Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 07:35:36 +1100
Subject: Re: Precarization was: Re: AUT: Backward workers, was: Negri and
From: Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine-AT-yahoo.com.br>


On 2/12/2004 12:36 AM, "Lowe Laclau" <lowe.laclau-AT-gmail.com> wrote:

> Well what I was saying is that capital/states would not find neither
> ability nor necessity for such a transformation in the regulation of
> labor markets without a broad set of macroeconomic factors of which
> Wal Mart is only a minute piece. In this sense... "made possible".

As I said, Wal Mart is a metaphor, but given that it happens to be the
largest corporation in the world it is only barely so. What it interesting
about it, as a metaphor and as a concrete reality, is what Doug noted - that
the workers don't need to be goaded into worshing the company and its
president, they don't need to have the values which facilitate their
structuration shoved into their heads. They do it themselves. As such, this
section of the working class represents a cutting edge of capitalism: only
at the broadest measure are they deluded by ideology like other workers have
been deluded by ideology. Look into the fine structure, and something quite
radical has been happening. Wal Mart represents an extremely successful, and
dangerous, class compact, a possible reaction to and facilitation of
precarization that is radically at odds with the image of the casualised
worker as a potential unrooted subversive.

I can't see any reason, other than prejudice and fashion, to think that
hackers are more representative of the emerging precariat. It's much more
comforting to think they are, but most of us sods will end up in shitty
services. 

> 
> I'd also question whether cultural values had so much to do with
> precarisation in industries. If my main priority is on my pocket, my
> only rationality will be the instrumental rationality of capitalism,
> not what I think about women or gays or whatever. I'm simply looking
> to rationalize the organization of my industry in the manner that
> gives me the most out of a given labor market or set of labor markets.

Your reading of what a 'cultural value' is is just really very naïve; like
Thomas Frank and every other clod who runs around screaming about how lazy
the identity politics and postmodernists are, you have missed the important
point, which is certainly not lost on the GOP, that values are as real as
lumps of steel. 

Your reading, moreover, starts and finishes with the gaze of th ruling class
- and doesn't even do a very good job of conveying it. Proletariats do not
emerge fully formed from the Sam Walton's head.

*sigh* Can we please try to avoid phrases like "...women or gays or
whatever" when talking about all that fluffy stuff that doesn't matter?

Thiago





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