The following is an old post of mine that, perhaps, addresses some of your ideas about the factory regime being modified or socially fragmented by the development of capitalism in recent decades. I'm not sure whether it supports or opposes your thesis about the importance of NGO's, but it sketches a territorial development of the forces of production based on classical Marxist concepts.
Charles
(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
From ground zero of Fordism here in Detroit, we experienced the last 45 years of change from the classic big industrial plant (such as Ford Dearborn with 100,000 workers)concentration to a relative scattering of the points of production. The deconcentration was from the city to the suburbs, from the North to the South and from the U.S. around the globe. The revolution in the means of transportation and communication is the technological base for this. For example just in time production, containerization, CAD/CAM et al. allow the production of a "world car" with parts from all over the world brought together anywhere on the globe for assembly.
>
> It occurred to me that the "new global economy", transnationalization of monopoly capital represents a dialectical qualitative change in the following sense.
> Marx in Capital defines two factors in the
> qualitiative emergence of industrial capitalism over manufacture capitalism. They are the use of machinery
> and the concentration of workers in one big factory:
> thus, the graphic locus of the classic Leninist agitation and propaganda the giant industrial plant.
> The qualitative change of today is the revolution in science and technology which has begotten a revolution
> in transportation and communication, creating such things as just in time delivery, containerization and CAD/CAM. Thus a revolution in machinery, one of the original two breakthroughs in Marx's analysis of the industrial revolution as negated the second original breakthrough concentration of > great numbers of workers in one workplace. There is no longer the need to concentrate large numbers in one place to increase the production of relative surplus value.
> I suggest the above infrastructural sketch as
> corresponding to the cultural change now
> named post-Fordism.
> But don't count the proletariat out. The slogan
> workers of the world unite , is more true today
> than when Marx and Engels coined it. And the
> proletariat is fresher than post-Fordist theory might
> know. In other words, the proletariat knows how to
> go with the new. Detroiters probably could show
> post-ologists a thing or two about what is new.
from Proletarian Central, Detroit
>>> Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> 04/14/99 11:03AM >>>
Here is what I see as an important issue, as far as Left organizing is
concerned. The enclosed posting argues that the development of NGOs (in
Latin America, but the argument can be extended to other regions as well)
has a detrimental effect on Left organizing, because:
1. It tends to divide the poor/working class consitutencies and make them compete against each other;
2. It tends to coopt community leaders and professionals to organizations that are utlimately dependent on donors;
3. It tends to promote neo-liberalism.
I think that this critique represents a quite popular on the Left view of NGOs. That view holds NGOs against a romantic notion of spontaneous popular movement and concludes that NGOs are too tainted with compromise to be useful to the Left's emancipatory project.
I also think that such a view is probably one of the gravest mistake the self-proclaimed lefties make, at least from a Marxist point view. From a Marxist perspective, a successful social movement takes advantage of- and attaches itself to- social changes caused by the dominant mode of production (instead of fighting those changes). The expectation of a mass workers movement taking over capitalist enterprises was based on the material foundation created by capitalism - a large working class "produced" by the factory regime. Thus fighting factory regime (as utopian socialists did) was considered counterproductive from a Marxist revolutionary project's point of view.
Therefore, assuming that a successful Left organizing should subsume (i.e. appropriate and transcend) social institutions and organizations created by the dominant economic forces:
1. The social fragmentation NGO critics talk about is caused by modern capitalist development, not by NGOs. NGOs are but an expression of that fragmentation.
2. The mass "Left" movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries grew out of social solidarity that had its roots in a peasant society. That society was all but destryed by capitalism, and the type of solidarity it created is for the most part gone. That means that those who are waiting for a mass popular movement reminiscent of the struggles in late 19th and early 20th centuries are waiting for Godot, indeed. Today, such movements belong to the "Left-files." They ain't gonna happen, because their social-economic basis does not exist anymore.
3. Given that NGOs are an expresion of social changes brought about by capitalist development, they are the most promising platform for Left organizing. Unfortunately, that field has been hopelessly dominated by foundation liberals with Left almost totally absent. Thus, the left is missing its best opportunity, IMHO.
4. In that light, the Left should stop dreaming about "organizing the masses" and instead devlop "middle-range" strategies for using NGOs (also called "civil society") as an organizing platform.
Any comments?
Wojtek
-clip-