Ironically, autonomism articulated its theories of worker power in the social factory at the very moment when capital’s adoption of cybernetic technologies began to present an unprecedented challenge to their fundamental premises. Computers and digital networks had been developed within the US military-industrial-academic complex during the Second World War and the Cold War. From the 1970s on, in the midst of an economic slow-down that saw profit rates sharply decline after a 30-year boom, these technologies were increasingly deployed at the home fronts of North American and European capitalism. This transition from Fordism to post-Fordism decomposed the power of the industrial working class. Beverly Silver (2003), a labour historian who, while not herself an autonomist, has a broadly similar analysis, describes how in confronting its labour problems, capital can resort to three ‘fixes’: ‘technical’, ‘spatial’ and ‘financial’. From the 1970s on, the ‘technical fix’ entailed automating factories and offices, pursuing the mechanical liquidation of labour, but at a level heightened by digital technologies, exemplified by the introduction of robots into auto factories. The ‘spatial fix’ involved relocating industrial production via supply chains to cheap labour/low-regulation zones of the world market: rather than replacing capital’s workforce with machines, this fix expanded it globally, but at the lowest wage, and with maximum disposability. The third ‘financial fix’ attempted to escape production entirely by moving into the realm of speculation, developing instruments such as derivatives and futures, at first to defensively hedge foreign investments, then morphing into high-risk gambling machines.
automating the social factory
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