The author discusses the limitations of 'methodological Fordism' and argues for an alternative approach, showing us how to conduct empirical research in political economy from a global vantage point. He draws upon McMichael's notion of 'incorporated comparison' and outlines a distinct research design for the field of the political economy of labour. Gallas develops categories for assessing class formation on the grounds of materialist class theory. He suggests putting them to use by mapping non-industrial strikes around the world and supplementing this mapping with detailed case studies. With the help of this research design, he addresses critical problems attached to doing empirical research: the dangers of subsumptionism; the limitations of approaching global issues from a quantitative angle; the challenge of reconciling analytical breadth and depth; and the need for selecting suitable cases and data. According to the author, this approach ensures that the research process remains open and enable us to move beyond methodological Fordism with its focus on the national state, a small number of core countries and manufacturing. He concludes that the method of 'incorporated comparison' allows us to reconcile a global perspective with a sensitivity to context-specific divergences.
From what I discussed in the last chapter, it follows that the overall aim of Marxist class theory is to identify features of the capitalist mode of production with class effects. Any conceptualization of class in capitalism based on a critical-realist, materialist ontology needs to have a specific entry point – a vantage point from which it is possible to discern how class relations are produced and reproduced. If we follow Marx’s line of argument in the first volume of Capital (1976: 90), there are, at the heart of each mode of production, distinct relations of production, which concern how ownership of ‘the object and the means of labour’ also conditions people’s relations with each other (Poulantzas, 1974: 18). Accordingly, it makes sense to start one’s theorization of class from here. The capitalist relations of production entail a specific division of labour that is the foundation of class relations in any capitalist social formation (Poulantzas, 1974: 18; Marx, 1976: 415; Carchedi, 1977: 1). In a nutshell, the capitalist organization of work determines, in the first instance, how class is lived and experienced. It creates a force field that conditions people’s lives. We can call this the class structure – a term that points to pre-existing social conditions under which people encounter each other, and under which they act, which is located in the ontological domain of the ‘deep’. Starting from the relations of production, I explain, in what follows, how class in capitalism can be conceptualized, that is, what the capitalist class structure looks like, and why the state plays an important role in its constitution.
As I focus on processes of class formation outside manufacturing, it makes sense to examine how the division of labour across sectors has been developing around the globe. I want to assess whether my focus on service and public sector work is justified – and whether my research heuristic captures relevant developments. The ILO is collecting and aggregating data on the size of the three sectors of the global economy – agriculture, industry and services – which can be used for this purpose. The figures refer to the number of people employed or self-employed in each sector. Undoubtedly, there are questions worth asking about the validity of the ILO data. The categories used are based on the empiricist assumption that the sectoral location of any worker can be read off from the ‘main activity’ of the business unit where they work. Following the logic of the ILO, the high-level asset manager working for a hedge fund, the independent business lawyer advising her for hefty fees and the janitor cleaning both of their offices and earning the minimum wage are all working in the service sector. And a similar point can be made about reliability. Data are gathered from all corners of the world and from a great number of sources. Nevertheless, I contend that the ILO figures still have a use value if one is clear about the fact that they provide a very rough sketch and not a fine-grained picture. The data are available in the form of absolute and relative numbers.
The general strike stands out as a form of labour unrest because of its openly visible class dimension. It calls the entire labour force across a society to stop work. By definition, stoppages only count as general strikes if they are based on cross-sectional, inclusive solidarity. Sometimes this is done exclusively for political aims, for example when people protest against an authoritarian government. But often, general strikes are organic strikes: They articulate economic and political demands and formulate a general, class-based agenda. In so doing, they usually concern the organization of work across the whole of society and create a divide between workers on one side and capital and the government on the other. Consequently, they are of particular interest when one examines working-class formation. The Spanish state is a useful test case for examining the demands, constituencies and dynamics of general strikes. Since la Transición, there have been ten union-led, national, general strikes (1985, 1988, 1992, 1994, 2002, 2003, 2010, 2012 [March] and 2012 [November]); two general national strikes with mass participation led by feminist organizations (2018 and 2019); and a number of regional mobilizations. In what follows, I will focus on the two most recent cycles of struggle and explore their connection: the cycle spanning the beginning of the Great Crisis and the sovereign debt crisis from 2008 until 2014, which includes three general strikes against austerity, and the subsequent cycle encompassing the two feminist general strikes against violence against women, the precarity of women workers, the disregard for care work and the effects of austerity on the social infrastructure.
Governments around the world have been managing the Great Crisis by adopting the politics of austerity. Public spending cuts tend to have drastic effects on workers because they usually translate into social wages being slashed. They are often particularly harmful to people employed in the public sector who may be faced with redundancies, worsening working conditions and direct wage cuts. Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that large, disruptive strikes have been occurring frequently in non-industrial settings in recent years. Complementing Silver’s point that labour unrest travels when industries relocate, it can be observed that in many countries, militancy in the public and service sectors has been pronounced, sometimes more pronounced than in manufacturing. In various contexts, public and service sector unions take a leading role in their respective labour movements – and the workers involved do not conform with Hyman’s image of the striker from the 1970s, that is, the White, middle-aged male miner. In this chapter, I map labour disputes from around the world that have been taking place in the public and service sectors during the conjuncture of crisis. I take inspiration from my colleagues Franziska Müller, Simone Claar, Manuel Neumann and Carsten Elsner, who have mapped African renewable energy policies (Müller et al, 2020) – and from Silver’s approach in Forces of Labor (2003), where she uses a dataset based on newspaper coverage of strikes to identify patterns of labour unrest. Mapping should here be understood in a metaphorical sense, that is, as a qualitative research technique that creates systematic but heavily simplified and ‘flat’ representations of multi-dimensional objects, which are mostly linguistic. For example, mapping can take the form of a table where large numbers of cases are grouped according to patterns. Due to the simplicity of these representations, mapping is well-suited for producing the contextualizations that incorporated comparisons require. It allows one to cover geographical areas with large extensions.
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