Producing red consciousness
> Youth are rebellious against meaningless work and face the problems of less skill
> and
> seniority, lower pay scales, dirtier work. Unemployment and underemployment are
> massive among youth; young people are used as a reserve pool of low-skilled labor.
>
>
— Weather Underground, Prairie Fire: The politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism
A further point on post-fordism. It’s interesting that the idea of the ‘global petit-bourgeoisie’ from Agamben is prefigured in the last place you would expect, in the statement of the arch-Third Worldists, the Weather Underground. What makes their particular brand of Third Worldism still relevant is that they recognise that imperialism is not something that just happens abroad. In Prairie Fire, they argue that imperialism is the name for the oppression of the first-world working class as much as it is the name for colonialism and neo-colonialism. This is one of the book’s most contemporary references; replace ‘imperialism’ with ‘globalisation’ and you could almost be reading Hardt and Negri.
Almost, but not quite — Weather’s perspective on the flattening of the first and third worlds concedes less to the boosters of globalisation (such as the absurd Thomas Friedman) who cheer the skyscrapers of New Dehli as a sign of the limitless expansion of the first world. The reality is more complicated and less pleasant. In the era of real subsumption, capital and empire are not _simply_ limitless, with no outside. Instead, empire increasingly depends on a direct inclusion of its outside which, paradoxically, maintains its character as an outside even while it becomes absolutely central (again, we have a precise political-economic equivalent of Agamben’s discussion of the state of exception). The subsistence economy of the favela is no longer marginal, no longer a sign of capitalism’s failure, but of its success
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Tim: what’s your connection to Chris Lightfoot? Apparently I was sitting next to him at Bill Thompson’s Geek Punt conference last weekend.
Comment by leila @ 6/10/2005 8:45 pm
No connection, really, except that I read his blog. And I once sat at the other end of the table from him at a No2ID meeting.
Comment by Tim @ 6/11/2005 1:46 am