respect you, while in other companies there’s no respect’.³¹ In this way, many employees at CERAT compare their

23 ‘Natheefa’ (translation by the author). 24 ‘Ihtiram’ (translation by the author). 25 ‘Kull had keef keef’, which translates into ‘everybody is the same’. 26 Field diary, 2018/02/13. 27 Michael Hoffmann in Chapter 2 of this volume points out similarly the stark contrast between a clean food factory and the disorderly world outside of the factory gates in Nepalgunj. 28 ‘Hina ta3eesh fil-opposition’ 29 ‘Une place pour chaque chose et chaque chose à sa place’ (translation by the author). 30 Field Diary, 2018/03/01. 31 Interview with Ziad J., 2019/03/04.

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workplace at CERAT with other places they have worked at or heard of and conclude that the factory is better organized, colleagues are more disciplined and they are treated with more respect. This is one of the main reasons why they feel they have a good job even if their salary, however comparatively high (see below), does not pay for what they consider to be a good life – a house, a car, a family. For many of them, a part of the development promise has been fulfilled – if not the material part, then at least others. The CERAT factory represents much of what the Tunisian state has portrayed as development: it emits a modern sense of organization, industriousness and discipline. In other words, when the government in the 1970s and 1980s painted a picture of a developed Tunisian future, this picture contained a work place like CERAT, even though the imagined lives of people with such jobs would have looked materially much better than the reality for employees at CERAT. Therefore, most people at the factory are happier with their job than they are with their lives – they feel privileged and stuck at the same time.

Ambiguous positionalities: A good job but not a good life Apart from the development imaginary, which the work environment at CERAT speaks to, there is another, material reason why employees at the factory feel (partially) privileged, even though many of them experience forms of economic hardship: employees at CERAT are actually materially better off than many people that they compare themselves to. On the one hand, they know that their European colleagues earn much more and some dream of emigrating to Europe or Canada. But they also know that their salary is good compared to many Tunisians, especially in the marginalized interior parts of the country. The uneven and combined development of Tunisia has created a situation in which industrial labour is privileged in comparison to other occupational groups, namely small-scale farmers and those who work in low-level services (i. e., shoe polishers, drivers, sales persons in small shops or restaurants). As shown above, industrial labour has been a part of the decidedly industrial development imaginary right from the start, and this shows in the working conditions of the employees at CERAT. Many of them have secure permanent contracts,³² and many employees told me that they earn comparatively well, considering what they would get in other companies. 32 I do not have the exact numbers for the whole factory, but I know that for one particular assembly line department in 2017 around 65 % had a permanent contract, 22 % had a short term con-

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The lower end of salaries at CERAT (for permanent contracts) amounts, according to my experience, to around two times the Tunisian minimum wage and is about even with what World Bank Data determines as Tunisia’s lower middle income (measured against the GNI per capita). Office jobs are paid what, according to this statistic, is called middle income and upper management employees earn more than what is defined as upper middle income. Thus, on a national scale, employees at CERAT are somewhat well off, and they know it. But they also draw on international comparisons to assess their socio-economic situation. Many of them, even the ones who work in lower-level shop floor positions, are familiar with CERAT’s sister-factory in China, which produces the same parts. Albeit knowledge on the Chinese factory is dispersed unevenly across the workforce, they are aware that in the Chinese factory quality of production is worse than at CERAT and workers in the Chinese sister factory earn less. It is thus unsurprising that employees at CERAT are proud of the factory’s performance and they feel at least better off than many other people in so-called developing countries. They are also aware of international competition. The management of CERAT hosts annual report meetings where they thank the personnel for their effort and inform them about the performance of the plant as well as upcoming changes inside the company. In this context, the director of the plant informed the employees in 2018 that they were meeting all their targets and that they were doing a good job. He also told them that their company would have to grow at twice the rate of the market, because a big competitor now had better access to the European market. Thus, employees at CERAT are aware of international competition. They might want or need more money, but they also know that they compete globally and that they cannot demand more. Considering all those things, most employees at CERAT feel somewhat privileged. They earn more money than their Chinese colleagues and more than many other Tunisians. They work in an environment that resembles important parts of the development promise and emits an atmosphere of progress and modernity. At the same time, most employees at CERAT do not earn enough to lead what they consider to be a good life. Many feel stuck, not seeing a realistic way forward in their careers. This goes especially for many foremen and -women and quality supervisors who often have been working at the factory for a long time in the production line and have gotten a promotion at some point. Those employees often mentioned that they felt stuck, as one quality supervisor put it, ‘at

tract and 13 % had a probation contract. I am quite sure that in departments with less manual jobs, the ratio of permanent contracts is higher.

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the same level’.³³ Another quality supervisor also told me that she ‘wanted to advance’³⁴ in her career, but had little hope to do so. While many employees feel stuck in their career paths, many also feel stuck in their lives more generally. Mostly young men have told me that they lack many of the things that they and society expect them to have. They need a car, a house and a family but do not see how they could pay for those things. In an interview, a quality supervisor told me that he did not like to spend much time with his parents, with whom he was living. When I asked him why, he answered: I don’t hang out with my family because there are some topics I’d rather not talk about, you see. I don’t hang out with them so I can avoid talking about these topics. Topics like what for example? Like, what I have done in life, why I don’t get married. There are topics that I don’t like.

Many employees at CERAT understand themselves as ‘ambitious’, which can create frustration when they feel that they cannot improve their lives. They would, however, rarely blame the firm for their hardships. Instead, they identify Islamists, politicians, politics, corruption, the inflation or simply ‘Tunisia’ as the main problem. They blame external, somewhat vague, ‘circumstances’, ‘possibilities’, or the ‘situation’. Quite a few also see the revolution in 2010 as a main reason for their tough economic situation. While most enjoy the newly won freedom of speech, they would also argue that the revolution was responsible for the inflation. From 2013 to 2017 the Tunisian dinar lost half its value due to structural adjustment reforms demanded by the IMF (OTE 2017b). As a middle management employee in the quality management department put it once while we were having beers in a pub: ‘Bouazizi ruined us all’.³⁵ Around one and a half years later, I asked him if he thought his salary was appropriate for his work: No! Not with the way—how do I explain it—nowadays, everything is more expensive. So, five hundred TND ten years ago were better than a thousand today since everything more than doubled its price. So, five hundred TND ten years ago, I mean before the revolution, of course.³⁶

33 ‘Fi nafs al-étape’. 34 ‘Nhibb nqaddim’. 35 Private meeting with the author, 2017/09/25, author’s translation. Mohamed Bouazizi became a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid after a bank had taken hold of his indebted uncle’s land. He never managed to obtain a vendor’s permit and was regularly harassed by the police. In December 2010 he set himself on fire in public, which started protests and revolts all over the country. Thus, he is known for starting the revolution. 36 Interview with the author, 2019/03/03.

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This shows how the particular position of employees at CERAT in the uneven and combined development of Tunisia has a tendency to de-escalate conflicts between labour and capital. The employees are mostly compliant with international regimes of capital accumulation because they feel that they partially profit from it. When they try to improve their lives, they often do so through individual strategies: they get a formal education, take evening classes, educate themselves online, try to emigrate or open their own businesses. This is not to say that all workers at CERAT are non-political and even less so in Tunisia in general. The role of labour riots leading up to the revolution in 2010 (Allal/Bennafla 2011; Swagler 2011) as well as the role of the UGTT in the revolution (Boeddeling 2020) show that this is not the case. Also, working conditions in other industries and in other firms are worse than at CERAT (Aliriza 2020, 21–25). However, my case shows a different side of uneven and combined development: an ambivalent socio-economic situation measured against a development promise made by the postcolonial state which results in people’s ambivalent evaluation of their lives. Those people have a good job but without a good life. Accordingly, they feel privileged and stuck at the same time.

Conclusion I draw two main conclusions from this chapter. First, when trying to understand uneven and combined development in postcolonial contexts, we should consider the longstanding, continuous but also changing and multi-dimensional history of development in these countries. To do this, we have to discern the various meanings that ‘development’ possessed and continues to possess for experts, politicians and in the everyday lives of people. Most authors in development studies understand development as a post-WWII concept that – for better or worse – sought to re-arrange the position of former colonies in world politics and world markets (Arndt 1987, 9; Esteva 2019, 1; Knöbl 2013, 80). Development thus is concerned with developing countries and their relationship with former colonizers. This is where a lot of controversy starts. Some think that development is a gateway for foreign intervention and imperialism (Ajl 2019; Sachs 2019; Escobar 1995), while others argue that, apart from the former, the idea of development has also an emancipatory and anti-colonial potential (and effect) (Cooper 1997, 64, 83–85; Ferguson 2005, 170–171). Some see ‘development’ as desirable and differ in their assessment of whether capitalist globalization (modernization theory) or delinking (dependency theory) is the right path towards it. Post-structural critics see a problem in the notion of development itself and argue that it limits the imagination of different actors to Eurocentric ideas of progress, domination and discipline, which are altogether unsustainable and undesirable (Sachs 2019; Escobar 1995; Lushaba 2009, 26). What, then,

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is development? The answer is probably: all of the above and more. My chapter has shown that, in the case of Tunisia, development denominates, at the same time, a) the material reality of Tunisia’s position in international markets; b) the political project of postcolonial national unity; and c) the hopes, dreams, and expectations invoked by the discourse surrounding it. Development is a materiality as well as it is a sensitivity and an imaginary (de Vries 2007). Unevenness in development is therefore not simply a material fact but is also felt – in the way people are treated at work, in how the factory is organized and what this represents to them. Second, the material and immaterial realities of uneven and combined development at CERAT create an ambiguous positionality in which employees rarely focus on conflictual class interests between them and the management or the owners. This indicates that factory workers are not necessarily the most marginalized group of society and thus represent not always the revolutionary subject (Weißenfels 2021). Rather, it shows that global capitalism, while being exploitative in sum, creates on the ground a complex constellation of individual chances and limits. Whether people welcome global capitalist dynamics or not depends a lot on their perception of those chances and limits (see Michael Hoffman in this volume). We have to consider that not only capitalists but also workers might cherish unevenness when they see individual opportunities in it. This endeavour forces us to deviate from Marx’s idea of development as the (teleological) changes in modes of production and Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development that did not necessarily question the teleological dynamic of development but only showed that the teleological movement was not smooth, but erratic (Trotzky 1930, 3; Makki 2015, 482). To understand the complexity of the postcolonial notion of development, we need to think about the combinations of different kinds of ideas, institutions, and actions that create particular positions in uneven global capitalist dynamics. Therefore, the debate about development has a lot to gain by engaging in the uneven and combined character of global capitalism. Development from the perspective of uneven and combined development is neither a natural law that leads to a bright future (as modernization theory would have it) nor is it just blocked (as dependency theory claims). It is also not simply desirable or undesirable. Because, even though global capitalism will always be based on exploitation, in a given context it represents a complex constellation of limits and chances that is connected to and negotiated with political projects, individual imaginaries and desires. Thus, in a postcolonial context, an analysis of uneven and combined development should engage with the development projects of the nation-states and the development imaginaries present in people’s everyday lives. This will help us to understand political action and inaction as well as the complex ways in which peo-

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ple connect – subjectively and objectively – with global dynamics of exploitation and suppression.

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Gherib, Baccar. Penser la transition avec Gramsci. Tunisie (2011–2014). Tunis: Éditions Diwen, 2017. Harik, Iliya. “Privatization and Development in Tunisia.” In Privatization and Liberalization in the Middle East, edited by Iliya Harik and Denis Sullivan, 210–232. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Hibou, Béatrice. “Work discipline, discipline in Tunisia: complex and ambiguous relations.” African Identities 7,3 (2009): 327–352 King, Stephen J. “Economic Reform and Tunisia’s Hegemonic Party: The End of the Administrative Elite.” Arab Studies Quarterly 20,2 (1998): 59–86 Knöbl, Wolfgang. “Aufstieg und Fall der Modernisierungstheorie und des säkularen Bildes ‚moderner Gesellschaften‘. Versuch einer Historisierung.” In Moderne und Religion. Kontroversen um Modernität und Säkularisierung, edited by Ulrich Willems et al., 75–116. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013. Lushaba, Lwazi. Development as Modernity, Modernity as Development. Dakar: CODESRIA, 2009 Makki, Fouad. “Reframing development theory: the significance of the idea of uneven and combined development.” Theory and Society 44,5 (2015): 471–497 Murphy, Emma. Economic and Political Change in Tunisia. From Bourguiba to ben Ali. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. OTE. ‘Tunisie et FMI, Injustices Transitionnelles.” Policy Briefing Paper, 2017. http://www.economie-tu nisie.org/sites/default/files/20180404-pb-tunisie_et_fmi_injustices_transitionnelles-fr_0.pdf/ Accessed November 13, 2021 OTE. ‘Comment le FMI attaque la valeur du dinar tunisien?’, Data Analysis Paper, 2017b. http://www. economie-tunisie.org/fr/observatoire/infoeconomics/comment-le-fmi-attaque-la-valeur-du-dinartunisien/ Accessed November 13, 2021 Pfeifer, Karen. “Parameters of Economic Reform in North Africa.” Review of African Political Economy 26,82 (1999): 441–454 Radl, Sascha. “Structural Adjustment in Tunisia. The Crisis of Neoliberalism and the ’Gafsa Riots’ of 2008.” In Development by Free Trade?, edited by Gisela Baumgratz, Khaled Chaabane, Werner Ruf, and Wilfried Telkämpfer, 109–130. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2017. Sachs, Wolfgang. “Introduction.” In The Development Dictionary. A guide to knowledge as power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, xxviii – xxxiii. London: Zed Books, 2019. Swagler, Matt. ‘Tunisia: A dictator falls, but what comes next?’ International Socialist Review 76 (2011). https://isreview.org/issue/76/tunisia-dictator-falls-what-comes-next/ Accessed April 28, 2023 Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution Volume One. Marxists Internet Archive, 1930 (2000). https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/download/hrr-vol1.pdf/ Accessed April 28, 2023 Weißenfels, André. “The Middle Class Factory. The (partial) privilege of industrial labour in Tunisia.” TRAFO Blog For Transregional Research, March 19, 2021. https://trafo.hypotheses.org/category/fac tory-reloaded/ Accessed April 28, 2023

Arnaud Kaba

The Uneven and Combined Development of Christmas Ornament Glass Production in Eastern France Introduction In 1848, a glassmaker in Lauscha, a village in Thuringia close to the border with Bohemia in the Austrian Empire that specialized in glassmaking, invented the concept of the Christmas baubles. A legend claiming that it was done by a very poor glassmaker who did not have the means to buy the usual decorations cannot be confirmed, but Lauscha keeps an inventory record that attests to the order of ten Christmas baubles in the winter of 1848. The production of Christmas baubles soon skyrocketed as they became extremely popular, and even more so after the German Kaiser declared the Christmas tree to be a German national symbol. Very quickly, trade and craftsmanship of Christmas baubles spread to all the Germanic glassblowing sites up to the French border region under Germanic cultural influence. Already in 1858, it was claimed that the first Christmas baubles were manufactured also in Lorraine, specifically in the Pays de Langstross (Land of Langstross) in the pine-covered mountains of Vosges, which lies a stone’s throw away from the German border.¹ Shortly afterwards, Christmas baubles became the speciality of Baublesbruck, one of the villages in the Pays de Langstross, which was already a 400-year-old glass production cluster at that time. Glass and crystal glassworks were already operating in almost every village, employing a large share of the local population. From the late 1960s onwards, however, the region experienced large-scale decline in its glass industry. In the summer of 2021, when I visited the region for the first time, it was really only the two biggest crystal glassworks that survived, and one company that cut crystal was living off the stock of an old crystal glasswork at Lisberg that shut down in 2009. Another company was cutting stained glass and window glass at their workshop in Baublesbruck, while a further company was simply treating spectacle glass in the same village; here and there some independent glass craftsmen and craftswomen had found precarious niches.

1 From the end of the Prussian-French War in 1871 until the end of World War I in 1918, the Pays de Langstross was part of Germany. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-010

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I came to the region with the intention of visiting La Verrerie, an institution subsidized by an association of municipalities that was set up in 1992 in the premises of the former factory in the village Glaeserdorf (adjacent to Baublesbruck) with the aim of reviving the local craft of glassmaking. Indeed, Glaeserdorf’s reinvented glass factory is one of the many manifestations of regional initiatives aimed at reviving working-class history, or at least the cultural elements that formed part of the formal industrial sites, as well as reviving vanishing skills, the historical patrimony. David Berliner (2010) has shown the extent to which the stakes around immaterial patrimony initiatives are always deeply political. In this regard, one concern is the participation of the local population in the process. Noël Barbe – who also happens to be one of the few anthropologists who has undertaken fieldwork and written on glass in the region (Barbe 1993) – states that, in order to revive a ‘plebeian’ (Barbe 2019) immaterial patrimony, the process has to be set from the beginning in a participative way. As we will see, in Glaeserdorf the establishment of a local museum (which is much older than La Verrerie) started with a participatory process. In this chapter, I argue that the multifactorial evolution of the heritage process created the impression among many villagers that the project was slipping out of their hands. Another concern was the monetization of working-class memory through its heritagization. Laurent Bazin (2014), after studying the heritage process of former coalmines that were turned into museums in the north of France, concludes that such a process produces a totally depoliticized memory aimed at tourists, from which the ex-workers do not profit. Hence, he concludes, heritagization creates a second dispossession of their work. The main difference between Glaeserdorf and these heritagized former coal mines – and this accounts for the originality of the case study presented in this chapter – is that in the former the tools of production are still present. Even if the volume of production has declined sharply over the decades, tens of thousands of Christmas baubles are still produced in Glaeserdorf and sold to the local market in competition with other production sites across the globe. In this chapter, I argue that this makes Glaeserdorf an excellent case study to illustrate the potential of the uneven and combined development paradigm for analysing what the transformations of a single site can tell us about global glass history and the reorientation of power relations between the North and the South. More specifically, the chapter thus addresses the overarching question: how did the uneven and combined evolution of the global glass industry shape glass production in Glaeserdorf and thus by extension most of its social and cultural life? For an anthropologist of labour whose area of study is primarily South Asia and its informal production regimes, it is this connection between the local and global that made me choose Glaeserdorf as a site of study in the first place. I

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came to Glaeserdorf following the advice of Jean Delaplace, a contemporary artist who had carried out a project that consisted of commissioning Glaeserdorf’s La Verrerie to make coloured vases blown from glass bangles that were produced in the Indian glass-making hub Firozabad. The glass cluster of Firozabad, which I began studying in 2019, is the largest cluster for the production of decorative glassware in South Asia, employing roughly 500.000 people in diverse aspects of glass production. Its main production has always been glass bangles, which every married woman in South Asia is supposed to wear to mark her status as a wife, but it also produces numerous other decoration goods. Production of export of glassware from Firozabad was first attempted in the 1930s but failed. In the early twenty-first century that has changed. Since the beginning of my fieldwork there, I had come across numerous exporting chains from vases exported to Europe to smoking pipes, lamps, etc. At the bottom of a warehouse of an exporting company located in Moradabad, the regional exporting hub, I also noticed some Christmas baubles. As Alessandra Mezzadri (2016) reported in her monograph on networks of garment production in India, sweatshop regimes have become extremely competitive in the global value chain. Likewise, the relatively low technology level of Firozabad’s industry is compensated by its informal and stark disciplinary regimes that allow it to draw on a cheap, relatively docile, yet skilled workforce to manufacture glassware decoration products for Europe and the US. The contemporary direction of export chains shows a deep reconfiguration of the flows of commodities between Europe and India, almost an inversion. When it all started in Firozabad in the 1930s, it was Indian glass producers who had severe difficulties coping with the competition from Europe. In 1878, in the city of Jablonec,² now part of the Czech Republic, Albert Sachse, a glassmaker and trader, founded a glass production company aimed at exporting cheap glass jewellery to the colonies. Its main export item were glass bangles, which he could produce cheaply thanks a new semi-industrial process and which he sent in large quantities to India. Thanks to his success, Sachse created Sachse and Co, a multinational company with production units in Venice, Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Paris and London, and with trading offices as far away as the Ivory Coast. Sachse’s company flooded the Indian market with Czech and German glass bangles.³ This threatened the artisanal glass producers in India and at some point provoked such widespread re-

2 Jablonec and Lauscha lie only 400 km apart. Although a powerful glass industry also exists in Britain, the belt stretching from Thuringia to Bavaria and, across the border, from Bohemia to Austria formed the centre of glass production in Europe, especially in the nineteenth century after the glass industry in Venice had been destroyed. I would like to thank Floor Kaspers for her help in connecting the dots between Indian and Czech bangles industries. 3 See Kaspers, 2004.

