Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 74

The historical changes of capitalism that enabled the rise of peer production can specifically be found within the 1970s and the response to the economic crisis. In making such an argument, I draw from critical scholars like David Harvey (1989, 2010) and Robert Brenner (2006) by focusing on the structural changes in the global economy and how those changes affected the broader geopolitics of global capitalism and the labor processes. I also draw from Dan Schiller’s (1999, 2014) theory of digital capitalism in foregrounding “communication and information as an emerging pivot of the ever‐mutating political economy,” as it was during this time that global commodity supply chains, financial networks, and military technologies were becoming increasingly networked through information and communication technologies (Schiller, 2014, p. 5). The goal of this broad overview is to identify important historical trajectories, even if this means sacrificing some of the nuance in particular details.

Prior to the 20th century, the early stages of capitalism were marked by industrial growth and increasing complexity in the division of labor. To address this complexity and streamline production, scientific principles were applied to the production process, which simplified the labor process by breaking down various stages involved in the production process into its component parts. These changes are often associated with Taylorism, as it was Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) that outlined the inefficiencies of human work and identified ways of optimizing efficiency in production. Once these distinct stages of the production process were identified, those same scientific principles could be used to construct machinery that would supplement or altogether supplant increasingly deskilled human labor. The pressures to increase productivity and the development of assembly‐line production are also associated with Fordism, as Henry Ford’s assembly line in 1913 made possible the mass production of automobiles.

Long before Ford’s assembly‐line production, Karl Marx was analyzing the mechanisms of capitalist production, particularly toward the latter years of the Industrial Revolution from roughly the 1840s to the 1880s. His task was a critique of existing political economic thought, while specifically focusing on the consequences of capitalist production for the growing numbers of laborers who were joining the working class. Focusing on industrial factories in the mid‐1800s, Marx determined that labor was being exploited in at least two primary ways. First, surplus value was being extracted from labor through the prolongation of the working day, which Marx referred to as absolute surplus value. Second, and perhaps most important for the present discussion, was the extraction of what Marx referred to as relative surplus value, which drew attention to the ways the “technical processes of labor and the composition of society” were being revolutionized (Marx, 1906, p. 559). In other words, ongoing changes in the technical processes involved in production constantly placed pressure on workers, especially as they were subject to deskilling (i.e., reduction in the skills necessary for performing certain tasks), reskilling (i.e., learning how to operate new technologies), or automating jobs that were previously performed by humans.

These trends would continue into the 20th Century, as global capitalism began to take shape. What emerged was a complex division of labor and an increasingly globalized capitalist economy. These developments also gave rise to a large pool of working‐class labor with common interests. As a result, workers in the Global North organized into trade unions to struggle against capital for fair wages, the eight‐hour work day, the end of child labor, and other labor rights. As the trade union movement grew, it ensured a certain degree of welfare for workers and created a shared identity among the working class.

As the 20th century wore on, World War II, and particularly its aftermath, significantly reshaped the geopolitical landscape.¹ The United States’ competitors in the global market were devastated by World War II, as their infrastructures were decimated by bombing campaigns, which caused manufacturing to decrease significantly. By comparison, the centers of American manufacturing remained basically untouched, which gave the United States an advantage in the immediate aftermath of the war. As a result, American firms greatly increased their exports, particularly to Western Europe through the Marshall Plan, which was a boon to the American economy. The United States was keenly interested in exporting its products as well as capitalist ideology around the globe during this time, as it was embroiled in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the two countries sought to expand their influence around the globe. The United States represented the “first world,” which was capitalist and developed, the Soviet Union represented the “second world,” which was socialist, and those countries that were not aligned with either capitalism or socialism were referred to as the “third world.” While the struggle between the United States and Soviet Union generally frames the dominant narratives of this period, there were also strong political movements within the non‐aligned nations (see Prashad, 2007). However, the United States also faced increasing pressure from other “first world” countries during this time frame. In the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese and German manufacturing grew rapidly and, as the global market grew, these competitors began to cut into American market share. The increased production and supply placed downward pressure on prices and, by the 1960s, Japan and Germany were able to undercut American prices, which had higher fixed costs. Exacerbating the pressure felt by the United States was the increased war spending during the Vietnam Era. All of these structural pressures set the stage for the global economic crisis of the 1970s.