And the Culture of Production

Creating traces all over the globe, capitalism is one of the most influential ideologies in contemporary societies. In China, since reform and opening-up (改革開放) started in 1978, capitalism has deeply penetrated into the Chinese society. With a diminishing role of central planning and a larger role of free market, some distinguishing values of capitalism, such as profit-seeking, privatization and commercialization are manifest in China since then. Through the constant interactions between men and social institutions, traces of capitalism have been continually created, substituted and renovated. Before discussing how capitalism transforms Chinese society, let us have a brief review of the core value of capitalism.

The Core Value of Capitalism

The essence of capitalism lies in profit-making. Capitalist culture is based on trading, be it services or products. Measuring the trading value with currency, a profit is made whenever the selling price exceeds the production cost.

Consider the example of Adam. Adam is a worker for a footware company. Every month he produces 100 pairs of trainers selling for $100 at the market. In other words, he can produce a market value equal to $10,000 monthly. If his wage is exactly $10,000, the footware company not only makes no profit but also suffers from a deficit due to the costs it incurs for factory operation and logistics. Therefore, if the footware company wants to make a profit, it must pay Adam less than $10,000, says $4,000. In this case, the difference between Adam’s wage and the value he produces is $6,000 (i.e. $10,000 minus $4,000).

How much can workers earn for the shoes they produce? (Photo by Coup d'Oreille / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Adam’s story illustrates the secret behind profit-making. According to Karl Marx, a famous critical political economic theorists, profit-making lies in the division of labor in production relationship: the bourgeoisie (or capitalists, 資產階級) who own the production capitals (or the means of production), and the proletariats (無產階級) who sell their labour in exchange for living. While workers create value with their labour on production, capitalists make a profit by maximizing what Marx referred to as 'surplus value', i.e. the value created by workers in excess of their own labour cost. In Adam's case, $6,000 is the surplus value appropriated by the footware company when shoes produced by Adam are sold.

Bourgeoisie specializes in pondering how to maximize as much surplus value as possible. There are many ways to do that, such as further suppressing the wages of labour. Remember surplus value is market values of production minus wages of labour. Therefore, many firms tend to relocate their factories to countries where labour cost is lower, such as China. The relocation of production line results in interactions of capitalist culture and various local culture, creating numerous and distinct traces.

Traces of Capitalism in Traditional Capitalist Countries: Fordism

Speaking of traces of capitalism, many would think of the legacy of Ford Motor Company (FMC), the world’s fifth-largest automaker. Founded in 1903 by Henry Ford in the American city of Detroit, FMC exerted profound influence over people’s lives not only by shaping the class of buyers, but also the way of living of its workers.

Ford was keen on raising productivity in the production process, for given the same wage level, higher productivity of workers yield a higher profit margin. Central to his productivity boosting plan was the introduction of the idea of producing cars on an assembly line. This involves lining workers up along a conveyor belt, with each worker focusing on one step of car production and passing his completed component to the next worker through the belt. Since each worker specialises on one step of production only, he may perform it more efficiently over time after repeated practice. And since each worker stays at a particular poisition along the conveyor belt for his work, it helps reduce his time wasted on moving around for his tasks. Meanwhile, Ford offered his workers a higher wage than many other manufacturers. Not only did he want to attract more productive labour to work for him, but he wanted to enable his workers to buy the cars they produced. In so doing, Ford promoted the development of a society founded upon mass production and mass consumption of standardised goods, a way of living now known as Fordism (福特主義).

The assembly line in FMC's factory stands as the trace of a profit-oriented culture of production
(Photo from Literary Digest, 1928 / Public Domain)

Opinions have differed on the impacts of Fordism. On the one hand, Fordism is praised as a way of living which supported the economic boom in Western nations after the Second World War. On the other hand, Fordism is criticised for how workers were exploited and alienated along the assembly line. For example, The New York Times once analogised Henry Ford with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and called him 'Detroit’s Mussolini' because workers’ wives complained that the assembly line was more powerful than masters’ control over slaves with a whip to exhaust their husbands.

