Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

the extreme alienation of labour that the Fordist organisation of
production implied. The overflowing of the labour movement,
always present, became torrential. More and more workers took
action outside the limits of the trade unions and against the
trade unions. More and more, the actions were aimed not just at
negotiating higher wages but against labour as such: absenteeism
and sabotage increased significantly. The militancy in the car
factories of Italy, organised and theorised by the operaismo of
the 1960s and 1970s was the peak of a much more profound
rejection not just of Fordism, but of capitalist labour.16
And then what? For some of the leading authors associated
with the operaista movement (now often referred to as 'postoperaista'),
the crisis of Fordism has been overcome and a
new post-Fordist pattern of domination established. Thus, for
example, Virno argues: 'During the 1960s and the 1970s I believe
that the Western world experienced a defeated revolution - the
first revolution aimed not against poverty and backwardness,
but against the means of capitalist production, against the
Fordist assembly-line and wage labour. Post-Ford ism, the hybrid
forms of life characteristic of the contemporary multitude, is the
answer to this defeated revolution' (2004: 111). Post-Ford ism
is the 'surpassing of the society of labour' within capitalism
itself, a society in which wealth is produced, not by the work
of individuals but by science or 'the general intellect', a society
in which 'there is no longer anything which distinguishes
labour from the rest of human activities' (ibid.: 101-102) and
no longer any difference between labour time and non-labour
time. Similarly, 'from the point of view of "what" is done and
"how" it is done, there is no longer any substantial difference
between employment and unemployment. It could be said that:
unemployment is non-remunerated labour and labour, in turn,
is remunerated unemployment' (ibid.: 103). The great wave of
subordination of the 1960s and 1970s has profoundly modified
capitalism (so much so that Virno speaks of post-Fordism as the
'communism of capital') (ibid.: 110): 'The masterpiece of Italian
capitalism consists in having transformed into a productive
resource precisely those modes of behaviour which, at first,
made their appearance under the semblance of radical conflict'
(ibid.: 99). Insubordination, it would seem, has been suffocated,
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