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sentment that during the early Independence movement people destroyed these Czech bangles in public – as Alok Kumar and Laure Dubussieu (2021) state in their monograph Ancient South Asian Glass History. It also convinced both the colonial authorities and the Indian industrialists to try their luck at building up a glass bangle industry in India itself. This materialized in Firozabad in 1908 (Syed 2011). Firozabad stands now as a fierce competitor of the Pays de Langstross. This is well illustrated by the fact that the contemporary glass artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, after exploring possibilities to commission the Glaeserdorf glass centre to produce his artworks, preferred to outsource their production to Firozabad. Things have come a long way since the early 1920s, when it was Baublesbruck’s glass factory exporting its shiny glass baubles to India, where they fascinated some aristocratic elites, who would hang them in their palaces. And Firozabad now outcompetes (at least in volume) Glaeserdorf’s iconic glassware production: the Christmas ornament. Back in the field in 2021, after the two waves of COVID-19, I visited a factory in Firozabad producing glass decorations for Christmas, pretending that I was an exporter and that my research assistant was my agent. The seller gave us his boss’s contact details and told us that an international home decoration fair was being held that very day, that is, 31 October 2021, in Noida, in Delhi’s suburbs. We went to the fairground and managed to pass through security without exporter badges. Inside the huge building there were innumerable stands providing all kinds of housewares. Roughly thirty per cent of them were stands from glass decoration companies situated in Firozabad. If one includes the brass decoration stands whose products in part also contained glass from Firozabad, it is fair to say that Firozabad glassware was present in half of the stands. All the glass stands were displaying Christmas baubles in countless models – painted, coated, transparent, round, conical at the top – waiting for proposals from the Indian intermediaries of foreign buyers. According to Trotsky (2017 [1930], 3), the core of the uneven and combined development theory is the rule saying that, instead of following a linear trajectory, the different historical processes of capitalist development are the result of the ‘combination’ – in fact the creative interaction – between three nations which had an uneven stage of development. However, as Marcel van der Linden (2007) critically remarks, the confidence with which Trotsky calls uneven and combined development a law contrasts with the poor definition of what exactly is combined. From the different texts written by Trotsky as well as by the Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel (1970) on ‘uneven and combined development’, it seems to be alternatively modes of production, technologies, and social systems which are combined between ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ states and regions. Another main concern with the theory is its inherent evolutionism. What defines a backward

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society? While Van der Linden rightly points out all these weaknesses, I argue in this chapter that the development of the glass industry in Lorraine – as well as the local culture it shaped – is indeed the product of a combination of influences between uneven societies, especially in countries of what is now called the Global North, like France, Germany and Austria, but also in countries of the Global South, like India. I agree with Van der Linden on the point that this cannot be called a ‘law’ of ‘development’ resulting from the combined elements of ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ societies. Rather it is the result of technological evolution, political choices and industrial policies to attract capital, to establish knowhow and to maximise its value. Indeed, as the competition between nations is fierce, the links (sometimes cooperation but mainly competition) between glass-producing regions can only lead to creative and sometimes violent interactions, which in my understanding is what Trotsky and Mandel mean by ‘combination’. Interaction between states triggered the transformation of Firozabad’s region from a centre of craftsmanship to one of flourishing industry. In 1801, Napoleon conquered Venice and left it to the Austrians. The Austrians, who also had an important glass industry, destroyed the Venetian glass furnaces on the tiny island of Murano in order to suppress competition from the top glass producer in Europe at that time. German and also French glass production centres did profit from this situation and grew extensively. Then, after the Second World War, technological evolution – here automation – ended this ‘golden age’ and caused the slow decay of the glass industry in the Pays de Langstross (although crystal, as a luxury good, persists). More recently, competition from southern glass industries like the ones from Firozabad who are producing not only Christmas baubles but even goods marketed as top-end contemporary art, has caused the capital itself to transform in Pays de Langstross. While Glaeserdorf originally tried to attract industrial capital and to earn money from the production itself through industrial and local policies (which were often linked)⁴, now, although production has resumed, the goal is as much to create a touristic and cultural aura around the village as it is to sell commodities. In this chapter, I argue that this transformation in the nature of the capital involved, from industrial to touristic, triggered changes in the village and also in the production process itself. Since it is an idealized site of memory and production and not a stricto sensu capitalist factory, the management tries to publicize a progressive stand towards labour conditions, but the growth of the touristic aura is, according to workers themselves, threatening

4 It was quite common in the region for glass factory owners to act as village mayors or for factory managers to sit on municipal councils.

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their somehow privileged labour rhythms. Furthermore, wider transformations, in particular the gradual recruitment of glassmakers into public glass schools, outside the old master-apprentice structure, are reshuffling the hierarchies. This chapter relies on three months of participant observation carried out between April and June 2021, followed by one week in August 2021 and a further two weeks in September 2021. I lived close to the glass workers for most of the time, in an artistic residence next to the glass factory, managed by an association of which only one former glassworker is a member. But since the association claims the legacy of the old popular working-class artistic associations, its members felt somehow connected to the glass centre’s evolution and it had become a local actor on the question of the development of a culture hub in the village, playing a role both as a parallel and alternative structure vis-à-vis the glass centre or the association managing the concert hall on the factory’s premises, but as an ally in developing the village’s aura. Here, I could share the stay with numerous artists and designers who collaborate with the glass centre. I did stay for two weeks in the welcoming centre that was hosting the designer and apprentices from La Verrerie’s glass centre and shared daily life with the staff. During the working days, I was inside the centre and spent time with the personal, although to my regret I was not able to participate in the work. The centre’s director had proposed that I do a three-week internship as a mould holder, but the practicum was impossible to bind legally, as I was on a Fritz Thyssen Fellowship, and thus I was neither engaged in proper formal employment nor formally unemployed. The chapter’s first part deals with the functioning of the structures at the Glaeserdorf glass centre. The second part explains the historical trajectory that led to the reinvention of the Christmas ornament tradition in Glaeserdorf. It also explains how uneven and combined development shaped not only its evolution and the reinvention of tradition, but also the concrete operations of skills transmission and preservation that accompanied the heritage project and that were shaped by competition between glass production centres, state and capitalist, as well as competition between men and machines and between southern and northern working classes. In these processes, the circulation, retention, and valorisation of knowhow occupies a central place. In the last part, the chapter dives into the ethnography of the labour process in Glaeserdorf to explain how transformation in the nature of the capital that the village wants to anchor locally – from industrial capital to a mix of industrial, cultural and touristic capital – shapes everyday relations on the shop floor as well as representations of work.

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French production juggling between serial production, immaterial patrimony, and artistic collaborations In early April 2021, in the middle of the pandemic’s third wave hitting Europe, I started fieldwork in Glaeserdorf. At the centre of the village stands the Halle Verrière (literally ‘glass hall’), a vast hall that used to be the glass factory’s main room, but that has been turned into a concert hall where people listen to music, dance and drink beer. After the closure of the factory in 1969, first a glass museum had been set up inside the old clerical staff building to safeguard the industrial and ‘immaterial heritage’ of the place. This glass museum also reconstructed in miniature the production infrastructure, the furnaces, the hot shop and the cold shop, which makes it different – as argued above – from other industrial heritage sites, e. g. the coal mine in northern France that lay aside the exploitation and the existential struggles (cf. Bazin 2014). La Verrerie is also established in the old factory’s first cold shop, that is, where the glass was cut, engraved and polished, and which dates from the eighteenth century.⁵ The official aim of the institution, as presented on its webpage, is not the production of glassware, but the conservation of local skills, which they consider to be the region’s heritage and which attracted me to Glaeserdorf on my first visit. La Verrerie, besides being managed by an association of the different municipalities of the Pays de Langstross, received donations from the Bettencourt Foundation – a private foundation owned by the owner of the beauty empire l’Oréal, who promotes local craft for the design and luxury industry. For the first six years of its existence, La Verrerie indeed focussed primarily on the conservation and regeneration of local skills in glass making. It organized workshops for the transfer of skills between the last skilled artisans of the former factory in neighbouring Baublesbruck. During these workshops, the centre’s workers received most of their knowhow, such as the blowing of Christmas baubles, which they have regularly and serially produced after designer-made blueprints since 1998.⁶ In addition to that, the centre hosts more exceptional collaborations with designers and artists who produce smaller series of original and often much more expensive goods. One of the most famous collaborations, for example, is with the artist Francis Anzanville for the glass vases he blows, which incorpo-

5 In the twentieth century, the cold shop was shifted to the big hall. 6 There were many other occasional ‘transmission sessions’ between the La Verriere workers and the region’s old glassworkers, as well as with the ones working in the crystal glassworks.

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rate pine leaves and twigs and are more upper-end items, with prices ranging between one hundred and one thousand euros. These two production lines are closely interrelated, as the serial production of Christmas baubles pays for the fancy artistic collaborations, which are often not so profitable financially for La Verrerie. During the hundreds of years of uninterrupted production at the Glaeserdorf glass factory between 1704 and 1969, it specialized in fine tableware glass. The transformation from a factory for tableware into a heritage and arts centre for Christmas baubles and vases points to the question of the value of the knowhow, which in turn determines the value of the local labour and of the glassmaking culture that is infused everywhere in the valley’s villages. Indeed, on my first day at the artists’ colony in Glaeserdorf I met Jacques, a twenty-four-year-old Parisian designer, who was then engaged in a project of working with a geometrically variable wooden mould to produce designer vases at a reasonable price. For Jacques, as well as for La Verrerie, it is important to advocate for local production and regional value chains. Jacques was an intern for Karl Schmidt, a Swiss glassmaker who happened to be, according to Jacques, the intermediary for Jean-Michel Oriflamme when the latter decided to outsource the production of his artwork to Firozabad. Although it is still unclear to me how Oriflamme established his connection to Firozabad, in November 2021 I met the industrialist to whom he had commission his late glass-brick artwork in Firozabad. This industrialist told me, ‘before going to Firozabad, Oriflamme was a nobody; now he is a billionaire … I charged him only 700.000 rupees [around 10.000 Euro] for the work’. Yves Grangé, the actual director of La Verrerie, told me that Oriflamme had come to Glaeserdorf with his project because they had already successfully collaborated on a joint project for a garden exhibition. However, when Oriflamme then came to discuss further collaborations, he raised the issue of prices.⁷ This sheds light on the unevenness and combination of labour regimes, which confront and create concurrence between the French and Indian working classes involved in glassware production. Of course, there are also differences among glass workers in France (as well as among those in India, cf. Kaba 2022), and in these micro-scale stakes the uneven and combination theory maybe finds its limits. Thus, glassworkers at La Verrerie are employed by the municipality on temporary contracts and earn monthly wages between 1.200 and 1.800 euros, depending on their level of experience. Workers at the crystal glassworks in St. Yves, by contrast, often hold permanent contracts and earn a monthly wage above 1.800 euros, depending on their experience. Nevertheless, the temporary workers at La Verrerie often consider their working conditions favourable because they can work at a

7 Informal discussion on 15 March 2021.

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slower pace and they have fewer and more stable working hours, unlike workers at St. Yves, who have to work assigned shifts.⁸ The differences in the employment and working conditions of workers at La Verrerie and St. Yves are of course minor compared to the ones Indian workers face in Firozabad. The monthly wages at La Verrerie are at least twelve times higher than in Firozabad, where they range broadly from 70 to 180 euros, and where workers have to work six days per week and nine hours per day, more than the total thirty-five hours per week that workers in Glaeserdorf have to work. Though the working conditions are so different that it makes little sense to compare them point-to-point, I argue that uneven and combined development helps us compare the processes that shaped the places of these two working classes in the competitive global market of glass decoration manufacturing. It is true that the products of the two working classes in the Pays de Langstross and in Firozabad in general serve different markets. The incursions of the Firozabad industry into glass production for the arts and for the design and luxury sectors are, so far, still rare exceptions. Othoniel’s art project was a one-time affair, and recently one could see upmarket export-quality vases and leadless crystal cut pieces⁹ exhibited in showrooms in the Noida suburb of Delhi but it is just a beginning. In February 2020, I met an exporter in Moradabad, another centre of the glass industry in India not far from Firozabad, who assured me that they had used glass from Firozabad to create pieces for Louis Vuitton, the multinational producer of luxury ware – but that Louis Vuitton now prefers to outsource in China. Furthermore, even if Firozabad still fails to compete in the global markets for luxury and design glassware, glassworkers in Glaeserdorf and the neighbouring villages only make top-end goods precisely because lower-end handmade goods are produced much more cheaply in non-European glass industry centres like Firozabad.

8 There are also, of course, other opinions about the balance between wages and working conditions. Thus, Leon, a former worker at St. Louis who left the job because of the night shifts and the repetitiveness of the work to become a glass artist, told me that the workers’ committees at the St. Yves crystal glassworks had asked for the reintroduction of night shifts in order to receive higher bonuses. 9 Some argue that the French crystal is ‘true’ crystal but that Indian crystal is not, because the latter is lead-free crystal, and lead-free crystal is nothing but heavy glass with an iridescent shine. However, while I was observing one Indian producer, he insisted on the non-lethality of his lead-free production. He is actually ahead of the times. The crystal glassworks in Lorraine are also going through a transition from ‘true’ crystal to lead-free crystal because it is simply impossible to go on with ‘true’ crystal production, considering the growing ecological awareness and the levels of poisoning in the worker’s body as well as in the region’s rivers.

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Therefore, I argue that the rare knowhow that glassmakers in Glaeserdorf possess is crucial for justifying the higher labour costs in Glaeserdorf compared to Firozabad. In Glaeserdorf, there are also attempts to compensate for this difference in labour costs through a marketing discourse that uses the register of ethical consumption. La Verrerie’s declared objective is to deal with innovation while keeping a strong local basis and a persistent reference to the continuation of the regional industrial legacy. A new Christmas ornament design comes out every year – which refers to the regeneration of skills and ideas – and in the weeks before its unveiling, the factory is closed to visitors to preserve the secrecy. Secrecy is an old tradition, but there are also pragmatic worries about the design being stolen. When the Christmas ornament is unveiled, La Verrerie would invite (before the COVID-19 pandemic) people from the surrounding villages to a large reception with free and unlimited food and drink. Besides the obvious marketing purpose, this event marks, I suggest, the point where the production passes from secrecy to open pride and may well symbolize the recreation of the social link, thanks to the village’s regenerated production. Yves Grangé also told me during an informal discussion in spring 2021 that people were sceptical when he first sold the Christmas baubles at much higher prices than the ones produced in the automated factories. Nevertheless, people bought them, and now there are long queues in front of the La Verrerie shop each Christmas season, and La Verrerie glass workers sometimes have a hard time keeping up with the demand.

Reinventing tradition: Shifting narratives and the politics of labour and knowhow in the Pays de Langstross An initial and important limitation to the uneven and combined development theory, as applied to an anthropological object such as representations of the value of skills and their evolution, is that, as it is embedded in Trotsky and Mandel’s positivist theory of development, it considers history as an objective process. However, to analyse the stakes around skills and production today, it is more heuristic to look at the history of skills and industry as narratives that are constantly reinvented and re-mobilized to frame the present. I will show that if infrastructure (here the objectively uneven and combined development of a capitalist glass industry) determines superstructure (here the narratives and the identities at work), it does so in such a complex way that the broad analyses in terms of stages of development are only of very limited use. In spite of that, one has to look closely at the ways local economic evolutions interact with the socio-political historic context

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which – as Sewell (1988) has shown for the history of the dock workers’ union in 19th century Marseille – is also very important to understand the specific trajectory of local industrial relations, and then how these transformations may have contributed to shape the worker’s symbolic universes and imaginaries of the workplace (Mollona 2005). In Glaeserdorf, a discourse is being developed that aims at reinventing a tradition of Christmas baubles that are allegedly typical of the region. On their webpages, La Verrerie as well as the museum claim that the technique of Christmas ornament production was invented in 1858, when pine trees carried only a few ill-shaped pinecones due to a drought, which made them look ugly as Christmas tree decorations. A glassblower from Baublesbruck then had the idea, so the local narrative goes, to blow pinecones of glass instead. One of the Christmas baubles La Verrerie distributes comes in the shape of a pinecone as an homage to this foundational moment. This ‘legend’ firmly roots the concept of Christmas baubles and the skills for making them in the region. In fact, a book the museum edited clearly states that the Christmas baubles more likely originated from Lauscha. When I mentioned this to Grangé, he told me sarcastically, ‘we are so much into this project that we almost believe ourselves in the story, and I said almost’. Similarly, Simon, a former La Verrerie glass worker, told me: ‘But most of the local people firmly believe that the Christmas baubles were invented here; only the people working in glass or at the museum bother about the real origin.’¹⁰ The main aim is of course to sell the paramount local product and to claim the ownership of the skills that make its production possible. For that purpose, a coherent narrative is required which locally roots the marketing as well as the skills and which thereby establishes a competitive production niche. The narrative somehow encompasses and legitimizes political choices determined by more pragmatic needs to keep the local skills valuable and thus also justify the cost of local labour power. But it can also build upon a concrete history of craftsmanship. The first traces of glass craftsmanship date back to the thirteenth century. At that time, the glass craftsmen were not particularly attached to the region; glass working was actually a semi-nomadic activity, because of the large quantity of wood required to power the furnaces as well as to make the raw materials, the soda ashes which are mixed with silica. The glass craftsmen came from actual Germany or Bohemia and settled in Lorraine on a permanent basis. This dependence on the forest created an ambiguous relation to the natural space: glass craftsmen are represented as attached to the forest but at the same time also as its predators. In 1448, the Duke of Lorraine issued the edict ‘charte des verriers’ which

10 Informal discussion on 7 October 2021.

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stipulated that the glass craftsmen could use the forest at their will for feeding their furnaces. The chart also granted them privileges of hunting and exempted them from paying taxes. But the duke also forced the glass craftsmen to keep their secret skills within the duchy. By doing so, the duke aimed to fix the knowledge of producing unique and expensive glass commodities and root it in the region in order to make it a valuable resource. It is well documented that glass craftsmanship indeed bloomed and further developed in the region in the late middleages and the renaissance (Beaupré 1846; Bardin 2002; Rose-Villequey 1971; Hiegal 1975; Le Tacon 1993; Girard 2009; Hérold 1987; Choné 2011). The same studies also document that the industry suffered during the Thirty Years’ War, during which the Swedish armies committed massacres in the region and relations between the glassmakers and the local elites degraded. Under the reign of Louis XIV, Colbert invited Venetian glass masters to France for making the gallerie des glaces in Versailles. The invitation was resented by the Venetian republic, which aimed to keep its monopoly on the famous glassmaking skills of Venice (Melchior-Bonnet 1994). However, the French succeeded to exfiltrate Venetian masters,¹¹ and the transmitted skills were not used solely for Versailles – soon after, under Louis XV, they also help to establish two main royal manufactures of crystal: the royal manufacture of Paris, which later became Saint Gobain, the glass production corporation that ranks first in France and third globally and that owns a huge plant in the western Indian town of Pune; and the royal manufacture of Saint Yves, nowadays the Hermès-owned crystal glassworks next to Glaeserdorf. The nineteenth century marked the beginning of a growing industrialisation, with an intensification of production and a constant rise in the technological power and skill pools of the valley. Emille Gallé, who is considered the founder of the Nancy school of Art Nouveau, starts his first artworks in the Glaeserdorf factory and commissioned his glass artworks at the factory between 1867 and 1894 (cf. Le Tacon 1993). In 1922, Laurent Harcourt, a former jeweller and another founding member of Art Nouveau, started the eponymous crystal glassworks in the village of Wingen-sur Moder, which still exists today. According to Mr Müller, an elder wood craftsman whose father was the factory’s carpenter, a founding member of the glass museum and who keeps collecting nineteenth and twentieth century archival material on the village, Harcourt wanted at some point to deploy his production to Glaeserdorf. However, mounting tensions with the workers, who did not want a ‘Parisian’ boss, prevented the shift.

