Asia Labour Study Group

Corporation ‘Samsung’ has been engaged in continuous struggles with the market, labour, the state, and society as a whole within which it develops. This article is a portrait of the struggles: the struggles that were made by every step of the movement of Samsung and made Samsung move again. It captures the way in which an individual capital, a very progressive one in many senses of modern management and corporate strategy, absorbs all possible social resources, including human sweat, soul, and lives, and turns them into corporate energy on which a miraculous capital accumulation has been made possible. Each part of its history will describe Samsung’s efforts to move out of old challenges, and new challenges created by its own moves. While it is written as a short corporate history, it is a corporate history written in labour’s language. In other words, it is a corporate history in relation to labour. This article particularly emphasises the other side of a multinational corporation’s history, namely the way in which ‘work’ is recomposed by mobile capital in Asia, tracing the interaction between multinational companies and local labour. The history of Samsung therefore starts with Korean labour in 1938 and ends with Asian labour in 2006. (more…)

By Henry Berstein, Keynote address at the Living on the Margins Conference, Stellenbosch, 2007

I am flattered to be asked to address the first session of this conference with two such luminaries as Marty Chen and Ravi Kanbur. They have done serious work in areas central to the themes of this conference, while I have done so only tangentially through my interests in agrarian change – interests pursued within a tradition of political economy of capitalism that centres on the social class relation of capital and labour. Neither capitalism nor class are explicit in the conference motivation1 , while it refers to ‘social exclusion, informality, adverse incorporation, structural poverty, and vulnerability’. These are not novel features of the historical development of capitalism or the ‘normal’ functioning of capitalist societies, but their scale, intensity and effects, for classes of labour today appear closely linked to globalisation. I use the term ‘classes of labour’ to refer to ‘the growing numbers…who now depend – directly and indirectly – on the sale of their labour power for their own daily reproduction’ (Panitch and Leys 2001: ix; my emphasis).2 (more…)

If we’re to believe the commentary to be found in the mainstream media, China is the economic powerhouse that will pull us through the global economic crisis. Though the economic slowdown which hit the country in late 2008 was widely reported, and led to claims that China’s meteoric rise was stalling, the country’s ‘recovery’ since has been the subject of many excited column inches. The growth of its economy in 2009 has been seen as part of Asia’s ‘astonishing rebound’ – or at least that of rising powers like China, India and Indonesia – by publications such as The Economist.¹ The implications for world recovery and the balance of power are significant, it is argued [By Anarchist Federation. posted at China Study Group]. (more…)

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