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# PostCapitalism-_Paul-Mason_-_z-library.sk_-1lib.sk_-z-lib.sk_
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Each of the advanced economies went through extreme class warfare from the late 1960s to the mid-70s. We will take Italy as a case study as it is one of the best documented and most heavily discussed, and because it gave birth to some of the earliest conclusions about how we move on from defeat.
ITALY: A NEW KIND OF CONTROL
By 1967 Italy’s economic miracle had pulled 17 million workers from the poor agrarian south to the industrial cities of the north. A shortage of public housing left many of the new migrant workers sleeping six or eight to a room, in shoddy tenements, with public facilities overburdened. But the factories had modern design, world-class technology and there was an élan attached to working there.
Real wages had risen 15 per cent in the decade to 1960.45 The major industrial brands invested heavily in canteens, sports and social clubs, welfare funds and designer overalls. At an industry level, the unions and management jointly agreed wage rates, output and conditions. But at plant level, ‘management absolutism is the rule’, one study reported.46
This combination of rising incomes at work and shabby conditions outside was the first impact of the boom. A second was the surge in student numbers. By 1968 there were 450,000 students – double the number of a decade before. Most came from working-class backgrounds and had no money. They found the universities full of useless textbooks and archaic rules. The historian Paul Ginsborg wrote: ‘The decision to allow open access to such a grossly inadequate university system amounted simply to planting a time bomb in it.’47 A better analogy might have been ‘a detonator’. Student occupations broke out in late 1967, flaring into street violence over the next year. Alongside them began a wave of workers’ strike actions which was to culminate in the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969.
At Pirelli Bicocca in Milan, workers on strike formed a ‘unitary base committee’ – completely independent of the union. As the idea of the base committee spread, so did new kinds of industrial action: sequential onehour strikes across different departments, sit-down strikes, go-slows
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specifically designed to reduce productivity and strikes spread by marching from one department to another in a so-called ‘snake’. A worker at Fiat described one: ‘We set off; just the seven of us. And by the time we got to the head offices where all the staff hung out, there were about seven thousand of us! … Next time we’ll start with seven thousand and end up with seventy thousand, and that’ll be the end of Fiat.’48
The Italian Communist Party rushed to create local bargaining committees but in many plants workers rejected them, drowning out the communists with the chant ‘We are all delegates.’
At a bar outside the Fiat Mirafiori plant in Turin, students initiated a ‘worker-student assembly’. On 3 July 1969 they marched from the factory into a running battle with the police, over the issue of rent increases, chanting a slogan that could have summed up the new mood: ‘What do we want? Everything!’
The leftist group Lotta Continua summarized what the strikers themselves thought they were going through: ‘They are slowly beginning to free themselves. They are destroying constituted authority in the factory.’49
If these developments had been limited to a few hot-headed suburbs in a perennially chaotic country, they would be of curiosity value and no more. But the Italian upsurge was symptomatic of a change taking place all across the developed world; 1969 was to be just the start of a period of contagious economic struggle, which continually spilled over into political conflict and which would trigger a total rethink of the West’s economic model.
It’s important to understand the sequence of events, because in popular literature the breakdown of Keynesianism often gets rolled into a single moment. In 1971, the long post-war upsurge ran out of steam. But the breakdown of fixed exchange rates, paradoxically, gave each country the ability to ‘solve’ wage and productivity pressures by allowing inflation to take off. Then, with the oil price hike of 1973, which triggered double-digit inflation, the old relationship between wages, prices and productivity simply fell apart.
Across the OECD, redistribution payments – family income supplements, welfare benefits and the like – which had averaged 7.5 per cent of GDP
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during the boom years, reached 13.5 per cent by the mid-1970s. Public spending – which had averaged 28 per cent of GDP in the 1950s – now hit 41 per cent.50 The share of total wealth going to industrial profits collapsed by 24 per cent.51
To contain worker militancy, governments hiked the social wage to record levels and brought workers’ representatives into government. In Italy this was in the context of the 1976 ‘historic compromise’ that ended the period of unrest, tying the Communist Party and its trade unions to a conservative-led government. The same basic process can be seen in the Spanish Moncloa Pact of 1978, the ‘social contract’ of the Wilson– Callaghan governments (1974–9), and numerous attempts by the American unions to secure a strategic deal with the Carter administration.
