Precarization was: Re: AUT: Backward workers, was: Negri and

[Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 30/11/2004 11:54 PM, "Lowe Laclau" <lowe.laclau@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Well precarization isn't made possible by Wal Mart. Its made possible
> by transformations in the decisions of financial capital (monetary
> relations).
>
> And these examples of the Zapatistas and ACT UP (I presume) I don't
> think were meant to serve as models for colonization of
> reactionaristic global populations. Rather a models of types of
> resistance and types of functioning of resistance in cooperation.

But, Lowe, precarization is made possible by the presence of oxygen in the
atmosphere of planet earth. "Made possible by" is dangerous stuff. You want
to distinguish between different kinds of enabling and precipitating
conditions. Financial instruments may be important enabling conditions - I
hope you could expand on ths for me - but precarious employment is enacted
by a structure of management and organization of the shopfloor that is, I
would have thought, crucially dependent on the institution of (a) sexism and
(b) religious/backlash conservatism. This would be impossible without a
recomposition of the working class that is, I think, leading the world in
the formation of a new, and extremely dangerous class compact. Dangerous for
us workers, true, but also for capitalism.

I am, of course, using Wal Mart as a metaphor here, but it strikes me that
this company has used certain ideological instruments, notably Christianity
and The Family, as modes for the control of workers. This ideological,
political and industrial recomposition is crucial to the formation of a new
capitalism regime of production/distribution, and in this process, the
working class' self-activity is very important, no less enabling than
financial capital, in the formation of a new compact. Without christian
workers, conservative workers whose material lives take on a backlash form,
Wal Mart would simply not exist. Self-activity: because a lot of what goes
on in a place like Wal Mart, industrially speaking, is a reflection of
predilections and ideas of the working class itself. It's really quite
remarkable - and you miss it all  if you think, in sophisticated terms as
you do, that these people are backward and away from the cutting edge of
capitalism.

Thiago





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