This paper argues that one strong and still largely uncontested theoretical heritage of mainstream approaches to capitalist diversity, and particularly the varieties of capitalism framework, is the binding of labour’s agency to national institutions and (cultural and ‘mental’) ‘paths’. This has been the main paradigm within political and trade union debates, too, especially in Germany, where the proposal to strengthen ‘typical German institutional advantages’ (namely co-determination) in the face of European and global competition is widespread. After a critical presentation of these approaches, the article proposes, following empirical findings and relying on concepts from the transnational migration literature and the debate in geography on scaling, to analyse local-oriented action by labour as itself being a specific form by which labour’s transnationality is constructed. However, in the cases presented, this specific form of construction turns out to be a competitive one, with ideological frames of cultural and mental divisions in Europe and beyond in systematic use.
In current debates on precarization in Europe, a transnational and more class-based perspective is demanded. While fully supporting this request, this article nevertheless notices that, often, when it comes to the economic logic of current Europeanization, scholars have only taken a one-sided look at financial capital and financialization. What is needed is a deeper conceptual understanding of European labour and production processes and how their transnational organization is interwoven with both the European integration project and rising precarization. In an inter-disciplinary approach, combining critical political economy, economic and social geography, and the sociology of work and industry, this article seeks to tackle the problem and develops three main arguments. The first is that, long before the 2008ff. crisis, a mode of Europeanization as multi-scalar competitive integration developed, one that, basically, takes socio-spatial unevenness as a competitive advantage. The second argument is that the backbone of this competitive Europeanization mode is a transnationalized European regime of fragmented and flexible production. This regime particularizes labour and labour processes on all social scales, within and beyond nation-states, by putting them in a competitive relation to each other. The third argument is that due to permanent transnational restructuring and technological (digital) modernization, no stable socio-spatial division of labour within and among the European countries arises. Instead, permanently changing forms of labour's social polarization occur, a finding that questions classic ideas
This article discusses labour-process-related racism and xenophobia among workers. It uses empirical findings from different projects to argue that, to a large extent, actual racism and xenophobia refer to experiences of objectification/reification, namely by harsh social competition in contemporary fragmented and transnationalised production. Racism and xenophobia are discussed as specific forms of subjectification which reproduce and stabilise these competitive social relations among workers, within and beyond countries. Racism thus is part of a “restrictive agency” developed by workers – that is, their orientation towards the subordination under objectifying, seemingly non-changeable structures. As a consequence, the article concludes, the repressive structures have to be questioned, and for this purpose the intense debate on racism and right-wing populism among workers is one-sided; there must be more attention paid to progressive labour-process-related, universalistic orientations that exist, despite already long-lasting neo-liberalism.
KEY WORDS: racism; Labour Process Theory; transnational production networks; fragmentation; Europeanisation; Critical Psychology
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