11 It is said that the Venetians even killed a glassblower in an act of revenge during that period.

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Nevertheless, the industry grew and prospered in the region and reached what in the Glaeserdorf museum is called the ‘golden age’ of glass, when the local factory employed around eight hundred workers – twice the village’s population. According to Mr Müller, at that time the factory drew on additional workers from the neighbouring village of Salengro, who filled the ranks of unskilled helpers, while workers from Glaeserdorf itself worked in skilled positions or as clerical staff. The factories in Baublesbruck and Ginsberg were also thriving and increasing production. This ‘golden age’ came to an end in the wake of the Second World War. The local industry fell into rapid decline due to the mechanization of production in glass industries in other competing sites all over the world. The commodity on which the industry in Glaeserdorf and surrounding villages thrived was not Christmas baubles, but other, more widely used glass products. However, spending money on hand-made dining glass items ceased to be part of bourgeois cultures of distinction in the 1960s and this diminished the market for Glaeserdorf glass products.¹² Likewise, the glassmakers of Baublesbruck were specialised in the blowing of glass baubles, not only for Christmas baubles, but also huge baubles, as big as one meter in diameter, which formed the raw material for cutting optical glass for spectacles as well as for telescopes, measuring instruments, or crystals for watches. However, in the post-Second World War period, technological innovations in robotics made it possible to produce optical glass by carving them directly out of pre-made sheet glass coming from automated factories, without any need for blown glass, which drastically devalued the skills of glassblowers. Nowadays, one company in the region still produces optical glass and employs between fifty and one hundred workers, but it has modernized its production and has implemented processes of high-precision curving and treatment machines. For this company, the term ‘glass factory’ is not clearly accurate, both according to the local people as well as to the workers of the factory that I was able to interview, because the glass they use is in fact a chemical composite material and is not ‘glass’ in strict chemical terms. There is also one last company in Baublesbruck producing windows and stained-glass patterns with a workforce of twenty to fifty workers who are specialists in working with cold glass. However, the skills for manually producing items with hot glass, either for optical instruments or for tableware, which were once characteristic for the Pays de Langstross, have mostly

12 Even the local popular taste had once been more inclined to spend money on glass tableware. As Jimmy, a glassworker at La Verrerie told me on 10 May 2021: ‘Before, it was a tradition in Lorraine, among families, to offer high standard drinking glasses, but who would do that now?’

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disappeared. Nowadays, the only factory that still has a hot shop, apart from the two remaining crystal glassworks, is La Verrerie. I came across several elders who vividly remember the once famous skills. On 11 July 2021 I met two elder workers, one of them Fritz, who was one of the last living men who did work inside the glass factory in Baublesbruck. About the idea that La Verrerie was supposed to salvage their skills, he complained bitterly. ‘I tried to enter La Verrerie, to test the furnace, to know if I could still master the glassmaking skills, but they did not even let me take the glass one last time!’ In our following discussion about the end of the industry and the region’s desolation after the end of the ‘golden age’ in the 1960s (which forced many men to work in Germany; cf. Coquard 2020), Jacques, Fritz’s friend, complained that the knowhow of the region’s workers had been stolen by foreign capitalists: ‘We had such a knowhow in the region, in Baublesbruck they knew how to make such precision optical glass, but the Americans [capitalists] who bought the company, took the skills and then finally closed it and wasted all the workers’.¹³ They continued discussing the industrial decline that also affected metalworking and mining in the region, always emphasising the role that the alleged theft of knowhow, especially by Chinese companies, played in it. Furthermore, just as in the Lorraine steel town that Serge Paugam (2000) studied, also in the Pays de Langstross, workers were convinced that, despite their harsh rule, local paternalistic capitalists were at least keeping the knowledge in the region, fixing it¹⁴ and valorising it, while foreign capital was preying on their knowledge and skills. The fear of industrial spying is indeed widespread (which is also the case in Firozabad). This is not the case at La Verrerie, but it is at the two remaining large crystal glassworks of Harcourt and St. Yves. The latter

13 In fact, the factory was bought back by a German optical company, which eventually closed it. 14 For example, the museum sells a children’s book with an early 1900s story of a stranger who tried to trick local kids into revealing to him some aspects of glass production. The story begins with the kids searching for the sugar that has disappeared. At the same time, the stranger enters the scene, pretends to be a journalist, and asks too many questions, especially to the kids; he then becomes interested in their search for the sugar. In fact, the kids’ father is the main chemist of the Christmas ornament factory in Baublesbruck and the journalist is an industrial spy from a rival glass factory. The father takes sugar from people’s homes (including his own), because sugar is the basis for a chemical that is required to produce an argentic chemical, and sourcing the sugar in this way allows them to fake the chemical quantities on the factory’s registers. When the concurrent factories try to imitate the formula by having their spies steal information from the factory’s register, they fail. For me, this says a lot about the centrality of capturing and guarding knowledge for both capital and local labour in the collective imaginations of the Pays de Langstross; in the story, there is a tacit alliance between the workers and the industrialists to keep the industrial secrets in the region.

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are not only producing luxury vases or glasses with prices ranging from seven hundred to fifteen thousand euros, but they are also producing for the global market, especially for the United States and China, not for the local market as La Verrerie does. China is not only the main customer, but is also a feared industrial spy. Both of the crystal glassworks have now closed their doors to visitors,¹⁵ and I was told that this was supposed to ward off industrial spies. Even when the two factories were still open for visitors, precautions were in place to protect the precious designs of their crystal products. Harcourt, for example, produces crystal glassware exclusively according to designs by the erstwhile founder Laurent Harcourt, his son and his granddaughter. Since none of them is now directly involved in the company, it has to rely on a tarnished family pool of designs and moulds. As Mrs Walh, an elder Harcourt worker, told me in summer 2020, ‘When the Chinese tourists came to visit the factories, we used to hide all the sensitive stuff far away from their eyes’. In this regard, local capitalists protecting their secrets and local political powers reintroducing the ‘tradition’ of the Christmas baubles do what the inhabitants ask of them as brokers of power: they protect the local knowhow from globalized competitions and valorise it to maintain the local glass-related livelihood – or at least what remains of it.

Of craftsmen, artists and labourers safeguarding employment and reframing labour regimes The ‘big picture’ of the industrial evolution of the Pays de Langstross seems to place us in a configuration where the superstructure is determined by the infrastructure, because after all, everything is about safeguarding the value of the skills. However, we can also see that the evolution is multidirectional. There is a richness and unevenness regarding the adaptations of this single region’s glass industry. Whether it is high-tech small companies for optical ware, the glass-cutting company, or the crystal glassworks that maintains an organisation of work that in many regards has not changed that much since the eighteenth century but which also uses high tech robots in Harcourt while a single, glass picking robot is used in St Yves, each company had its own economic and technological history which determined its own path, chosen to make a difference with the others. This belies a concept of unidirectional ‘development’ from one certain stage to another. Looking at the everyday relations of labour inside the La Verrerie workshop, where old and 15 One could see a glimpse of the factory from a window situated inside the Museum of Glass at Saint Louis, which looks more like a showroom of ancient designs.

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new conceptions of the transmission of skills cohabit, where individuals like aspiring artists, craftsmen and self-designed labourers are not only found side by side, but where a single worker’s subjectivity may change over time, adds another layer to this complexity. Though it is not considered a proper factory and though indeed there is much less pressure for profitability than in the nearby crystal glassworks Harcourt and St. Louis, the public-funded La Verrerie at Glaeserdorf is not free of hierarchies and conflicts about the possession of knowhow. The management, especially the director, Yves Grangé, loves to define the centre in terms of a hierarchy and an organisation of knowhow transmission that is presented as much more ‘progressive’ (that is, less based on patriarchal values) than in the capitalist crystal glassworks. According to elder La Verrerie workers, the working conditions and the structuration of the daily politics of labour has changed greatly over the almost thirty years of its existence. The change the villagers noted most was the division of the previously unified workshop into two distinct spaces. La Verrerie is divided between the experimentation and the serial production workshop, while traditionally the glass factories were more often divided between the hot and the cold shop. While in the hot shops, the glass is collected from the furnace, worked in its semi-liquid state, and blown into shape, in the cold shop, the glass is polished, curved, ground, and engraved. Similar to what Mollona (2009) observed in outdated British steel workshops in Sheffield, there was in the Glaeserdorf region a clear hierarchy between the workers in the two respective shops, which is still quite lively in the crystal factories. Workers in the hot shop tend to feel more heroic than workers in the cold shop, and they are more visibilized, because they are lifting heavy goods or standing in front of red-hot furnaces. The hierarchy is also gendered. Until very recently, women were not permitted to work in the hot shops. It was only in the last generation that women entered the hot shops, but they are still very rare, and they all describe the overly masculine ambiance as extremely tough and discriminating. In the cold shop, for example in Baublesbruck, women were always confined to tasks which were not only less visibilized but also considered as less skilled, such as the last stages of polishing or quality control, to name some prominent examples. Maya, for example, one of the few regular women workers at La Verrerie’s hot shop, when I asked her how it feels to be a woman there, replied, ‘well, but me, I’m a dude’ – meaning she had to appear tough to survive in the hot shop in the long run. Similarly, Audrey, an independent glassworker living 150 km from Glaeserdorf, told me in October 2021: ‘yeah well as a woman, one has to avoid the manufacture and factory environments the maximum, except if you are a masochist’. Perhaps, it is no wonder that Bourdieu (1998) uses the example of glass manufac-

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turers when he discusses the male and female discrimination at work in his book Masculine Domination. However, at La Verrerie, also two distinct spaces have been established over the years that do not recreate the hot shop and the cold shop hierarchical scale, still they are formed along a hierarchy between the ‘elders’ and the youngers. The first room, the former decoration and cold shop, is the domain of the first generation of glass workers. They are often called by their co-workers ‘les vieux de la vielle [the elders of the old guard]’¹⁶ – an expression which means ‘very experienced’ and a bit old fashioned as the members of Napoleon’s ‘old guard’ – to which this expression refers – were known to be attached to tradition. Morin, for example, a former social worker and one of the les vieux de la vielle, marks his belonging to the glass craftsmen quite visually and unequivocally with a tattoo on his forearm. This tattoo shows human evolution starting from the chimpanzee, the first hominids, the homo sapiens and, finally, as the evolutionary apex, a man blowing a glass ball. Interestingly, Morin, like Grangé, the new director, is not the son of a glassworker but was in education populaire. ¹⁷ They were friends from the same education populaire association, and both made a trip to Bohemia in an old car, to visit the famous glass factories there, and then came back to Glaeserdorf and joined the La Verrerie. Both, the trip to Bohemia as well as the tattoo, I would suggest, may help to substantiate their belonging to the glass works in a milieu where such belonging also in the 1990s actually still was considered to be passed down from father to son. An elder glassblower, by contrast, whom all call JP, is the heir of a long lineage of glassblowers from St. Yves. Similarly, Thierry, a specialist in flame working, is the son of a thermometer maker, a highly specialized category of glassworkers, and also the grandson of a glassworker. Another vieux de la ville, also named Joël, is a highly skilled cold shop worker, a cuttercum-engraver, and also the descendant of a glassblower. Lastly, there is Monique, who is doing the last steps of the cold work (mainly grinding and polishing). She is also considered ‘senior’ in the local hierarchy but given the gendered hierarchies it does not come surprising that other, junior workers emphasised her elevated status much less than those of her four male co-elders. However, these widely recognized masters of their respective skills represent the local skill pool at large. The ‘elders of the old guard’ at La Verrerie are engaged only seldom¹⁸ in the serial production of Christmas baubles but are more commonly mobilized when it comes to the special collaborations with artists and designers. However, the skills 16 There is also a comic French film by this name. 17 In France, the term education populaire refers to any kind of teaching and educating beyond the school and encompasses numerous activities such as social work, popular theatre, animation for kids, etc. 18 Except when there are no artistic collaborations, of course.

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they have mastered and they embody are valued nowadays only partly for in the productive realm, but to a greater deal they derive their value from demonstrating them during the summer in performances for tourists. Glass working with the glowing nature of the molten glass offers fascinating performances, especially for the kids, so the shows at La Verrerie are well attended.¹⁹ Groups of tourists pay four Euros each to visit the glass-making centre and the pinnacle of the visit of course is the demonstration of the making of a glass piece. Morin comments his performance with a wireless mic while the tourists look at them from a safe distance, from the gallery above the production floor. When I asked Morin about his omnipresence as the centre’s touristic attraction, he replied laconically ‘unfortunately’. Since performativity is so central to the touristic demonstrations of glasswork, the sharing of one’s skills is an unavoidable aspect of it. These skills and the specific know-how conserved in Glaeserdorf is not only marketed in heritage tourism events, but also at the souvenir shop where tourists are offered artisanal products. With each product comes a leaflet indicating the techniques of its production as well as a picture of the producer blowing the piece, which is supposed to enhance the value of the products. For the specific artistic commission i. e. the ones of Azenville, the gallerists come to take pictures and videos of the production process, to add value to the artwork. As they market since the beginning of the 20th century this collaboration between artists and craftsmen – which is often called a mutual fecundation – the great crystal glassworks and the glass factories have developed a discourse about the added value of the craftsman’s gesture inside the art piece. This kind of performativity probably reaches its peak with the most expensive products commissioned to the centre. On one day in April 2021, I came to the centre and was surprised by the upper-class atmosphere all around; visitors in haute couture, the smell of expensive perfumes, and suspicious looks at the cleanliness of the glasses, from which working class people had drunk before in the canteen. I was told that a team from House Dior is visiting to capture a footage to document the making of quite expensive vases commissioned at the La Verrerie. The video device was quite impressive: prime lens camera coupled with wireless live footage screening for the filmmaker. The hot shop looked like a studio, and apparently, so thought the filmmaker who was asking JB to hold the extremely heavy molten glass vase for ten seconds, in a still position, sweating like hell because the filmmaker did not want him in the camera field before he had finished his light. After 19 On my very last field trips in spring 2022, I remarked that the demonstrations to the tourists are now better shared between ‘old guard’ workers and younger recruits, but the only one worker from the younger ones, Clément, from Paris, starts to have a growing role in the artistic commissions.

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some time, he said at last ‘go’ like he would have done in a set, to allow him to reach the furnace. In JB’s eyes and face, I discerned a sense of tranquil hatred. In the other room, by contrast, the goal is to keep up with the production for Christmas baubles, and the working process and rights are much more standardized. The day is spent by blowing no more than two different baubles, over two furnaces. Two or three workers produce baubles regularly from each furnace and blow them into two moulds held at each extremity of the roof by an apprentice, who might well be a designer on an internship. These ‘youngsters’ (although the oldest among them was already forty) are not confined to this room; they participate in the touristic demonstrations and creations in the other room, but they do so only as helpers, which can be particularly hard to take for the most experienced of them. They often complain of underexposure and of limited perspectives. Their room is no less devoted to the continuation of the craft’s tradition than that of the ‘old guards’; in neon letters, above their heads, a sign stating l’histoire continue (‘the history goes on’) reminds them of their responsibility. In contrast to the elders, none of the young workers is from the region. Jafar, for example, is from Montpellier, but he grew up in a Parisian suburb. Clément is also from Paris, but from a ‘better’ neighbourhood, while Jamie started learning glassworks in central France and then came to Glaeserdorf to perfect his skills. These differences in regional backgrounds are perceived quite starkly. Thus, in the elder’s room, conversation is in Platt, the local Germanic dialect, or in standard German, and the same is true of the preferred radio channels. In the room of the ‘juniors’, conversation is in French, and the music playing would be French pop music and hip-hop. Furthermore, in addition to these cultural differences, all the ‘youngsters’ went through formal training in glassmaking in vocational schools, often in the nearby town of Winterfeld. The ‘youngsters’ are further divided into a core of quasi-permanent workers (that is, they are de facto employed throughout although not on permanent contracts) and a periphery made up of students from the high school and design schools – in particular from Karlsruhe, in Germany – who come here for a three-week internship. During these internships, the design students, as future producers of blueprints, the ‘heads’ of the production process, are supposed to take on the role of assistants or ‘hands’²⁰ before being allowed to commission one project of their choice to the ‘elders’. These ‘youngsters’ do have formal training and are there to get the proper work experience, but not all of them come to remain in the trade for the whole 20 I am here referring to the distinction between ‘hand’ and ‘head’ in the sense of Renaissance crafts and arts, about which the sociologist Richard Sennett has written (2010). Interestingly, Sennett is a central reference for many of the designers coming to Glaeserdorf. He is often the only scholar they have read apart from Tim Ingold.

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of their careers. Workers like Simon have a background in design and art glasswork. They aspire to become glass artists, for which La Verrerie does not offer them much opportunity. Samuel, for example, attracted some envy when he left the centre in the middle of the pandemic to set up his own business. Being the son of a doctor, he is nonetheless esteemed by his ex-co-workers. Jimmy, the oldest of the ‘youngsters’, said: I have such a respect for him, he knew how to sacrifice everything for the glass works … I stopped dreaming, it is very hard to progress here, and I know that I will not become an artist but will stay doing the same thing … I have so much experience, but when I am called to the other room [where the elders work], when we work with the designer, it is to be the helper. It is impossible to progress now, I know that I will stagnate, but I am fine with it, I have a family, my kids, a simple life. It is too hard with too many sacrifices, also in terms of family life, to become a glass artist or an independent craftsman.

Quite a few of the ‘youngsters’ complained of the so-called favouritism that JB does with his son, whom he often selects as his personal assistant for demonstrative purposes, and for collaboration with designers. For JB, who comes from an old glassmaker’s family of St. Yves, I doubt that the practice appears as problematic; after all, he is only reproducing a traditional familial ethos. However, some workers who came from elsewhere to the Pays de Langstross but also some locals from Glaeserdorf object against JB’s behaviour that such nepotism might be justified in a crystal glassworks, like St Yves, but not in a state-subsidized institution like La Verrerie. According to Jérôme, the warehouseman, the recreation of the production facilities in Glaeserdorf, was ‘a toy’ that became a ‘war machine’, and this led to the reproduction of some of the hierarchies from the original glass industries that many local people were not nostalgic for. Indeed, La Verrerie was presented as a kind of utopia, a dream to reconstruct the positive side of the industrial past, and in this regard, it is as much a production centre as a memorial tool that idealised glassworks. By growing in size and stakes, La Verrerie could not avoid reproducing some features of the relative alienation typical for the industry. Though all the workers interviewed agreed that the working conditions are much laxer and more bearable than in the private sector, they made numerous comments evolving around the theme ‘now it starts to look again like a real factory’. One has to understand that the workers in the La Verrerie as semi-public workers are not paid as much as in the private sector so they regard the better and more relaxed working conditions almost as a duty from their employer. When people from Glaeserdorf speak about the past, they recall also extremely difficult conditions. Back to the bar on the evening in July 2021 with the elder, retired glassworkers, Franz complained to me of the excessively hours they had

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to work in the 1960s. His friend Vincent added about retired workers like them, ‘you won’t find many alive, especially in the crystal glassworks. There was so much lead in the crystal, nobody speaks about it there but after they reached 60 or 70, they all became sick. It spoils the blood cells you know…’. Testimonies from some oral history interviews Yaelle, the archivist of the centre, conducted with old workers and villagers are full of hard memories, of patriarchal violence in shop floor socialization, for example when ‘the elders used to heat the benches with molten glasses so that we burned our butts when we wanted to sit down’. Indeed, the world of labour that has collapsed together with the glass industry in the Pays de Langstross did not look at all like the utopia that La Verrerie’s people were trying to recuperate. But it would be equally wrong to say that La Verrerie, by intensifying its rhythms is reproducing the old labour regime. The two young glassworkers which are considered to become the successors to the ‘old Guard’ are Clément, who originates from hated Paris but who is gaining more and more significance in the artistic demonstrations at La Verrerie, and Jafar, a black man from a region that is well known for its structural racism. Indeed, the story goes on… but not exactly like before.

Conclusion Nobody in Glaeserdorf is nostalgic about the exploitation and the harsh working conditions that prevailed in the so-called ‘golden age of the glassworks’. However, they are nostalgic for the once densely populated and lively village, as well as for the comparatively good employment conditions. Here lies precisely the tension within which each glass production centre is competing in the context of globalisation and its labour regimes. In other words, no one in Lorraine wants to compete with the sweat shop regime prevailing in India or China, so employment must be safeguarded by adding sufficient value thanks to the knowhow infused in the labour value – and thus in the product price – in order to remain competitive. Or, as Glaeserdorf also does, by providing an ideological incentive for the customer to consume the local products. Glaeserdorf, with its protected labour regimes, localised and rich pool of skills has somehow reproduced an elitist labour regime with very limited positions – but can still keep a form of the glass utopia it pretended to be precisely because the size is still relatively small. However, the villagers as well as some workers at La Verrerie feel that the ‘toy’ has become a ‘war machine’, with increasing production, rising stakes in terms of tourism, and a phenomenon of synergy that goes beyond the control of the centre itself. The glass hall was totally renovated, thus raising its prestige, while the museum has been also totally re-

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shaped during the COVID-19 pandemic through an architectural project involving a famous American architecture firm. If the public powers are willing to invest such an amount of money, it is because the stakes go beyond the village to involve the entire region’s touristic development. As I have shown, the shift from capital derived from industrial production to capital derived from tourism has been triggered by a combined interaction of states and competing glass industries. Here, the theory of uneven and combined development can tell us a lot about the processes that caused this decline and that are now putting Lorraine’s glass workforce in competition with Southern workers like the ones in Firozabad, where I started my journey. It can explain, for example, how it was through technological and industrial evolution that the competition between production of daily consumer and decorative goods shifted in favour of the latter.²¹ This process is embedded in more general trends of deindustrialisation – affecting, for example, also the region’s erstwhile coal mining and steel production – all of which certainly have a stimulating history of labour, techniques and economic relations, structures that could be more precisely understood by looking at these past and present interactions within globalised capitalism. However, the richness of the repertoire of adaptation, the configurations which boomed after the decline, as well as the complexity of the everyday labour relations in the Global South’s informal sector surely goes far beyond the uneven, combined, but after all unidirectional frame of the theory of uneven and combined development. Therefore, this case study highlights many advantages of this theory as well as underlines its limits. The theory was designed to render legible global and teleological evolution, and it was then re-used by macro-scale and hypothetico-deductive international relations studies; there are perils involved in trying to adapt it in a straightforward fashion as a tool for micro-scale, inductive anthropological analysis.

References Barbe, Noël. Hommes du verre: les verriers de La Rochère. Besançon: Cêtre, 1993. Barbe, Noël. “Pour une anthropologie plébéienne et pragmatiste du patrimoine. En finir avec le patrimoine patricien. Par le bas et par la marge.” In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales 1, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2022 Bardin Christophe. “Daum, 1878–1939: débuts, évolution et accomplissement d’une industrie d’art lorraine.” PhD diss., Nancy 2, 2002.

21 For a history of how trade flows have begun to favour India after having earlier been an importer of glass from Europe, see Kaba, 2021.

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Bazin, Laurent. “Anthropologie, patrimoine industriel et mémoire ouvrière.” L’Homme et la Société 192 (2014): 143–166. Bourdieu, Pierre. La Domination Masculine. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Choné, Rosette “La circulation transfrontière des objets, des idées et des hommes, entre Meuse et Rhin, 1815–1870: histoire culturelle interfrontière,” PhD diss., Metz: Université de Metz, 1995. Coquard, Benoit. Ceux qui restent. Faire sa vie dans les campagnes en déclin. Paris: La Découverte, 2020. Dussubieu, Laure and Anand Kunak. Ancient Glass of South Asia: Archaeology, Ethnography and Global Connections Singapore: Springer, 2021. Girard, Delphine. “La compagnie des cristalleries de Baccarat de 1905 à 1948.” PhD diss., Paris: Paris 1, 2009. Hérold, Michel. “Les verriers de Lorraine à la fin du Moyen Age et au temps de la Renaissance (1431–1552). Approche documentaire.” Bulletin monumental 145,1 (1987): 87–106. Kaspers, Floor, 2004 Beads from Jablonec, a history in beads, self-edited, https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/ 5617285-beads-from-jablonec. Accessed November 17, 2022. Le Tacon, François. “Les Techniques et les marques sur verre des Établissements Gallé après 1918.” Le Pays Lorrain 74,4 (1993): 203–218. Mandel, Ernest. “The Law of Uneven Development.” New Left Review I/59 (1970): 19–38. Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. Histoire du miroir. Paris: Editions Imago, 1994. Mezzadri, Alessandra. “Class, Gender and the Sweatshop: On the Nexus between Labour Commodification and Exploitation.” Third World Quarterly 37,10 (2016): 1877–1900. Mollona, Mao. “Gifts of Labour: Steel Production and Technological Imagination in an Area of Urban Deprivation, Sheffield, UK.” Critique of Anthropology 25,2 (2005): 177–198. Paugam, Serge. Le Salarié de la Précarité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France: 2000. Rose-Villequey, Germaine. Verre et verriers de Lorraine: au début des temps modernes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New York: Yale University Press, 2008. Sewell Jr, William H. “Uneven Development, the Autonomy of Politics, and the Dockworkers of Nineteenth-Century Marseille.” The American Historical Review 93,3 (1988): 604–637. Syed, Imran Mohd. “Child Labour and the New Legislation; A Study of Home-Based Bangle Industries of Firozabad, UP.” PhD diss, Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University, 2011. Trotsky, Leo. History of the Russian Revolution. 1930. Translated by Max Eastman. Reprint, Kollektiv Yakov Perelman, 2017. Van der Linden, Marcel. “The Law of Uneven and Combined Development: Some Underdeveloped Thoughts.” Historical Materialism 15,1 (2007): 145–65.

Christian Strümpell and Hasan Ashraf

Uneven and Combined Development in Bangladesh’s Garment Industry: The Politics of Up-Scaling, Up-Skilling and Re-masculinizing Labour The uneven and combined development of industries in Bangladesh For much of its history, Bangladesh presents a clear case of uneven and combined development, of the dialectical interaction between multiple social formations driving historical processes (cf. Anievas and Nişancioǧlu 2015, 45). In the early seventeenth century, the Indian subcontinent was the world’s textile workshop, possessing twenty-five per cent of the global manufacturing capacity (Washbrook 1997, 418) and exporting millions of yards of cloth annually to markets from Southeast Asia to Latin America (Washbrook 2007, 87). Thanks to the especially fine cottons that it owed to the climatic conditions in the Bengal delta and to the skills of its weavers, Dhaka and its surrounding region formed one of the major textile-manufacturing centre of the Indian subcontinent already in the sixteenth century (Seth 2017; Berg 2015). However, the trading monopoly that the British East India Company established on textile products in Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century turned Dhaka’s weavers from semi-independent craftsmen into de facto bonded labourers (Seth 2017, 1623; Hossain 2010). Through its long-term engagement with South Asian cotton textiles, the East India Company also acquired knowledge about their products and their markets, without which Britain barely would have been able to establish its own cotton-textile industry (Riello 2009). Furthermore, by the early nineteenth century the British textile industry had been widely mechanised,

Acknowledgement: We gratefully acknowledge the support of the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), Universität Hamburg, and Jahangirnagar University in conducting the ethnographic research in and around Dhaka in October and November 2019, and March and April 2022. We are enormously indebted to numerous interlocutors – especially to the garment workers – for the time and the insights they gave us during these visits. We are furthermore extremely grateful to Nahid Fakir and Fazlee Shamim Ehsan for generously sharing their long-term experiences and insights with us, and to Mamun Ur Rashid and his team from Development Research Initiative (dRi), as well as to Sailful Ishlan Bahar for their generous support during research visits and afterwards. Last but not least, we remain indebted to Fatema Aarshe and Md. Khaled Bin Oli Bhuiyan for their invaluable research assistance. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-011

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which was, as Washbrook (1997, 419–20) emphasises, in crucial ways due to its position in global commodity chains, not to exceptional internal developments as the standard European narrative has long claimed. The British textile industry’s dependence on cotton supply from abroad facilitated centralised control by only a few importing merchant capitalists in Britain. This gave them the power to centralise production in large factories and to invest in its mechanisation, which in turn gained them an advantage over competitors around the world. Furthermore, colonial rule gave Britain the power to restrict technology transfer to India, to destroy local loom technologies and to impose high tariffs on Indian manufactures. This pushed the textile industry in Dhaka – as well as in many other centres in South Asia – into rapid decline, and turned the region into a provider of raw materials, especially indigo and jute, for British industry, and a consumer market for its products.¹ Soon after it gained independence from British rule in 1947, the government of Pakistan, to which Bangladesh then belonged, aimed to catch up with the advanced industrial countries by means of import-substituting industrialisation. As did many other ‘developing countries’, Pakistan pursued this policy with foreign aid and established a series of vital industries ranging from cement, fertilizer, textile, cotton, jute, steel and shipbuilding to defence in the public sector. However, unlike, for example, in India (Parry 2020, 3–38), Egypt (Waterbury 1983) or Brazil (Mollona 2020, 1–7), in Pakistan the state soon handed over most of its industries to a few big business houses of Pakistan, the regionally famous ‘twenty-two families’ (Haq 1976; Haq 2017). Furthermore, Pakistan’s industrial development was characterised by internal unevenness and combination. The country consisted of a western and an eastern wing, separated by 1,500 km of Indian territory. Political power was concentrated in the western wing,² and so were the state’s efforts at economic development. The eastern wing was allotted a few industries in sugar, steel, and textile around Dhaka and other urban centres. However, these were usually also run by the twenty-two families that were all from West Pakistan or – if they remained in the public sector – by civil servants who also were largely from West Pakistan.³ Since Urdu, the language most widely spoken in West Pakistan, served as the coun-

1 For in-depth histories of the Bengali and Indian textile industries, see Chaudhury 2020, Hossain 2010 and Parthasarathi 2009, as well as the contributions to Riello and Roy 2009. 2 Pakistan’s capital, for example, was located in the western wing, first in Karachi and then, since 1966, in Islamabad. Furthermore, in the national assembly, members from the western wing outnumbered their counterparts from the eastern wing, even though more than half of the population of Pakistan lived in the latter. 3 For example, in 1971, seventy-two per cent of private industrial assets in East Pakistan’s manufacturing sector were owned by Non-Bengalis (Sobhan and Ahmad 1980).

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try’s national language, not Bengali, middle-class aspirants from East Pakistan were disadvantaged in competing for civil service positions (van Schendel 2009, 111–13). Furthermore, two-thirds of the foreign exchange financing industrial development in the West was earned by the rural economy of the East, with the export of jute grown there (ibid., 137). Pakistan’s industrial development hence thrived on the combination of the unevenness between its western and eastern wings, and further deepened this unevenness. Already by the early 1950s, economic deprivation in conjunction with cultural humiliation had alienated a growing segment of the population in East Pakistan from the ruling West Pakistani military-bureaucratic establishment. As a result, calls for self-determination were raised. By the time the military dictators finally agreed to hold general elections in Pakistan for the first time in late 1970, the movement had gained widespread momentum and the Awami League, the political arm of the movement, won almost all the constituencies in East Pakistan, and came out as the strongest party in the assembly. The military rulers still holding power and senior politicians from West Pakistan remained reluctant to hand over power to the Awami League. When demands rose in East Pakistan to declare independence from the western wing, West Pakistani military forces started to suppress the movement with utmost brutality in March 1971. These forces met determined resistance by the civilian population, guerrilla forces and troops defecting from Pakistan’s military, and they later also gained support from India’s military intervention. After a prolonged struggle, the eastern, Bengali wing won the ‘War of Liberation’ in December 1971 and Bangladesh was declared as an independent nation-state. The newly established government of Bangladesh followed a moderately left developmental model resembling the one established by its grand neighbour India under Nehru. It subscribed constitutionally to the ideas of secularism and socialism, installed a parliamentary democracy and rebuilt the economy by import-substituting industrialisation led by the public sector, while at the same time it shied away from a thorough land reform (van Schendel 2009, 175–6). However, in the second half of 1975, a series of military coups first led to the assassination of the moderately leftist Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and then to right-wing military regimes that lasted until 1990. The military rulers early on broke with the leftist tenets, withdrew the terms ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’ from the preamble to the constitution and fostered the development of private-sector export-oriented industries instead of public-sector import-substituting ones. One major reason for the latter policy shift was that donor agencies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund or USAID made further loans, on

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which Bangladesh depended, conditional on it (Maurer 2011, 289).⁴ The region’s prime export commodity since colonial times, jute, had lost importance in global trade by then due to the rise of synthetic fibres. New industries taking its place included shrimp farming,⁵ but even more so – as is well known – the readymade garment industries that tapped what was considered the country’s main resource, its vast reserve of cheap labour. In this chapter, we aim to show how its connection to global markets and institutions shaped the ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh and how these connections have changed since the late 1970s. Our main aim is to show how the industry shaped and was shaped by the workforces that emerged and transformed alongside it. As Kasmir and Gill (2018, 356–57) argue, one of the major merits of Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development lies in its explicit focus on labour and class struggle, not exclusively on the internal requirements of capital. In the first and second section, we first delineate the emergence and consolidation of Bangladesh’s ready-made garment industry within the uneven and combined development of global garment production and trade, followed by a discussion of the kind of workforce the industry recruited as well as the struggles it fought. In the third section, we then demonstrate how recent shifts in the global garment industry reflect in garment production in Bangladesh, in an increasing computerization of production, its concentration in larger factories, and in the relocation of these factories away from city centres. We further show that these changes had profound impacts on the social profile of the garment workforces, and on their political subjectivities.

The birth of Bangladesh’s export ready-made garment industry The first ready-made garments were produced in Bangladesh in the early 1960s, but only in a handful of small factories and exclusively for a domestic market, which was primarily served by local tailoring shops producing custom-made gar-

4 Bangladesh’s dependency on aid from western countries was also instrumentalised to pressure it not to align with socialist countries and to stop, for example, the export of jute goods to Cuba (Maurer 2011, 257). 5 By the mid-1990s, shrimp accounted for fifty-seven per cent of Bangladesh’s exports in primary goods and constituted the third-largest foreign income earner (Alauddin and Hamid 1999; van Schendel 2009, 236).

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ments (Ahmad 1989, 94). The situation began to change due to the so-called MultiFibre Arrangement, or MFA, which was introduced in 1974 to set quotas on the amounts of garment producers from newly industrialising countries in Asia, such as South Korea, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, could export to North America and the European Union. The MFA was meant to protect western producers in this labour-intensive industry against competition from low-wage countries as well as to reward alliances of companies in these countries with the western bloc (cf. Neveling 2018).⁶ However, to skirt export restrictions (and also rising wages in their home countries, cf. Rhee and Belot 1990, 5), garment manufacturers, especially from East Asian countries, sought to relocate production to countries still outside the purview of the MFA (Siddiqi 1996, 68). Its ample supply of cheap labour – wages were among the lowest in Asia then⁷ – made Bangladesh a favoured destination for such relocations. The first garment factory producing for export was set up in 1977, and from the early 1980s onwards their numbers rose steeply and steadily, from 88 in 1982, to 740 in 1985, 2,353 in 1996, and 5,063 in 2010. Some of these factories were joint ventures between East Asian garment manufacturers, such as Daewoo, and Bangladeshi companies. However, Bangladesh’s notorious political instability under changing military dictatorships rendered such investments not as attractive for foreign companies as the government of Bangladesh had hoped. In 1983, when the export garment industry really began to take off, only fifteen such joint ventures existed, and their numbers rose only to about fifty by the early 1990s (cf. Siddiqi 1996, 71). The large majority of factories producing export garments operated without foreign direct investment, and they produced for either foreign (often Hong Kong-based) or local so-called buying houses who procured orders from foreign buyers, and who in fact took the major share of profits accrued in Bangladesh (Maurer 2011, 297; Siddiqi 2004, 127). Unlike the Bangladeshi partners in the joint ventures, all of whom were already relatively big players in local industries, though not necessarily in garment industries,⁸ the founders of other factories had a rather mixed background. A good

6 It is important in this regard that the public-sector Trading Corporation of Bangladesh produced for export already in mid-1970s and exported primarily to socialist Eastern European countries (Siddiqi 2004, 76; cf. Maurer 2011, 291). 7 Maurer (2011, 297) states that in the mid-1980s hourly wages in Bangladesh’s garment industry did not exceed $0.25. This was even below the $0.35 hourly wages paid in Sri Lanka then, which initially had been the favoured destination for garment production until the civil war broke out in 1983. 8 One of the first garment manufacturers fully producing for export, Desh Garments, was actually established only for that purpose by an industrialist, M. Noorol Quader, a former high-ranking government bureaucrat, who had started out as an importer of electric diesel locomotives.

