Post-industrial Capitalism Research Articles

Package wars and mouse movers: on the media escalation of remote-work during the COVID-19 global pandemic

ABSTRACT This paper looks at media escalations between different kinds of workers during and after the COVID-19 global pandemic. Combining post-Autonomist Marxist and media theoretical approaches, I argue that the ‘Glitter Bomb vs Porch Pirates’ video series, and related phenomena, point to the unique role that networked and computational media play in both the material enactment and cultural-symbolic valorisation of different kinds of work in relatively affluent postindustrial capitalist settings. Mark Rober, the creator of the ‘Glitter Bomb vs Porch Pirates’ video series, demonstrates how those who enjoy a relatively privileged positionality under post-Fordism actively participate in the medialogical defining and detecting of different kinds of ‘enemies’ as a form of both work and leisure. Overemployed.com and automatic mouse-movers, meanwhile, exemplify more tactical approaches to this broader set of conditions, wherein workers utilise networked and computational media to appear ‘visible’ as productive workers according to the criteria via which they are regularly detected and evaluated. Noting a common subjective framework undergirding these various examples, I conclude by highlighting the work of various media scholars focused on the question of what a truly alternative instantiation of networked and computational systems might entail.

Поэтичность техники: переосмысливая Хайдеггера в условиях позднего капитализма

The article is devoted to the problem of the relationship between technology and poetry, first posed in contemporary philosophy by Martin Heidegger. Due to the qualitative changes in technology and the transition from industrial capitalism to post-industrial capitalism this issue becomes relevant again. Since the philosophy of technology has long focused on the problem of the machine, it should be put in a more modern context. The research reconstructs the contradictions defined by the Heideggerian philosophy of technology between technology and poetry, understood as the essence of language and creative activity. The paper shows that modern technology, which primarily involves the communicative abilities of an employee, largely eliminates the contradiction between technical and poetic in the field of art and labor. This makes it necessary to rethink the role of technology in the process of achieving harmony between technology and language. Thus, the author concludes that although the phenomenon of alienation persists, technology can become a means to overcome it, provided that it is appropriately articulated.

Not “what”, but “where is creativity?”: towards a relational-materialist approach to generative AI

AbstractThe recent emergence of generative AI software as viable tools for use in the cultural and creative industries has sparked debates about the potential for “creativity” to be automated and “augmented” by algorithmic machines. Such discussions, however, begin from an ontological position, attempting to define creativity by either falling prey to universalism (i.e. “creativity is X”) or reductionism (i.e. “only humans can be truly creative” or “human creativity will be fully replaced by creative machines”). Furthermore, such an approach evades addressing the real and material impacts of AI on creative labour in these industries. This article thus offers more expansive methodological and conceptual approaches to the recent hype on generative AI. By combining (Csikszentmihalyi, The systems model of creativity, Springer, Dordrecht, 2014) systems view of creativity, in which we emphasise the shift from “what” to “where” is creativity, with (Lievrouw, Media technologies, The MIT Press, 2014) relational-materialist theory of “mediation”, we argue that the study of “creativity” in the context of generative AI must be attentive to the interactions between technologies, practices, and social arrangements. When exploring the relational space between these elements, three core concepts become pertinent: creative labour, automation, and distributed agency. Critiquing “creativity” through these conceptual lenses allows us to re-situate the use of generative AI within discourses of labour in post-industrial capitalism and brings us to a conceptualisation of creativity that privileges neither the human user nor machine algorithm but instead emphasises a relational and distributed form of agency.

Dead Ends: Ruin, Redundancy, and the Horrors of Precarity in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and It Follows

While Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) ostensibly focalise their films’ narratives upon the imminent threat of bodily violence which endangers their respective protagonists’ lives, a deeper analysis of both films illuminates the terror at the heart of the narratives: economic precarity and immobility. Both Hooper and Mitchell deliberately situate their horror films within settings that are haunted by the past hope of prosperity and which have corroded into ruins, left to rust and rot under the hostile conditions of post-industrial capitalism. These rents in the socio- economic fabric are intimately registered on a corporeal level, as the bodies of both Chain Saw protagonist Sally Hardesty and It Follows protagonist Jay Height become the sites onto which the capitalist horrors of unequal prosperity and labour redundancy are violently enacted. In Hooper’s film, the rural backwoods of Texas play host to a brutal confrontation between a working-class family—made redundant by the rise of automation and thus embodying the industrial atrophy of the American South—and a group of drifting, unfettered young people, represented by Sally and her friends.

