Post-Fordist restructuring was partly driven by workers’ own desires for freedom

Evidence

On the one hand we have the restructuring of capitalism along the lines of post-Fordism. But what’s key to that, of course, is that this just wasn’t something that was simply imposed by capital on workers; it was in many ways driven by the desires of workers — workers who simply didn’t find enticing a life of boredom for forty years in a factory, who wanted more freedom. I think the key issue now is, in a way, the discrepancy between what they did want and what they actually got. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2100

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard capital-imposes-on-labor narrative: workers’ legitimate anti-authoritarian desires were the fuel for a flexible capitalism that delivered precarity. This is a genuinely paradigm-sensitizing insight about how emancipation can be captured.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the desire for freedom-from-boredom as the unrecognized engine of precarity — how workplaces marketed flexibility against the forty-year factory life.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalism co-opted workers’ own desire for emancipation from the Fordist factory; Capital co-opted workers’ own desire for liberation from Fordist routine — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 74; Capital absorbed workers’ own desire to escape Fordist routine, trapping the left — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1405 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Capital co-opted workers’ own desire for liberation from Fordist routine #expands (0.90) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 74
• Capitalism co-opted workers’ own desire for emancipation from the Fordist factory #expands (0.88)
• Neoliberalism succeeded by capturing workers’ desire to escape Fordist strictures #expands (0.88) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1504
• Capital absorbed workers’ own desire to escape Fordist routine, trapping the left #expands (0.87) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1405
• Enlightened capitalism captures workers with diversions that dissipate their transcendence #complicates (0.74) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 89
• Post-Fordist workers are liberated from factory bondage but lost in a desert #qualifies (0.72) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 74