Twenty-five years ago, I started publishing work that described a New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL).1 Since that time, the concept has generated further research.2 In this chapter, I run through the idea and why it is in need of revision to describe the current conjuncture, in terms of both work and the environment.
Radical political economy birthed the notion of the NICL. It starts from the understanding that inequality colors everyday work and domestic life, stressing that although workers generate value, they rarely benefit commensurately, due to the power of capital. Political economy concentrates on those who are âlost in the great anonymous sludge of history,â in the words of the physicist-novelist CP Snow, where life âhas always been nasty, brutish and short.â3
Whereas neoclassical or bourgeois economics assumes that supply and demand effectively (and supposedly rightly) determine the price of commodities, political economy examines the role of the state and capital in controlling labor and ideologizing consumers and citizens. In other words, orthodox economics concentrates on markets, regarding them as jewels of human behavior; the heterodox approach challenges this focus on consumption, stressing production as a source of value and a site of control.
This latter method argues that objects and services accrete value through corporate exploitation of the people who make or provide them. The power of capital includes both authority over the conditions and possibilities of the workplace and surplus value, realized as profit. The division of labor links productivity, exploitation, and social control. As capital subdivides, multiplies, and spreads geographically, it hides the labor that constitutes it.4
Latin American political economists from this critical tradition generated a theory of dependent underdevelopment in the 1940s to explain why the industrial take-off experienced by Western Europe and the US had not occurred elsewhere. They found that a global system saw value added and enjoyed in the Global North, where rich societies had become richer through their colonial and international advantages. The global core imported ideas, fashions, resources, and people from the worldâs periphery and exported manufactures. Over the next three decades, this dependencia theory gained adherents across the Global South and among radicals everywhere, and was linked to analyses of cultural imperialism.5
Labor Market Changes
In the late 1970s, former colonial powers still dominated the Global South, exercising power over client states to extract surplus value. But in some instances, domestic bourgeoisies were emerging. This was spectacularly true of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, known then as âNewly Industrialized Countriesâ or âAsian Tigers/Dragons.â They benefited from US, Japanese, and West European control of transport and communications and investment, undertaken because they were capitalist states rather than Maoist or Marxist-Leninist ones, in a region that Cold Warrior yanquis feared might âturn Red.â But they were not mere pawns of foreign governments and multinational corporations exploiting cheap labor and repatriating profit. Domestic wealth creation did occur, albeit in a way that constructed profound inequalities. Consider South Koreaâs rapid transformation from a very poor, essentially peasant, economy to a vibrant manufacturing one.6
As the global value chain grew more diverse, those of us who were influenced by the dependistas and critics of cultural imperialism had to confront the fact that coreâ periphery relations were not uniform. This necessitated a partial break with dependencia as an explanatory mechanism. In its placeâor perhaps supplementing it, given that such asymmetries continued to characterize much of the worldâcame the idea of a New International Division of Labor (NIDL).7
Theorists of the NIDL acknowledged an increasingly global competition for working-class labor as manufacturers looked to invest in places where employees were capable, cheap, and compliantâthe ultimate realization of a worldwide reserve army of workers. So the production of cars, boats, refrigerators, and televisions might still be funded from Tokyo or New York, but it was undertaken in Seoul or Guadalajara.8
An even more spectacular change in the market for labor occurred in the five years after 1989. The collapse of state socialism saw people from the former Soviet empire enter the capitalist world tout court. Then the Peopleâs Republic of China and India opened up to international competition. Virtually overnight, the global pool of workers doubled, as massive reserve armies of labor were unleashed.9 In Chinaâs case, this was achieved under the tight control of semi-state corporations and the first police state dedicated to export-oriented industrialization. Footloose capital could rejoice as billions of mostly unskilled workers lined up for obedience school. For its part, India benefited from decades of centralized technocratic planning that had produced huge cohorts of educated people who also spoke English, the worldâs lingua franca. It garnered a great deal of skilled work in the services sector, from software to sales. At the same time, the spread of the internet permitted unprecedented surveillance of inventory and labor. âCool stuffâ abounded, made by pliant employees. This development immediately cut into the lives of unskilled First World labor.10
The new wave of workers was not just doing traditional manufacturing, but rather cultural manufacturing: assembling vast numbers of machines dedicated to making meaning, such as photocopiers, printers, laptops, tablets, and phones. They formed the invisible background of cultural work. Along with developments in the digital exchange of meaning, this had profound implications for a domain that the Global North had long regarded as its own: the information society.