By the late 1970s, all the actors in the old Keynesian system – the organized worker, the paternalist manager, the welfare politician and the state-owned corporation boss – were locked together in a bid to save the failing economic system.
The standardized production process of the post-war era – and the strict scientific management controls it had relied on – ended up creating a workforce it could not control. The mere fact that work-to-rule actions became the most effective form of sabotage tells the real story. It was the workers who really ran the production process. Any proposal to solve macro-economic problems without their consent was pointless.
In response, a new breed of conservative politicians decided the entire system would have to be dismantled. The second oil shock, after the Iranian revolution in 1979, gave them the opportunity. It triggered a new, deep recession and this time the workers faced corporations and politicians determined to try something new: mass unemployment, industrial closures, wage cuts and cuts in public spending.
They also faced the emergence of something they’d insufficiently prepared for in the years of radicalism: a part of the workforce prepared to side with conservative politicians. White southern workers put Reagan into power; many skilled British workers, tired of the chaos, swung to the Conservatives in 1979 to give Thatcher ten years in office. Outright
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working-class conservatism had never gone away: what it always wants is order and prosperity, and by 1979 it could no longer see these things being delivered by the Keynesian model.
By the mid-1980s, the working class of the developed world had moved in the space of fifteen years from passivity to strikes and semi-revolutionary struggles to strategic defeat.
Western capitalism, which had coexisted with organized labour and been shaped by it for nearly two centuries, could no longer live with a workingclass culture of solidarity and resistance. Through offshoring, deindustrialization, anti-union laws and a relentless ideological warfare, it would be destroyed.
DIGITAL REBELS, ANALOGUE SLAVES
After more than thirty years of retreat and atomization, the working class survives, but massively transformed.
In the developed world, the core-periphery model first envisaged in Japan has become the norm, replacing ‘unskilled vs skilled’ as the most important division within the working class. The core workforce has been able to cling on to stable, permanent employment, with non-wage benefits attached to the job. The periphery must relate either as temporary agency workers, or via a network of contracting firms. But the core is shrunken: seven years into the post-2008 crisis, a permanent contract on a decent wage is an unattainable privilege for many people. Being part of the ‘precariat’ is all too real for up to a quarter of the population.
For both groups flexibility has become the key attribute. Among skilled workers, much value is placed on the ability to reinvent yourself, to align yourself with short-term corporate objectives, to be good at forgetting old skills and learning new ones, to be a networker and above all to live the dream of the firm you work for. These qualities, which would have attracted the word ‘scab’ in a Toronto print shop in 1890, are since the 1990s obligatory – if you want to stay in the core.
For the peripheral workforce, flexibility relies first on the general and abstract character of your work. Since much of the work is automated, you need to be able to learn an automated process quickly and follow a formula. While this may often involve boring and dirty manual work – say, personal home care delivered to a strict check-list in fifteen-minute slots for the minimum wage – at its extreme it involves submitting your personal and emotional behaviour to work discipline. At Pret A Manger, staff are required to smile and be cheerful, and are encouraged ‘to touch each other’. The official list of forbidden activities include working ‘just for the money’ or to ‘overcomplicate things’. One reported: ‘After a day’s trial, your fellow workers vote on how well you fit the profile; if your performance lacks sparkle, you’re sent home with a few quid.’52
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The workforce of all developed countries is now heavily serviceoriented. Only in the export giants – Germany, South Korea and Japan – does the industrial workforce come close to 20 per cent of the whole; for the rest of the economically advanced countries it is between 10 per cent and 20 per cent.53
In the developing world too, only around 20 per cent of the workforce is industrial.54 While the global workforce numbers around 3 billion, and across Asia and Latin America it is common for people to work in big production units, any idea that globalization has simply transported the Fordist/Taylorist model to the global south is illusory.
