Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 16:17:44 -0600
From: Nate Holdren <nateholdren-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Precarization was: Re: AUT: Backward workers, was: Negri and Charleton Heston?


hi Thiago-

I only have anecdotal evidence for this, but in some places WalMart is
actually a better job than folks have had otherwise in recent memory,
which feeds into the stuff you're talking about.

I worked on a union drive that took me to parts of rural Missouri for
a few months. I housecalled a woman - living in a tiny trailer home -
who was no longer doing homecare (the unionization drive was among
homecare workers) and was very happy because she had gotten "the best
job she'd ever had at a place she really loved". The place? WalMart.
My co-worker, an oldtime socialist and former steelworker, almost fell
out of his chair when she said that.

best,
Nate


On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 07:35:36 +1100, Thiago Oppermann
<difference_3ngine-AT-yahoo.com.br> wrote:
> 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.


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