Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 4: The toxic cradle of productionof development and shapes the new world of clean production. “In the words of EdgarWoolard Jr, former chairman of DuPont, ‘The goal is zero: zero accidents, zero waste,zero emissions’” [71].This representation of green capitalism, in a book written for Greenpeace, could notbe further from the experience of actual networked production and it fundamentallymistakes the nature of capital. First, the new wave of development has been accompaniedby a new wave of waste precisely from the cutting edge sector of electronics, as shownin Box 13.Second, global production networks have located the dirty end of the productionchain in the global South giving the North the appearance of clean production. This isan uneven process but, schematically, what has emerged is a triangular ordering of theglobal economy. Raw materials from Africa and Latin America are taken to the Asianfactory to produce goods consumed in the North. This flow of resources is largelymanaged by Northern transnational corporations who also determine the technologiesof production, control product development and allocate ‘value’ – or profits – throughthe network. Heavy pollution in China, and recent scandals involving the contaminationof goods produced there, has as much to do with cost cutting imposed by Northernlead firms as with cowboy development in the wild East. Europe, in Murray’s view, isleading the revolution in clean production. A critical European perspective on this isgiven by environmentalist Wolfgang Sachs in Box 14.Third, the management of production networks is counted as ‘services’ rather than‘industry’. The transition from high energy industrial to low energy service economiesis generally represented as inherent to the trajectory of development: where the(post)industrial developed world leads, the developing world will follow as they ‘catchup’. But first they must pass through the stage of industrialisation. To the contrary,however, the service economies are possible only on the basis of the global structuringof production described above and they rely on the unequal global division of labour.This brings us to the fourth problem – the wasting of people. Globally, and in individualcountries as labour scholars Edward Webster and Karl von Holdt [2005] have shownfor South Africa, the world of work is increasingly unequal and divided into threemajor ‘zones’: a shrinking core of permanent and well skilled workers with substantiallabour rights; a growing ‘non-core’ of insecure casualised and contract workers who canWasting the Nation - groundWork - 83 -