The Queerification and Effeminization of Haitian Society

This article applies Mocombe’s concepts of queerification and effeminization to Haitian society, contemporarily. For Mocombe, the shift from industrial capitalism to postindustrial capitalism in the West has led to emasculated and feminine patriarchy, the assumption of patriarchal norms by the state, its ideological apparatuses, queers, and women (given the feminization and queerification of the postindustrial – financialized – workplace) from individual men whose masculinity is no longer associated with being producer and provider as it was under industrial capitalism; instead, they have been interpellated and embourgeoised, like their female counterparts, to define their masculinity as sensitive entrepreneurs, consumers, and or service workers for finance capital, i.e., rentier oligarchs. In the Black diaspora, this process has led to the queerification and effeminization of society as global capital under American hegemony queerify and effeminize the diaspora by promoting queers and women into the labor force at the expense of men and young boys who are either gangsterized or trained for the athletic and entertainment industries.

‘Promises promises’: international organisations, promissory legitimacy and the re-negotiation of education futures

ABSTRACT Promising lines of scholarship have emerged on how International Organisations (IO’s) deploy anticipatory techniques aimed at colonising the future as a means of governing in the absence of sovereignty. It follows that securing hegemony over a vision of the future is important strategic work for IOs, and a source of legitimacy derived from authority beyond procedure and performance. This is called promissory legitimacy. Yet what happens when this promised future arrives and is problematic? How does an IO creatively strategise this shortfall? In this paper, we identify five strategies deployed by the OECD in its Future of Education and Skills 2030 programme aimed to re-negotiate a failed present and anticipate a new future. We also reflect on the ideational underpinnings of the OECD’s new futures programme, and argue it is being mobilised to, on the one hand, get beyond the limitations of data governance, and on the other to help selectively shape a new cognitariat subjectivity engaged with immaterial labour in emerging post-industrial capitalism.

Black Emasculated Patriarchy

This article posits that the shift from industrial capitalism to postindustrial capitalism in the West has led to what Mocombe deems emasculated and feminine patriarchy, the assumption of patriarchal norms by the state, its ideological apparatuses, queers, and women (given the feminization and queerification of the postindustrial workplace) from individual men whose masculinity is no longer associated with being producer and provider as it was under industrial capitalism; instead, they have been interpellated and embourgeoised, like their female counterparts, to define their masculinity as sensitive entrepreneurs, consumers, and or service workers. Black men in this social structure are, paradoxically, emasculated and hyper-masculinized. The former, given their poverty and under-education in the postindustrial social structure they are unable to assume the service-worker, consumer, and entrepreneur emasculated identity required to recursively organize and reproduce their being-in-the-world; the latter, the entertainment industry and athletic domain have become the spheres they are relegated to where their hyper-masculinity is overemphasized as means to the emasculated identity.

Transition and Labour in the United States: Industry and Employment in the Changing Political Economy of Knowledge Capitalism

The history of capitalism in the United States since the crisis of the 1970s is marked by a process of global scope: the decline of industrialism. This represents the transition to a new era of capitalism as a mode of production. The US has experienced a set of interlocked processes, three of which are of fundamental interest for this article: the structural change from industrial to knowledge-based economy; the making of neoliberal policies that allowed for the financialisation of the economy and the weakening of unions; the transformation of the corporate model. Consequently, there is an intense downward pressure on wages, job quality and middle-class employment. This translates into the loss of benefits for workers and a decline in job security. This article addresses these processes through the lenses of an evolutionary theory of history. From this perspective, the observed changes are expressions of the transition to a post-industrial capitalism that entails destruction of old jobs and the creation of a pool of labour with limited bargaining capacity.

A Conceptual Framework Proposal Regarding the Engagement of Hotels in the Modern Fight against Unsustainable Food Practices

The ecological crisis that emerged rapidly in the 2000s because of vertiginous economic growth is still one of the dominant themes today. This unprecedented phenomenon has led to intense political-economic and social tensions over reconsidering the priorities of “post-industrial capitalism”. The main issues here are increasing inequalities in the distribution of resources and high dependence on non-renewable energies. In response, valuable policies have been developed with the intention of creating new economic models that satisfy environmental and ecological needs. However, the literature shows that the effectiveness of the global schemes proposed to achieve sustainable behaviors and techniques has been very low. In the hospitality sector, particularly in the food and beverage department, pollution and consumption of scarce resources remain issues. In this paper, we propose a structural framework for analyzing the commitment of hotels regarding sustainable practices in the F&B department, centered on standards set by relevant institutions. To enhance understanding, an extension of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) is proposed. The use of this conceptual framework will enable us firstly to gain a perception of how a hotel acts through its F&B administrator in the light of relevant standard practices. Secondly, it will allow us to understand the role of the common internal and external factors behind the theories describing the behavior adopted. In this way, this research aims to contribute to a global understanding of the factors that influence the commitment of hotels to sustainable practices in their F&B department.

