POLI 364 Lecture : POLI 364 - Lecture (Mar 13/15th)

• School: McGill University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLI 364
• Professor: William Clare Roberts

Document Summary

Skilled workers >>> dignity of labor/trade unionism/leninism >>> mass. Worker/ford & taylor/assembly line production >>> refusal of work >>> social. Worker/feminism/commodification of dissent/anti-political >>> intellectual worker (multitude)/ just in time production/toyotaism. Hayek/thatcher/reagan >>> neoliberal state/cybernetics/networks >>> decline of state sovereignty/private security/empire. The answer to the question, who is the working class is constantly changing, because the individual who comprises labour changes, parallel to the current mode of capitalism. Autonomists stress the role of the labourers themselves in driving capitalist expansion and evolution; capitalism only grows when it adapts in response to the working class movement. Multitude = the current configuration of the exploited class, the intellectual workers of the post-globalized western world; this is a term used by virno, as well as negri & arendt. One point made by virno is that the distinction between labour and non-labour has all but disappeared in modern society. Unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment.