JennyChan.PhDThesis.2014.FINAL

observers find that young laborers were skilful in combining legalistic and
extra-legal means to advance their individual or collective demands, rather than
tolerating injustice. 94
During the work process, managerial control is crucial to extract labor power and to
procure profit (that is surplus value) in capitalist production. Structurally, the
disciplining of workers to conditions of factory production entails “the social control
of physical and mental powers on a very broad basis.” 95 The subjective or
ideological dimension 96 of work, however, needs to be carefully examined. Michael
Burawoy in his seminal work The Politics of Production succinctly explains:
The crucial issue is that the interests that organize the daily life of
workers are not given irrevocably; they cannot be imputed; they are
produced and reproduced in particular ways. To assume, without further
specification, that the interests of capital and labor are opposed leads to
serious misunderstandings of the nature of capitalist control, if only
because it provides an excuse to ignore the ideological terrain on which
interests are organized…We must investigate the conditions under which
the interests of labor and capital actually become antagonistic. 97
The nature of class opposition, or worker acquiescence, is dynamic; it is not a thing
that exists in a static form. Under the right circumstances, workers share a common
identity on their interests “as between themselves” and “as against other men whose
interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.” 98 In other times, the
unevenness or disjuncture of class experience between workers is observed. 99 In the
University of California Press.
94 Chris King-Chi Chan, 2013, “Contesting Class Organization: Migrant Workers’ Strikes in China’s
Pearl River Delta, 1978-2010,” International Labor and Working-Class History 83 (Spring), pp.
112-36; Chris King-Chi Chan and Pun Ngai, 2009, “The Making of a New Working Class: A Study
of Collective Actions of Migrant Workers in South China,” China Quarterly 198, pp. 287-303; Wang
Jianhua and Meng Quan, 2013, “Xinshengdai ongmingong de Jiti Kangzheng Moshi” (Collective
Resistance Models of a New Generation of Rural Migrant Workers”) 新 生 代 農 民 工 的 集 體 抗 爭 模
式 , Open Times《 開 放 時 代 》No.1. http://www.opentimes.cn/bencandy.php?fid=367&aid=1702
95 David Harvey, 1989, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, p. 123.
96 Michael Burawoy specifies that “any work context” involves three inseparable dimensions: “an
economic dimension (production of things), a political dimension (production of social relations), and
an ideological dimension (production of an experience of those relations).” See his book The Politics
of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism (1985), London: Verso, p. 39.
97 Michael Buraowy, 1985, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and
Socialism, London: Verso, p. 28-29.
98 E. P. Thompson, 1966, The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage, p. 9.
99 Keith McClelland, 1990, “Introduction,” E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, edited by Harvey J.
Kaye and Keith McClelland, Cambridge, England: Polity Press, p. 4.
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