Reflections On Feminism, Immaterial Labour And The Post-Fordist Regime

Abstract

1. OPERAISMO AND THE SUCCESSES OF CLASS STRUGGLE? In the many articles and books written in recent years on the topics of precarious labour, immaterial and affective labour, all of which are understood within the over-arching frame of post-Fordist regimes of production, there is a failure to foreground gender, or indeed to knit gender and ethnicity into prevailing concerns with class and class struggle. I seek to rectify this by interrogating some of the influential work in this terrain. I will also draw attention to those accounts which have reflected on gender and on changes in how feminists and sociologists nowadays think about the question of women and employment. (It is almost unnecessary to indicate that the critical paradigm underlying the shift in feminist debate is performativity theory and the radical de-naturalising of gender therein.) I ask the question, how integral is the participation of 'women' to the rise of post-Fordist production, and later in this article I ask what kind of role do women, especially young women (dispensing from now on with the need for the commas that query the category) play in the urban-based new culture industries? By prioritising gender I am also critiquing its invisibility in this current field of new radical political discourse associated with writers like Hardt and Virno, and Hardt and Negri. (1) I propose that the transition to precarious work or immaterial labour which is now so profoundly felt by vast numbers of young people, especially young women, (2) across Europe and under the age of 40, is inadequately understood without recourse to a critical interface that develops from the late 1970s onwards, between the wider impact of the women's movement (going well beyond the confines of self-declared feminists), and the modes of counter-response which capital, the state and consumer culture develop to constrain and re-shape, by means of a range of biopolitical strategies, the whole terrain of gender and sexuality. I challenge writers like those associated with the Italian Operaismo School for their insistence on class, as the defining meta-concept for understanding contemporary work and for imagining a radical political future. Fundamentally this is a 'labour-society' model where the 'decline of labour' and the shift of the centre of gravity to the non-work sphere, is blamed for a wide range of contemporary pathologies including the 'opacity of groups' and the 'ruin of the self'. (3) Counter to this I would argue that the way in which class now needs to be retained, (in its always-existing entanglement with gender and ethnicity) is, paradoxically, in its decline, something which has been displaced as a primary or foundational concept. This is not quite the same as Beck's idea of the zombie concept, more a governmentally-directed shift which fades out the social and political salience of class permitting at the same time a coming forward of gender as a source of self-validation. An understanding of this as a political strategy does not negate the place of class, but it does require a different kind of thinking about class, one which focuses on this twilight status. The sustained attempts within contemporary governmentality to 'de-classify' society in the name of a gendered modernity (the New Labour strategy in the UK) have, I would suggest, had tangible effects. This is partly due to the successes of 'make-over' lifestyle television programmes, and to the growth of aspirational media and popular culture. (4) This is not to say that class is irrelevant. But does it have, and can it have, quite the fundamental analytical purchase writers like Hardt, Lazzarato, Negri and Virno claim? If we agree that class is neither a sociological descriptor, nor a question of social identity, but primarily, though by no means exclusively, a set of antagonistic relations formed in the struggle between capital and labour, or between the state and subordinated social groupings whose subjugation entails a distinctive relation to labour, (for instance the unemployed), are these class antagonisms today such primary structuring mechanisms when labour comprises of subjects now much less engaged as 'workers'? …