Forum Commentary
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Forum Commentary Rebecca E. Karl 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract This is a commentary to accompany the essay by Pun Ngai in this volume. What is the position from which one interprets social phenomena and events? Those of us in the academy can be accused of poaching (抽水), or of objectifying some social happening for professional gain. Such charges reside in and derive from a realm of putative purity which only stifles discussion while serving to factionalize where mutual support is a better strategy and a better tactic. And yet, I am not unaware of the importance of the politics of critical engagement in the long course of social struggle. The following comments are offered in a spirit of political engagement and solidarity.1 Our current historical conjuncture is both highly globalized and hugely parochial. Structural changes in global capital over the past several decades—collected under the rubric of neoliberalism—dominate to an unprecedented degree our material and ideological worlds, even as the reconfiguration of local societies is specific to how and from what condition each was incorporated into the global division of labor and regimes of capital accumulation. Because of the built-in fragmentations of the contemporary moment, it is not clear to me that we can talk meaningfully about a supra-historical subject named “workers [of the world],” other than as an objective feature of a capitalist system, whose global logic continually is produced through and intended to produce disunity. That is, for all its unified virtuality, flattened financialization, and purported multitudinous undifferentiation, global neoliberal capitalism produces working classes as precarities all over the world at highly uneven and incommensurate paces, in competition with one another internally and externally. As China’s economy forms and is re-formed around and through these global and local logics, the original particular precarity of the migrant worker (the nonggong 农工) of the 1980s and 1990s— fashioned out of the engineered collapse and transformation of the socialist political 1 Recent attacks on Pun Ngai by a variety of actors—“young Maoists” and others—prompts this prologue. See the exchanges in www.reignitepress.com in May/June 2019. For a more comprehensive account, consult “Seeing through Muddied Waters, Part 1: Jasic Strikes and Unions,” in chuangcn.org, June 10, 2019, and follow the embedded links. Thanks to Kevin Yang for supplying me with some of the relevant interventions in this debate; without his assistance, I’d have been a bit oblivious to the dimensions of the discussions.
* Rebecca E. Karl [email protected]
1
History Department, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA
Rebecca E. Karl
economy—has turned into something more structurally enduring and yet no less precarious, now that the new capitalist formation is entirely premised upon a second and even third generation of migrant labor power. Thus, several decades ago, it may have appeared that migrant workers were on their way to becoming new c
