著者

片岡 信之

出版者

JAPAN ASSOCIATION OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

no.93, pp.147-160,L16, 1990

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Sufficient attention has not paid to the reproduction of labor in the literature of the capitalist world-system. But recently we can see a growing recognition of the fact that the availability of appropriate labor power is of primary importance for the accumulation of capital in a particular region. For example, international labor migration as one of the various forms of 'the global labor supply system' has attracted the increasing interest of international economics students.<br>This paper, inspired by this trend, attempts to analyze what I call 'the mechanisms of externalizing the cost of labor reproduction' in the capitalist world-system. The relative cheapness of available labor, in addition to its quantity and quality, constitutes one of the essential requirements of an appropriate labor supply. Labor has been made cheap by imposing part of the reproduction cost upon the so-called 'non-capitalist' spheres.<br>On such mechanism is the 'functional dualism' between the capitalist sector and the rural subsistence economy in peripheral economies. The process of disintegration in the rural subsistence sector has been constrained, since this sector assumes the costs reproducing new generations of workers and absorbs those that have become redundant in the capitalist sector. This 'subsidy' paid by the subsistence sector is translated into the extremely low wages which characterize the peripheral economies.<br>Marxist feminism has emphasized the similar mechanism between the market and the home in center economies. Wage is only a monetary cost of reproduction and requires a lot of unpaid domestic work to accomplish a reproduction of labor meeting the hard demand of center economies. This non-monetary 'subsidy' overwhelmingly assumed by women helps lower the wage level relatively.<br>The present restructuring of the world economy called 'the new international division of labor' can be seen also as a restructuring of 'the mechanisms of externalizing the cost of labor reproduction.' The rural subsistence enclaves in the Third World are diminishing and the expanding informal sector in 'hyper-urbanized' cities functions as a substitute for the rural sectors. The penetration of transnational corporations caused and/or facilitated this transformation, indirectly through the cultural change of Third World societies, and directly through the employment of rural young women into TNCs' 'world market factories.'<br>Most women in these factories are fired around the age of 24. After that they tend to emigrate to developed countries where more and more cheap labor is needed because of the 'informalization' now under way in the process of industrial restructuring, or disappear into the informal sector of Third World cities.<br>Women have always disproportionately assumed the burden of externalized reproduction costs and the restructurings of these mechanisms have historically pivoted on women. This is true in the latest global restructuring which is at the same time a restructuring of the international political economy. Marxist feminism has much to offer concerning this.