Transitions of labor

Il caso Parmalat e l'economia politica della menzogna. Un sentiero di lettura L'inganno della baby sitter Parmalat, Enron, WorldCom, Crédit Lyonnais, Vivendi sono accomunate dallo stesso circolo ben poco virtuoso che si snoda tra falsificazione della contabilità e gioco spericolato in borsa. Ma quello che molti studiosi considerano solo una illecita distorsione nel funzionamento dell'economia è invece una delle caratteristiche strutturali del cosiddetto capitalismo cognitivo. Da Guido Rossi a André Gorz, da Barbara Ehrenreich a John Plender, alcuni libri per ricostruire genesi e sviluppo di un rapporto sociale basato sulla asimmetria di conoscenza tra forza-lavoro e impresa, nella quale il management cerca di appropriarsi del sapere

Dai desideri inconfessabili e mai realizzati della New Economy al bisogno di pace che si nasconde dietro la «convenzione Cina», da tre anni vincente sui mercati finanziari mondiali grazie alla vastità del suo mercato e alle sue potenzialità espansive. Tra processi economici e nuove soggettività, un cambio di tendenza che coinvolge in primo luogo l'Europa. Nuovo baricentro di inediti scenari.

We all agree to the fact that we want to fight capital and renew the world. But I think this ain’t conceivable as a poetical process. Because the name »multitude« is not a poetical notion, but a class concept. When I talk about multitude as a class concept, I talk about the fact that workers today work in the same and in different ways compared to those they worked some centuries ago. The working class and its class composition are quite different in the distinct periods that followed each other since the beginning of the industrial age.

Precarias a la deriva (Precarious women workers adrift) is a collective project of investigation and action. The concerns of the participants in this open project converged the 20th of June 2002, the day of the general strike called by the major unions in Spain. Some of us had already initiated a trajectory of reflection and intervention in questions of the transformations of labor (in groups such as ‘ZeroWork’ and Sex, Lies and Precariousness, or individually), others wished to begin to think through these themes. 

      Focus on the production of affects in our labor and our social practices has often served as a useful ground for anticapitalist projects, in the context of discourses for instance on desire or on use-value.  Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities.  The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization.  Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women's work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor.  Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.