From: "FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za>
Date:          Fri, 14 Jun 1996 16:32:06 GMT + 2:00
Subject:       Re: discussing neo-liberalism & utopia


Hi comrades. Harald wrote:

> I am sorry that it is has taken me so long responding to Franco's post of 18
> April. I'm been busy with other things.
> 

I am sorry too to be so late in answering to Harald.

> What's more I'm highly sceptical to the very notion of "the possibility of a
> rupture in the restructuration which is not recuperable and which is
> INDEDEPENDENT (my emphasis) of the maturation of class-consciousness." I may
> have misinterpreted Negri, so it would be interesting to hear how other
> people on this list read the foregoing passages.
>

Probably Negri means that restructuring is now premised on an 
activation of workers' communicational and informational skills in 
the workplace and that this means putting in value their entire 
experiential and perceptive sphere as developed outside the factory 
as well, and that this defines a new kind of dependence of the 
capitalist labour process on worker subjectivity, what ultimately, 
given the increasingly arbitrary nature of exploitation, will lead 
to the overcoming of the capital-labour relation itself. I don't 
entirely buy this argument, as I have explained in previous posts. 
Fiirstly, bacause it still smacks of determinism and teleology. 
Secondly, because the appearence of new info-communicational skills 
on the workplace is not sufficient to rule out the permanence of 
older forms of capitalist control and division of labour. Thirdly, 
because they are not still sufficient to define a new kind of fully-
fledged "core" workforce as the dominant feature of the new 
production model and as clearly separated from pre-existing figures 
supposedly doomedto be confined to the "periphery". This holds 
especially in considering proletarianization processes in the NICs, 
the restructuring of labour markets as a result ofthe subordinate 
incorporation of the households in capitalist production for the 
world markets, the diffusion of precariousness and insecurity among 
the "informatized" and "communicatized" workers themselves. 

However, I think that what Negri wrote can indicate a *trend* to the 
increasing reliance of capital in the age of flexibility on worker 
subjectivity, and this *regardless* for the actual forms of control, 
Fordist, post-Fordist, whatever. I don't think that 
decentralized quality controls or Just-in-Time or even teamwork by 
itself are sufficient to define a rupture with Fordism (maybe they do 
with Taylorism, but this is a different story). And I don't think 
that such devices are less efficient in Fordism than in a supposed 
post-Fordist model. But this is not relevant. What is relevant is 
that restructuring in the age of flexibility involves a set of 
*promises* for workers (greater responsibilization in production, 
greater control of the process and the like) which are invariably 
broken and betrayed by the underlying inequality in power relations 
and by the exposure to competitive globalized markets. This generates 
a whole series of highly complex responses. 

Workers can positively evaluate quality and competitiveness, but only 
insofar they maintain the perception that this is associated with a 
certain degree of control over their job. Once this is broken at a 
subjective level, actions of insurgency can arise, as it often 
happens here in SA. Can we say that in the former case they have a 
kind of false consciousness and in the second one it is a real one? 
For me it is a bit simplistic and misleading. What is more likely is 
that even if workers are compliant with the imperatives of production 
this also implies that the meanings they give them are not coincident 
with management's ones, that they rely on a set of assumptions and 
norms, *developed especially by an understanding of their autonomy as 
a capacity of action developed in their experience prior to factory 
life*. And when these assumptions and norms, which are *exceeding* in 
respect to company ideology, are violated moments of insurency, 
eruptions of subjectivity take place. And this is necessarily 
*unpredictable*. That is what, I think, Negri meant for *regardless 
for class consciousness*. I don't have much time now, but I think 
that seriously trying to assess the issue of worker subjectivity 
involves rejecting the notion of class consciousness as trasnalted 
into the Lukacsian Marxist "vulgata". I deal with these aspects in a 
paper I've just posted to Steve for the list's archives on worker 
subjectivity with reference to my research on SA automobile industry. 
Steve: did you get the paper? Otherwise please, get in touch with me.

On Harald's points on organization and class language. Well, I'm 
sorry but I still think that the penetration of managerial ideology 
at any level of the traditional working class mass proletariat is 
disarticulating both its class language and its associated 
organizational forms. But this is not building, I don't wnat to be 
misunderstood on this point, a new reconciled labouring subject who 
effectively buys all the ideologica shit on the holistic approach to 
the labour process. The problem is that workers are not passive 
subjects simply suffering managerial ideology. Even if they accept 
that to a certain extent, they also nurture expectations in exchange. 
The problem is not whether those expectations are reflecting a "class 
language" or a "class consciousness", but to understand the process 
through which those expectations, once betrayed, are re-elaborated to 
define a subversive collective subjectivity. And this not in order to 
substitute a new theory to that of class consciousness, but because I 
think that is how the most important factory conflict are taking 
place under capitalism now. I would say that is the way through which 
factory itself can be understood as a site of conflict, even if the 
processes through which this happens are not so clear. For that I 
said we need a new "anthropology of work". And from that, from the 
analysis of the material processes of development of antagonist 
subjects, I think we can start re-thinking the issue of the 
organization. Subjectivity is a prism whose faces do not always 
reflect a shining class language but where all its faces, 
nonetheless, shed light to illuminate social conflict.

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Programme
Dept of Sociology
Private Bag 3
University of the Witwatersrand
PO Wits 2050
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel. (++27 11) 716.2908
Fax  (++27 11) 716.3781
E-Mail 029frb-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html
http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/direct.htm

Home:
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Kensington 2094
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel. (++27 11) 614.3497







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