For back issues the following rates apply:
IMR/PECI, BP 85, 75522 Paris CEDEX 11, France.
i
Introducing this issue: MAXIME DURAND
The political economy
of "Lean Production"
FOR THE last twenty years, capitalism has been vainly seeking to recover the secret of the relatively regular growth of the 1960s. The turn to neoliberal policies which took place at the beginning of the 1980s corresponds to a systematic offensive against wage levels and social gains. The rise of unemployment on the one hand, the failure of the bureaucratic and social-democratic "models" on the other, has made it possible to attack the working class on all terrains and very often to put it on the defensive.
This long process of seeking a hypothetical way out of the crisis, making it possible for capitalism to return to higher rates of profit and accumulation, goes along with thoroughgoing restructuring at an international level. In this we can see two main, combined aspects, which also concern the geographic location of work.
From a geographic point of view, the world economy is undergoing an increasingly internationalisation which is characterised by an intensification of international trade and flows of investment, by the functioning of big groups on a broader level, directly addressed to multi-national markets. This trend mainly concerns the links made between imperialist countries, but shapes the whole of the world economy. This is why the concept of unequal
4 International Marxist Review and combined development is becoming more useful than ever for understanding this process which tends to select the countries, or more exactly the regions of countries, which can be successfully integrated into it. This is the case both of the so-called "third world" countries and of the previously bureaucratised ones: the logic of internationalisation tends to extract what can be integrated and rejects the rest. It is thus profoundly destructuring.
This globalisation is not a uniform process. It is, on the contrary, a contradictory process which is also accompanied by a regional reorganisation structured around three poles of the world economy. The United States exercise their influence over the whole of the American continent while East Asia is organised in a pyramid of increasingly inter-connected economies in which Japan plays the key role. Europe is the third major pole, but unlike the two others is is not based on a constituted national economy. The project of European union is at the intersection of these two trends: internationalisation and integration.
It is from this point of view that Claude Gabriel studies the movements of restructuring and mergers which go along with European integration. This is obviously a real and measurable process, and the ideological speeches about Europe are not based on simple mirages. The idea can even be put forward that European integration is, at the level of the structure of groups, much more advanced than in other fields and in any case the institutional obstacles to this integration have been removed for a long time, particularly in the case of industry. However, this is not a linear process and the European dimension is not mechanically guaranteed. Gabriel's analysis leads to an insistence on the contradictory aspect of the European union project. This project responds to an undeniable political desire of the European bourgeoisies, but also to their real needs. However this is not enough to guarantee real and harmonious development. It would thus be dangerous to conclude, on the basis of the obstacles encountered, particularly on the monetary question, that the project as a coherent political project could disappear definitively: the debate on Maastricht is far from over. The three other articles are devoted to the second aspect of capitalist restructuring: the transformations in the labour process. The terms of the discussion are comparable in a certain sense: the hymns to Toyotaism correspond to the optimistic speech-making on European union and the beneficial effects of economic liberalism as a way of going beyond capitalist exploitation no less. In its most apologetic versions, the post-modernist or post-Fordist discourse implies that that technological changes could bring
The political economy of "Lean Production" 5 about a radical overcoming of Taylorism. By pushing the reasoning a bit further, the idea is put forward that the notion of social classes is becoming more and more fluid, that the working class is losing its identity.
Faced with this very systematic offensive, basing itself on different networks and forms of financing, there is obviously a big temptation to deny any change and defend the idea that the working class still exists and that capitalist exploitation continues to exist. This a correct response but in too general a sense to be functional. The merit of the articles brought together here is to take seriously the articles about Toyotaism, lean production etc, and to put forward a rigourous and serious critique.
Keith Mann starts by resituating these discussions in perspective. This is not the first time that the question of whether or not the progress of technology will transform the working class or introduce important differentiations within it has been posed.
This questioning immediately raises a question of method. It is impossible to consider technology as an independent factor, from which an appropriate structure of skills would flow. Mann shows how the referential work of Braverman has had the merit of outlining a radical critique of Taylorism and its effects on skills, but under-estimated the resistance of the workers which has contributed to making skilling a social relationship resulting from concrete struggles. Today, the question posed by Toyotaism is to know whether it is a new productive system that is intended to increase the overall level of skills, or if it is going to increase a new polarisation, or if it is simply a new dress for Taylorism. Mann's answer, inspired by the work of Roger Penn, bases itself on the thesis of this latter that "dualism is not a conjectural phenomenon but is intrinsic to the very nature of capitalism: technological changes (under capitalist conditions of production) generates both skilling and de-skilling).
This same method of noting the really new elements contained in notions like the team concept — which represents, as Mann emphasises, "a departure from some of the essential characteristics of Taylorism" — is adopted by Tony Richardson and Andy Kilmister.
Their contribution starts with a consideration on the New Management Techniques that the famous book The Machine That Changed the World gives as an example on the basis of a close comparison of the US and Japa-. nese car industries. They show that the Japanese model is not reduced to management techniques but incorporates an attempt to totally reshape the
6 International Marxist Review wage relation, both from a juridical and an ideological point of view. They show that the identification with the company, the obstacles to or simple ban on trade-union action, are an integral part of Toyotaism which is a socio-technical model a lot broader than the team concept of Just In Time. The British contributors also insist on the idea that none of these techniques is absolutely new. Automation and the introduction of robots are a lot less generalised than one likes to say. On the other hand, it is the coherence and the scope of the project which constitutes the novelty and makes it that much more dangerous, to the extent that the main goal is to break up the cohesion of the working class and to dismantle class consciousness.
Capitalism thus finds itself in quite a specific period, to the extent that it today has a set of new techniques which, in the abstract, could lead to an unprecedented rise in social productivity. But in the hands of the capitalists they become a real war machine against the working class. This latter is then led to fight against the new techniques, or more exactly against their main effects, that is to say the intensification and increased discipline at work, and more broadly against the rise of unemployment.
This is an almost universal reality, even if it takes different forms because of specific features of each country. The article on the Italian case by Eugenio Preo makes it possible to verify this similarity by placing the offensive for total quality in a more general attack on wage costs. It thus underlines the difficulties for the workers' movement in placing itself in relation to these new productive techniques: can one be in general against polyvalence and an increase in skilling? The objective analysis of the significance of technological changes appears in total as complex and contradictory. It should show how the potential that they hold is perverted by capitalism: in the factories where they become a means for further subjection of the workers, and more broadly, to the extent that capitalism uses them as a means of stirring up unbridled competition of all against all, which will certainly not lead to "total quality" of the societies in which we THIS issue of International Marxist Review will be the last in its current format. A discussion has begun, the aim of which will be to decide on a better format for the presentation of the Fourth International's theoretical views. We trust our readers will bear with us, and as soon as a decision is reached we will publish details in our sister English langauge monthly, International Viewpoint.
CLAUDE GABRIEL