Re: Virno: "Post-Fordism is the empirical realization of the 'Fragment on Mac...

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>As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great
well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must
cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value must
cease to be the measure of use value.'<

 

Comment

 

"Post Fordism" has been articulated by some as "post industrial" and "labor in the direct form" posited alongside of dead labor or indirect labor represented in machinery. Other's in quiet conversation speak of the polarization between exchange value and use-value or the rupture in the commodity form of social products or even the increased polarization between value and price.

 

Not simply the barrier to conversion created by the cheapening of labor power, overcapacity and over production but a rupture, the emergence of a new qualitative configuration that emerges from within the industrial process and radically changes forever the interactivity of dead and living labor and with this the mass circulation of commodities based on labor time slowly grinds to a halt, based on the increasing valuelessness of direct living labor. Or is it the industrial form of production itself? Then there is species money, which seems to me to be based on military force by definition.  

 

At any rate things should be clearer in say 2025, a mere twenty years.

 

Tim Robbins has out a new movie (Code 46) that gives visual representation to this brave new world, with its accompanied eco-catastrophe, huge cities, applied genetic manipulation and an urban population living outside the "imperial center cities." Interestingly, automobiles as the primary form of individual transportation does not exist in this vision. The automobile seems to have gone the way of all flesh or Fordism.

 

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