What are the socio-economic and ecological effects of mass-production in the South for the purpose of matching mass-consumption in the North? This Third World Quarterly article examines the two levels of the process of displacement, which in the current global capitalist order inherently displaces insecurity onto marginalised populations in order to reproduce the social conditions for accumulation at a global level. This illustrates the current crisis as a momentary violation with an existing rational social order, the discourse of security seeks to normalise the global status quo and justify a sequence of actions to securitise it.
The notion of security is undeniably intertwined within the project of development. Security underscores the rule of law that guarantees property rights upheld by capitalism, enforces the commodity form upon social relations, and highlights the power of money as a universal claim on social resources. Security is illustrated in the construction, reproduction and extension of the legal and political infrastructure for capitalist development. With capitalist development represented as the rational outcome of a market society, the security of development becomes ideologically charged as the security of a rational order.
The first level of the process of displacement argued by the author relates to the social dynamics of the international division of labour. It is against a backdrop of labour-made-cheap that the ongoing transformation of the international division of labour must be examined. The escalating internationalisation of labour-intensive production nuclei in Asia and Latin America has developed creating a new industrial workforce. These developments in the labour market have resulted in:
- a notable increase in the length of the working week and the intensity of work within industrial production; and
- a relocating to regions where the costs of the social reproduction of the worker are low, this having enabled the reduction of wage costs within the overall product dramatically.
The second level of the process of displacement occurring is related to the socio-ecological foundations of contemporary divisions of consumption. These are the result of the consolidation of a global division of consumption in which Western mass consumption displaces ecological costs onto the global majority, creating grave insecurities over future life and livelihoods. The articles offers key examples of the ecological impacts of the current mass production and consumption mechanisms, these include:
- The absorption of mass industrial production has resulted in a mounting environmental crisis within China with high levels of pollution affecting both the environment and the health of people.
- Due to climate change, the rapid melt of Himalayan glaciers caused by climate change will enforce dramatic social upheavals in the valleys fed by the ‘Water Tower of Asia’.
- In Southeast Asia, rising sea levels threaten to engulf the low-lying coastal deltas of the subcontinent and amplify the intrusion of salt water into the groundwater further inland.
The article concludes that the institutions of international development have been unable to transcend the liberal epistemology that correlates development with the security and expansion of capitalist social relations. As the inconsistencies of capitalism continue to develop, the mission for critical theory becomes not only to scrutinise the contradictions of capitalist development, but also to offer methods in which these crises are latent with possibilities to break from the unsustainable trajectory of the present.
