At the core of the processes associated with capitalist globalization are new capital-labor relations based on deregulated, informalized, flexibilized, parttime, immigrant, contract, and precarious labor arrangements. These arrangements have involved the ongoing withdrawal of the state from protection of labor and the erosion of reciprocal obligations to labor on the part of the state and capital, or even any notion that social reproduction of the worker is a part of the labor contract. Workers are increasingly a naked commodity to be integrated into and expelled from circuits of accumulation just like any other input. Working-class contingents around the world find themselves destabilized and thrust into crises. The International Labor Organization reported that 1.53 billion workers around the world were in such "vulnerable" employment arrangements in 2009, representing more than 50 percent of the global workforce. We need to be clear with regard to the causal origins of these arrangements. In Sivanandan's view, "Capital emancipated [itself] from labor on the basis of the revolution in productive forces made possible by the communications revolution." But capital cannot, by definition, emancipate itself from labor lest it cease being capital - one side of an antagonistic unity with labor. Rather, global capital has come to subject and exploit global labor in new ways. Sivanandan is correct that "capital no longer needs living labor as before; not in the same numbers, in the same place, at the same time". Similarly, technology may have made globalization possible, but it has not caused the process. Globalization is rooted in changes that took place in the relations of production starting in the 1970s, when the world economy entered a period of stagnation and crisis. The process evolved out of the response of distinct agents to the r 97os crisis of Fordism-Keynesianism, or of redistributive capitalism. Let us examine these matters in more detail. "Fordism" refers to a way of organizing the economy that was associated with a large number of easily organizable workers in centralized production locations, mass production through fixed, standardized processes, and mass consumption. It was known as "Fordism" because it became generalized following the lead of the automobile tycoon Henry Ford. Ford argued that capitalists and governments should stabilize the national industrial capitalist systems that had emerged in the previous century by incorporating workers into the new society through higher salaries, benefits, and secure employment coupled with tight control and regimentation of the workforce (although Ford himself was a bitterly anti-union industrial tyrant). Ford's initial shop-floor changes grew into Fordism as a "class compromise" between workers and capitalists mediated by the state, involving government measures to regulate capitalist competition and the class struggle. Fordism combined with Keynesianism in the post-World War II social order. John Keynes had broken with the assumption of classical economic theory that the natural state of the capitalist economy was an equilibrium brought about by market forces allowed to operate unimpeded.
Capitalist European Slavery Trade Expands Transnational Ties in the Continent
