4. Revisiting the New International Division of Labour Thesis

This, however, begs the question of why one or the other form of the international division of labour tends to prevail in a particular country or region. I think that neither Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye nor their critics offered a convincing answer. As Grinberg and Starosta (2009) argue, the existence and reproduction of those protected domestic markets have historically required the continuous inflow of an extraordinary mass of social wealth which complemented the surplus-value extracted from the domestic working class to the point of marking the very specificity of the accumulation process in those national spaces (see also Chaps. 2 and 3). The availability in some countries of an abundant mass of ground-rent, deriving from the presence of exceptional non-reproducible natural conditions in agriculture, mining and/or energy-production, has provided such an additional source of social wealth.

Besides, it should be noted that the ‘relocation back north’ line of reasoning relied on what has been convincingly shown to be a mythical story about the effects of new flexible technologies on the productive attributes of direct workers (Tomaney 1994).

This was grasped by Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye to a certain extent, although mentioned mainly in passing (see, for instance, Fröbel 1982: 538). In a subsequent study on export processing zones, they explicitly considered the debates on the effects of new technologies on the NIDL and correctly recognised that ‘innovations in process technologies have not led firms to turn their backs on low-cost sites in the world-wide organization of their production’, since the ‘wage-differential’ between ‘North’ and ‘South’ for the more skilled work often required could be even greater than that between wages for unskilled workers (Fröbel et al. 1987: 15).

As we shall see in Chap. 6, these dynamics of relative simplification and a subsequent international relocation of intellectual labour are also at the basis of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon, with software development as one of its emblematic sectors.

International migration is thus part and parcel of the NIDL and not its refutation (as implied, for instance, by Cohen 1987). Sassen (1988) offers a more balanced view.

In this sense, data on FDI cannot empirically settle the question about the validity of the NIDL thesis, as some authors argue (for example, Kiely 1995: 94).

See Jacobson et al. (1979), Walker (1989) and Liokadis (1990), for diverse critiques of the world-system/dependency theory leanings of Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye’s account.

For further elaboration of the determination of capital as the alienated total social subject of the movement of modern society (and hence the inverted social existence of human beings as its personifications), see Starosta (2016).

This mistaken focus on manufacture instead of machino facture was accurately picked up by Jenkins (1984) in his early critique of the NIDL thesis, although he did not explore the implications of this confusion any further.

See Balconi (2002) on this twofold effect of new technologies on the skills of direct labourers. This general contradictory development of the particular and universal dimensions of labour-power subsumed to large-scale industry had already been identified by Marx as its characteristic form of motion. See his discussion of education clauses of the Factory Acts in Capital (1976: Chap. 15), and also Starosta (2011).

As for the, so-called, polyvalent worker, it has been amply demonstrated that its development might not entail any vertical expansion of skills. Instead, it has involved in most cases the horizontal incorporation of additional, quite simple tasks, that is the sheer intensification of labour (Elger 1990). Rather than being an obstacle, the generally weaker and more compliant working class in certain ‘peripheral’ countries might have been even more suitable for the greater labour intensity allowed by flexible production methods. This has been noted to be true of Japan as well, one of the hidden secrets behind its competitiveness vis-à-vis American and Western European capitals in the 1980s (Dohse et al. 1985).

Strictly speaking, the multiplication of the surplus population relative to the needs of the accumulation process has also constituted a transformation of productive subjectivity produced by the automation of large-scale industry (see Marx 1976: 553–75).

As Grinberg (2014: 2) points out, wet-rice cultivation has, among others, the following two characteristics. First, it is highly labour-intensive, notably during planting and harvest periods. Secondly, whatever their extent and complexity and, consequently, degree of centralisation, all irrigation systems have required the ‘cooperation at various levels between the farmers in a single water control unit’ (Bray 1986: 67).

It is this difference in timing that largely explains the divergence in the patterns of industrial development (that is, the extent of the deepening process) between the first generation East Asian Tigers and their ‘followers’ in South East Asia. Also, many of those later followers had a comparatively greater mass of ground-rent for capital to recover through protected domestic markets before being turned into sources of cheap and compliant labour power for world market production. Thus, it was generally after the collapse of raw material prices (hence of ground-rent) in the early 1980s that these countries changed their mode of integration into the international division of labour (this also applies to the case of Mexico in Latin America). This, of course, does not mean that the industrialisation process in East Asia simply responded to the dynamics captured by the ‘flying geese’ thesis (cf. Kasahara 2004). Indeed, the NIDL has taken shape in a hierarchical structure (Bernard and Ravenhill 1995) which, due to global-scale requirements of different types of labour-power, narrows at the top and widens at the bottom. Moreover, the advent of China, with its ‘unlimited’ supply of relatively cheap and disciplined labour-power, has strongly restricted the upgrading possibilities of the rest of the followers.

As Grinberg (2011: 35) points out, the ‘flying geese’ theory reflects only the second of these factors. Moreover, this theory does not explain why industrial production for world markets using a relatively cheap and disciplined unskilled of labour force could develop in Japan in the first instance.