Ithaca, New York; London: ILR Press [an imprint of Cornell University Press], 2018. x, 206 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-1110-7.
Rarely when you think of Myanmar and its millions of precarious migrants in search of better economic opportunity do you think of or read about inspiring empowered agents who shape their own conditions of possibility. But with Stephen Campbell’s new ethnographic account of Burmese garment migrant workers in Mae Sot, Thailand on the border with Myanmar, we get a closeup account of their everyday struggles for fair economic exchange for their labour, despite the odds stacked against them. Speaking as a Myanmar scholar who has lived and worked in Thailand for many years—with frequent work visits to Mae Sot—the stigma against Burmese migrant workers in both Thailand and Myanmar runs deep. Frankly, I find these accounts of migrant workers’ ordinary acts of evasion, contestation, and negotiation with factory bosses, police officers, and immigration officials refreshingly poignant by giving us a glimpse of worker solidarity and resolve at making an honest living in otherwise hostile conditions. Campbell provides theoretical rigour in deepening our understanding of the politics of precarity and flexibilization of labour in Southeast Asia with his geographical and historical specificity, which make this book a must read by scholars seeking to locate working-class struggles in Asia’s dramatic industrial transformation.
Campbell’s overall theoretical contribution to Marxist labour studies, economic geography, migrant studies, and border studies is by providing an ethnographically rich corrective to state and capital-centrist geographies of labour. For each ethnographic chapter on the regulatory work environment migrant workers continually navigate within—and, in turn, redirect—the author demonstrates how migrant workers’ forms of spatial praxis of resistance—outside both the workplace and formal organizing—have nonetheless reshaped capitalist relations at the point of production. Although at times a bit short on empirical support, Campbell pushes back against special border economic zone (SBEZ) factories cast as hegemonic “spaces of exception,” alternatively viewing these constitutive struggles over capitalist relations as “hegemony-as-assemblage” and, relatedly, “assemblage of governmental rule.” By bringing into conversation Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze to advance his arguments, Campbell stresses the primacy of workers in how they are governed through a dialectic between an array of workers’ struggles and multiple recuperative capitalist responses.
In the introductory chapter, Campbell succinctly summarizes debates on the politics of precarity and the flexibilization of labour in the North Atlantic, in addition to showing how to locate this rich theoretical debate in the Global South that is specific to the social production of border capitalism for his case study. The next two chapters do the necessary historical work to understand the wider structures of transformation in the region that constructed Mae Sot as a regulated border for migrant factory workers. I found these two chapters a bit lacking in historical detail and, although admittedly beyond the scope of the book, lacking in drawing connections to migrants’ original moments of dispossession in their places of origin (which could have multiplied the scales and geographies tied to the construction of border capitalism). Instead, Campbell begins his ethnography starting with chapter 3 on workers’ place-based struggles over their mobility in Thailand, which he sees as threats to the spatial organization of capital and challenges to the state-centric production of capital and borders.
Moving to a different theoretical current to understand the shifting patterns of coercive state policing in chapter 4, Campbell builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of class formation that is not limited to economic relations of production. Campbell points us to the subordination of migrants beyond the point of production as well as the exploitation of workers within the workplace, since these coercive relations inside and outside the workplace are mutually constitutive. In chapter 5, Campbell builds from the Marxist workerist tradition and Antonio Negri’s reading of Marx’s Grundrisse by ethnographically revealing how, despite the tendency to view class fragmentation under regimes of flexibilization, the conditions of the work floor and outside points of production have enabled new conditions conducive to migrant working-class “recomposition.” More ethnographic material to convincingly demonstrate the multiple ways in which workers open up new informal avenues of solidarity would have helped here, however. The final chapter more than makes up for this shortfall in providing a fascinating detailed account on informal migrant workers’ organizing outside unions in their quest for getting the legal minimum wage. Campbell, by being present in many of these negotiation meetings and party to discussions on workers’ informal strategizing, brings the whole book together in
chapter 6 by pointing to the dynamics of these struggles being shaped by their particular conditions of emergence—be it laws and policies regulating labour, geographic conditions of capital, flexible employment relations, forms of governmental rule, or particular constellations of class forces and formations—that are themselves the outcomes of earlier class struggle.
I appreciate Campbell’s theoretical and ethnographic commitment to show how flexibilization and its transformation of capital-labour relations also creates new conditions of possibility and counter-hegemonic working-class social formations. Capitalism’s creative destruction, Campbell reminds us, is clearly demonstrated by the workers’ variety of decentralized and autonomous struggles as emergent conditions from the state’s and their employers’ regulatory containment. It is precisely this dialectic that Campbell explores in the book that I believe helps us understand Burmese factory workers’ prominent role in the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) against the military coup on February 1, 2021. Specific to the outskirts of Yangon and domestic Burmese factory workers’ counter-hegemonic spatial praxis there, female factory workers spearheaded the country’s most sweeping coalition of national resistance against one of the world’s longest lasting and most brutal militaries, and were subsequently targeted by the most extreme violence. This conjecture brings home Campbell’s insistence on the possibility of scaled-up broader solidarity through a multiplicity of autonomous working-class struggles.
Kevin M. Woods
University of Hawai‘i, Honolulu