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the manufacturing sector's been entirey reorganized. everyone notices but sometimes it seems like nobody knows, like saying it's violating some rule or worse like farting in church. kanban just in time supply chains lean production flexibility all those words meant production becoming fragmented then mobile then a matter of subcontracting in contexts where labor costs had become variable and so the "logic" of capitalism in its oldest form, straight exploitation of people who sell their labor power for a wage, particularly in contexts where working people cannot organize themselves into unions in order to protect their own interests....this is what neoliberalism has brought back in a shiny new form.
i can imagine policy/regulation actions that could break up the globalized system of labor exploitation, of deterritorialized production managed via supply chain interfaces---but i cant quite see who would intiate such a thing given that access to cheap goods has been presented to us as an end in itself and as desirable in part because price is severed from an idea of production.
so maybe opening up commercial lending and aggressively supporting new business? and extending the new-deal style public works projects to make more jobs available.
thing is that the employment problems are results of structural transformations that the entire center-right american political establishment has cheerleaded along. it's just come to a head under obama. i do not envy the administration having to figure out how to deal with the consequences of what amounts to 30 years of herbert hoover-style economic ideology.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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