The global wage share of GDP is on a downward trend. In the USA it peaked at 53 per cent in 1970 and has now fallen to 44 per cent. Though the effect is lessened in countries with an export-oriented model, the social impact has been to push the workforce into financialized behaviour. And as we saw in Part I, the proportion of profits generated by the consumption and borrowing of the working class has risen in proportion to that generated through work.55
Costas Lapavitsas, a professor of economics at London University’s SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), calls this ‘financial expropriation’, and its impact on the self-image of the working class has been profound.56 For many workers, their primary physical and ideological relationship to capital is through consumption and borrowing rather than work.
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This shines a new light on the long-observed tendency of post-1989 capitalism to blur the boundaries between work and leisure. In some sectors, and not all of them high-value, there is increasingly a trade-off between meeting a project target and leeway for personal activity at work (e-commerce, social media, dating); the deal is that the employee has to be answering emails at home, working while travelling, prepared to work long, unofficial hours to meet targets.
In highly information-centred work, especially with smart mobile devices, work and leisure time are substantially blurred. This has over a relatively short period loosened the bond between wages and working time. For the high-value worker you are paid, effectively, to exist, to contribute your ideas to your firm and to meet targets.
In parallel, the geography of working-class life has been transformed. Long commutes from suburbs whose culture bears no specific relationship to work are the new normal. Commuting originally required people to actively re-create a physical community through non-labour organizations: the gym, the nursery, the bowling alley, etc. With the rise of info-tech, a portion of this community-building activity has moved online, fostering even more physical isolation. As a result, the old solidarity – where workplace ties were reinforced by a socially cohesive community – exists far more sporadically than at any other time in capitalism’s history.
To the younger, precarious workforce it is instead urban proximity that matters; they tend to cluster into city centres, accepting massively reduced living space as a trade-off for physical closeness to the network of contacts needed to find partners, sporadic work and entertainment. Their struggles – in places like Exharchea in Athens, or the London student uprising in 2010 – tend to focus on physical space.
As they tried to understand these qualitative transformations in working life, sociologists focused first on space. Barry Wellman chronicled the move from group-based communities to physical networks and then digital networks, terming the outcome ‘networked individualism’57 and linking it explicitly to greater job flexibility. LSE professor Richard Sennett meanwhile began to study the new characteristics of a hi-tech workforce.58
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If work rewards detachment and superficial compliance, values adaptability over skill and networking over loyalty, Sennett found, this creates a new kind of worker: s/he is focused on the short term, in life as in work, and lacks commitment to hierarchies and structures, both at work and in activism.
Sennett and Wellman both noticed the tendency of people adapted to this networked lifestyle to adopt multiple personalities, both in reality and online. Sennett writes: ‘The conditions of time in the new capitalism have created a conflict between character and experience, the experience of disjointed time threatening the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives.’59
The worker of the Keynesian era had a single character: at work, in the local bar, in the social club, on the football terraces, they were the same essential person. The networked individual creates a more complex reality: s/he lives parallel lives at work, in numerous fragmentary subcultures and online.
It is one thing to document these changes; the challenge is to understand their impact on humanity’s capacity to fight exploitation and oppression. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri summed it up well in their 2012 book Declaration:
The center of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory but has drifted outside its walls. Society has become a factory … With this shift the primary engagement between capitalist and worker also changes … Exploitation today is based primarily not on (equal or unequal) exchange but on debt.60
If, in the 1970s, Negri and the Italian left were premature in declaring the workplace ‘over’ as a forum for class struggle and ‘the whole of society’ the new venue, they are today correct.
What is the future for the working class, if info-capitalism continues along these lines?
In the first place, the current global division of labour can only be seen as transitional. The workforce of the global south will achieve higher living standards and at some point capital will react by introducing greater automation and pursuing higher productivity in the emerging markets. This will place the workers of China and Brazil on the same overall trajectory as the rich-world workforce, which is to become service-dominated, split into a skilled core and a precariat, with both layers seeing work partially delinked from wages. In addition, as the Oxford Martin School suggests, it is the low-skilled service jobs that stand the highest risk of total automation over the next two decades. The global working class is not destined to remain for ever divided into factory drones in China and games designers in the USA.