From Utopia to an Eco-Feminist Critical Dystopia: Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness

In this article, I discuss Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020) as an eco-feminist critical dystopia that presents the precarious nature of human lives connected with the more-than-human world. The novel achieves this through Bea and Agnes’s journey from the City to the Wilderness that is mainly constructed by balancing utopian and dystopian elements and thus offering a critical look at our contemporary world under the risk of climate change. While doing this, the novel reminds readers of the interdependent relation between nature and human beings who tend to forget nature but try to meet the demands of the post-industrial capitalist world. In addition, the novel portrays Bea and Agnes as strong women who can challenge systems of power and patriarchy and present the possibility of a change that would heal the wounds of the climate crisis at least to a certain extent. At the same time, however, they need to go beyond patriarchal definitions of being a mother and a daughter by caring for their individual needs and showing their self-determination in deciding on their present and future lives. Thus, this article demonstrates that the novel presents not only a powerful warning to readers about the possible calamities of environmental degradation but also a glimpse of hope in its female characters.

The Changing Political Economy of Music in Presidential Campaigns

Music has been a part of US presidential contests since George Washington first campaigned across the newly independent nation. In time, the country grew, the voting public was augmented, and new technologies and industries were invented. In the midst of these changes, both small and profound, music remained constant, but its role and uses underwent transformation. This article examines three advertisements in Presidential campaigns during the mass media age, from 1960 to the present, where music culture was an essential element of the message. These examples, a pro-Civil Rights ad featuring Harry Belafonte for John F. Kennedy in 1960, Will.i.am’s “Yes, We Can” for Barack Obama in 2008, and a tweet by Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media coordinator in 2020, all differ in their media platform, content and relationship to voters. Each analysis centers the socio-economic changes that accompanied each period and examines the relationship between the production of knowledge in industrial and post-industrial capitalism. These ads, their content, appeal, and codes are read through theories of industrial and post-industrial epistemology. Here, music serves as an entry into understanding the effect that economic change has on cultural production and reception. Music is a necessary feature of campaigns, but as the production and reception of knowledge change, so does the use of music by campaigns. The efficacy of these three ads depends on different relationships among campaigns, voters, and cultural products, and this relationship is always affected by dominant modes of production.

Historical Perspective on Mental Health: Emergence, Transformations of Subjectivity and Consequences in Clinical Practices

Mental health has become a prolific field of research, concern, debate and intervention in the health sciences and human sciences in the last two decades. The fundamental interest of this brief history of the concept of mental health is to analyze the semantic and pragmatic configuration of the concept. There is a wide range of social uses of mental health. In the conditions of life of post-industrial capitalism since the Second World War, mental health has become a field of production of discourses and commodities addressed to the individual as coping templates, tools for self-understanding of their lives or mechanisms of meaning to overcome the difficulties of life. The event of mental health entails registers social events, socially mediated life experiences, cultural meanings, as well as capacities of agency over reality to the point of becoming a systematic articulation of human acts and contents of experience that ordered reality, therefore, it acquired the quality of a concept. Mental health is of relevance for historical work because it has left in its wake sources of various categories that require an exercise of compilation, systematization, reflection and narration. It is a reflexive concept for history: it reflects on experience, functions, practices and uses. It is part of what has been called the linguistic turn and the emotional turn, the awareness that both language and affective sensitivities sediment the understanding of the world. For this historiographic approach it is necessary to understand the context of emergence, the transformations of subjectivity, the consequences on clinical practices, and the means that have allowed its scientific and cultural appropriation in the second half of the twentieth century.

Ускоренная рефлексивность — депрессивная социальность

The article concerns the problem of distinguishing the key features that qualitatively define Modernity. Against the background of transition from industrial to postindustrial capitalism the original projective character of social thought changes. In the society of “late modernity” to the fore come not the critical projects of reconstruction or modernization but social and cultural reflection, that aims to help in local orientation in the increasingly complex world. Large-scale social thought narratives and research programs buckle under the onslaught of original authors’ approaches. As the result we face the fragmentation of theoretical social philosophy field and social frustration. The article aims to detect the common ground, on which the further theoretical discussion about the disciplinary boundaries and the subject of social theory can be developed. The author leans on the attempts made in the last few decades of the 20th century (Jürgen Habermas, Hermann Lübbe, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash) to provide a common framework of productive understanding of contradictions and tendencies of Modernity. To these instrumental but simultaneously concrete ideas belong social acceleration and reflexivity of modernity. The acceleration of historical eventfulness led to a symmetrical response — it begins to see its task in keeping in pace with gained speed. This interpretative acceleration generates a situation of depressed sociality, when all the attempts to critically comprehend what is happening only increase the frustration. In the conclusion the author assumes that social acceleration understood exactly in the sense of reflexivity could be a turning point for redefining philosophical coordinates of the theory of Modernity.