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deal of them, as our interlocutors from various backgrounds in the export garment industry took for granted, were industrialists already involved in garment production for the local market, for example of hosieries. Many others, however, were members of the urban middle class or elite without prior experience in industries or large-scale business, such as retired civil servants or army officers. These neophyte industrialists could afford to try their luck because the buying house-system meant that they did not require direct business contacts to establish themselves. More importantly, lax lending practices by development financial institutes in Bangladesh made funding readily available, even more so since their secure access to sales markets in the US and the EU seemed to guarantee that they could repay credits (Maurer 2011, 291). Furthermore, garment production then did not require large funding anyway. The fabrics and accessories were provided by the fashion brands and exempted from import duty, and they could produce the shirts and t-shirts, which the export garment industry in Bangladesh then exclusively produced, with relatively simple and cheap machinery in relatively simple technical operations of ‘cutting trimming making’. The lines of sewing machines and other equipment also did not necessarily require expensive, specifically built infrastructure. Since these producers ran on average only between fifty to one-hundred plain sewing machines plus twenty-five overlock stitching machines (Siddiqi 1996, 71), they could accommodate their ‘factories’ most often on a few rented floors in large residential complexes, and did not need ‘proper’ factory buildings on industrial estates.⁹ There were also a few large units producing one million pieces, but these were primarily – though not exclusively – joint ventures. Most of these joint ventures were located in the Export Processing Zone in the port city Chattogram in southern Bangladesh, which the government of Bangladesh had established for export-oriented industries in 1983, followed by another one established near Dhaka in 1993 (Maurer 2011, 293). Although they remained few in number, the joint ventures were crucial for the transfer of technology and skills to Bangladesh. As part of its joint venture, Desh Garments, for example, sent 130 trainees to South Korea in 1978 for a six-month training course in sewing, management and marketing at the Daewoo plant; those trainees in turn trained other operators in the Desh Garment factory after their return (Rhee and Belot 1990). Workers received formal training also in Bangladesh, at technical training institutes that were set up in Dhaka, usually also with foreign aid from the governments of Japan, West Germany and – again – South Korea. However, it is widely assumed that the training of Desh workers at the Dae-

9 In 1991, only ten per cent of the garment factories were in buildings designed for the purpose (Siddiqi 1996, 71).

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woo plant was the main trigger for disseminating skills in Bangladesh at large. Because of their foreign training, these operators were highly sought after by other garment manufacturers for getting their own workforces trained. Hence, they attracted them by higher wages and often succeeded. Even more often, it is said, the returning trainees left Desh Garments to set up their own units (cf. Rhee 1990). Unfortunately, not much is known about the social background of these trainees. Of the 130 trainees that were sent to South Korea, 113 were men, and there is good reason to assume that men heavily outnumbered women at the training institutes also. Technical training required literacy, which was possessed by less than thirty per cent of the adult population in the early 1980s,¹⁰ and literacy in English, which was required for training in South Korea, was even more exceptional then. This suggests that the trainees were not only men but that they were also from families with some – however modest – means who could afford school education for their children, and that they most likely had an urban or peri-urban background, and were not bottom-of-the-heap rural migrants. Another reason that points – in our view – to a relatively elevated social background is that many of these trainees set up their own garment units, and thus must have commanded some social capital and authority. The ready-made garment manufacturers producing for the local market in the 1960s and 1970s relied on male workers as well. These workers were master tailors and their helpers, and they were from Dhaka and the immediately surrounding countryside. This was still the case in many of the first bangla factories – as factories outside the EPZ are popularly referred to – that were set up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, at that time women also entered the workforce in large numbers. Thus, according to Yunus and Yamagata (2014), between 1979 and 1981, women made up a tiny portion of the export garment workforce, but that changed dramatically from 1982 onwards when their share rose to twenty-five per cent and a few years later already to more than fifty per cent. Towards the end of the decade, their share stood at roughly eighty per cent,¹¹ a good number of them girls

10 “Bangladesh Literacy Rates 1981–2023, Macrotrends, accessed January 6, 2023 https://www. macrotrends.net/countries/BGD/bangladesh/literacy-rate 11 The actual figures on the gender composition of the export ready-made garment workforce differ significantly depending on the sources. Thus, the official body of the industry, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), claimed throughout the 1990s that women constituted ninety per cent of the total garment workers. The figure circulating most widely in the industry spoke of eighty per cent women, but it usually is not made clear on which sample this figure is based.

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below majority age.¹² The women entered the garment industries as unskilled helpers on sewing floors, where they assisted the (skilled) operators and from whom they eventually learned to operate sewing machines themselves after some time and became operators as well. Men formed a minority in the garment workforces, but they were usually employed in better-paid positions that often also came with more authority than the (largely female) operators and helpers. Supervisors were exclusively male and so were workers in the cutting and finishing sections, for example, where work requires more physical strength. Each factory also employed at least one mechanic plus an apprentice for fixing machines. These mechanics usually had undergone vocational training, were all male and earned more than twice as much as the largely female operators. The first generation of women in the export garment industry belonged either to the families of workers retrenched from the erstwhile public-sector industries already living in or nearby Dhaka and Chattogram (Muhammad 2011, 23–4) or – more often – they were rural migrants (Afsar 2003). The arrival of young women especially from the countryside is presented as an unprecedented social change, because until then women had been largely excluded from formal employment. However, rural women had been part of recurrent rural-to-urban migration patterns for a long time already, but they worked indeed primarily in the informal sector, as domestic helpers or in construction work (ibid.). Once there, many women preferred the garment industry to domestic service. Many rural migrants were driven to Dhaka by impoverishment. In the late 1970s, under the rule of General Zia, the government of Bangladesh also heavily invested in modernizing agriculture, for example by sponsoring deep-tube wells that were supposed to improve irrigation and to increase agricultural output. From the mid-1980s, under Zia’s successor General Ershad, these deep-tube wells were privatized. Large landholders outbid small ones, increased their output and profits, invested these gains in mechanising farming and in acquiring more land, and drove large numbers of people off the land (Adnan 1999). Consequently, the share of landless households in the overall population rose from almost thirtythree per cent in 1977 to forty-five per cent in 1984 (Maurer 2011, 298; Jansen 1983, 3). Since rural Bangladesh did not offer many options to gain a livelihood, they came to Dhaka in large numbers and formed a labour force that the expanding export garment industry could easily tap. Thus, the industry developed in Bangladesh not only through the combination of the variegated social and economic unevenness between the US and EU (where the brands and consumer markets are

12 In 1993, under international pressure, the export garment factory owners dismissed more than fifty thousand children working in the industry (Ranade 2007).

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located), other Asian countries and Bangladesh (where the garments are produced), but also within Bangladesh, between factories in EPZs and bangla factories, and between the large cities and the countryside.

Consolidation of the industry and the rise of labour militancy In December 1985, the MFA was extended also to Bangladesh. Because the share of imports from Bangladesh was still quite low then, the extension of the quota came as a surprise and caused a brief hiccup in the industry at a time when it was just about to really take off. In 1985, altogether 740 garment factories existed in Bangladesh, out of which close to 647 had just opened in 1984 and 1985, but 500 had to close down again when the US, Canada and the European Economic Council extended the quota restrictions to Bangladesh, as mentioned in a report of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (Nath 1992; also see The Economist 1989)¹³. However, the government of Bangladesh and the garment manufacturers successfully renegotiated the quota with the US, Canada, and the EEC, and opened up to different markets, which alleviated the situation. By 1987, three hundred of the closed-down factories had reopened (Rhee 1990: 343). Furthermore, the government of Bangladesh restricted the entry of newcomers into the sector to protect the market shares of existing garment manufacturers by quota distribution (Nath 1992; Chaudhuri Zohir 2001: 78; cf. Maurer 2011, 301). This happened at the behest of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), the industrial, business, and trade association in which garment manufacturers had organized in 1983 and which by then had gained considerable influence over policy-making in Bangladesh thanks to the industry’s vital importance for the country’s export earnings. Together with government institutions, the association introduced a formal process through which work orders were channelled and distributed among garment factories registered with it. Newcomers could only gain access to these orders as subcontractors of registered manufacturers if the latter had taken on work orders that exceeded their capacity. This introduced a new hierarchy among garment producers in Bangladesh in addition to those existing between joint ventures and Bangladeshi-owned factories as well as between EPZ factories and non-EPZ bangla factories. In 1995, the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing replaced the MFA, but it once more extended the quota regime in the global garment trade before it finally 13 “A Survey of the Third World,” The Economist, September 23, 1989, 46.

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ended in 2004. Since then, Bangladesh’s export garment industry has to compete with other countries in South and East Asia and recently also with a few African countries like Ethiopia. Towards the end of 2004, fears of a possible exodus of the garment industry to more competitive places, that is, to places with even lower wages, circulated widely in Bangladesh. Garment manufacturers of course also played on such fears in order to curb demands from garment workers and unions, and to extract tax cuts, reductions in customs, and other concessions from the state. Lack of competitiveness and low labour productivity became a matter of concern in Bangladesh then. As the way forward, the BGMEA propagated ‘lean manufacturing’, also known as Toyotism, which managers worldwide regarded as the most suitable tool for factory production in globalised economies since the 1990s (Mollona 2014, 190–95). Toyotism builds on just-in-time production, that is, on continuous production flows in which units reach the next production step exactly at the time and in the quantities needed, and producing goods according to changing market demands, which thereby reduces waste, inventory and costs (Naruse 1991, 37). In contrast to Fordism and Taylorism, Toyotism requires flexible assembly lines and emphasises workers’ cooperation rather than their close control (Lipietz 1997, 4). In the Bangladesh garment industry, the flexibility of assembly lines that were frequently re-arranged according to the specific requirements of orders was the only thing that remotely resembled Toyotism. In fact, workers were kept not only under low pay, but also under tight Taylorist control (cf. Tickell and Peck 1995, 362), which drew extensively on the ethos and norms of patron-client relationships between the landed and the landless as well as sharecroppers in rural Bangladesh to which rural labour migrants had been accustomed (Siddiqi 1996, 176–200). Because labour costs in China were rising while Bangladesh’s garment owners succeeded in keeping them low, the post-quota regime then turned out to be a ‘blessing’ for Bangladesh, as garment owners called it. Their order books were filled as never before, and profits soared (Razzaque and Raihan 2008). Garment workers did not passively endure these developments. They had organized already early on. The master tailors who had joined the first garment industries because of the security of income they expected from it soon found the working conditions in the garment factories appalling, and the deskilling that it entailed and the discipline humiliating. ‘One could not even go out to smoke a cigarette or have a cup of tea!’ was the complaint of one master tailor to Amirul Islam, who founded the Dhaka City Tailor Worker’s Union together with some of these tailors in 1983 while he was studying at Dhaka University, and a little later founded the National Garment Workers Federation. The union faced swift repression by the government, as most unions did during the years of military rule between 1975 and 1990. The turn away from moderately leftist developmental policies under the generals Zia and Ershad saw not only

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the demise of public-sector import-substituting industrialisation and the rise of private export-oriented industries, but also the decline of organized industrial labour. Under the country’s first prime minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the still very small industrial workforce of only 206,000 out of a total population of 64 million (Uddin Ahmed 2007 [1992], 481) and their unions enjoyed considerable leverage. In fact, organized labour had actually pushed Mujib to adopt at least moderate socialist policies after Bangladesh’s liberation and, for example, to nationalise the industries that West Pakistani business houses had abandoned along with several others in 1972 (Rahim 1978; Ahmed 1984). Industrial workers derived their influence then from their strategic position in a country aiming to industrialise, but also from their vocal role in the Bengali movement for self-determination in the 1960s and in their militant stand against the management (usually West Pakistani) of the industries in which they worked. By contrast, for the military rulers and their aim to re-orient the country towards export to the western capitalist world, labour militancy was a serious threat. Hence, they violently suppressed left unions, arrested or killed their leaders, and co-opted the leaders of the moderate reformist unions (Badiuzzaman 1987; Rahman 2011, 83–7). The young rural women who entered the export garment industries in large numbers in the early 1980s were expected to form a docile workforce, as the unionist Amirul Haque Amin, among others, told us. The garment workforce was not only largely young, female and rural, but garment owners and the urban elite to whom they belonged considered them also mere sojourners in the industry and the city. They expected them to work a few years in the factories in and around Dhaka and Chattogram, but eventually to return to their villages and marry, with their savings from garment work paying for their dowry, as garment owners habitually told these women’s parents in the 1980s. Indeed, when Ashraf started his long-term ethnographic research on garment workers in Dhaka in 2010, the workers themselves took it for granted that they would leave the industry and the cities after five to ten years. However, they did not mention marriage as the reason for their eventual return, but the sheer fact that nobody could sustain oneself any longer than that under the working conditions prevailing in the garment industry. The picture of the young, rural, and hence docile ‘garment girl’ is seriously at odds with the measures of control they have been exerted to, as has already often been argued (Kabeer 1991; Dannecker 1999, 252; Siddiqi 2009). Furthermore, it is seriously at odds with the often also militant collective action in which they have engaged. Women garment workers had already organized themselves early on, too, but the military regimes then in power repressed these unions and labour activists with a heavy hand (Kabeer 1991 cf. Rahman 2011, 177), as they did with any other form of popular protest. After large-scale popular protest forced the military

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government to give way to parliamentary democracy in 1990, garment workers became increasingly organized and engaged in large-scale collective action, at times with the help of political parties as well as NGOs (Rahman 2011, 201–15; Hossain 2019). In 2006, and again in 2010, they launched major strikes, which were also partly successful. The large-scale strike by garment workers from thousands of factories initiated in 2006 indeed led to the enactment of the Bangladesh Labour Law that lowered barriers to form unions at plant level and that almost doubled the minimum wage (Siddiqi 2017, 72–4; cf. Ashraf and Prentice 2018, 98). The garment owners and the government gave in to many of the workers’ demands because they became seriously concerned about the tainted image the industry had gained among western customers. This was not only due to the often dismal working conditions, but even more so to the horrific factory disasters that frequently made it into the news. Between 1990 and 2010, eleven major accidents – most often caused by fires – killed at least 260 workers and injured more than 1,000 (Rahman 2011, 137). The collapse of the Spectrum factory that killed at least 73 workers in 2005 was the first one that turned into a major global headline (Miller 2012). In 2012, this was overshadowed by the Tazreen Factory Fire that killed more than a hundred garment workers and heavily injured more than two hundred. In 2013 the Rana Plaza Factory Collapse, the biggest accident in the history of garment production, killed at least 1,134 workers and injured, often heavily, more than 2,500. Especially the latter sparked wide attention across the globe and led to the so-called Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, negotiated between several brands (though some major ones refused), national and international trade union federations and the government of Bangladesh (Ashwin et. al. 2020). The Accord was imposed on Bangladesh’s export garment factories without consulting or involving BGMEA. Hence, as Siddiqi (2022) argues, “the framing of the Accord not only obscured deeply asymmetrical structures of globalized (and racialized) supply chains, but actively reinforced such inequalities”. Moreover, as Ashraf and Prentice (2018) show, although the Accord addresses important issues regarding workers’ health and safety, it treats them merely as technical matters requiring technical solutions and does not challenge the fundamental structures of exploitation on which the industry rests. It thus depoliticises the predicament that garment workers find themselves in and it delegitimises any forms of protest beyond the conciliatory approach pursued by many of the unions that entered the scene after 2006 and were linked up with political parties (cf. Prentice 2021, Feldman and Hossain 2019). Furthermore, in reaction to workers’ struggles, the garment owners tightened coercive measures against workers. The BGMEA, for example, centrally collected data on allegedly recalcitrant workers. Given the importance garment owners have gained in Bangladesh politics because of the in-

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dustry’s importance for Bangladesh’s export earnings (in fact, roughly one-third of Bangladesh’s members of parliament own garment industries or have stakes in them), it is not very surprising that the state sides with them. In 2010, an industrial police force was installed and provided with far-reaching authority to control workers and curb future ‘labour riots’ (Siddiqi 2017, 75). Towards the mid-2010s, militant protest by garment workers indeed declined, whether due to the depoliticized approach of mainstream trade unions (and their international affiliates) or due to state repression. What is obvious, however, is that, contrary to widespread elitist expectations, the large share of workers who are women from the countryside temporarily migrating to the garment factories in Dhaka did not prevent labour protest and militant action in the first place. These were triggered usually by concrete experiences of exploitation and humiliation at work, but they were organized and sustained, too, by networks that were fostered in the large labour colonies of Dhaka and its surrounding industrial belts where garment workers lived and were offered some amount of protection. These networks often rested on common ties of kinship and village of origin, but these networks were dynamic and also reached beyond such ‘primordial’ ties (Islam 2019). Although the large majority of garment workers remained ultimately sojourners in Dhaka’s urban-industrial society, for the time being they nevertheless closely integrated themselves into it socially and politically. It was not only capital that pursued the combination of the unevenness between city and countryside, but – once they were there in the city – also workers.

