Real subsumption, cultural insurgence and social re-composition

Abstract

This article looks at the crisis of the classical workers movement from the mid-1970s, and workers’ contribution to the emergence of new radical political and cultural theory from the 1980s in the ongoing struggle of workers against value relations. I deal with four intersecting areas: the neo-liberal attack on the cost of labour power in the Global North; the social, cultural and technical re-composition of the working class globally; the expansion of the participation of a diverse working class in higher education; and the changing function of real subsumption as workers and non-workers are incorporated into value relations through an ideology of economic self-reliance and the new entrepreneurial ethos. From this re-composition emerges the fundamental moving contradiction of our times: the increase in expectation of autonomy with the development of new technical skills across the working class and access to higher education, and the social and cognitive realities of the new economy and new digital culture: a precarious world of automative ‘non-work’, underemployment, passive consumption and deskilling. This conflict between the expectation of autonomy and realities of value production, has, I argue, been one of the driving forces of workers’ contribution to the new radical culture and theory since the 1980s.