Post-Fordist restructuring privatised individual workers’ experience of systemic economic stress

Evidence

This depression was not experienced collectively: on the contrary, it precisely took the form of the decomposition of collectivity in new modes of atomisation. Denied the stable forms of employment that they had been trained to expect, deprived of the solidarity formerly provided by trade unions, workers found themselves forced into competition with one another on an ideological terrain in which such competition was naturalised. Some workers never recovered from the traumatic shock of seeing the Fordistsocial-democratic world suddenly removed: a fact it’s worth remembering at a time when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government is hounding claimants off incapacity benefit. Such a move is the culmination of the process of privatising stress that began in the UK in the 1980s. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1490

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader reading about how ideology operates through pre-rational affect and how structural conditions get reframed as individual failings — echoes themes in Trust and Essential Essays on managerial power. — connects to: Workplace stress is social in origin but individualized through diagnosis — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1648; Post-Fordism internalized class antagonism into individual worker psychology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1405; Neoliberal policy privatised stress into individual mental illness — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1601 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalist societies socialize stress-producing conditions while privatizing their cost #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 42
• Post-Fordism internalized class antagonism into individual worker psychology #corroborates (0.88) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1405
• Stress has been privatized, reframing systemic dysfunction as individual illness #corroborates (0.86) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 42
• Neoliberal policy privatised stress into individual mental illness #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1601
• Just-in-time capitalism rewires workers’ nervous systems for perpetual instability #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 73