Re-combining industry and workforce since the 2010s Bangladesh’s ready-made garment industry remained in a vulnerable position. In the 2010s, many of the global garment brands reduced their so-called ‘lead time’, that is, the time in which producers are bound to deliver the ordered garments, from 120 to 90 days. This served their ‘fast fashion’ lines, but it increased the already enormous time pressure on garment producers in Bangladesh and elsewhere. In addition, overcapacity in the industry further decreased their profits margins and bargaining position vis-à-vis retailers. In late 2019, several garment manufacturers and senior managers we talked to told us that large western garment retailers encouraged such an overcapacity. They frequently told Bangladeshi producers ‘We grow; grow with us!’ However, once Bangladeshi manufacturers had grown and expanded their productive capacities, they also completely depended on large orders coming their way to repay bank loans, workers, etc. In order to

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secure orders, they were ready to accept ones with very low profit margins and even ones that meant producing at a loss. Our interlocutors emphasised that they had been wise enough to avoid such situations, but that the overcapacity of course also adversely affected their bargaining power with garment retailers. Although smaller companies were particularly affected, many larger producers were also in trouble. In late 2019, out of the total of 4,500 garment manufacturers in Bangladesh, 700 were then at the brink of insolvency.¹⁴ What compounded the problems in the eyes of garment manufacturers and their senior management staff was that the world habitually casts a critical eye on the working conditions in Bangladesh, but not on the equally dismal working conditions prevailing in the factories of competing garment-producers from other countries of the Global South. Since these competitors did not need to adhere to an Accord or engage in corporate social responsibility as much as they allegedly do, they could also make lower bids. Many expressed fears that the brands might source from new locations with still cheaper workforces, such as Ethiopia, whose labour minister assured investors that ‘There is no minimum wage here!’ Accelerating time constraints, shrinking profit margins, and fierce competition from producers from other places in the Global South that were trying to get a foot into the export garment industry all renewed concerns about labour productivity in Bangladesh. In the glossy magazines the BGMEA publishes, articles about industry 4.0 and other sophisticated technology were regular features in 2019. In the knitwear sector, larger, solvent companies invested in new printing machines that required fewer workers to handle the process of applying print on t-shirts, thus using less factory space and allowing more production lines to be installed. In sweater factories, larger, solvent companies invested in computerised jacquard machines that could produce faster and required fewer workers to operate them. Lastly, companies in the third major sector, the so-called oven sector that produces denims and shirts, invested in high-end, laser operated marking machines. Furthermore, in order to save time and costs, the larger solvent companies aimed to turn into composite factories that united various production steps under one roof. A few garment manufacturers aimed at forward integration, for example by hiring designers to develop their own fashion lines and then sell them to the brands. The more pressing concern for individual garment producers as well as for the industry as a whole, however, was backward integration. From its start, the garment industry depended heavily on imports. In 2004, Bangladesh

14 Jasim Uddin, “38 % garment manufacturers under pressure to cut prize,” The Business Standard, October 17, 2019, accessed December 15, 2021. https://www.tbsnews.net/economy/38-garmentmanufacturers-under-pressure-cut-price

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spent seventy per cent of the export earnings from the garment industry on imports (Siddiqi 2004: 63), for example, of accessories from China, and most importantly of cotton from a variety of countries. In 2010, for example, the industry went into crisis when India – from where Bangladesh procures around thirty per cent of its cotton supplies – suddenly stopped exporting, arguably to protect its own garment industry. This sent shock waves down the spines of garment owners, and the BGMEA begged the Bangladesh Textile Mills Corporation, the publicsector umbrella organization of mills turning cotton into fabric and yarn, not to increase prices in the face of the cotton shortage. As a long-term remedy, the Bangladesh Textile Mills Corporation started to diversify its cotton sources and to import from, for example, Uzbekistan or the USA. For individual owners of knitwear units, there was a further problem. Orders required their own, specific kind of cloth, and procuring this from other companies cost precious time, even more so when it turned out that it did not meet the specifications and that it had to be ordered anew. To avoid that, knitwear factories took steps such as installing spinning sections for producing their own fabric (though still with imported cotton) and dying sections for colouring the fabric themselves. The new, sophisticated technology, and even more so the backward integration, required large-scale investments, not only in equipment but also in new factory buildings and in land. Some of these new industrial facilities are located in socalled Economic Zones that the government of Bangladesh has established since 2010, in addition to the overall eight Export Processing Zones that have developed already since the mid-1980s. Companies are encouraged to relocate due to the enhanced infrastructure in terms of electrical connections as well as road connections to ports, and – in the case of the Economic Zones – also due to enormous fiscal and non-fiscal incentives.¹⁵ A further incentive is that these new economic enclaves are governed by the Bangladesh Economic Zones Act of 2010, which means that they are thus exempted from the Bangladesh Labour Law of 2006 that garment workers had successfully gone on strike for. Instead of organizing in trade unions, which the law from 2006 and even more so an amendment in 2013 had made easier, the act for Economic Zones only provides for a Workers Welfare Association (WWA). The latter, in contrast to trade unions, needed the approval of the Zone’s Executive Chairman, a high-ranking bureaucrat who is responsible for the smooth running of the zones. Furthermore, unlike in the 1980s and 1990s, when garment companies rented residential buildings within urban areas 15 These incentives include exemption from taxes, customs and excise duties; lifting of ceilings on Foreign Direct Investment; residence permits or citizenship for foreign investors; and financial infrastructure for easy capital flow. For details, see http://www.beza.gov.bd/investing-in-zones/incentive-package.

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as production sites, since the 2000s and increasingly so since the mid-2010s, many garment manufacturers have constructed their own factory complexes outside of Dhaka (or Chattogram), often on land they had bought as well. Obviously, only profitable enterprises can afford such large-scale investments in technology and infrastructure. For the garment manufacturers from various backgrounds that we have talked to since 2019, it was certain that only the large players are able to make such investments and have a chance to remain profitable in the coming years. The large composite factories have not replaced the smaller factories that still only ‘cut, trim and make’ and that are therefore supposedly destined to die out, as is the case in neighbouring India (cf. De Neve 2014; Mezzadri 2017). Although the composite garment companies now spin and dye their own fabric, they still regularly outsource at least sewing operations, because they regularly take on orders beyond the actual production capacities of their sewing floors. This entails the risk of failing on deadlines, but they do so in order to sustain profits, which they then aim to invest in larger production capacities (if not siphoning them off to foreign bank accounts),¹⁶ and they avert the risks of contractual penalties from the brands by passing them on to their subcontractors. Although the ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh has not (yet) created the kinds of giant factories that have come up in China during the last decades (Freeman 2018), pace Joshua Freeman (ibid., 318), characterising it as a return to nineteenth century-style small sweatshops is quite off the mark. As earlier, the unevenness and combination driving the development of the garment industry on the global level reproduces unevenness and combination within Bangladesh, too. The changes just outlined are also reflected in the labour process in the garment industries and in the social profile of the garment workforces. During the period 2010–2019, when the numbers of garment factories have declined from roughly 5,000 to 4,500, the business volume of the industry increased from 12.5 billion USD to 34 billion USD. Likewise, the garment workforce has increased in size, from 3.6 to 4.1 million. These figures suggest that garment production is increasingly concentrated in fewer but larger and more productive factories, which is also what garment owners and unionists we talked to emphasised. The articles on garment industry 4.0 in the BGMEA magazine Apparel Story in late 2019 in fact predicted that further labour-saving technologies were around the corner and that these would allow the industry to reduce the workforce drastically in the near future, down to sixty per cent of its 2019 figure. It needs to be seen to what extent this materialises. However, on our visits to several factories in late 2019 it was im-

16 “ACC probing some RMG owners,” The Daily Star, February 23, 2021, accessed December 3, 2021. https://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/news/acc-probes-some-rmg-owners-2049445

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possible to miss the fact that garment producers had invested heavily in laboursaving technologies and in a labour-saving organization of the labour process. Thus, in several of the knitwear factories, the number of workers on the sewing floors, the most labour-intensive section, had been reduced drastically because the tasks of so-called helpers had been made largely redundant. Earlier, helpers had been employed at almost every sewing machine for cutting threads and for carrying piles of garments from one machine to the next in the line (Ashraf 2017). The introduction of new sewing machines that cut threads automatically, in conjunction with a reorganisation of the lines that enabled sewing machine operators to place garments in a cardboard box and push it to the subsequent operator, made the job of helpers redundant. By these means, it was estimated, the number of workers on the sewing floors had been reduced by forty per cent. Even more drastic was the reduction of the workforce in sweater factories. In the large sweater factories in 2019, the large, brightly lit and immaculately clean production halls were filled with one hundred computerised jacquard machines, which required less than twenty workers to operate them. Manual sweater machines, by contrast, require at least one knitting operator plus an assistant for continuous production. Furthermore, it was also obvious that the concentration of production in everlarger factories with more sophisticated technology had very uneven social consequences. As had been the case earlier, the new sewing machines in the factories we visited were still almost exclusively operated by women. Many other new machines, like the computerised jacquard machines, or new sections, like the dying and washing section where knitwear factories nowadays produce their own fabric, were, by contrast, exclusively operated by men. These ethnographic observations are in line with statements from garment owners and unionists who estimated that the share of men in the workforce had almost doubled, from twenty per cent earlier to thirty-five per cent when we talked to them in late 2019. Studies undertaken by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies and the International Labour Organization¹⁷ respectively come to the conclusion that men nowadays have even grown to slightly outnumber women in the garment workforces.¹⁸ According to these studies, one reason for the widespread re-masculinization of

17 International Labour Organisation, 2020, Issue Brief: Understanding the Gender Composition and Experience of the Ready-Made Garment (RMG) Industry in Bangladesh: https://www.ilo.org/ wcmsp5/groups/public/—asia/—ro-bangkok/—ilo-dhaka/documents/publication/wcms_754669.pdf Accessed on 15 December 2021. 18 Muslima Jahan, “Women workforce declining in RMG sector,” Prothomo Alo, September 4, 2019, accessed March 15, 2021 https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/Women-workforce-declining-inRMG-sector.

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the garment workforce is the wage hikes in the garment industry since 2013, which make it more attractive for men to work there. There is, of course, a bitter irony in this, because it was largely women garment workers who had fought for these hikes in the strikes of 2006, 2010 and thereafter. As we observed in recent years, another reason for the re-masculinization of garment labour in Bangladesh has to do with spatial-temporal changes in the production process. Over the last decade, many companies relocated into new industrial parks on the outskirts of Dhaka and Chittagong, which offer enhanced infrastructure.¹⁹ Because they cannot afford to commute, factory relocations also force workers to relocate. This disconnects them from the social-cum-political networks they have built up in the city and renders them more vulnerable to control. Furthermore, several of these new factories often run twenty-four/seven in two twelve-hour shifts. Since women are legally prohibited from regularly working night shifts, they are de facto excluded from such factories. Moreover, a further reason relates to the higher skills that the recent technological changes require. For operating the sophisticated and expensive computerised machinery, one must have basic literacy in English and at least vocational training, and on average, such levels of education are much more rare among women than among men. Institutes offering special technical training for the garment industry, such as vocational training institutes and textile engineering colleges, were established in Bangladesh already in the 1980s. Over the last years, such training institutes have mushroomed, from 75 that existed until 2000, to roughly 150 in 2009 and 250 in 2021. In early 2023, a member of the Bangladesh Technical Education Board estimated that the number of such institutes and colleges to be around 400. Since 2015, the BGMEA funds and collaborates with around 160 such institutes (together with the government of Bangladesh and the Asian Development Bank),²⁰ and many of these are attached to garment factories that offer access to the new jacquard and other computerised machines. Many courses at these institutes, such as computer software learning, industrial engineering and management, require literacy in English, but also courses taught in Bangla, such as sewing machine operation or maintenance, de facto require an eighth grade or more often a tenth grade degree. Since parents are more willing to spend on the education of their sons than their daughters, women rarely attend them, apart from some in the

19 The government of Bangladesh is in the process of establishing a hundred Economic Zones for these and other industries at the periphery of Dhaka and Chattogram (http://www.beza.gov.bd/). 20 For details, please see https://bgmea-seip.org/. In fact, two further associations involved in the export garment industry, the Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association, and the Bangladesh Textile Mills Association also run programmes for skilling workers. For details see their respective webpages https://bkmea.com/projects/seip/ and https://www.btmaseip.org.bd/

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sewing course. A further entrance barrier is of course that these courses are a financial burden, not because of fees (they usually are free of charge), but because of the costs for accommodation and subsistence that have to be covered while one is not earning during the three to six months a course lasts. These latter barriers in fact also keep out men from families who cannot afford to support a non-earning grown-up son for any extended period of time. As this suggests, these new kinds of garment workers do not belong to the urban or rural poor. In their chats, which Ashraf followed in social media, these workers emphasised their education, their attitude, their commitment, their self-discipline, and their special skill to operate high-end machines. They also explicitly identified as middle class (moddhobitto sreni), however much such an identification appears at odds with realities on the grounds, as in many parts of the world (cf. Weiss 2019). Their chats also reveal efforts to masculinize work in the garment sector. At work, and especially also in their photos on social media postings, many of them like to show off their muscular bodies, and some call themselves jacquarder shoinik, ‘soldiers of the jacquard machine’. It is not far-fetched to assume that they lay such emphasis on performances of masculinity to counter the widespread assumptions and depictions of the feminine nature of the workforce – similar to what male workers in Mexican maquiladoras do (Salzinger 2003). Thus, the recent transformations in Bangladesh’s transnational export garment industry have fostered an increasing unevenness among the workforce along the fault lines of gender and class. This raises the important question of what social and political consequences the recent changes in the industry and in the sociological profile of its workforce may have. The capital-intensive investments in sophisticated machinery and infrastructure grants the male skilled workers operating them a more powerful position than their female workmates ever had. Their identification as middle class, and their prospects for promotion and upward social mobility that feed this identification, suggest that they might be less willing to engage in collective class action than women workers have often done, who had no choice but to identify as working class. How their subjectivity and position in the industry will shape their politics and in what contexts remains to be seen. And it should be remembered also that women workers were initially considered an ideal workforce that would not challenge transnational capital.

Conclusion The export-oriented garment industry has developed in Bangladesh since the late 1970s, when flexible accumulation gained precedence in global capitalism (cf. Harvey 1989, 141–72), and when industrial production shifted to flexible factories.

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These operate with lean manufacturing systems that rely on a small, relatively well-paid and well-protected core workforce and a much larger number of subcontracted peripheral workers with low wages and few rights (Mollona 2014, 188). In its aim to exploit wage differentials among uneven social spaces and formations, global enterprises search for these workforces across the world (ibid., 195–98). In Bangladesh, the legacies of British colonialism, West Pakistani (under)developmentalism, and the Liberation War exacerbated local inequalities of class, the urban-rural divide, and gender, and produced a large reserve of labour that was cheap not only in comparison to the western world, but also in comparison to other newly industrializing countries in Asia. Furthermore, in order to stabilize their rule and to leapfrog capitalist development, Bangladesh’s military governments and its economic elites were keen to enable the transnational garment industry (as well as other export-oriented industries) to combine with this reserve. Under the constant threat of capital flight to other places in the Global South, it became a major concern for the country’s political and economic elite to keep the low-skilled, low-value-adding industry in Bangladesh, and the safest way for this was to keep labour cheap and docile. The continuous combination of unevenness within Bangladesh, in terms of class, gender, and of the urban-rural divide,²¹ was supposed to achieve this. However, in contradiction to the notion of the docile, ‘nimble-fingered’ Bangladeshi women cherished by transnational and local capital, female garment workers regularly engaged in (often militant) class-cum-gender struggles. They achieved several important concessions in terms of wage hikes and political representation, but garment owners in conjunction with the state also continued to react with severe suppression and intensified forms of surveillance techniques. In reaction to labour resistance and the threat of capital flight, the large garment factory owners also attempted to leapfrog in the global commodity chain, up-scaling production, and up-skilling the local workforce. The most pronounced social effect of this was a re-alignment of the gender and class character of the garment workforce. Given the labour militancy of the preceding decades, it does not appear far-fetched that the new divisions of gender and class this introduced among the workforce is not only a side effect of local capital’s strategy of upscaling and upskilling, but a central part of it. Thus, the development of the

21 Although ethnicity never played a major role in this process in the factories we visited over the years, there are instances when it did so. Thus, according to Pehlan (1986), an early observer of the industry, some export ready-made garment industries in 1980s Chattogram, contracted women from the adivashi or indigenous communities of the surrounding Chittagong Hill Tracts to work board and lodging for up to two years that the contracts were running. Pehlan further reports that his interlocutor, a buying house agent from Hong Kong, claimed that those factories were his most reliable suppliers (ibid., 12).

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transnational ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh is driven by a dialectics of class, the urban-rural divide, and gender, or of unevenness and combination, which is, as others have emphasised for different contexts (cf. Kasmir and Gill 2018; Mandel 1963), at its core politically momentous.

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Sharryn Kasmir

Uneven and Combined Development and the Anthropology of Capitalism: An Afterword

Lesley Gill and I turned to the growing body of literature on Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development to consider the heterogeneity of capitalism, differentiation, and class formation. We were swimming against the current in anthropology that saw the discipline as a repository for ethnographic studies of ontological difference and radical alterity (see critique by Kalb 2015). That current made little of ‘the idea that the world is a structured and meaningful articulation of connected ongoing relationships’ that can be apprehended and explained ‘through analysis and theory, as a premise for acting upon it’ (Narotzky 2016, 278). To the contrary, our inclination was toward a coherent theory of the global capitalist regime, to account for differentiation and unity, and to grapple with history, labour, and the production of space (Gill and Kasmir 2016; Kasmir and Gill 2018). Lesley and I had carried out field work in Colombia and the United States (respectively,) in regions where previously powerful industrial working classes had been disorganized and dispossessed in the last decades of the 20th century (Kasmir 2014; Gill 2016). In those settings, we saw how ‘overcoming the incoherence that arises from the unevenness of capitalist development is a political project for working people, who must craft their own coherence against the violence and chaos engendered in their lives by capital accumulation and dominant classes’ (Kasmir and Gill 2018, 365). Uneven and combined development pointed toward novel combinations of people, places, and struggles that gave rise to new labour formations. It helped us to understand ‘how the parameters of political possibility emerge and transform, and to consider what working people can do alone, what they can accomplish with others, and what is simply unthinkable or unimaginable at particular junctures’ (Kasmir and Gill 2018, 365). Scholars from geography, international relations, world sociology, and political economy were taking up Leon Trotsky’s writing on uneven and combined development and yielding valuable insights¹. Yet few

1 For example, Allinson and Anievas 2009; Anievas and Matin 2016; Bond, Desai, Ngwane 2013; Burawoy 1989; Dunn and Radice 2006; Herod 2006; Makki, 2015; Rosenberg 2006, 2013; N. Smith 2006, 2008; Davidson 2016; van der Linden 2007; Werner 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-012

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anthropologists were engaging it, despite its promise of general theory to guide ethnographic research (but see Kalb 2018; Kalb and Mollona 2018; Lem 2018; Smith 2016, 2020). The present volume is the first edited collection on uneven and combined development in anthropology, and it therefore marks a milestone. Trotsky set out the theory of uneven and combined development to explain the so-called anomaly of socialist revolution in ‘backward’ Russia in 1917. At the same time, the framework he authored was also a general treatise on capitalist development and on politics (Trotsky 2007 [1906]; 2008 [1932]). As Hofmann and Strümpell summarize in their introduction to this volume, Trotsky abstracted common processes from the particular Russian case: [T]he Tsarist state engaged in large-scale development of infrastructure and built industries with capital borrowed from foreign stock markets. The crucial outcome of this was that an autonomous capitalist class did not develop in Russia, and that the proletariat – though small in total – was concentrated in a few large industries in a few large cities, surrounded by peasant villages. Generalizing from this case, Trotsky (2008 [1932]: 5) argues that ‘[u]nevenness [is] the most general law of the historic process’ and that this historical process unfolds through the dialectical interaction between the multiple uneven societies or social formations. Hence, this combination of unevenness between different societies has to be taken as the starting point for understanding their particular trajectory (Hoffmann and Strümpell, this volume).

The internal contradictions of capitalism were in the centre of Trotsky’s frame. Capitalism had a tendency to expand, and it simultaneously universalized social and economic relations and differentiated them. For this reason, uneven and combined development sped up with the spread of capitalist relations. Trotsky explained, that capitalism inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the surmounting of economic differences, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a system of financial interrelationships. Thereby it brings about their rapprochement and equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the most progressive and the most backward countries (Trotsky quoted in Callinicos 2009, 88; also see Allison and Anievas 2009).

Capitalist expansion brought countries closer together and evened out their economic development. It thereby set ‘one country against another, and one branch of industry against another developing some parts of world economy, while hampering and throwing back the development of others’ (quoted in Callinicos 2009, 88; also see Allison and Anievas 2009). This contradictory unity of capitalism’s universalizing and differentiating tendencies, in Trotsky’s memorable words, ‘explains for us the living texture of the

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historical process’ (quoted in Callinicos 2009, 89). In concrete experience, Tsarist Russia, then rooted in an agrarian economy, sought to catch up with countries in western Europe. This ‘whip of external necessity’ was the terrain for new lines of development and politics. To again refer to Hoffmann and Strümpell’s useful summary: This (as Trotsky called it) ‘whip of external necessity’ did not produce alike structures and experiences of capitalist development in Russia (and never does anywhere else) because, among other reasons, the ‘privilege of backwardness’ allowed late-developers to skip developmental processes, to draw on the technologies already developed elsewhere and combine them in unique ways with their pre-existing social and economic configurations (Hoffmann and Strümpell, this volume.).

