The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

186 Political-economic capitalist transformationoveraccumulation problem through geographical displacement ranout. The crisis of Fordism was, therefore, as much a geographicaland geopolitical crisis as it was a crisis of indebtedness, class struggle,or corporate stagnation within any particular nation state. It wassimply that the mechanisms evolved for controlling crisis tendencieswere finally overwhelmed by the power of the underlying contradictionsof capitalism. There seemed to be no option except to fallback into devaluation of the sort that occurred in the period 1973-5or 1980-2 as the primary means of dealing with the tendency towardsoveraccumulation. Unless, that is, some other and superior regime ofcapitalist production could be created which would assure a solidbasis for further accumulation on a global scale.Flexible accumulation here seems to fit as a simple recombinationof the two basic strategies which Marx defined for procuring profit(surplus value). The first, termed absolute surplus value, rests on theextension of the working day relative to the wage needed to guaranteeworking-class reproduction at a given standard of living. The shifttowards longer working hours coupled with an overall reduction inthe standard of living either by erosion of the real wage or by theshift of corporate capital from high-wage to low-wage regions capturesone facet of flexible capital accumulation.Many of the standardized production systems built up underFordism have, for this reason, shifted to the periphery, creating'peripheral Fordism.' Even the new production systems have tendedto shift, once standardized, from their innovative hearths to thirdworld locations (Atari's 1984 move from Silicon Valley to South­East Asia's low-wage labour power is a case in point). Under thesecond strategy, termed relative surplus value, organizational andtechnological change is set in motion to gain temporary profits forinnovative firms and more generalized profits as costs of goods thatdefine the standard of living of labour are reduced. Here, too, theproliferating violence of investments, which cut employment andlabour costs in every industry from coal mining and steel productionto banking and financial services, has been a highly visible aspect ofcapital accumulation in the 1980s. Yet reliance on this strategy bringsto the fore the significance of highly skilled labour powers with thecapacity to understand, implement, and manage the new but muchmore flexible patterns of technological innovation and market orientation.A highly privileged, and to some degree empowered, stratumwithin the labour force emerges as capitalism depends more andmore on mobilizing the powers of intellectual labour as a vehicle forfurther accumulation.In the end, of course, it is the particular manner in which absoluteTheorizing the transition 187and relative strategies combine and feed off each other that counts.Interestingly, the deployment of new technologies has so freed surpluses? f labour power as to make the revival of absolute strategies forprocur ng surplu value more feasible even in the advanced capitalistcountnes. at IS, perhaps, more unexpected is the way in whichnew production technologies and co-ordinating forms of organizationhave permitted the revival of domestic, familial, and paternalisticlabour systems, which Marx tended to assume would either bedriven out of business or reduced to such conditions of gross exploitationand dehumanizing toil as to be intolerable under advancedcapitalism. The revival of the sweatshops in New York and LosAngeles, of home work and 'telecommuting', as well as the burgeoninggrowth of informal sector labour practices throughout thea? : anced captalst ;vorld, does indeed represent a rather soberingV1SlOn of capltaltsm s supposedly progressive history. Under conditionsof flexible accumulation, it seems as if alternative laboursystems can xis : side by side within the same space in such a way asto enable capltaltst entrepreneurs to choose at will between them (seetable 2.3). The same shirt designs can be produced by large-scalefactoris in India, co-operative production in the 'Third Italy,' sweatshopsIII Ne ,; : or and London, .or family labour systems in HongKong. EclecticIsm m labour practIces seem almost as marked in thesetimes as the eclecticism of postmodern philosophies and tastes.Yet there is, in spite of the difference of context and the specificitiesof the example used, something quite compelling and relevant aboutMarx's account of the logic of capitalist organization and accumulation.Re-reading his account in Capital strikes home with a certainjolt of recognition. We there read of the ways in which the factorysystem can intersect with domestic, workshop, and artisanal systemsof manufacture, of how an industrial reserve army is mobilized as acounter-weight to workers' power with respect to both labour controland wage rates, of the ways in which intellectual powers andnew technologies are deployed to disrupt the organized power of theworking class, of how capitalists try to foster the spirit of competitionamongst workers, while all the time demanding flexibility of disposition,of location, and of approach to tasks. We are also forced toconsider how all of this creates opportunities as well as dangers anddifficulties for working-class people precisely because education,flexibility, and geographical mobility, once acquired, become harderfor capitalists to control.Even though present conditions are very different in many respects,it is not hard to see how the invariant elements and relations thatMarx defined as fundamental to any capitalist mode of production