Anti-luddism
In a blinding (because blazingly illuminating) series of posts (continued in part 2, part 3, part 4 and now part 5), Spurious brings a different perspective to issues of precarity. Words that particularly grabbed me:
Who is aware of it, this light? Only the part-time worker, the contractor who goes home early at three o’clock or, who, because she has no friends among her colleagues, looks out of the vast windows across to the field out of which a new retail village has begun to appear.
One of the things I’ve taken away from the precarity discussions around the ESF is the need to re-think the primacy of workplace struggles. I see the plausibility of the Leninist idea that the workplace is the privileged site of struggle because that is where the proletariat’s economic strength is greatest. But to assume that it necessarily holds true today is to be insufficiently historicist, to forget that this applies to a particular organisation of capitalism. What kind of workplace struggle can I engage in when half of my working time is spent at home, working for a company with one other employee, and for clients perhaps a couple of hundred miles away, perhaps I know not where?
In an earlier stage of capitalism, the luddites waged sporadic, isolated attacks on a capitalism that was itself isolated into a few locations. As capitalism increasingly spreads out over the whole of society, do we not need an inverse of luddism, a method of struggle which targets capital everywhere?
But what would this look like? Up until now (as one would expect in an age just entering post-fordism) struggle outside workplaces has generally been idealist, either consciousness-raising (certainly useful but obviously not sufficient) or moralistic ‘demands’ to those in power. What sort of genuinely materialist activity can we take outside of the workplace? As post-modernism is, in part a hyper-modernism so post-fordism is hyper-fordism (or, for the Hegelians amongst you, an aufhebung of fordism); I imagine the action we need would be a kind of hyper-strike, a social strike. But my imagination doesn’t extend as far as seeing what such a thing would look like. Perhaps Spurious’s does?
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