For Labor Power, Bigger is Better

 “Behemoth – A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World” by Joshua Freeman, 2018 (Part 2)

Socialist Views

Marx saw capitalism’s factory in a dialectical sense.  While it was the direct site of the extraction of surplus value and profits from labor while despoiling nature, it could also provide the means to make every worker’s life easier and still protect nature, if the means of production were fully socialized and taken out of capital’s private hands. In short capital was developing technology, machinery and now software which could alleviate backbreaking and monotonous labor, shorten hours and lead to a more pleasant life, while at the same time not being driven to destroy the environment.  A factory could produce more clothing quickly and cheaply than a woman sewing at home for hours, and possibly of better quality.  A water pump beat walking to the well.  A solar panel supplies better light and power than a fire.  And so on. 

Freeman spends time on the strikes and class battles that occurred at the sites of big factories in the U.S. and the U.K.  Many of these are legendary to this day.  He mentions the Luddites, the Chartists, the IWW and CP and Peterloo, Homestead, Little Steel, Fisher Body #1 & 2, Republic Steel and so on. State troops in the U.S. were called out over 500 times from 1875 to 1910 to deal with labor unrest, with hundreds of workers dying in strikes.  1919 was a peak year of labor struggle with tens of thousands out on strike, a reflection of events in Europe. All this happened before the massive upsurge in the 1930s.     

In the early Soviet Union, Lenin and Trotsky favored ‘modern’ methods of production management.  They endorsed Taylorism due to the low quality of Soviet labor after the decimation of the Civil War. Trotsky said it was efficiency or poverty and starvation in polemics against Party opponents in the Workers’ Opposition.  The WO said workers needed input over the ‘experts’ on how to improve productivity.  I tend to side with the WO on this issue theoretically, as those doing the work have the most intimate ideas on how to improve production.  But given at the time that many new, rural workers were completely inexperienced, it would have to be a collaborative effort – so it depended on what kind of workers and experts were there. I say this as a former 20-year factory worker who has seen my share of lunk heads and incompetence even in ‘modern’ times.

Of interest to socialists is the relation between American capitalists and the first 5 year plan in the USSR in 1929.  Many U.S. architects, experts and companies – even Ford – helped build an industrial base in the Soviet Union, but at breakneck speed. The huge tractor plant in Stalingrad, the massive 32,000 worker truck/auto plant in Gorky and the monstrous Magnitogorsk steel complex east of the Urals were based on U.S. designs and input. New planned cities arose around these facilities. As was to be expected, ex-peasants from small villages had no idea how to work in a factory.  At the tractor plant, initial production was very slow due to ignorance, damage, idleness and lack of good parts and machines.  

Some of these projects were built in the middle of nowhere, a form of industrial adventurism, which required belated attempts at housing and more. The factories employed thousands of prisoners, ex-kulaks and disgraced professionals in forced labor, who lived in terrible conditions in caged camps.  This was a pattern followed by the Stalinist bureaucracy as the Gulag system grew. In the end, a hyper-industrial base was built out of these cruel and bureaucratic methods, while virtually ignoring consumer production. 

REBELLIONS Due to Size

Giantist factories spread to central Europe after WWII, as Soviet methods were used in countries like Poland’s giant Nova Huta steel complex near Krakow and the Hungarian Sztalinvaros steel plant in what is now Dunaujvaros on the Danube.  A new city was built around Nova Huta, with mostly communal planning, to house the tens of thousands of new workers from the countryside.  The plant became a key redoubt of the Solidarnosc union in the 1980s, as Sztalinvaros became a redoubt of the Hungarian Revolution and workers’ councils in 1956.  During the 2011 Arab Spring in Egypt, the huge Misr Weaving Company in Mahalla, Egypt provided one of the centers of resistance and inspiration for the overthrow of Mubarak. Yet in Germany the massive Volkswagen complex in Wolfsburg employs 72,000 workers and the 39,000 employees of BASF in Ludwigsafen are not as combative due to social-democratic policies in Germany.  

Factory giantism had the same political effect in the U.S., emboldening labor.  This was shown by the massive strike wave in 1946 after WWII, centered on large employers with big factories.  After this, U.S. corporations started moving away from large plants, dispersing workforces to rural areas and the South, an early harbinger of the ‘Southern Strategy.’  The political point here is that small factories, dispersed or isolated locations and friendly anti-union political climates all impact the siting of new capitalist production facilities.  This is because they know large factories can become hotbeds of class consciousness, unions and labor power.  Capital is allergic to that.