Traces of Capitalism in China: Foxconn

Since the opening-up and marketisation of the Chinese economy in 1978, a flock of foreign investors in China to take advantage of its preferential policies and cheap and abundant labour resource for their manufacturing business, turning China into the world’s factory. Arrived with these investors are not only their capital and technology, but also the capitalist culture of production. It is in the mushrooming number of factories that Chinese people, as workers, come into contact with such culture. Unfortunately, the tough lives imposed by capitalist production systems has sometimes proven too unbearable to the workers, leading to miserable and deadly consequences.

A widely reported site of such interaction is the manufacturing facilities of Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), the largest Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) worldwide. It is an important component maker and final assembler for electronic products we use today. As its business rapidly expands, Foxconn needs not only a larger pool of workers, but it also needs each worker to work harder to meet its skyrocketing production needs. To make this possible, Foxconn has taken the Fordist model of mass production to the extreme. It operates like a ‘semi-militarized labor system’ (Pun et al. 2016: 172), in which assembly line workers are intensely supervised to maximise their output.

Electronics assembling in a Foxconn factory (Photo by Steve Jurvetson / CC BY 2.0)

The everyday life of Foxconn’s workers is very much organised around their daily production targets – their day of work does not end until they produce enough as required by their supervisors. This arrangement has resulted in long working hours without adequate pay. According to a 2010 study, to raise their company’s profit, Foxconn’s management would deliberately set up daily production targets which most workers could not meet during their regular shift, so as to force workers into free overtime work (Cai, 2012, p. 19). For workers who failed to meet the targets, they were penalized by their shop-floor foreman and managers, who were equally under pressure to meet their production targets, in forms such as scolding and not allowing to have meals. Those who managed to meet the targets did not have an easier life; rather, to profit further from their productivity, the management would assign a higher target on them.

Apart from a harsh time at work, Foxconn's workers also suffers from social atomisation, the process in which a person is detached from his/her social networks and become socially isolated. Foxconn’s business depends on the production needs of multi-national brands, such as Apple, HP and Dell. Changes in the nature and volume of demand made by these companies can have a major impact on Foxconn's production setups, such as large-scale reallocation of workers across assembly lines. This kind of reallocation is not confined to a single production plant, but across factories distributed in different cities or even provinces (Lin et al., 2016). Frequent shifts in workplaces sever workers from the social bonding they build up with their colleagues. Moreover, since many Foxconn’s employees are migrant workers, they are too poor to find a place to live. They live in Foxconn-maintained dormitories, where workers from the same origin or working in the same production department are not allocated to the same room. Given a lack of shared hometown culture or work experience, workers find it difficult to socialise with others in the dormitories and lack access to peer support when they are emotionally unstable. Under unbearable stress, some Foxconn workers committed suicide as a last resort to end their pain and express their discontent to the repressive capitalist regime in which they work.

Conclusion

To conclude, culture is not necessarily harmonious. Again, one of the essential values of capitalism is profit-seeking. This value emphasizes the exploits of surplus value and shapes the relationship between capitalists and workers. In other words, capitalist culture can be a product of the tension between the management and control over workers. In this sense, capitalism is not just a culture but a tool that nurtures certain power relationships, which may form conflicts and corresponding cultural traces. As capital flows internationally, the culture-shaping power of capitalism has been penetrating in more and more modern societies in ways unimagined.

References

Cai, S. (2012). Industrial organization in China: A case study of Foxconn's factory relocations (Unpublished master's dissertation). UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.

Lin, T., Lin, Y., & Tseng, W. (2016). Manufacturing suicide: The politics of a world factory. Chinese Sociological Review, 48(1), 1-32.

Pun, N., Shen, Y., Guo, Y., Lu, H., Chan, J., & Selden, M. (2016). Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese workers' struggles from a global labor perspective. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 17(2), 166-185.