Supply Chain Workers’ Inquiries: Class Struggle along Value Chains

Abstract

Abstract The following is an account of my own personal involvement, over the last 20 years, with a circle of militants in California’s San Francisco Bay Area who have been researching changes in the class composition of global production. We have been using informal and formal inquiries with rank-and-file workers to analyze how transformations in communication, data gathering, and transportation technologies have revolutionized the logistics industry. Our goal has been finding supply chain vulnerabilities, where working class solidarity has the greatest possibility to spread up and down these value chains, and for class struggle to be effectively cross-sectoral and international. The following is a balance sheet of our efforts, demonstrating the instances when we were able to realize our goals, as well as critiquing our limitations. We hope this will point to the importance of workers’ inquiries in the current era, especially in adjusting to the many changes the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, exposing the weaknesses of just-in-time production chains spanning the planet, changes to class composition, and encouraging new forms of class struggle along ever-changing value chains.