Last Friday, I went to hear a lecture at the University of Minnesota by a distinguished scholar Anna Tsing. Her talk was entitled “Figures of Capitalist Globalization: Firm Models and Chain Links.” I won’t do her talk justice; but in brief, she discussed new stories of capitalism that must emerge within our global economy. Within these new stories, account should be given of the varied, niche supply sites that provide the labor for the capital. Currently, the diverse niches within our global economy chains do not create a direct supply-chain-type connection with large companies (for example, Nike) as found more readily in the past, ultimately allowing companies to distance themselves from any exploitation going on at these niche sites and hide behind the image of branding and marketing. In other words, companies easily say “we don’t have control over how factory X treats their workers.” An important theoretical premise of her talk was the idea of how, within given cultures, there exists labor theories of value. How do we attach value to labor? How does the nexus of labor and capital get defined in the global economy? As I interpreted her talk, Tsing is concerned with how varied struggles for justice in the global economy displace each other, ultimately making social labor movements difficult.

During the Q&A session at the end of her talk, she was taken to task by an audience member about her invocation of Marx’s image of the worker. She claimed that Marx’s reification of the worker, or image of the worker, was useful to read how the idea of labor gets pitted against capital. She asked how we locate those images (sites) now? In other words, in the global economy with its niche sites (she gave the example of Mayan farmers doing specialty broccolis), how do we create an image of the worker to use as a productive symbol for social labor movements (similar to Marx’s image of the worker)? Or, are multi-nationals able to cut connections to these niche labor sites and avoid any accountability to a “worker” that has a hard time gaining traction within a common labor goal? I found Tsing’s insights extremely useful in my own work evaluating the rhetoric of science and technology–which has now become global. But, I don’t see an easy answer.