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This article critically evaluates trade union strategies and the international consumer campaign in the garment industry. It looks at the origin of the trade union inability to deal with the movement of capital that recaptured ‘labour’ in the global garment industry, by tracing labour’s reaction to the movement of capital emerging around protectionism in the 1960s, all the way to the debates around the 2004 Multi-Fibre Arrangement. This is followed by a critical review of the international consumer campaign and the corporate reaction that saw the introduction of company Codes of Conduct and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that challenged the international solidarity-building undertaken by the trade union movement. We draw on examples from the consumer campaign in the garment industry to argue these new campaigns take an individualistic approach to capitalist social relation and risk creating new divisions of labour, while reinforcing older one. Moreover, they risk driving the labour movement towards increased dependence on transnational capital for protection, The conclusion is that building a new labour solidarity is possible for the labour movement only if it is engaged in organizing from the ‘bottom-up’, both inside and outside factories, in developing as well as developed countries, rather than taking a top-down approach based on the market power of developed countries or the institutionalized leverage of international trade unions. Dae-oup Chang is the research coordinator of Asia Monitor Resource Centre. Monina Wong is the executive director of Labour Action China. They are involved in building up an Asia-regional labour network, Asian Transnational Corporation Monitoring Network, which consists of more than 20 labour NGOs and unions working for theories and practices of organizing labour against mobile capital. 128 The Movement of Capital and Capitalist Labour The Origin of Capital Movement It is not an exaggeration to say the mobility of capital is rewriting the labour movement. In many labour disputes, employers repeatedly emphasize their readiness to relocate factories. The freedom and ease with which corporations can relocate is the greatest fear for worker organizations. It also provides a good excuse for governments to introduce anti-labour policies in many countries. People are repeatedly told that firms and national economies will be in deep trouble if they undermine investors’ confidence. For external labour monitoring groups, capital mobility gives a temporary nature to their findings and makes it more difficult to trace the movement of the capital group responsible for leaving workers behind. The huge increase in foreign direct investment in recent years illustrates the greater cross-border capital movement. Asia is no exception. FDI in Asian developing countries increased from $396 million in 1980 to $147,545 million in 2004 (UNCTAD 2004). The relative significance of the investment flow into Asian developing countries also increased. FDI inflow into Asia’s growing economies accounted for a mere 0.7 per cent of global FDI in 1980. In 2004, this figure had increased to 22.7 per cent. Foreign investment from Asian developing countries also grew significantly from $11.4 billion in 1990 to $69.4 billion in 2004 (UNCTAD 2004). Although the intensified international movement of capital is a recent phenomenon, the movement of capital itself is nothing new as capital always moves in search of greater profit. The origin of capital mobility lies in the very nature of capital accumulation that inevitably develops in competition with other individual capital and in conflict with labour. The competitive pressure is not something from which individual capital can escape. Rather, it is based on the basic reproductive mechanism incarnated in the commodity-form (Marx 1990). Commodity has a dual nature: it has value as a product of useful labour, while it also has socially recognized ‘value’ as a product of abstract labour (Marx 1990). It is the nature of commodity to be a product of (homogeneous and commensurable) abstract labour that makes products as real commodity, exchangeable in the market. Therefore, a particular nature of ‘capitalist’ labour is that it is and must be value-producing labour (Clarke 1991). Other than value-
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