Disrupting Border Capitalism: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone by Stephen Campbell (review)

To what extent can the particularities of a case study shed light on the contradictions of global systems? Campbell's recent monograph addresses this question through an ethnographic account of actually existing late capitalism in the Global South. Asking "what constitutes a politics of precarity in Asia" (p. 159), Campbell spent more than two years conducting fieldwork in an industrial zone on the Thai-Burmese border, based in a migrant labor rights organization. Documenting the everyday experiences of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand's garment industry through ethnography, interviews, and demographic survey data, he analyzed how migrants relate to an assemblage of regulatory structures that work to enforce a flexible labor regime fixed to the border region. In the border town of Mae Sot, migrants are economically, politically, and socially precarious as state authorities and employers exploit their largely undocumented status to maintain a regime of low-wage insecure labor. Throughout the text, Campbell enumerates what analysts recognize as the common traits of global supply chains in late capitalism in the Global South, namely industrial decentralization, the relocation of capital to geographic and political peripheries through the establishment of export processing zones, and the flexibilization of labor.

With rich accounts of migrant workers' mobility, encounters with various state authorities, and their experiences engaging in forms of collective action and mutual aid, Campbell relies on an operista—or workerist—theoretical framework to center the everyday experiences of labor as a catalytic force informing capitalist development. Capital engages in restructuring in part because of labor struggles, Campbell suggests, and this, in turn, both undercuts modes of worker organizing and leads to new forms of worker struggle, which, of course, lead to further capital restructuring.

What makes Campbell's work so important is that he uses this framework to interrogate assumptions scholars have made about late capitalism. I include two here. First, Campbell argues that rather than a reflection of coherent and uniform government policy, the relocation of capital and the establishment and maintenance of a flexible labor regulation regime is a product of diverse—often opposing—interests involving a range of actors including state authorities, passport brokers, humanitarian NGOs, and migrants themselves. In chapter one, Campbell illustrates that the border itself emerges as a technology of rule, enabling authorities to inscribe the constant threat of what Nicholas De Genova calls "deportability" in migrants' lives. Chapter two focuses on the seemingly benevolent governance strategies deployed by the state and NGOs to address workers' complaints through means that are non-disruptive to the demands of capital. Imbricated with migrants' experiences with this "network of liberal governmental rule" (p. 36) are the coercive tactics of local police described in chapters three and four. Through extortion and arbitrary arrest, police inform migrants' development of Bourdieu's concept of "class habitus," writes Campbell, reproducing a sense that they are insecure as migrants and subordinate as workers. Local authorities also defy national immigration policy as they block migrants' attempts to relocate to central regions of Thailand to earn higher wages. Together, these disparate forces either enforce or leave unquestioned the structural injustices of labor in this industrial zone, thereby reproducing the conditions of precarity for workers there. By focusing on assemblages of rule in this way, Campbell calls into question theories of graduated sovereignty that have favored state-centric or market-centric perspectives.

Second, Campbell notes that while capital relocation represents a spatial fix to undercut organized labor and facilitate a move toward flexible labor regimes, it cannot be assumed that this development necessarily engenders class fragmentation. Indeed, Campbell provides detailed accounts of worker organizing despite a proscription on non-citizens forming unions in Thailand. For example, chapter five describes how insecure legal status for migrant workers in Mae Sot prompted employers to house migrants in factory dormitories. While this renders migrants, most of whom are undocumented, captive, dormitories offer spaces for both the planning of resistive acts as well...