Agrarian Russia had the ‘privilege of backwardness.’ As a relatively late comer to industrialization, Russia could leapfrog earlier stages of economic and technological development. Importantly, Russia’s lateness also conferred political and ideological advantage, that is, the conditions whereby bourgeois and socialist revolutions merged into one. This combination of unevenness resulted in new class configurations and capacities: In this way, it was politically momentous. In Russia, that meant a rapidly constituted and spatially concentrated urban, industrial working-class and a weak national bourgeoisie. The particular class relations arose from embedded historical processes within Russia and from the international formation of capital. International politics were likewise crucial for the revolutionary character of Russia’s working class. Trotsky listed the legacy of the French Revolution, the successes of the labour movement in western Europe, and World War I as indispensable political forbearers. For Trotsky, there is a critical international dimension to the combined concept. The historically specific combination of people and power, in Russia or elsewhere, should neither be conceptualized as local nor global. These two poles of experience are cornerstones for many anthropologists; often they are depicted as spatial containers for different scalar processes. But they are better understood as having being made through mutual interdependence (Makki 2015). This perspective on the local and global, and their interactions, is useful for both ethnography and general theory. It invites anthropologists to think historically and relationally about our field sites. If uneven and combined development is a rich theoretical resource for anthropology, the benefit also accrues in the other direction. Anthropologist can play a role in furthering the project of reworking and refining uneven and combined development, as our colleagues in other social sciences have fruitfully done. The present volume is a welcome overture in this regard.

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Trotsky’s original formulation of uneven and combined development was surely teleological and this fact presents anthropologists with our first challenge for using the theory today. The teleology is vividly expressed in the terms ‘backward’ or ‘archaic’ modes of production versus ‘advanced’ modes, to describe less and more industrialized and capitalized societies. More damningly, teleological thinking inhabits Trotsky’s assumption of a socio-political forward march. The theory moves toward development, class formation, and revolutionary action. Yet conditions on the ground are messy and contradictory. In our own time, we see the disorganization of working classes via deindustrialization or state repression; the rise of revanchist and right-wing political movements; and the worldwide proliferation of livelihoods beyond the wage. These ‘messy realities’ include individual and collective ‘ideas, expectations and sensitivities’ that do not necessarily lead toward political protest or action (Weißenfels, this volume). Dispelling teleological thinking from uneven and combined development is clearly an urgent task. Winnie Lem presses the point: [The] inevitability of revolution as an historical outcome cannot be assumed. The imperative, then, is to retain uneven and combined development, in terms of a more open-ended history. Moreover, what is also challenging […] and gives analytical gravitas to attempts to appreciate the uneven processes of social change is a conceptualization of how the multiple forms of unevenness are combined in contexts where the telos of collective agency is open (Lem 2018, 369; also Smith 2016).

The combined concept leads us to ask about the actual and potential relationships among heterogeneous populations. At any historical moment there are multiple labour forms and different kinds of labouring people—free/unfree; waged/unwaged; urban/rural etc. How these are categorized, differentiated, or unified and how those relations change over time and with the intercessions of states and other institutions are political questions. And the outcomes cannot be taken for granted; they may be revolutionary, reformist, or regressive (Kasmir and Gill 2018, 1; also Carbonella and Kasmir 2014). Anthropologists can therefore further the elaboration of uneven and combined theory with our close accounts of actually existing capitalism and of labour as a political formation. Together, the chapters in this volume contribute an anthropological reading of uneven and combined development. Their focus is on industry, although true to the complex, non-linear trajectories of the people and places they depict, social reproductive labour, rural economies, construction, mining, etc. are not far from view. The chapters serve as evidence that actually existing capitalism is heterogeneous, as are the historically formed classes that make up particular societies. More, they underscore the agency of labour in these social processes, even as they make evident the power of capital at regional and global scales. They take an ‘explicit focus

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on labour and class struggle, not exclusively on the internal requirements of capital,’ (Strümpell and Ashraf, this volume; also Herod 2006). With the carefully considered cases collected here, we can sharpen uneven and combined development’s toolkit. What does uneven and combined development enable us to grasp about global capitalism that other theoretical frameworks do not? What precisely does unevenness mean, and (more difficult to parse) what is combination? How does uneven and combined development urge political questions? Readers may note that the meanings of key terms unevenness and combination are inconsistent across the chapters. This presents us with an opportunity for deepening and clarifying these concepts. Geographer Jamie Peck wrote that unevenness refers to a ‘spatially differentiated world,’ and to the effects of the myriad ‘processes of (primitive) accumulation, dependency, exploitation, struggle, dispossession, devaluation, domination, resistance, and more’ (Peck 2019, 50). In Neil Smith’s evocative framing, uneven development is social inequality blazoned onto the geographical landscape’ (2008, 206). If Marx took capitalist development out of space and time, Smith, as a geographer, was keenly interested in the tensions between capitalism’s universalizing and particularizing moments and the creation and destruction of space. He mapped differentiated spatial landscapes, which were the consequence of the ‘see-saw’ movement of capital accumulation. For both these geographers, the spatial and temporal dimensions of unevenness are fundamental because cycles of investment and abandonment are the motor of the process. This movement of capital is apparent in Strümpell and Ashraf’s chapter on textile labour regimes in the outskirts of Dhaka and Chattogram. Their account begins with the certainty that ‘Bangladesh presents a clear case of “uneven and combined development”, of the dialectical interaction between multiple social formations driving historical processes.’ They survey the era of British colonialism to the present day, when competition from African producers is transforming labour and gender relations in Bangladesh’s factories. As well, we clearly see the spatial and temporal dimensions of unevenness in Arnaud Kaba’s multi-sited study of glass making. Artisan glassmakers in Lyon, France and mass-producing wage labourers in factories outside of Delhi, India are mutually constituted by waves of investment and abandonment. Decline in one location (Lyon) and development in the other (Delhi) shape the different life experiences of two distinct and differently valued working classes. Unevenness also produces structural inequalities and hierarchies within local, regional, or national working classes. This gives rise to labour segmentation, for example, between informal/formal or temporary/permanent workers. However, these empirical circumstances are not the precise equivalent of unevenness. It is understandable that there would be slippage in some of the chapters between

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the two concepts unevenness and labour hierarchy, as they are closely intertwined. Yet it is important to keep the analytical distinction sharp, and to specify how labour segments and hierarchies are created and recreated by the multi-scalar interactions of states, capital, and working classes. For geographer Doreen Massey, ‘spatial divisions of labour’ are constructed and reconstructed over time, as waves of investment and disinvestment are layered upon earlier histories, including the social formations of particular localities, especially their gender, racial and class dimensions (Massey 1986). Understood in this way, the concept of unevenness captures ever-changing divisions of labour through the lens of capitalist trajectories. This kind of analysis animates Julia Soul’s account of union politics in Latin America in this volume. Soul details the divergent paths of capitalist investment and state policies over the 20th century in Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala, and she shows how these different paths produce distinct union structures, unequal power for organized labour, and differential wage levels. Labour segmentation, in her account, is not a static sociological category but the effect of waves of uneven development. Similarly, in the German automobile sector, the legacies of the post-socialist transition and the underdevelopment of the east by the west create unequal conditions for labour within one country and a single company, Volkswagen (Ivanova, this volume). In Indian coal fields, layered histories of development, state policy, and gender and caste relations, from the colonial period and then after Independence, have at different moments created a largely informal workforce, then formalized the workforce, then reintroduced informal arrangements (Suravee Nayak, this volume). If the concept of unevenness is sometimes stretched too thin in some chapters combination is even more difficult to pin down. At the same time, it is arguably more open-ended, and it invites more theoretical thinking and innovation (Peck 2019). First, combination points to multi-linear paths of development. ‘Combination’, in this sense, denotes hybrid complexity, structural asymmetry, and contradictory coexistence, rather than systemic singularity, equilibrium, or purity, invoking an ontology of mutually entangled social formations fashioned from elements old and new, near and far (Peck 2019, 50).

Michael Hoffmann’s chapter on post-revolutionary Nepal brings this dimension of the concept to life. Present-day capitalist relations combine several developments: the relatively late industrialization of regions of Nepal; the empowerment of unions in key sectors as a result of the Maoist Revolution; the transnational division of labour and migration to the Middle East and Malaysia; and changing morals, hopes, and aspirations. In another case, workers in a French-owned electronics factory in a special economic zone in Tunisia are acutely aware that uneven devel-

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opment cheapens their labour. They know intimately that their wages do not afford them a ‘modern life,’ including a house and car. Nonetheless, they deem the clean, well-ordered factory as a space of capitalist modernity, precisely the image of modernity and post-colonialism that was promised them. They see themselves as privileged within the Tunisian labour force, and they are not therefore inclined (at least not presently) to protest their wage exploitation (Weißenfels, this volume). Similarly, Umut Kuruüzüm (this volume) details the ways that Kurdish steel workers construct their lives across the national borders of Turkey and Iraq. Kuruüzüm vividly describes how Kurdish male workforces in the mini steel mills, which emerged in Iraq in the shadow of war, are mutually constituted by the conditions of their factory employment and the patriarchal relations of rural households back home. Combination—rural/urban; patriarchal/wage relations; agricultural/industrial—aptly captures this labour formation and its potentialities. Elsewhere, Gavin Smith offers a, fruitful take on the concept of combination. He revisits the double-sided question about agrarian economies and peasant populations, which were familiar ‘problems’ for 19th and 20th revolutionaries. Smith carefully parses its spatial and temporal dimension and its economic and political registers, For the hundred years following 1899, the agrarian question addressed first an economic question having to do with the uneven development of capitalism, and then – sometimes as the peasant question – a political one having to do with the uneven role of the peasantry as agents of (revolutionary) history (Smith 2020, 154).

Smith continues to tease out the combined concept and its political moment, [O]ne political element of ‘the agrarian question’ would have to do with the unevenness in this respect between the peasantry and the often more spatially concentrated struggles in the cities or a similar kind of unevenness on a global scale. An urgent question was how these might be fruitfully combined (2020, 156).

Here, combined is the particular arrangement of differentiated populations, wherein political outcomes hang in the balance. This dynamic between combination and political possibility is palpable in Soul’s discussion of the international steel union in Latin America. Her ethnography shows possible new organizational forms and class configurations in motion. Similar dialectical tensions animate Andrea Tollardo’s (this volume) historical ethnography of the porphyry stone extraction industry in Trentino, Northern Italy. Changing international relations and state-level development and immigration policies since the mid-19th century differentially produce the statuses of native and im-

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migrant workers. At distinct conjunctures, immigration is criminalized or normalized, leading to changing political conditions. Throughout this volume, we glimpse how working classes are always combinations of differently valued labourers, created by layered histories of capital accumulation. We are given to understand that organizing self-conscious working classes-for-themselves, as political actors, always requires overcoming unevenness and difference. When Lesley Gill and I wrote that unevenness is ‘politically momentous,’ we meant quite literally that combination of unevenness should be seen as a political occurence. Various ideological and organizations strands are brought into relationship; alliances and networks (old and new) are put in play; and new identities are made in this context. The chapters in this volume invite further questions for gauging the parameters of possibility: What are the actual political configurations on the ground? What are their trajectories, contradictions, and outcomes? And how do their different histories shape individual and collective hopes, expectations, and aspirations for the future? The anthropologists who contributed to this volume are engaging with uneven and combined development, and they are charting the global anthropology of capitalism. Together, they show how heterogeneity is produced; how regions mutually constitute each other; how layered, spatial histories shape class formation; how difference and similarity among labour forces are created; and how political possibility is made. When anthropologists work with the theory of uneven and combined development, we can grasp the scales of local and global and their mutual constitution. We can apprehend radical difference as well as structured, ongoing relations, and we can help explain, in Trotsky’s redolent phrasing ‘the living texture of the historical process.’

References Allinson, Jamie C and Alexander Anievas. “The uses and misuses of uneven and combined development: an anatomy of a concept,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22,1 (2009): 47–67. Anievas, Alexander and Kamron Matin (eds.). Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Long Duree. London and New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2016. Bond, Patrick, Ashwin Desai and Trevor Ngwane. “Uneven and Combined Marxism within South Africa’s Urban Social Movements.” In Marxism and Social Movements edited by Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, 233–58. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013. Burawoy, Michael. “Two Methods in Search of Science: Skocpol versus Trotsky,” Theory and Society 18,6 (1989): 759–805. Callinicos, Alex. Imperialism and Global Political Economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009.

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Carbonella, August and Sharryn Kasmir. “Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor.” In Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor, edited by Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella, 1–29. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014. Davidson, Neil. “Uneven and Combined Development: Modernity, Modernism, Revolution.” In Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Long Duree, edited by Alexander Anievas and Kamron Matin, 31–53. London and New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2016. Dunn, Bill and Hugo Radice (eds.). 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects. London: Pluto Press, 2006. Gill, Lesley. A Century of Violence in a Red City Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Gill, Lesley and Sharryn Kasmir. “History, politics, space, labor: on unevenness as an anthropological concept,” Dialectical Anthropology 40,2 (2016): 87–102. Herod, Andrew. “Trotsky’s Omission: Labour’s Role in Combined and Uneven Development.” In 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects, edited by Bill Dunn and Hugo Radice, 72– 88. London: Pluto Press, 2006. Kalb, Don. “Introduction: Class and the New Anthropological Holism.” In Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality, edited by James Carrier and Don Kalb, 1–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kalb, Don and Mao Mollona. “Introductory Thoughts on Anthropology and Urban Insurrection”. In World Wide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning, edited by Don Kalb and Mao Mollona, 1–29. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018. Kalb, Don. “Trotsky over Mauss: Anthropological Theory and the October 1917 Commemoration,” Dialectical Anthropology 42,3 (2018): 327–343. Kasmir, Sharryn. “The Saturn Automobile Plant and the Long Dispossession of US Autoworkers.” In Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor, edited by August Carbonella and Sharryn Kasmir, 203–49. New York: Berghahn Press, 2014. Kasmir, Sharryn and Lesley Gill. “No Smooth Surfaces: An Anthropology of Unevenness and Combination,” Current Anthropology 59,4 (2018): 355–377. Lem, Winnie. “Dialectics of Uneven Spatial-Temporal Development: Migrants and Reproduction in Late Capitalism.” In Migration, Temporality and Capitalism: Entangled Mobilities across Global Spaces, edited by Pauline Barber and Winnie Lem, 186–206. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Makki, Fouad. “Reframing development theory: the significance of the idea of uneven and combined development,” Theory and Society 44,5 (2015): 471–497. Massey, Doreen. Spatial Divisions of Labour. London: MacMillan, 1984. Narotzky, Susana. “On waging the ideological war: against the hegemony of form,” Anthropological Theory 16,2–3 (2016): 263–284. Peck, Jamie. “Combination”. In Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, edited by the Antipode Editorial Collective, 50–56. Hoboken, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. Rosenberg, Justin. “Why is There No International Historical Sociology?,” European Journal of International Relations 12,3 (2006): 307–40. Rosenberg, Justin. “The ‘Philosophical Premises’ of Combined and Uneven Development.” Review of International Studies 39,3 (2013): 569–597. Smith, Gavin. “Against social democratic angst about revolution: from failed citizens to critical praxis,” Dialectal Anthropology 40,3 (2016): 221–239.

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Smith, Gavin. “Interrogating the Agrarian Question Then and Now in Terms of Uneven and Combined Development.” In The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux edited by Ida Susser and Don Nonnini, 153–75. New York: Routledge, 2020. Smith, Neil. “The Geography of Uneven Development.” In 100 Years of Permanent Revolution, edited by Bill Dunn and Hugo Radice, 180–195. London: Pluto, 2006. Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. 3rd Edition. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008 (1984). Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. 1906. Reprint, London: Socialist Resistance, 2007. Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution. 1932. Reprint, Chicago: Haymarket, 2008. van der Linden, Marcel. “The ‘Law’ of Uneven and Combined Development: Some Underdeveloped Thoughts,” Historical Materialism 15,1 (2007): 145–165. Werner, Marion. Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.

List of Contributors Hasan Ashraf is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at the Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. He is currently working on two books: one is based on his Ph.D. (Heidelberg University) research that explored the relationship between transnational industrialization and physical and mental health among the Bangladeshi garment factory workers. The second book is with Christian Strümpell focusing on the historical development and contemporary shifts in the global garment industry in Bangladesh and its implications in workers’ lives. His recent publications include a co-authored article published in New Diversities with Dina M. Siddiqi (2022), Pandemics Politics: Class, Gender and Stigmatized Labor in Bangladesh’s Garment Industry. He has published articles on shopfloor ethnography, labour politics and health in Ethnoscripts, Dialectical Anthropology, Somatosphere, and in other edited volumes and contributed book chapters. Michael Hoffmann is a Research Associate at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Re:work “Work and Human Life Course in Global History” based at the Humboldt University Berlin. Previously, he worked as a project leader and research fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies (ZIRS) at the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, as a senior research fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin, as a post-doc fellow at the Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology in Cologne and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He completed his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences in 2012 and is the author of the anthropological monographs “The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal” and “Glimpses of Hope: The Rise of Industrial Labor at the Urban Margins of Nepal” both published at Berghahn. He also published extensively in Focaal, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Modern Asian Studies, Critique of Anthopology, Dialectical Anthropology and History and Anthropology. Katerina Ivanova is an independent researcher who received her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle and Comenius University in Bratislava. Her research interests include industrial labour, postsocialism and ethnicity with a regional focus on Eastern Germany and Bulgaria. Her published works include “I have never been unemployed”: narratives of work, worth and worthlessness in an East German town and The Moral Dimension of (Un)Employment: Work and Fairness in an Eastern German Town. Arnaud Kaba is a lecturer at the Paris VIII University specialized in the anthropology of labour. He has undertaken long-term ethnographic research in different parts of India as well as Europe to study social relations and collective representations at the workplace. After having completed his PhD on work identities among metal workers in the central Indian state Madhya Pradesh at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Toulouse in 2018, he has started working on the ways contemporary processes if globalization shape the valorization of work, skills, and commodities in regions specialized in glass craftsmanship: Firozabad, in India, and Lorraine, in France. Among his publications is a monograph on tea workers in northeast India, several book chapters as well as articles in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Journal of Agrarian Change, South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, and Anthropologie et Société.