Information Society
For decades prior to the NICL taking effect, developments in the media and associated technologies of knowledge had been likened to a new Industrial Revolution or the Civil and Cold Wars, touted as a route to economic development as well as cultural and political expression. In the 1950s and 1960s, futurists identified âknowledge workersâ as vital to information-based industries that would generate productivity gains and competitive markets and expand the middle class.11 Cold Warriors like National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, cultural conservative Daniel Bell, and professional anti-Marxist Ithiel de Sola Pool saw converged communications and information technologies removing grubby manufacturing from North to South and ramifying US textual and technical power, provided that the blandishments of socialism, and negativity toward global business, did not create class struggle.12
The NIDL would supposedly not impoverish the West, because the latter would embark on structural adjustment by retraining blue-collar workers away from assembly and toward services. The neoclassical economist Fritz Machlup produced a bedside essential for true believers in doctrines of human capital.13 The party line was that the middle class would continue its merry investment in human capital through higher education. There would be four, largely painless, changes from production to services: the preeminence of professionalism and technique, the importance of theory to innovate and generate public policies, the formation of a discourse of the future, and new intellectual technologies to help make decisions.14 This technocratic vision, dominated by experts, promised a world of modernity, of rationality, of the ability to apply reason to problems and seek salvation in the secular. It was as amenable to the center-left as well as the right, fulfilling Keynesâs idea of a fifteen-hour work week enabled through technology and compound interest as well as Machlupâs model of investment in the self.15 The fantasy has suited policy makers and think tanks ever since, for reasons of ideology as much as efficiency.
Ronald Reagan launched his successful 1966 campaign for the governorship of California in this context, saying: âI propose ⌠âA Creative Societyâ ⌠to discover, enlist and mobilize the incredibly rich human resources of California [through] innumerable people of creative talent.â16 That rhetoric publicly birthed todayâs idea of technology unlocking the creativity that is allegedly lurking, unbidden, in individuals, thereby permitting them to become happy, productiveâand without full-time employment.
Reagan opposed then-President Lyndon Johnsonâs rhetoric of a âGreat Society.â The Fabian Graham Wallas had coined this term half a century earlier.17 His acolyte Walter Lippmann spoke of âa deep and intricate interdependenceâ that came with âliving in a Great Societyâ and worked against militarism and other dehumanizing tendencies that emerged from âthe incessant and indecisive struggle for domination and survival.â18 Lippmann influenced Johnsonâs invocation of the âGreat Societyâ (minus its anti-militarism), which became a foundational argument for competent, comprehensive social justice through welfarism and other forms of state intervention.
Most of that âGreat Societyâ vision has been undermined by decades of neoliberalism, operating under the sign of the information society. Todayâs bourgeois economists argue against state participation in development because private initiative and new technology obviate the need for it. For example, they claim that cell phones have streamlined markets in the Global South by making market data easily available, thereby enriching people in zones where banking and economic information are scarce. Mobile telephony supposedly guarantees âthe complete elimination of wasteâ and massive reductions in poverty and corruption by empowering individuals.19
This richly utopian discourse has seen a comprehensive turn away from researching and combating unequal infrastructural and cultural exchange, toward an extended dalliance with new technology and its supposedly innate capacity to endow users with transcendence.20 New media technologies are said to obliterate geography, pollution, sovereignty, and hierarchy in an alchemy of truth and beauty. Corporate and governmental cultural gatekeepers and hegemons are allegedly undermined by todayâs innovative possibilities of creation and distribution. The comparatively cheap and easy access to making and circulating meaning afforded by internet media and genres is thought to have eroded the one-way hold on culture that saw a small segment of the world as producers and the larger segment as consumers. New technologies supposedly allow us all to become simultaneously cultural consumers and producers (prosumers) and environmental guardians while the world economy glides into an ever-greener postindustrialismâno more factory conditions, no more factory emissions.21
Cognitariat
How can we theorize such developments? The philosopher Antonio Negri redeployed the concept of the cognitariat from the lapsed leftist and Reaganite futurist Alvin Toffler to account for the change.22 Negri defines the cognitariat as people undertaking casualized cultural work who have heady educational backgrounds yet live at the uncertain interstices of capital, qualifications, and government in a post-Fordist era of mass unemployment, limited-term work, and occupational insecurity. They are sometimes complicit with these circumstances, because their identities are shrouded in autotelic modes of being: work is pleasure and vice versa, so labor becomes its own reward.23
In the new era, readers become writers, listeners transform into speakers, viewers emerge as stars, fans are academics, and vice versa. Think of the job prospects that follow! Zine writers are screenwriters. Bloggers are copywriters. Children are columnists. Bus riders are journalists. Coca-Cola hires African Americans to drive through the inner city selling soda and playing hip-hop. AT&T pays San Francisco buskers to mention the company in their songs. Urban performance poets rhyme about Nissan cars for cash, simultaneously hawking, entertaining, and researching. Subwayâs sandwich commercials are marketed as made by teenagers. Cultural-studies majors become designers. Graduate students in New York and Los Angeles read scripts for producers then pronounce on whether they tap into the Zeitgeist. Unpaid interns to public-relations firms post putatively organic desires for products and services on social media as part of lucrative contracts for their elders and betters.
New âjobsâ are emerging in surveillance. Audience members spy on fellow spectators in theaters to see how they respond to coming attractions. Opportunities to vote in the Eurovision Song Contest or a reality program disclose the profiles and practices of viewers, who can be monitored and w...