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However, the struggle in the workplace is no longer the only, or most important, drama.
In many industrial and commercial cities around the world, the networked individual is no longer a sociological curiosity, s/he is the archetype. All the qualities the sociologists of the 1990s observed in the tech workforce – mercuriality, spontaneous networking, multiple selves, weak ties, detachment, apparent subservience concealing violent resentment – have become the defining qualities of being a young, economically active human being.
And – despite the oppressive conditions at work – you can find them even in China, whose factory workforce was supposed to be the alter ego of the feckless Western consumer. From the mid-2000s, internet cafés with hundreds of screens opened up in the workers’ districts of the exportoriented cities. Sociologists who interviewed the young migrant workers back then found them using the web for two things: to build connections with other workers from their home towns and to let off steam by playing games. To young people who had only ever slept on a farm or in a factory dorm, the internet café was transformative. ‘Our foreman is a tough guy. But when I meet him in the internet café I am not afraid of him,’ one female worker told researchers in 2012. ‘He has no right to control me here. He is an internet user. So am I.’61
That now feels like prehistory. Smartphones have put the internet café in every Chinese worker’s overall pocket. Mobile internet connections outran desktop connections in China in 2012, and are now available to 600 million people. And the mobile internet means social networks. In 2014, 30,000
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shoe workers at Yue Yuen factory in Shenzhen staged the first big strike to use group messaging and micro-blogging as organizational tools. The village networks, which in analogue form were used to recruit and divide jobs informally across a single factory, were now being used to check wage rates and conditions and spread information across whole industries.
Terrifyingly for the Chinese authorities, the factory workers in Shenzhen were using the very same technology as the liberal, networked students who in 2014 staged the democracy protest known as Occupy Central in Hong Kong.
If you accept that the main faultline in the modern world is between networks and hierarchies, then China is sitting right on top of it. And China’s workers – who for now look like digital rebels but analogue slaves – are at the heart of the phenomenon of networked rebellion. These networked movements are evidence that a new historical subject exists. It is not just the working class in a different guise; it is networked humanity.
And this is the antidote to the pessimism of Gorz’s generation. With the death of the ‘real’ working class, Gorz concluded, the prime mover in anticapitalism had disappeared. If you wanted postcapitalism, you must pursue it as a utopia: a good idea, which might or might not come off, and with no major force in society to embody its values.
In the past twenty years, capitalism has mustered a new social force that will be its gravedigger, just as it assembled the factory proletariat in the nineteenth century. It is the networked individuals who have camped in the city squares, blockaded the fracking sites, performed punk rock on the roofs of Russian cathedrals, raised defiant cans of beer in the face of Islamism on the grass of Gezi Park, pulled a million people on to the streets of Rio and São Paulo and now organized mass strikes across southern China.
They are the working class ‘sublated’ – improved upon and replaced. They may be as clueless as to strategy as the workers of the early nineteenth century were, but they are no longer in thrall to the system. They are enormously dissatisfied with it. They are a group whose diverse interests converge on the need to make postcapitalism happen, to force the info-tech revolution to create a new kind of economy, where as much as possible is
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produced free, for collaborative common use, reversing the tide of inequality. Neoliberalism can offer them only a world of stagnant growth and state-level bankruptcy: austerity until death, but with an upgraded version of the iPhone every few years. And the freedom they cherish is perennially hemmed in by the neoliberal state – from the NSA’s mass surveillance techniques to those of the Chinese internet police. Above their heads, politics in many countries has become infested by a kleptocratic mafia, whose strategy is to deliver growth at the price of suppressing freedom and expanding inequality.
This new generation of networked people understand they are living through a third industrial revolution, but they are coming to realize why it has stalled: with the credit system broken, capitalism cannot sustain the scale of automation that is possible, and the destruction of jobs implied by the new technologies.
The economy is already producing and reproducing a networked lifestyle and consciousness, at odds with the hierarchies of capitalism. The appetite for radical economic change is clear.
The next question is: what do we have to do to achieve it?
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