[p2p-research] higher transportation costs can reverse globalization

[Kevin Carson]

On 5/30/08, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This study is dynamite:
> http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/feature1.pdf

It is, indeed, a great article.  I recently read Waddell and Bodek's
*Rebirth of American Industry*, which described the (lean) Toyota
Production System.  It also explained how attempts to implement lean
production, in companies governed by the basic metrics and assumptions
of the prevailing Sloan management accounting system, were doomed to
failure.

The book includes a foreword by org theory writer H. Thomas Johnson.
He points to the Toyota system as the hope of the future--but not,
interestingly, for its promise of outperforming other giant
corporations in the conventional globalist model.  Rather, he sees the
real hope in the TPS's application to decentralized, small-scale
production.

And he's right on this IMO.  Rubin and Tal refer, among other things,
to container ships.  The just-in-time inventory system, both as it
affects suppliers of lean factories, and in its wholesale version for
Wal-Mart and other big box retailers, is frequently referred to
"warehouses on wheels" (or at sea, in the case of container ships).
And "warehouses on wheels" is a very apt term for it.  Lean
production, as practiced by Toyota, relies on just-in-time supply
chain operations to reduce inventory costs to zero.  But as practiced
by a giant corporation like Toyota, it simply outsources the inventory
costs to the long-haul trucks and container ships.  They're not only
still paying for de facto warehouses to hold inventory, they're paying
the fuel costs to move it around.   That's why, IMO, trying to
integrate lean production into a conventional globalized economy of
large corporations is putting new wine in old bottles (although Ohno
did it as well as it was humanly possible to do it).  The TPS is
really meant for a decentralized world where the trucks and container
ships are eliminated,  the supply chains are local and composed of
small firms (on the Emilia-Romagna model), and the local economy is
organized for producing on a demand-pull basis.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html