The Globalisation of Production and the Struggle for Workers’ Unity: Lessons from Bangladesh

Declining profitability was at the heart of the last system-threatening crisis to afflict the major imperialist economies in the 1970s. The relocation of wide sectors of industrial production to low-wage countries played a crucial, yet insufficiently acknowledged, role in the restoration of profits and exit from that crisis. The outsourcing of production – or ‘export-oriented industrialisation’ looked at from a Southern perspective – gave the capitalist system a respite that was to last for barely 25 years, all the time preparing the ground for the eruption of a new, even bigger crisis. I begin by discussing how the fundamental force driving and