Introduction: The New International Division of Labour and the Critique of Political Economy Today

Abstract

This chapter attempts a critical reconstruction of the NIDL thesis. While acknowledging the insights of the original thesis, it argues that the foundation for the emergence of the NIDL does not reside in the intensification of the manufacturing division of labour, that is, in the deskilling resulting from the subdivision of the production process into elements. Instead, the NIDL developed as an expression of the impact that the progress of the automation of capitalist large-scale industry has had on the individual and collective productive subjectivity of the working class. More specifically, the constitution of the NIDL has been the result of the transformation of the modes of existence of the global collective labourer brought about by the leap forward in the process of computerisation and robotisation of the production processes of large-scale industry, especially since the ?microelectronics revolution?. As a result of its own immanent tendencies, the simplest original form of the NIDL has evolved into a more complex constellation, whereby capital searches worldwide for the most profitable combinations of relative cost and qualities/disciplines resulting from the variegated past histories of the different national fragments of the working class. Each country therefore tends to concentrate a certain type of labour-power of distinctive ?material and moral? productive attributes of a determinate complexity, which are spatially dispersed but collectively exploited by capital as a whole in the least costly possible manner. Productions in specific industrial branches has thereby expanded in some countries while contracting in others where new and more advanced sectors developed, following a rhythm determined by the evolution of those two main factors ? i.e. technological changes and relative cost and productive attributes of national labour forces. An important claim made by this chapter, therefore, and which will have relevance for subsequent Chapters Four and Seven, concerns the degree to which ?structural? characteristics of the CIDL and the NIDL today co-exist in national spaces of accumulation ? particularly in Latin America. This, the chapter concludes, actually confirms the validity of a reworked NIDL thesis rather than its refutation, as some commentators have asserted.