FoxConn factory in Zhengzhou

CHINA & VIETNAM  

The books’ remaining examples of industrial giantism are in China and Vietnam, concentrating on private capital. 4 examples in China are the huge Foxxconn City, owned by a Taiwanese firm; Pegatron, another Taiwanese firm employing 100,000 tech assembly workers in Shanghai; the Huafeng Group, a Chinese textile firm housing 30,000 workers in one building; and Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings Ltd., a Taiwanese firm employing 110,000 workers making shoes – the largest textile factory in history.  One factory in Datang made one-third of the world’s socks in the mid-2000s.  In Yiwu, 600 factories produced 60% of the world’s Christmas decorations.  Foxconn itself could turn out 10,000 iPhones a day over 3 shifts. 

Just In Time methods, as well as harsh labor conditions in these factories, eliminated inventory and provided a flood of products quickly, using software communications and data, air-freight, container ships and ports to make world-wide distribution easier and faster.  These techniques were essential to the basic strategy of mass labor.

Freeman notes the back and forth struggle in China between ‘politics being in command’ and production being in command in the period after the 1949 socialist revolution.  This was reflected in both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as the Maoist ideal of incorporating workers and communities into production was carried out by what can only be called primitive or ultra-left means.  This definitively ended after Mao’s death and the triumph of the adherents of ‘production only’ under Deng Xiaoping. 

The leading faction continues this policy to today, expanding it to allow a huge sector of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the growth of huge private Chinese companies.  Strikes were made illegal in 1978 and ‘special economic zones’ were set up in Guangdong and Fujian provinces for FDI. Decollectivization and later, privatization in the countryside pushed rural workers into the low-tier hukou system to flood into these factories.  As under Stalin, peasants in China became the chief losers in industrialization, but perhaps not quite as brutally.  The ‘market’ had won.  Freeman notes this ‘liberalization’ process also took place in Vietnam under Doi Moi. 

Strikes still occur regularly in China over pay, benefits, pensions, dormitories, the work load, long hours, cruel supervisors, injuries, food, fines, useless unions and foreign exploitation.  The state attempts to reconcile strikes until they become too large and disruptive, after which repression is used.  Factories are secretive, guarded compounds filled with plain buildings, alongside regimented worker dormitories.  The dorms are reminiscent of early English mills and Lowell’s textile towns. Inside the big box plants semi-military discipline is employed.  At the same time Foxconn has a large number of amenities on their ‘campuses’ like libraries, hospitals and sport facilities, so it might be more pleasant than an isolated and poor village. Chinese vocational schools require students to work at low pay for 6-12 months at a factory, providing another source of cheap labor. And yet industrialization has eliminated acute poverty in China, unlike fully capitalist India.

In Vietnam there are more strikes percentage-wise, as strikes are legal there and fining workers is forbidden.  Strikes against Nike, Adidas and other brands took place in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2015.  The famous 2011 strike against Yue Yuen involved tactics similar to the Luddites, with scores of factories destroyed or damaged around Ho Chi Minh City by an angry Vietnamese working-class.  

CONCLUSION   

In his conclusion Freeman notes that capitalism and socialist attempts both use industrial technology.  The question is what is produced; how are the workers treated; how much power do they have in the plant; what happens to the profits; what damage is caused to nature; what tech is appropriate; how are factories designed; where are they built and more.  He notes that many old, large factories are no longer functioning or are severely shrunken.  River Rouge still as a small amount of production going on.  Capitalist boom and bust cycles, tech changes and most prominently the class struggle actually determine how long factories will last. 

Large factories still exist across the world outside China, Vietnam and Germany.  A private Chinese company, Huajian Shoes, opened a giant factory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2010 at a $30 a month wage, as the average monthly wage in China is $560.  This shows the Chinese private sector is now using ‘low cost sourcing,’ exploiting African, Asian and South American labor in the process of wage arbitrage, just like every other capitalist entity.

Instead of production facilities, Freeman notes that ‘sophisticated’ capitalist money is now invested in rentier profiteering or financialization. For instance The Vanguard Group owns the second largest shares of stock in Foxconn’s owner, Hon Hai Precision Industry.  Vanguard is the third-largest shareholder in Pegaron Corporation, and the ninth-largest holder of Yue Yuen shares.  The present version of Chinese ‘internationalism’ is to allow U.S. private equity to own big chunks of Chinese production to this day.  How that bodes for the new cold war against China is another matter.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “factory,” “USSR,” “China,” “peasant,' "Cultural Revolution."    

And I bought this book at the used/cutout section of May Day Books!

Red Frog / July 8, 2025