Re: AUT: Fascism

[Arianna <ari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

just thought in relation to your point this extract might be interesting:

In the long run, the products of immaterial labour will be the crucial assets for each nation: scientific and technological research, training of the labour-force, development of management, communication, electronic financial networks. In the universe of intellectual labour we find: researchers, engineers, computer scientists, lawyers, some creative accountant, management consultants, financial advisors, publicists, the ^Ñpracticioners^Ò, editors and journalists, university professors. This ^Ñrank^Ò is destined to accelerate the process of decline of all activities of the taylorist kind, i.e. the repetitive and executive ones, that are easy to reproduce in countries with low-cost labour force; whilst services to people, even though still important in a society with a strong tertiary sector, cannot benefit from material subsidies, since they are not, according to Reich, value creating activities.
The economist^Òs resoning runs more or less like this: the globalisation of the economy does no longer allow one to refer ownership of capital to the national composition of the means of production. For instance, a Ford is the result of partial and combined activities that are dispersed around the globe and concerted within global webs, where what counts is efficiency and the productivity of communication. The car that results from this process of productin is a composite of parts produced in different nations, by means of a capital of multinational ownership.
However, what is lost as a consequence of the de-nationalisation of capital ownership (i.e. the means of production, costant capital) is recuperated at the level of ownership of immaterial labour, of the control of knowledge production. The denationalisation of physical-material capital is counterbalanced by the nationalisation of knowledge, and the command on its organisation. ^ÑBuy American^Ò means from now on: ^ÑValorise american knowledge^Ò. Nationality, according to Reich^Òs reasoning, is recuperated through a strategic investment in activities that create more value, i.e. immaterial activities that characterise the post-fordist mode of production. The income generated by immaterial activity must be nationalised in order to deal with the unemployment of the unskilled American labour-force and reduce the disparity of income between skilled labourers and the working poors (competition with emerging countries) without inhibiting the comparative advantage of the US with respect to the rest of the world. American pride ought to function as solidaristic glue:  when compared with competitive countries, the greater wealth generated by greater productivity and skill of immaterial labour provides the fiscal means to temper the deterioration of the life conditions of unqualified and defeated American people. (Marazzi: p90-91)


At 13:12 21/02/2002, you wrote:
>If Negri+Hardt are right, we are seeing the decline of
>the nation-state. With the decline of the
>nation-state, nationalism also starts to die.
>
>Hence, to equate fascism with extreme nationalism,
>won't make too much sense in a couple of years (hardly
>anyone will be seen as a fascist).


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