Supply Chains in Capitalism Today: From Foxconn to Wal-Mart

Date: Thursday 27th June

Time: 7.30-9.30pm

Location: Hydra Books, 34 Old Market St, Bristol, BS2 0EZ

Price: Donation

Speaker: Gifford Hartman

Supply Chains in Capitalism Today: From Foxconn to Wal-Mart

One of the forms in which the working class exists today is at the various nodal points along global commodity chains. Global production is based on a system of “factories without walls,” where increasingly components are manufactured using an inventory-less subcontracting system that races around the globe looking for the “leanest” costs of production — especially cheap and compliant labor. Yet these just-in-time chains are vulnerable and this presentation identifies the nodes where struggles offer the greatest possibility for solidarity to spread down supply chains — and across oceans and borders. The presentation will show the links between bread riots worldwide in 2008, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy shutdown of the Port of Oakland, California in November, 2011.

Gifford Hartman is a writer and activist from California, USA.