Emasculated Patriarchy

This article posits that the shift from industrial capitalism to postindustrial capitalism in the West has led to what Mocombe deems emasculated and feminine patriarchy, the assumption of patriarchal norms by the state, its ideological apparatuses, and women (given the feminization of the postindustrial workplace) from individual men whose masculinity is no longer associated with being producer and provider as it was under industrial capitalism; instead, they have been interpellated and embourgeoised to define their masculinity as sensitive entrepreneurs, consumers, and or service workers. The work concludes that this has led to the emasculation of men, by removing their patriarchal norms and authorities over the family, which do not disappear; instead, the latter has been assumed by the state, women, and queer folks operating through ideology, state ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse.

Post-Symbolic Images in Platform Capitalism

Platform capitalism brings several processes to completion that were already apparent during post-industrial capitalism. One of these involves images and their gradual loss of a symbolic dimension. The mechanisms that platforms employ to direct the production of media content reduce images to objects of immediate use and consumption. Consequently, images fail to synthetise the multiplicity of the social reality: instead of inscribing it within a horizon of meaning, they simply reflect it. This article reconstructs the “de-symbolising” process of images during the various phases of capitalism and explains why a post-symbolic aesthetics should also be viewed as “impolitical”. If the political is indeed symbolic, since the giving of meaning and direction to society (a political task par excellence) also takes place through the construction of symbolic systems, the post-symbolic aesthetic is instead imposed by platforms for purely economic reasons.

Educational Rationality and Consumer Society

In the paper we analyze the educational rationality closely associated with a neoliberal cultural logic that causes various lifestyles which seek only the satisfaction of unreal or symbolic needs where the ideal of education appears as one more among others. Furthermore, we consider educational policies subordinated to an expansive cultural logic of post-industrial capitalism, having as a historical reference the neoliberal turn of the Peruvian educational policy and a symbolic structure deeply established in the psyche of the society transformed by the social pathologies of mercantilism and consumerism. This insight will allow us to propose a socio-philosophical critique of postmodernity.

Characteristics of the civil war

In the modern world the problematic of the civil war remains relevant. The transition of the leading countries to post-industrial capitalism does not exclude the threat of wars of this type. The purpose of the article is to identify the conceptual characteristics of civil wars. The methodological basis of the research is based on L. Wittgensteins theory of language games. The first theoretical basis of the study is the definition given by Martin van Creveld: War does not begin when some kill others; it begins when those who kill have risk to be killed. The second theoretical basis of the study is the position put forward by Karl von Clausewitz: War is the continuation of politics by other means. The study revealed that the civil war should be analyzed in two aspects. In the military-strategic aspect the civil war remains a competitive mutual mass physical violence, using both regular and irregular methods of warfare. Whereas in the political aspect, the civil war should be understood as the competitive construction of the state.

Post-industrial capitalism and trade union decline in affluent democracies

This study examines trade union decline in light of concurrent changes in the demographic and sectoral composition of labor markets. Drawing on classical sociology and contemporary scholarship on work and employment, the author theorizes that the emergence of post-industrial work settings coupled with more socially diverse workforces make labor organizing more difficult than prior research recognizes. Operating through various mechanisms, these factors are thought to hinder the development of solidarity among workers and direct employment growth toward previously unorganized parts of the economy. Using panel data on 18 countries from 1960 to 2015, these ideas are tested with regression models that capture labor market changes indicative of post-industrial capitalism—measured by changes in deindustrialization, foreign-born population, and female share of employment. The results support the theoretical argument, with counterfactual estimates suggesting that labor market changes occurring between 1960 and 2015 reduced union density by 9 to 13 points for the whole sample.

Frankenstein Redux

Frankenstein Redux

‘I like working with my hands’: performative and embodied nostalgia among post-industrial blacksmiths

Using participant observation and interview data, I analyse social processes that surround the craft of blacksmithing and its role in post-industrial capitalist society. This inquiry explicates the role of visual experiences and performances of embodied nostalgia in motivating the embrace of historic craftwork. I present visual documentation alongside qualitative data to illustrate the visual features of embodied nostalgia and document the symbolic stage upon which the modern blacksmith identity is reinforced. Blacksmithing as a profession has been deoccupationalized while conversely evolving into a richly social craft, largely driven by nostalgia and performance. Blacksmithing is physically demanding, time-consuming, costly, and once represented a hard day’s labour; this study offers an examination of why it became an activity people seek out as a weekend hobby. I find that within the community of hobbyist blacksmiths, a prime motivation is the drive to experience and perform embodied nostalgia for observers, either physically present or for a materially and temporally disembodied gaze of online viewers. The performance of embodied nostalgia is predicated on a romanticised – and mildly subversive – invocation of preindustrial social relations and a symbolic temporary seizure of one’s means of production. Ultimately, this study highlights the symbolic meanings expressed in the actions of the post-industrial blacksmithing community, while underscoring an informative case of occupational evolution in the 20th century.