UC Berkeley

This project begins with a simple observation: during the first decade of the 21st century, worker resistance in China continued to increase rapidly despite the fact that certain segments of the state began moving in a pro-labor direction. This poses a problem for the Polanyian theory of the countermovement which conflates resistance to the market with actual decommodification and incorporation of labor. I then pose the question, why is labor strong enough to win major legislative and policy concessions from the state, but not strong enough to significantly benefit from these policies? The "incomplete" nature of the countermovement can be explained with reference to the dynamics of labor politics in China, and specifically the relationship between migrant workers, unions, and the state, or what I refer to as "appropriated representation." Because unions in China are an invention of the state, they have good access to policy makers but are highly illegitimate amongst their own membership, i.e. strong at the top, weak at the bottom. Labor's impotence within enterprises means that pro-labor laws and collective agreements frequently go un-enforced. As a result, workers are forced to take radical autonomous action in order to have their grievances addressed. Expanding worker insurgency strengthens the hand of unions at the national (and potentially provincial and even municipal) level, but fails to produce a durable re-alignment of power at the point of production that is capable of enforcing laws. Thus, the central state's initiatives to advance the interests of migrant workers is simultaneously undermined by their categorical ban on independent worker organization, a dilemma I refer to as insurgency trap. Through an analysis of several most-likely cases, I empirically demonstrate the problems generated by appropriated representation and attempt to discern under what conditions insurgency trap can be undone. By reconfiguring the theory of the countermovement, I gain conceptual clarity on the relationship between spontaneous resistance to the market and institutionalization of class compromise.