Daniel Speich Chassé: Die Erfindung des Bruttosozialprodukts. Globale Ungleichheit in der Wissensgeschichte der Ökonomie (= Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, Bd. 212), Göttingen:: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2013, 344 S.

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Special economic zones: The global frontlines of neoliberalism’s value regime

This chapter develops an anthropological theory and ethnographic research paradigm to capture the role of special economic zones (SEZs) as frontlines in neoliberalism’s global value regime. Based on global ethnographic and archival research, the lineage of today’s more than 5,000 zones with more than 100 million workers across over 140 nations can be traced back to late 1940s economic development policy innovations in the US-American dependency Puerto Rico. From there, early zone policies spread with remarkable continuity as frontlines of a singular political-economic value regime with novel relations between capital, state, and labor across the diverse geopolitical constellations of capitalist aggression against socialism, decolonization, and non-alignment. Carried by a dynamic global alliance of US-American, various United Nations agencies, private sector pressure groups, and postcolonial comprador bourgeoisies’ development policies, the zones shaped neoliberal export-oriented industrialization by way of implementing gendered and racialized (super-)exploitation of workers in a new international division of labor. The chapter identifies the zones’ prevalent singular value regime as a global labor arbitrage that pits workers in less-developed nations against workers in advanced capitalist nations, while post-colonial (and nowadays all) nation-states provide subsidies for transnational capital in exchange for the provision of employment, contributions to gross domestic product, and incorporation into global value chains. Alongside this, persistent zone operations have established a plural value regime that portrays investors as benevolent donors of employment despite the fact that they operate SEZ factories on the basis of gendered and other super-exploitation that has pushed labor standards into a global race to the bottom

Export processing zones and global class formation

Anthropologists are renown for studying small places. Even though the discipline’s focus has extended well beyond the remote and fairly self-contained villages that were its characteristic subject matter through most of the twentieth century, a concern with the local remains an important part of the way that anthropologists approach the world. This orientation brings benefits to anthropologists and to those who study their works, but it also brings costs. In particular, that concern with the local often diverts attention from the broader frame that encompasses the locality. Even anthropologists who have studied the local in terms of that frame commonly focus on the relationship between the local and the frame, rather than seeing the frame as part of their understanding of those small places (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Ong 2006). Equally, that concern often is accompanied by an inattention to things that are not apparent from the local perspective. So, a focus on the local can accommodate slum dwellers in Mumbai or workers in a Bangalore call center, but not the places where their broader frame is shaped, such as a working group within the World Bank or a conference attracting international investors. As a result, anthropological descriptions and analyses of these small places commonly are partial, or even flawed, as they omit important factors affecting the local