Post-Fordist work conditions undermine the very family values they increasingly depend on

Evidence

The slogan which sums up the new conditions is ‘no long term’. Where formerly workers could acquire a single set of skills and expect to progress upwards through a rigid organizational hierarchy, now they are required to periodically re-skill as they move from institution to institution, from role to role. As the organization of work is decentralized, with lateral networks replacing pyramidal hierarchies, a premium is put on ‘flexibility’. Echoing McCauley’s mockery of Hanna in Heat (‘How do you expect to keep a marriage?’), Sennett emphasizes the intolerable stresses that these conditions of permanent instability put on family life. The values that family life depends upon – obligation, trustworthiness, commitment – are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism. Yet, with the public sphere under attack and the safety nets that a ‘Nanny State’ used to provide being dismantled, the family becomes an increasingly important place of respite from the pressures of a world in which instability is a constant. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 70

The ethos espoused by McCauley is the one which Richard Sennett examines in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, a landmark study of the affective changes that the post-Fordist reorganization of work has brought about. The slogan which sums up the new conditions is ‘no long term’. Where formerly workers could acquire a single set of skills and expect to progress upwards through a rigid organizational hierarchy, now they are required to periodically re-skill as they move from institution to institution, from role to role. As the organization of work is decentralized, with lateral networks replacing pyramidal hierarchies, a premium is put on ‘flexibility’. Echoing McCauley’s mockery of Hanna in Heat (‘How do you expect to keep a marriage?’), Sennett emphasizes the intolerable stresses that these conditions of permanent instability put on family life. The values that family life depends upon – obligation, trustworthiness, commitment – are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 70

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to prior chapter notes: capitalism’s growth fetish vs. ecological sustainability, and stress being privatized as individual illness. — connects to: Class antagonism has moved inside each worker rather than between classes — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 74; Post-Fordist capitalism both depends on and destroys the family — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 70; Mass unemployment isolates families and weakens parental authority — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 438 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 70

Related

• Post-Fordist capitalism both depends on and destroys the family (similarity 0.86)
• Capitalism both depends on and undermines the family simultaneously (similarity 0.84)
• Post-Fordist capitalism both needs and destroys the nuclear family (similarity 0.83)
• Mass unemployment isolates families and weakens parental authority (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Post-Fordist capitalism both depends on and destroys the family #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 70
• The family structure cannot survive the loss of the father’s ordinary image #qualifies (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 697
• Mass unemployment isolates families and weakens parental authority #qualifies (0.70) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 438