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Mark L. wrote: "We're dealing with something very, very different where consciousness requires less and less of a material check." I'm not sure what exactly this means..., but following on what Richard was saying about the increased rate of exploitation in the, what I would prefer to call, classical capitalist countries (rather than advanced, imperialist cores, etc., which gives the idea that the form of the other countries is less determined by capital, so “underdeveloped” that they actually need more capitalism, which is so progressive these days), I think the central material determination of the break-up of trade-unionization is somewhere else. In other words, the rate of exploitation as I see it has been increasing globally, this we may say initiated in the classical countries but took a global character –as it must- due to a deeper process underlying it which is the fragmentation of the productive powers (or productive subjectivities) of the working class as a whole, or what Marx called the collective labourer. This is a consequence of the development of large-scale industry itself, which particularly since the 70’s (though this process which Mandel called the 3rd technological revolution had started before) accelerated concurrently with the process of over-accumulation of capital. The absolute contradiction of capital is its tendency toward the socialization of *private* labor, so that as much as much as this process needed to homogenize the working class through de-skilling it also had to do it by determining the individual worker as the appendage of machinery, who as the personifications of labor-power have now to reproduce themselves with a differentiated specificity. The ideologies of racism, xenophobia, nationalism, etc. are the manifestations which are needed to perpetuate this fragmentation, and this is why the struggle of undocumented immigrants, not just in the US but as far as Argentina, is central to a reconstitution of workers political power in order to force capital to reproduce the labor-power of the working class on the same universal conditions, and which is therefore to go against the current national form of accumulation and international division of labor. In that respect, such theories of the aristocracy of labor are unhelpful, to say the least. I would write more but I have to go now. Luckily, most of the things I wanted to say (which are not originally mine of course) can be found in these two articles: 'Transformations in capital accumulation: From the national production of an universal labourer to the international fragmentation of the productive subjectivity of the working-class’ by Juan Iñigo Carrera www.iwgvt.org/files/03Inigo.doc ‘The New International Division of Labour and the Differentiated Evolution of Poverty at World Scale’ by Nicolas Grinberg http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/events/conferences/povertyandcapital/grinberg.pdf ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
