Thread by @Itmechr3

1. Really weird and interesting tensions playing out in the global economy right now. You have 50 years of creating a bunch of enormous multinational supply chains designed to let companies move production to places with lower labor costs so they

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2. could break the labor movement by just leaving when labor movements erupt. This works pretty well in political terms. It does set off a new wave of labor movements in places like South Africa, Vietnam, and South Korea, which sometimes look like

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3. the older labor movements and sometimes don't (Vietnam's in particular is very interesting, it's highly decentralized to the point where even the people walking off the line often don't know who started the strike).

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mulpress.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/a…

4. But in the US, Europe, and China it's extremely successful in breaking the labor movement. Part of how this happened is a massive shit towards contract labor, in essence transforming every stage in the production process

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cominsitu.wordpress.com/2020/03/25/sup…

5. into something carried out not by employees of a company but by independent contractors. There's a lot of different levels of this, sometimes it's the Uber model of everyone is a contractor, sometimes it's turning a part of the working class

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6. into "small business owners" who're just part of the supply chain but act as a buffer between their own workers and the corporations. This is extremely effective at reducing costs by lowering wages and worsening working conditions. But it has

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7. its own costs. As I talked about in this Bastards episode, this model is basically designed to let you do crimes. From slavery to poisoning babies there's basically no end to what you can get away with using contractors.

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stitcher.com/show/behind-th…

8. But these enormous contractor based supply chains have another cost: they're extremely inefficient. They rely almost entirely on the smooth function of shipping in order to move shit all across the world and their actual productivity is shit.

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9. Now if your goal is to stop the left from taking control of your factories, you can afford to have shitty supply chains and inefficient production, it's just the cost of survival. But now we have COVID, which resulted in a massive disruption to

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10. global supply chains that revealed how flimsy and inefficient they are. The corporate response to this has been to talk about shortening supply chains, but this makes you less able to resist organized labor because you

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https://twitter.com/JonahFurman/status/1449037049483378695?s=20

11. lose the threat of outsourcing. Meanwhile with supply chains fucked up the disruptive power of any given strike is intensified because there isn't as much slack productive capacity to scab out strikers and each disruption just magnifies every

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12. other disruption. COVID and the broader conditions of modern capitalism also set off another strike, this one informal but all the larger and more powerful for it: the general strike of the refusal of work. All across the world people are

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13. simply saying fuck you I won't die for your profits and just walking off the job, often leaving the labor force entirely. In these conditions Marx's reserve army of labor, even as it expands, is by its very existence fighting for the working

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14. class in its entirely by just refusing to go die for a pittance, thereby magnifying the power of labor and creating their own general strike. Add to this the morbid reality that vast, extremely skilled sections of the working class were

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15. annihilated by the pandemic and you have essentially a classical tight labor market at the exact same time companies are trying to rebuild more efficient but more strike-vulnerable supply chains. Further complicating things is a basically

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16. contradictory tendency on the part of capital to integrate national capital blocks. In particular in the last 3 years we've seen massive lifting of restrictions on foreign ownership of Chinese firms. This is allowing international firms to

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17. simply buy out their Chinese partners and operate in China directly, processes which have already started to bear fruit in the banking and insurance sectors. This leads to two contradictory trends in the economy: attempts at delinking and

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18. regionalization of supply chains on the one hand and integration of capital on the other, all playing out against the backdrop of an uptick in class struggle. How is this all going to play out? I have no idea. But capital is weak and divided

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19 right now. If anything is going to change, this is the time to strike.

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed