In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 2 Supply-Chain Tourist; or, How Globalization Has Transformed the Labor Question I’m not much of a tourist, but I’m proud to think that I have visited what are, arguably, the three most important nodes of capitalist production during the last hundred years. When I toured the huge Ford production complex at River Rouge during the winter of 1978, “Detroit,” as both organizational metaphor and industrial city, was already well past its prime. But the world of classical Fordism still cast an impressive shadow across the economic landscape and the social imagination. The Rouge then employed some thirty thousand workers in a highly integrated complex of seventeen buildings that sucked in iron ore, silica, and coal at one end and transformed them into steel, glass, axles, fenders, and engine blocks before assembling all of those parts into a set of cars and pickups that were the visible marker of U.S. manufacturing prowess and working-class well-being. You could almost touch it: the giant parking lots, the smokestacks belching hot white vapor from the giant Rouge power plant, the modernist glassand -steel Ford World Headquarters a couple of miles away, and the suburban swath of single-family, working-class houses that stretched for miles from Dearborn to Ypsilanti. Visit the Detroit Institute of the Arts and you could find the still stunning set of Diego Rivera murals that captured this Fordist world in all its romance and brutality.1 Twenty-seven years later I flew into Bentonville, Arkansas, to tour a second node of the capitalist world. It is easy to get there because there are so many direct flights—from Denver, Chicago, La Guardia, and Los Angeles—to this once remote Arkansas town. It is still not very big. Between Fayetteville and the Missouri line there are hardly more than two hundred thousand people. But it is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan regions in the country. In Bentonville, where WalMart maintains its world headquarters in an unimpressive, low-slung building next to the original company warehouse, the parking lots are full, the streets are crowded, and new construction can be found everywhere. Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 29 5/24/13 8:04 AM 30 shaping myself, shaping history Most important, Bentonville is home to at least five hundred, perhaps a thousand , branch offices of the largest Wal-Mart “vendors,” who have planted their corporate flag in northwest Arkansas in the hope that they can maintain or increase their sales to the world’s largest buyer of consumer products. Procter and Gamble, which in 1987 may well have been the first company to put an office near Wal-Mart’s headquarters, now has a staff of nearly two hundred in Fayetteville; likewise Sanyo, Levi Strauss, Nestlé, Johnson and Johnson, Eastman Kodak, Mattel, and Kraft Foods maintain large offices in what the locals sometimes call “Vendorville .” Walt Disney’s large retail business has its headquarters, not in Los Angeles, but in nearby Rogers, Arkansas. These Wal-Mart suppliers are a Who’s Who of American and international business, staffed by ambitious young executives who have come to see a posting to once-remote Bentonville as the crucial step that can make or break a corporate career.2 If they can meet Wal-Mart’s exacting price and performance standards, their products will be literally sucked into the huge stream of commodities that flow through the world’s largest and most efficient supply chain. For any manufacturer it is the brass ring of American salesmanship, which explains why all those sophisticates from New York, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles are eating so many surprisingly good meals in northwest Arkansas.3 The final stop on my recent tour of the capitalist world was Guangdong Province in coastal South China. With more than 40 million migrant workers, thousands of factories, and new cities like Shenzhen, which has mushroomed to more than seven million people in just a quarter century, Guangdong lays an arguable claim to being the contemporary “workshop of the world,” following in the footsteps of nineteenth-century Manchester and early twentieth-century Detroit. This was my thought when we taxied across Dongguan, a gritty, smoggy, sprawling landscape located on the north side of the Pearl River between Guangzhou (the old Canton) and skyscraper-etched Shenzhen. We drove for more than an hour late one Sunday afternoon, along broad but heavily trafficked streets, continuously bordered by bustling stores, welding shops, warehouses, small manufacturers, and the occasional large factory complex. This...

Share