Читать книгу Enrichment - Luc Boltanski - Страница 16

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, in Western societies, mass production was no longer viewed as the only way – perhaps not even as the principal way – to maximize profits and accumulate wealth. For capitalism, too, the extension beyond mass production proved to be a necessity imposed by the requirement of profit as the possibilities opened up by that form of production, initially considered virtually infinite, seemed to reach their limits. While the standard form was not abandoned, the extension of capitalism entailed financialization and – in the realm of the production and/or commercialization of objects – the redrawing of geopolitical maps. Certain “emerging” countries took over responsibility for mass production as the primary path to enrichment (the accumulation of wealth), while some countries that had been among the powerhouses of world capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concentrated on finance and on developing high-tech goods in order to retain power – from a distance – over the manufacturing of the most common goods, insofar as these were products derived from technological innovations. However, the latter countries also turned toward a much more intensive commodification of domains that had long remained more or less on the margins of capitalism.

The geographic expansion of capitalism redistributed – toward countries in which the labor force was abundant and ill-organized and in which wages were therefore low – a number of standard production sites, although the conception and sales of the objects produced remained for the most part under the control of companies headquartered in Western countries, which were still at the heart of world capitalism. Among other effects, these transfers accelerated the deindustrialization of Western Europe. Deindustrialization in the first decade of the twenty-first century is a well-studied phenomenon affecting Western economies, France’s in particular.¹ Industrial employment reached a peak in 1974, with more than 5,900,000 salaried workers. In the early 2010s, this sector lost a little more than 40 percent of its personnel. During the same period, what statisticians define more broadly as the “productive sphere” decreased from 48 percent of all jobs to 35 percent.² This drop affected almost all areas: mining, metallurgy, machinery, ship-building, textiles, and so on, excluding only certain high-tech sectors such as aeronautics and the nuclear, pharmaceutical, and weapons industries.³ The sectors that included intermediate goods and common consumer products were particularly affected. Their decline, which began as early as the 1960s and 1970s in the textile and leather-working areas, went on to affect manufacturing as a whole.

By “deindustrialization,” however, we do not mean the shift to a “post-industrial” society that was often predicted by sociologists in the 1960s.⁴ That prophecy has not been fulfilled on a global scale. On the one hand, many domains that had long remained on the margins of the industrial world – such as small businesses, education, health, and personal services – are run today (even those that do not depend on the private sector but are under state control) according to management methods that originated in the major worldwide companies and are subject to accounting norms developed in industry, a development that has been facilitated by the spread of computer technologies. But, above all, European societies make more use than ever of products of industrial origin – mobile phones, for example, or personal computers – that now count among the most common household appliances. The commodities in circulation are more numerous than ever before, but they are manufactured elsewhere. During the same period, in France, internal consumption almost doubled in global added value, as did commercial services, while the industrial sector declined by nearly two-thirds. Among economists, the explanations for this process of deindustrialization have been subject to intense debate. It is hard to determine how much importance to attribute, on the one hand, to the outsourcing of certain functions that had long been assumed by companies but were not directly productive and, on the other hand, to the increase in labor productivity. But it is quite probable that the most important factor is the importation of objects manufactured in countries with cheaper labor (depending on the sector, from 9 percent to 80 percent of the manufactured items sold in France are imported)⁵ and in which the workforce is neither well organized nor well protected. This is especially the case in Far Eastern countries such as China and Vietnam, but also in post-communist Eastern European countries, for example in Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Industrial delocalization has been inscribed in the history of Western capitalism during the last fifty years, and it undoubtedly constitutes one of the paths adopted for getting out of the crisis that capitalism underwent from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, roughly speaking. Often analyzed in terms of a decline in productivity and an excess in productive capacities with respect to the demand among those who can afford to buy, and the resulting steady erosion in profits from the production of manufactured goods,⁶ the delocalization movement also has political roots. For the big companies, it has been a way to escape from the fiscal constraints of nation-states, and it has also constituted a response to the mobilization of the European proletariat, particularly during the decade following the upheavals of May 1968. One of the consequences of this process, but perhaps also one of its unacknowledged objectives, has been to pacify or even suppress a working class that, in the 1960s and 1970s, had proved particularly combative, especially in France and Italy. Nevertheless, the delocalization movement could not have occurred at the same pace or to the same degree without the measures of financial deregulation adopted in the 1970s and 1980s, measures that favored transfers of capital from the old industrial countries toward the so-called emerging countries, thus stimulating the creation, in countries with low wage scales, of subcontracting firms that were largely dependent on orders from companies based in the major European or North American cities.