Locating labor and class in contemporary capitalism: historical comparison and spatial analogies in the Chinese politics
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Locating labor and class in contemporary capitalism: historical comparison and spatial analogies in the Chinese politics of place A commentary on Pun Ngai’s “The new Chinese working class in struggle” Charlotte Bruckermann 1 # The Author(s) 2020
In this evocative call to arms for worker solidarity and collective action, Pun sketches conditions of contemporary exploitation and the contours of resistance among an emergent working class in China. At an analytic level, the story unfolds as an instance of labor contesting, confronting, and fighting capitalist exploitation under coercion of global neoliberal dominance in collusion with the Chinese state. The workers and students involved in the Jasic Technology factory conflict draw on an arsenal forged by activists in the fires of the industrial revolution and sharpened during decades of welfare concessions, now repurposed for twenty-first century experiences of capitalism in the Global South. Pun describes events that provide welcome lessons for worker activism worldwide, explicitly written against tropes of the demise of the working class and the arrival of the end of history. Concretely, industrial workers and idealistic students join forces and struggle to start a union and fight against unacceptable working conditions through a new left politics. Pun contextualizes these actions within a staggering increase of Chinese protests, in the form of sit-ins, strikes, and litigation, citing larger numbers, size, and frequencies of occurrence. I would like to comment on how class is located, both temporally and spatially, in this account. On the one hand, there are the specificities of politics in China, where rural-urban dichotomies entangle with reimagined Maoist motivations. As such, these contemporary conditions go beyond nostalgia for Maoism among industrial and urban workers and its youth movement, instead forging a new way forward in late capitalism. On the other, there are the temporal analogies with industrialization in the West, now displaced onto the global South, with an ensuing relocation of investment and accumulation through a new transnational division of labor. Here, the account relies
* Charlotte Bruckermann [email protected]
1
Social Anthropology, Universitetet i Bergen, Fosswinckelsgate 6, 5020 Bergen, Norway
C.Bruckermann
on a double homology, between the theory of class mapped onto the Chinese rural-urban dichotomy and class relations reshaped through a West-South axis of globalization. This would be highly problematic if left as an unqualified polemic. Yet Pun delves deeper, articulating how consciousness, subjectivity, and action enrich this politics of place with the particularities of circumstance and the coincidences of context. This is where class disappears as a “group” and emerges as a relational, incomplete, and ongoing process. Moreover, it is here that Pun’s emphasis on forging alliances, taking collective action, and seizing opportunities, while creating a political awakening of consciousness of a class for itself, becomes
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