Post-Fordism internalized class antagonism into individual worker psychology
Evidence
The horrors of these new working patterns are clear, but it is imperative that the left renounces one of its most dangerous addictions, its nostalgia for Fordism. As Christian pointed out, the disintegration of stable working patterns was in part driven by the desires of workers — it was they who, quite rightly, did not wish to work in the same factory for forty years. In many ways, the left has never recovered from being wrong-footed by Kapital’s mobilisation and metabolisation of the desire for emancipation from the Fordist routine. … Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, qua worker, is interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximising their investment. There is no longer an identifiable external enemy. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1405
Categorization
- XREF: Pays off the book’s recurring theme of internalized psychic control (chs 32, 33) and connects with the Frankfurt ‘authoritarian character’ trajectory. — connects to: Postmodern mental fragmentation internalizes social division of labor into cognition itself — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 789; Analyzing only subjective workplace reactions obscures the underlying management-labor conflict — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2094; Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 459 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- Postmodern mental fragmentation internalizes social division of labor into cognition itself
#expands(0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 789 - Analyzing only subjective workplace reactions obscures the underlying management-labor conflict
#complicates(0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2094