Global Capital and Global Labor

William I. Robinson

doi:10.1017/CBO9781107590250.003

1 - Global Capital and Global Labor

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014

William I. Robinson

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William I. Robinson: Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara

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Summary

[Foxconn] has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.

Terry Gou, chairman of Foxconn, talking to Chin Shih-Chien, director of the Taipei Zoo, regarding how animals should be managed, and prior to announcing plans to replace one million workers with robots

The solution to the sanitation crisis – at least as conceived by certain economics professors sitting in comfortable armchairs in Chicago and Boston – has been to make urban defecation a global business. Indeed, one of the great achievements of Washington-sponsored neoliberalism has been to turn public toilets into cash points for paying off foreign debts – pay toilets are a growth industry throughout the Third World slums.

Mike Davis, in Planet of Slums

Capitalism goes through regular crises about once a decade, what we call cyclical crises. But the crisis that exploded in 2008 with the global financial collapse and the Great Recession points to a deeper structural crisis, such as we faced in the 1970s, and before that in the 1930s, meaning that the system can no longer continue to function in the way that it is structured. These types of crises are therefore restructuring crises. They must result in a restructuring of the system if there is to be any resolution to the crisis. Yet in such a conjucture the structural crisis has the potential to become systemic, depending on how social agents respond to the crisis and on the unpredictable element of contingency that always plays some role in historical outcomes. A systemic crisis is one in which only a change in the system itself will resolve the crisis.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity , pp. 16 - 64

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107590250.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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