The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

188 Political-economic capitalist transformationstill shine through, and in many instances with an even greaterluminosity than before, all the surface froth and evanescence .socharacteristic of flexible accumulation. Is the latter, then, anythmgmore than a jazzed-up version of the same old story of capital .is asusual? That would be too simple a judgement. It treats of capItalIsma-historically, as a non-dynamic mode of producti n, when ll .theevidence (including that explicitly laid .out by Ma ) IS that capItalIsmis a constantly revolutionary force m world hIstory ?a force thatperpetually re-shapes the world intọ new and often quite unexpectedconfigurations. Flexible accumulation appears, at leasṭ, .to ?e a ne :vconfiguration and, as such, it requires hat we scr tIlllze ItS malllfestationswith the requisite care and senousness, usmg, nevertheless,the theoretical tools that Marx devised.11Flexible accumulation - solidtransformation or temporary fix?I have argued that there has certainly been a sea-change in thesurface appearance of capitalism since 1973, even though the underlyinglogic of capitalist accumulation and its crisis-tendencies remainthe same. We need to consider, however, whether the shifts insurface appearance betoken the birth of a new regime of accumulation,capable of containing the contradictions of capitalism for the nextgeneration, or whether they betoken a series of temporary fixes, thusconstituting a transitional moment of grumbling crisis in the configurationof late twentieth-century capitalism. The question of flexibilityhas already been the focus of some debate. Three broad positionsseem now to be emerging.The first position, primarily espoused by Piore and Sabel (1984)and accepted in principle by several subsequent writers, is that thenew technologies open up the possibility for a reconstitution oflabour relations and of production systems on an entirely differentsocial, economic, and geographical basis. Piore and Sabel see a parallelbetween the current conjuncture and the missed opportunity of themid-nineteenth century, when large-scale and eventually monopolycapital ousted the small firm and the innumerable small-scale cooperativeventures that had the potential to solve the problem ofindustrial organization along decentralized and democratically controlledlines (the figure of Proudhon's anarchism looms large). Muchis made of the 'Third Italy' as an example of these new forms ofworker-co-operative organizations which, armed with new decentralizedtechnologies of command and control, can successfully integratewith, and even subvert, the dominant and repressive forms oflabour organization characteristic of corporate and multinationalcapital. Not everyone shares this rosy vision of the forms of industrialorganization (see, for example, Murray, 1987). There is much thatis regressive and repressive about the new practices. Nevertheless,