Thoughts on Fantasia and Voss; Baudrillardian model for labor "militance"

Reading Hard Work by Fantasia and Voss, excellent overview of the particular problems of the American labor movement.

The unusual part (that I like) is their focus on the symbolic power of social movements. They don't do this in an overly academic way, they mention it alongside real political and institutional situations. But they mention it, and they point out that the business unionism of the post-WWII era rooted in bureaucracy and social contractism crippled the sets of desire that allow for strong and militant unionism. Immediate resolution of problems on the shopfloor, broad inclusiveness, a sense of participation in a larger social movement, and the experience of "sacralizing" fairly mundane events thereby. All of these gave unions strength and vitality, and their absence makes them less robust.

I don't think the shopfloor antagonisms have gone away at all. I think they have been channeled away from their potential resolution in spaces of either immediate agon or bureaucratic mediation.

I think the working class has stopped imagining itself as such, and instead of resolving "shopfloor" tensions in a direct way, it has undertaken something else entirely. It has taken the paths of resistance open to ideological slaves, namely passive avoidance and self-abuse and denigration. This manifests itself either in the bodies of single individuals or in the relationships between collectivities, groups, couples, packs of friends and associates, etc.

I put "shopfloor" in quotes because we have a social factory now (and honestly always did) and so the workplace itself is really just a system, a concept displaced onto matter along a particular logic. We see the same logics in schools, governments, professional and technological societies, churches, prisons, sites of recreation, as media participants and consumers, as consumers in general, etc etc etc.

Because American society has displaced space for direct confrontation, of which the workplace is simply the easiest site to show both this practice and its negative repercussions, instead we have a viscous flow, Baudrillard's mass perhaps. There is a rise of self-policing and a decentralized regulation, but it occurs as a secondary phenomenon, wholly inadequate to stabilizing labor.

Capitalists and hence those who think through and by capitalist ideology (meaning most of us most of the time) have tremendous difficulty keeping a clear view of these things. Capitalists have no "memory," meaning simply that profits in a particular constellation of labor and desire are transient, and capitalists must remain uncritically and constantly in observation of their markets. When the markets representing public desire shift, new capitalists rise to the fore, new companies gain the upper hand, and old companies must adapt. So there is no cause or structural ability to remember what labor was five years ago let alone thirty years ago, nor to tease out the unconscious drives in operation in the past and in operation now.

So, to put it bluntly, if labor has entered a period of alienation, neurosis and widespread self-abuse (psychologically, spiritually and physically) there is no need for a capitalist logic to worry too much over it in the short-term. They can always sell self-help books or even better, make enormous profits from the sale of psychoactive drugs and medicines. Or in the prison economy, or through the massive service and entertainment sectors.

The expansion of these sectors represents a new phase of "labor militance." However, this is labor militance of a fairly strange new form.

If you take a wild animal, chain her up, and starve her of attention and community, she will chew her own leg off to escape. Will to difference does not vanish and cannot be stopped or halted, and this is the thing that capitalist logic at its core has always desired and worked towards. Stasis, calculability. It has succeeded in America in simulating near-total victory.

However, will to difference has not stopped. It has turned against itself.

The only rebellion open to a slave in the purest and most effective of absolutisms, at the end of the day, is suicide. And so as the integration of capitalist logic becomes more and more complete for vast swaths of the American population, we see more and more cracks in basic social structures in America. We see massive increases in medication and self-medication, we see prison populations that never cease to grow, we see slow collapse in schools.

We also and far less nihilistically see rejection outright of the working class of the most alienated forms of labor and dependence upon imported and exported workforces. This is not a sufficient strategy for revolt, but it does open some doors, and it does reveal the nature of the problem effectively.

Another version of this is the expansion of schooling as a near automatic choice for much of the young population. Again, rather than profit in alienated work, young people pay for an identity that will leave them debtors or simply impoverished. There is some economic necessity and gain for this, true, but I think there is a much more subjective element of desire for most people. The economic advantage of schooling is more a justification and rationalization than a direct cause.