About 30 years ago, a string of
manufacturing plants called "maquiladoras" began to grow up along the
border between the U.S. and Mexico on the Mexican side. There are now
almost 4000 of them. They employ close to a million Mexican workers,
many of them girls and young women from 14 to 20 years old. The
result has been a huge growth in shanty-town cities from Tijuana just
south of San Diego across the Southwest to Matamoros next to
Brownsville Texas. These developments were the topic of two articles
that ran recently in The New York Times; I'd like to add some
observations that the Times would not see fit to print.
Corporations with money to invest
were, as always, looking for the safest and quickest way to turn the
smallest amount of capital into the greatest amount of profits. New
tariff, tax and labor regulations enacted by the Mexican and the US
governments enabled North American corporations to send partially
assembled items across the border to factories on the Mexican side,
and after they had been further processed by Mexican workers, shipped
duty free back to the U.S.. What made this location ideal for the
purpose? Of course it wasn't only the absence of tariffs and the very
low taxes charged by the Mexican government. There was also the lack
of laws and the enforcement of laws concerning the impact of the
plants on the local environment and on the health of the workers. But
most important was the wages for which Mexicans would work and the
conditions of work they would put up with. "They work six days a week
in grueling 10-hour shifts with few breaks. Working conditions are
often hazardous, and industrial accidents and toxic exposures are
common. On average, the workers earn between $0.80 and $1.25 an
hour…" (ibid.). Two people working full time cannot earn enough
to support a family of four. The taxes paid to local governments does
not enable them to provide infrastructure for these communities:
clean water, sewers, roads, schools, public transportation. This
explosion of the frontier population fits Marx's description of the
progress of capital over a century and a half ago:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule
of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more
colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations
together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery,
application of chemistry to industry and agriculture,
steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole
continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole
populations conjured out of the ground.
The names and the forms of technology
have changed, but the movement of wealth and commodities and the
displacement of people remains the same.
There are a couple of things The
New York Times is not going to point out about this scene. First,
there is the importance of national boundaries to the operations of
capital. Money, goods and managers are free to cross the borders at
will, but laborers are not. If Mexican workers could cross the border
as easily as their bosses, or as the goods they manufacture, then
they could compete for North American wages and would no longer be
willing to work for pennies an hour and live in a hovel next to an
open sewer. Without the border, there would be no maquiladoras, for
their existence depends on their workers being confined to a
territory where wages and labor standards are low. The tall fences
guarded by the INS are part of a system that perfectly illustrates
the phrase "wage slavery." The border patrol is nothing but a
slave-catching agency whose function is to apprehend those who run
away to the north and return them to the sphere of labor proper to
their complexion and their manner of speech. Immigration laws and the
INS make the maquiladoras profitable, just as the run-away slave laws
and the slave-catchers of the 19th Century made the cotton
and tobacco plantations rewarding for their owners.
A second point to notice is that
maquiladoras bring with them not just "workers" who somehow cease to
exist at the end of their shifts and then re-appear the next day
ready for work. Where there is a factory, there will be families and
communities who must find ways to shelter and feed themselves,
dispose of their waste, transport themselves to and from work, care
for and educate their children, and carry on some kind of social and
political life. Plantation owners in the U.S. had to provide some
kind of food and housing for their slaves, bad as they usually were.
The legal responsibility of the capitalist ends at the factory gate.
Wage slaves have to find or make their own abodes with very few
resources. Surrounding the factories are miles and miles of
make-shift housing, described by The New York Times as a
"squalid grid of dirt streets, rotting garbage and swamps of open
sewage." Drinking water is unsafe and scarce. Schools are unequipped
and overburdened if they exist at all. Drug related crime and wanton
violence against women are pervasive.
What the Times does not observe is
that this anti-social chaos is the inevitable result of the free flow
of investment capital. Capital builds the part that ensures its
profits and lets the workers take care of themselves. If you take a
stand outside the logic of capital accumulation, as the Times cannot
do, then you are free to see what the underlying problem is here. It
is that the essentially social action of capital investment is
allowed to be owned and controlled by private interests. The rapid
development of the maquiladoras and the slums that surround them are,
as it were, a perfect laboratory experiment to demonstrate that the
investment of capital in production cannot be separated from the real
lives of those who do the producing. Investment is a social act, not
a private one. When, as Marx puts it, you conjure whole populations
out of the ground, you create not just a work force but a society.
But corporate capital has no interest in the society it has blindly
created, only in the work force. Therefore the perspective of
capital, which is the perspective of The New York Times,
cannot draw the logical conclusion: that investment is, and should be
treated as, a social act.
Here's an analogy to show what this
conclusion leads to. Going to war has momentous impact on a people,
altering and often destroying people's lives. So it would be
outrageous if private interests could lead a nation into war for the
profits they would make. So, too, the productive investment of
capital has momentous impact on the structures and the details of the
lives of thousands and millions of people. It is, then, outrageous
that investment continues to be treated as something individuals and
private corporations can do with an eye only to their own profits. It
needs to be something we do, a public action, subject to
public determination and will.