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Sharryn Kasmir is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University. She has done pioneering work in the anthropology of labor and uneven and combined development. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in manufacturing settings in the Basque region of Spain and the southeast U.S. and is currently studying political activism in a rust-belt region of Pennsylvania. Her publications include Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor (Routledge 2022); Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor (Berghahn 2014); The ‘Myth’ of Mondragón: Cooperatives, Politics and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town (SUNY Press 1996); “The Anthropology of Labor,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology (2020); “No Smooth Surfaces: An Anthropology of Unevenness and Combination,” Current Anthropology (2018); “On Difference and Combination: Politics and Social Movement Organizations in a Pennsylvania Rust-Belt Region” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (2023.) Umut Kuruüzüm is a London School of Economics trained economic anthropologist, working on economies of waste, recycling, war, rubble, pesticides, and infrastructure of water in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and along the north-eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. After graduating from the LSE, he began working as an Assistant Professor of Development at Istanbul Technical University, where he has been teaching ecological and development economics, as well as working as a consultant to the ILO in humanitarian aid and development response. Suravee Nayak is an Associate Fellow with the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment (ICEE) at Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi. Suravee’s research interests are energy and labour, political economy of coal, energy transitions, extractive industries and nature-society relations. Prior to joining CPR, she was a Doctoral Scholar at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Thiruvananthapuram. Suravee was also a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK, in 2019. During her M.Phil. and Ph.D., she researched the political economy of coal mining in India, particularly understanding various socio-economic- ecological transitions in coal-dependent economies. Her recently submitted Ph.D. project specifically explores the labour process and labour regimes in the coal mines of Eastern India based on 18 months of ethnographic research. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and on digital media. Julia Soul received her PhD in Anthropology from the National University of Rosario in 2010 and is a researcher at the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales (CEIL) at CONICET Buenos Aires since 2012. She has conducted interdisciplinary research projects on Latin American labor, focusing on the dynamics of working-class formation, labor organizations and conflicts in industrial contexts during the recent, neoliberal history of capitalism. She teaches post-graduate courses at different universities in the country, and she is part of the Taller de Estudios Laborales (TEL), an organization dedicated to the joint production of knowledge for trade union organization with activists and militants of the trade union movement in Argentina and Uruguay. Among her publications is the monograph SOMISEROS: La constitución y el devenir de un grupo obrero desde una perspectiva socioantropológica (Prohistoria 2014) as well as several contributions, articles and book chapters in journals and edited volumes Argentina and abroad. Christian Strümpell is Research Associate at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies Delhi, after having held positions at the Institutes of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Universität Hamburg and at Tübingen University. In addition to his research in Dhaka presented in this volume, he has undertaken further extensive ethnographic research on workers of hydro-electric powerplant and on steel workers in Rourkela, India. His publications include the monographs Steel Town Adivasis:

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Industry and Inequality in Eastern India (Social Science Press, 2023), “Wir arbeiten zusammen, wir essen zusammen”: Konvivium und soziale Peripherie in einer indischen Werkssiedlung (LIT 2006), chapters to edited volumes at Weißensee Verlag, Cambridge University Press and Berghahn, articles in journals such as Contributions to Indian Sociology, Citizenship Studies and Modern Asian Studies as well as blogs in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research and in Workplaces: Pasts and Presents. Andrea Tollardo is a PhD candidate finalising his dissertation in the Doctoral program of Cultural and Social Anthropology (DACS) at the University of Milan-Bicocca. He is interested in the anthropology of labour –with particular reference to industrial extraction– and of migrations. He has a geographic focus on Europe and European highlands. He conducted research in a mountainous locality in the Italian Alps characterised by economic collapse after the Great Recession of 2008. His research combines the analysis of local historical specificities with global socio-economic factors to analyse the development of social reproduction strategies and the production of conditions that favour migrations in the context of capitalist cycles. André Weißenfels is Scientific Associate and doctoral researcher at the Political Science Institute at Free University Berlin. Trained in Near-and Middle Eastern Studies and Sociology, his PhD project analyzes the everyday of Tunisian employees in a French factory in Tunis and how it connects to global capitalist dynamics and the post-colonial development project of the Tunisian state. He also works on structures of self-governance and collective resource management in Tunisia after the revolution 2010/2011. His overall research interests include political economy, postcolonial studies, and anarchism.

Index age 55, 67, 75, 102, 125, 208 agrarian, agricultural 3, 42, 75–76, 137, 149, 165–66, 208, 227, 231 austerity 125, 129, 131, 162, 165–66 Bourgeois, Bourgeoisie (see also class) 112, 189, 227

3, 5, 13,

casual, casualization 9, 19, 25, 27–28, 69, 104, 137, 147–48 caste 6, 12, 24–25, 27, 141, 144–45, 149–52, 230 Catholic, Catholicism (see also religion) 42, 117– 18, 119, 122 class – conflict, struggle 114, 119, 130, 162, 204, 229 – formation 55, 63, 225, 228 – working 9, 14, 27, 43, 84, 104, 149, 151, 152, 178, 182, 194, 219, 225, 227–32 children/childhood (see also kinship) 71, 76, 103, 125–26, 128, 160, 207 colonial/colonialism 42, 137–38, 143–45, 162, 180, 201–04, 230 – and labour 40, 42, 145, 148–49, 151–52 commonality 41, 44, 49–50 communist 86, 119 – parties 28, 34, 117 – unions 117 community 25, 42, 44, 102, 139, 149–51 – closed corporate 110–11 – farming community 58, 75–77, 137 – ideal of 119 – of gold smugglers 25 – rights over resources 128 – trading 25 – working-class 43, 54, 105, 145 company, corporation, enterprise 65, 83, 91, 121–22, 124, 216 – GDR enterprises 85 – global, multinational, transnational 9–10, 21, 37, 43–44, 52, 57, 179, 185, 220 – micro-, small- 42, 124, 127, 131 competition 44, 98 – between companies 125 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311418-014

– among workers 55, 90, 185, 198 – global, international 90, 93, 113, 166–67, 171, 178–79, 181–82, 205, 214, 229 consumption 58–59, 76, 139, 186 control 33, 65, 98, 113, 197 – of labour 44, 57, 76–77, 80, 210–11, 213, 218 – of production, quality 76, 146–47, 192, 202 – patriarchal 76–77, 80, cooperation 39, 55, 89, 94–96, 99, 181, 210 corporate, corporation (see also companies, enterprises) 41, 47, 91 – agri-food 42 – culture 44 – multinational 9, 21, 37–39, 42–43, 45, 52, 56– 57 – of glass production 188 – Bangladesh Textile Mills Corporation 215 crime, organized 130 criminalization, of labour 11, 47 dependency theory 3–4, 173–74 debt, indebtedness 172 peonage 42, crisis 125, 165 dispossession, dispossessed 21, 41, 47, 58, 77, 137–39, 149–51, 178, 226, 229 Eckert, Andreas 1, 77 economic boom 30–31, 109, 119–20, 125 n. 13, 129–30, 165 – crisis 33, 83, 90, 105, 110–12, 118–19, 125–27, 215, education/educated (see also skills) 14, 27, 31, 54, 77, 103, 116–17, 160, 163, 166, 173, 193, 207, 218–19 employer 26, 43, 80, 90, 94–95, 99–100, 114, 161, 196 – big employers 122 – ‘good employer’ 86 – international employer 13 – organization of 88, 90–92, 163, 167 – repression by 47–48, 55

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employment 23, 26, 31, 67, 77, 119–20, 122 – casual, precarious 19, 69, 88, 100–01, 124, 126 – conditions 129, 185, 197, 231 – formal, ‘normal’, permanent 19, 69, 88, 104, 148–49, 161, 182, 208, – security of 70, 73, 92, 96, 101–04, 114, 151, 167 – of women 144 ethnic/ethnicity 9–10, 24, 25 n. 3, 27, 34, 55, 67, 71, 75, 78, 147, 149, 220 n. 21 experience 33, 38, 73, 206, 227 – of crisis 170 – of struggle 47, 53, 162 – of work (see also skills) 68, 93, 184, 195 exploitation 14, 27, 42–43, 56, 63–64, 75–80, 95, 104–05, 114, 119, 122, 144, 152, 16–68, 174–75, 183, 197, 212–13, 229, 231 factory, plant 1, 5–6, 13, 26, 28–29, 37, 94, 102– 03, 160, 165, 189192, 196 – as heritage sites 13, 178, 182–84, 194 – automated 181, 186, 189 – building 206, 215–16 – car 11, 85–88, 89–92, 93–96, 97–102, 105 – Chinese 171 – Coal handling 147 – closure 183, 209 – disaster 212, – electronic equipment 12–13, 157, 169, 171, 230 – garment 1, 205–07, 209–16, 220 – glass 178–82, 184, 188–90, 192–94 – food-processing 1, 9, 19–20, 23, 24–28, 30, 32–34, 169 n. 27 – Fordist 121, 131 – mega 14, 202, 216 – regime 6, 210, – relocation 1, 218 – small 204 – space 7, 10, 28, 67, 158–59, 169–70, 214, 231 – steel 1, 7, 9–11, 28, 37–38, 43–44, 46–47, 50– 52, 63–64, 64–67, 68–70, 77–79, 114, 137, 192, 202, 231 – sweater 214, 217 – workers 29, 75, 102–03, 105, 168–69, 174 family 38, 69, 71–74, 76, 78, 87, 96, 103, 144, 170, 172, 196

– and ownership, family firms 43, 119, 121 – and wages, remittances 32, 72, 76 farmers, farming (see also agrarian, agriculture) 76–77, 166, 170, 208 fascism, fascist 112–16, 118, 120, 130 feelings 32, 47, 53, 99 – of fear 32, 85, 90, 98–99, 160, 190–91, 210, 214 – of hope 31, 34, 85–86, 88, 110, 129, 160, 172, 174, 230, 232 – of uncertainty, insecurity 33, 74 – structures of 54, 57 food 74, 186 – prices 31 – production of 160 ideological, ideology 113–17, 197, 227, 230 inequality 7, 12, 14, 34, 63, 78, 90, 104, 117, 212, 220, 229 informal – economy, sector 7, 23, 58, 198, 208, – labour 12, 104, 138, 143, 146–48, 152, 229–30 informality 10, 70, 95, 164, 178–79, informalisation, casualisation 12, 64, 104, 140 gender – and class 24, 220–21, 230 – and work 6, 144, 150, 159, 192, 207, 219, 229– 30 – masculinization 217–19 Gill, Lesley 1–2, 5, 40, 64, 78, 80, 84, 103, 138, 152, 204, 221, 225, 228, 232 globalization 2, 9, 45, 58, 97, 131, 173, 191, 197– 98, 210, 212 Harvey, David 1, 4, 20, 104, 122, 219 health 54, 104, 117, 159, 212 hierarchy, hierarchical 9, 32, 64, 75–76, 104, 209 – gendered 12, 14, 55, 75, 144, 192–93 – of labour 33, 122, 141 n. 5, 152, 182, 192–93, 196, 229–30 homogenization 9–10, 41, 44, 49, 53–54, 57, 116–17, 122, 130 house, household 27, 64, 67, 69, 72–76, 78, 208, 231

Index

housing 13, 32, 38, 65, 70–71, 73, 148, 161, 163– 64, 170–72 industrialization 6, 8, 21–23, 75, 79, 112, 114–15, 118, 120, 122, 130, 137, 139, 157, 161, 188, 227 – export-oriented 42, 165–68, 203, 206, 211, 219–20 – and de-industrialization 126 – import-substituting 21, 165, 202–03, 211 – late 227, 230 industrial labour, workers (see also factory workers) 1–2, 3 n. 1, 5–6, 7–8, 20–21, 23, 26, 34, 38, 45, 47, 64, 79, 211 – and agricultural labour 5, 58, 166, 170 job (see also employment) 33, 38, 68, 123, 217 – ‘good job’ 160, 168–70, 171–73 – opportunities 32, 86, 87, 96, 110, 126, 128, 150, 163 Kalb, Don 12, 33, 40, 63, 84, 117, 152, 225–26 Kasmir, Sharryn 1–2, 4–5, 40, 45, 64, 78, 80, 84, 96, 103–05, 138, 204, 221, 225, 229 kinship, kin-based 67, 73, 75–77, 80, 122, 131 knowledge (see also skills) 38, 47, 50, 56–57, 171, 188, 190, 201 labour – and gender (see gender) – bonded 25, 201 – camp 69, 74, 76–78 – casual 25,27–28, 104, 137, 147–48 – forced 26, 145 – fragmentation of 84, 91, 103–04, 138, 149– 50, 152 – market 20, 42, 93, 124, 129, 150, 167 – migrant 10, 63–71, 76–81, 113–15, 121, 144– 45, 150 – militancy, ‘labour riots’ 11, 29, 34, 46, 48, 95, 173, 211, 213, 220 – process 6, 44, 57, 182, 216–17 – organization, organizing (see also trade unions) 38–40, 42, 47, 54–55, 57, 59, 70, 99 – recruitment 77, 129, 144, 148, 150, 182 – resistance, struggle 10, 19, 40, 49, 55, 64, 78, 80, 88, 95, 123–24, 152, 204, 220, 229 – law, rights 27, 48, 57–58, 122, 131, 212, 215 – laws, legal aspects

– in Argentina 37, 46–48, 49–50, 54–55 – in Bangladesh 218 – in France 182 – in Germany 85, 87, 94 – in Guatemala 43, 46 – in India 140 – in Iraq 80 – in Italy 115–16, 123–24 – in Nepal 27 – in Tunisia 157, 165 living circumstances/conditions, expenses 32, 34, 55, 71, 117, 163

241

9, 27,

machine, machinery (see also technology, labour process) 44, 86, 93, 121, 128, 148, 150, 158, 182, 189, 206–08, 214, 217–19 managers, management 26, 29, 37–38, 49–53, 68 n.2, 87, 89, 96, 98–99, 138 n. 1, 158, 165, 181 n.4, 210, 213 – human resource managers, management 44, 70, 77 Mandel, Ernest 4, 75, 114, 180–81, 221 Marx, Karl 2, 55, 57, 63, 80, 127, 174, 229 memory 150, 178, 181, 197 mine, miners, mining 6, 12, 52, 114, 118, 123, 125, 137–38, 141–42, 143–49, 151–52, 178, 183, 190, 198, 228 migrant, migration 1, 11, 42, 75, 109, 131, 150 – labour (see labour migrant) – national 113–16, 122, 208 – international 19, 23, 26, 29, 31, 73, 75, 122– 24, 230 mobility (see migration) – social 20, 219 modern, modernity 6, 13, 19, 26, 30–31, 79–80, 112, 148, 166, 170–71, 231 – modernization of agriculture 112, 208 – modernization of production (see also technology) 189 modernization theory 173–74 Mollona, Massimiliano 39, 56, 57, 79, 104–05, 187, 192, 202, 210, 220, 226 Muslim, Islam (see also religion) 24–27, 64, 73, 77 neoliberal, neolibaralism 27, 30, 39 n. 2, 43, 45, 58, 75, 93, 104, 138, 140, 149, 152, 165–66

242

Index

networks (see also kinship) 47, 67, 69, 74, 78–79, 213, 218, 232 – of migration 73, 116, 125, 131 – among companies, employers, firms 42, 44, 93, 114, 179 – among trade unions 37, 40, 45, 48, 58 organized labour (see trade unions) 10, 29, 58, 117, 130, 230 owner, ownership 9, 23, 43, 85 n. 3, 113–14, 119, 123–24, 126–28, 174, 181 n. 4, 183, 187, 208, 210–12, 215–17, 220 Parry, Jonathan 7, 148, 167, 202 patriarchy, patriarchal (see also gender, kinship) 11, 67, 74–77, 80, 115, 192, 197, 231 peasants 2, 3 n. 1, 5, 47, 75, 112, 114–15, 119, 226, 231 Peck, Jamie 1, 4, 210, 229–30 property, property relations (see also owner) 31, 42, 55, 110–11, 119, 129 n. 16, 165 n. 18 protest (see resistance, strike) 47, 86, 89, 211–13, 228, 231 public sector 4, 66, 112, 140–41, 146, 148, 150, 202–03, 205 n. 6, 208, 211 real abstraction 10, 41, 56–57 recruitment 77, 129, 144, 148, 150, 182 religion (see Catholicism, Islam) reproduction 40, 49, 54, 56, 57, 59, 75, 76, 79, 84, 105, 130, 152, 196 retirement, pension 75, 104,141 resistance 10, 40, 80, 95, 139, 157, 220 Russia Tsarist 3, 5, 226, 235 salary (see also wage) 70, 71, 87, 98, 160, 162, 168, 170, 172 security guards 29, 149 segmentation 149, 229 skill, skilled, skilling 12, 13, 46, 55, 57, 66–67, 68 n. 2, 86, 93, 104, 147–48, 168, 178–79, 182, 183, 186–90, 191–95, 196–97, 201, 206–08, 218–20 socialism, socialist 3, 89, 146, 162, 166, 203 solidarity 11, 12, 34, 38–39, 47, 49, 50–52, 54, 67, 88, 90, 91, 97, 104, 105, 150, 151 Special Economic Zones 12, 30, 230

state – capitalism 146, 165 – enterprises 85 – subsidies 86 strike (see also protest, resistance) 11, 25, 46, 48, 56, 58, 88–89, 90–92, 95, 99–101, 113, 129, 212, 215, 218 stone extraction 11, 109, 118, 231 supervisor 67, 73, 138, 151, 169, 171–72 surveillance (see also control) 151, 220 technological (see also machine, machinery) – development 191 – evolution 181, 198 – innovation 51, 189 textile industry 6, 7, 22–23, 100, 114, 201–02 trade unions (see organized labour) 1, 8, 19–21, 27–28, 30, 34, 45–48, 55, 89–92, 96–97, 105, 124, 211–13, 215, 230 – confederations of 52–53, 87–88, 167, 212 – global, international 37, 39–40, 45, 48–49, 55–56, 59, 212, 231 – Gramsci on 55–56 – representatives, leaders 27, 51–52, 55, 87, 147 – Maoist, left 9, 27–28, 34, 211, 230 – of artisans 182 – of metalworkers 37, 45, 48, 52, – of rural workers 47, 113, 113 n. 4 – repression of 38, 41, 44, 47–48, 55, 58, 210– 11, 213, 228 – right-wing 97, 114, 118 Trotsky, Leon 1–5, 8, 63, 84, 137, 138, 174, 180, 181, 186, 204, 225–228, 232 uncertainty 33, 73, 103, 120 unemployed, unemployment 12, 47, 75, 85, 104, 126, 163 urban – development, gentrification, real estate 8, 20–21, 30–31, 32 – workers, working class 5, 21, 42, 58, 227 – rural to urban migration 115, 208, 210 Van der Linden, Marcel 180–81, 225

3–4, 45, 54, 76, 104,

Index

village 2, 6, 10, 11, 13, 24, 26, 28, 74, 80, 134, 140–146, 150, 151, 178, 180, 182–184, 186, 189, 192, 197, 198, 211, 213, 226 violence (see also war) 24, 47, 51, 58, 197, 225 wage 1, 13, 20, 32, 53, 57, 68, 70–80, 102, 114, 116, 117, 119, 122, 126, 127, 129–131, 148–150, 168, 184, 185, 205, 207, 210, 218, 228–231 – agreement 83 n. 1, 88, 91–92, 100, 104, 147 – labour, labourer 1, 55–56, 58–59, 63–64, 77, 103, 163–64, 229 – levels 43–44, 230 – low 42, 47, 50, 75, 90, 130, 145, 220 – minimum 27–29, 71, 171, 212, 214 – waged relations 40, 42 war 63–64, 64–67, 76, 80, 177 n. 1, 188, 231 – civil war 22–23, 24, 42, 205 n. 6 – Cold War 22 – economy 63–64, 67 – First World War 111–13, 118, 130, 177 n. 1, 227

243

– Second World War 115, 119, 120, 130 – Bangladesh’s War of Liberation 203, 220 welfare 55, 148, 165, 215 workers (see also labour) – agricultural 27, 42, 47, 69, 113–14, 141, 144, 166, 210 – women (see also gender) 14, 26, 28, 103, 144– 45, 150, 152, 159, 192–93, 207–08, 211, 213, 217–20 working class (see class) working conditions 11, 29, 32, 67, 90, 92, 93, 100, 105, 119, 125, 145,146, 148, 170, 173, 184, 185, 192, 196, 197, 210–212, 214 Wolf, Eric 5, 56, 110 Yazidis

77–78

‘zooming in’, ‘zooming out’ 5–8, 84, 109, 113, 118, 122, 123, 151