This paper focuses on the runaway capitalist control over human body and soul as established and implemented in what critical political economists have identified as the global factory. That factory is global because it builds on a unified regime of labour surveillance regarding production planning, worker performance, and (this is what I add) an ideology of productive labour. In the millions of garments and electronics factories across the world’s 6,000+ special economic zones, this articulates as a combination of Taylorism, manufactured consent (à la Burawoy), and orientalist imageries of undeserving and lazy humans depending on the gift of labour.
Following in the footsteps of Silvia Federici’s argument that the human body was the first machine developed by capitalism, prior to the steam engine and the clock, my aim is to put to the test recent claims of a rise of neo-feudalism or techno-fascism as a new mode of production. Interestingly, those theses often rely on the wrong analysis of special economic zones in that they fixate of sovereignty and its absence rather than on the control of human labour power in the surveillance regime of global factories.
Patrick Neveling works in social anthropology, global history, and critical political economy. He is Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences at Bournemouth University, editor of www.focaalblog.com, and acting Chair of the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology in the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. Patrick’s publications and research focus on the historical anthropology of capitalism since 1800, Marxian anthropology, a critical political economy of special economic zones, and related topics.