Industry 4.0 and the Future of Work: Global Production Networks, Global Disassembly Networks, and the Circular Economy

Much current literature regarding the precarious future of ‘work’ is focused on salaried clerical or office-based labour. By contrast, Industry 4.0 and the Future of Work returns to Karl Marx's development of the labour theory of value, regrounding the analysis of work under capitalism to produce a more precise definition and evaluation of likely futures. Crucially, attention is paid to the agency of workers, as indeed is the matter of work's geographical location. The result is a deeply researched, fundamentally critical analysis of various strands of future-of-work-focused discourse, paying particular attention to the often boosterist treatments of the circular economy and ‘Industry 4.0’. At the outset, the authors are clear: ‘we see a future largely full of dysfunction and penury for billions of workers who face precarity in the labour market as week as biological precarity’ (p. 2). They propose ‘historical geographical materialism’ (p. 4) that would enable proper recognition of the unevenness of capitalist development in practice. An additional analytical dimension concerns the ‘valence’ of technology, reflecting both its design and application, which, far from being neutral, are determined ‘by the history and socio-spatial context within which it develops and exists’ (p. 7). This is especially relevant when considering circular economy practices. The authors chart the evolution of the global commodity chain (GCC) concept that originated in World Systems Theory (WST) discourse. GCCs were a lens by which WST could map the linkages between core, semi-peripheral and peripheral states in the world system. Their subsequent rendering as global value chains (GVCs) gave agency (and even normative approval) to the firms responsible for the reconfiguration of production via outsourcing and offshoring on a global scale. Refashioned again as global production networks (GPNs), the concept addressed the question of power in the context of hierarchically layered networks, as opposed to the more straightforward ‘verticalist’ GVC approach that emphasized the key role of ‘lead firms’. The GPN concept is better equipped to incorporate consideration of firm behaviour and the significance of place (pp. 24−25) within networks. Nevertheless, the authors argue that the issue of labour's agency − as subject, rather than mere object − has yet to be given adequate acknowledgement in GPN discourse, amounting to a ‘labour process deficit’ (p. 56). This is bound up with the question of place more deeply considered, given ‘how workers, through their praxis, can shape the geographical structure and political-economic operation’ of the production process (p. 25). This necessitates also the recognition of the state as a key actor, given its territorial jurisdiction (p. 34). The geographical dimension is also visible in the emergence of the concept of ‘Industry 4.0’ (i4.0). The authors trace its origin to the 2011 Hannover Fair and its subsequent popularization by the World Economic Forum (p.56). i4.0 discourse presumes the inevitability of digitalization, automation and process acceleration, with differing emphasis on disruption (discontinuity) or efficiency enhancement (continuity) characteristic of the locations of this discourse (United States and Germany, respectively). Absent from either is a proper consideration of labour. Having established its value theory foundations, the book turns to the geography of labour, noting the rise of intra-firm trade ‘with much of that being South-South trade’ (p. 85). However, the urbanization of the Global South ‘has largely been decoupled from industrialization’ (p. 87), instead ‘largely being driven by the reproduction of poverty’ rather than the availability of new jobs (p. 88). Given that such populations can no longer subsist via agriculture, their income sources are increasingly based on what the authors term ‘global disassembly networks’ (GDNs), which they treat as ‘an indispensable Other’ to GPNs (p. 176). The proliferation of waste is the corollary of an economic system that depends on relentless production and consumption in order to realize and accumulate value. The complementariness of GDNs and GPNs facilitates a more fully rendered conceptualization of the circular economy as a world system. The authors highlight the ‘importance of the extreme city phenomenon’ for the future of work because ‘it links globalization, the activities of GPNs, extended urbanization, and the kinds of technological innovation seen to be at the heart of i4.0 developments’ (p. 89). This is evident at both local and global levels due to ‘strong agglomeration forces that are leading to innovators clustering in particular places … mirrored in the concentration of university graduates and STEM workers’ (p. 92): a spatial bifurcation of high-skilled/low-skilled workers with increasingly visible economic and socio-political consequences (p. 250). Waste has become a global resource rather than simply a local problem. The ‘spatial fix’ of dumping of Global North waste in the Global South has existed for decades. It was the subject of a notorious World Bank memorandum signed by Larry Summers as far back as 1991. Yet, as the book painstakingly makes clear, the circular economy that much recent literature excitedly proclaims as offering a clean and sustainable future without the sacrifice of either consumption or purchasing power already exists, albeit not in the hygienic and spotless forms often imagined. Analysis of GDNs shows ‘how the Circular Economy relies heavily upon the so-called “informal” economy’ (p. 190). Recycling and the circular economy must, in capitalism, be profitable. The organization of GDNs as integral to GPNs means that the informal labour of increasing numbers of city dwellers is employed in the recovery of materials that are sold back into production networks as commodities. Even this is spatially differentiated, as the safer, more mechanical processes of recovery employed in the Global North are less thorough than the more manual, and therefore dangerous because unprotected, processes typically employed in the Global South. An important theoretical distinction is made between devalorization − the transfer of value from machine to commodity − and devaluation − the absolute destruction of value. Thus, the process of machines reaching the end of their useful lives as originally designed is distinct from technological obsolescence, rendering redundant machines that are otherwise functional (p. 174). This theoretical clarification could be strengthened via the incorporation of entropy into the analysis, as per Alf Hornborg's work, given the authors’ intention to ‘acknowledge the materiality of Nature and the operation of capitalism’ such that the physical properties of discarded machines or commodities can be distinguished from their status according to value theory. Industry 4.0 and the Future of Work is a rich repository of well-informed critical analysis conducted on a truly global scale, guided firmly by adherence to theoretical fundamentals that retain their expository power. The result is not reassuring with respect to our collective future, but it does underscore the ability of workers to act in their specific circumstances, and the possibilities arising from that.