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Contribution short abstract:

Gathering cultural forms watched by fragments of the global collective worker – and situating them via the global social process of capital, rather than ‘stages of development’ – this paper hopes to probe how they can reveal differences and commonalities in these fragmented workers’ struggles.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the fragmented subjectivities of the global collective worker. Taking case-studies from positions in global value chains, the paper cris-crosses countries in different ‘stages of development’, to bring together cultural forms global workers are watching and reproducing themselves through–from Zambian miners’ preferred TV shows, to Silicon Valley developers’ favoured video games. And, while it firmly situates these cultural forms in relation to each fragment’s global position, it does so by comprehending each fragment as an aspect of a fundamentally global process (Bonefeld and Holloway 1996). In so doing, the paper seeks to step ‘out’ of the methodological statism that can afflict conceptions of ‘development’. Here, we are not dealing with organic national ‘paths of development’ that have been held back or accelerated – either by inter-national (core-periphery / unequal) relations, or national policy successes / mistakes (Iñigo Carrera 2016). Rather, what may appear as ‘under-development’ is simply a result of how that territory has participated in the uneven development of global capital. This is not to deny that inter-national relations have effects – but to stress that the determining relation is between territories and a global capital whose dictates are produced ‘behind the backs’ of all state actors. From this basis, it’s hoped we can probe these forms for the differences and commonalities in how these fragments of the global collective worker are processing their struggles to survive in –and against - a crisis-ridden social process whose only developmental concern is that ‘money beget more money’.