Strategic refusal of self-surveillance work outperforms strikes against managerialism.

Evidence

If neoliberalism triumphed by incorporating the desires of the post 68 working class, a new left could begin by building on the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy. For example, the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy. What is needed is a new struggle over work and who controls it; an assertion of worker autonomy (as opposed to control by management) together with a rejection of certain kinds of labor (such as the excessive auditing which has become so central feature of work in post-Fordism). … What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without. Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it’s time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up by the crisis to begin to rid public services of business ontology. When even businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public services? — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 163

Categorization

• SEED: A concrete, near-tactical essay: ‘de-auditing’ — withdrawing the paperwork that only management notices — as the new industrial action that can actually hit managerialism.
• XREF: Direct payoff of ch8’s audit-culture claims; also parallels extralegal/withdrawal strategies in the diamond-trade readings. — connects to: Control societies replace external surveillance with self-policing but require the subject’s complicity. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 48; Collective refusal transforms individual self-discipline into public spectacle of noncompliance — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 282; Individual resistance is too weak to counter coercive organizational pressure (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Discretion and concealment constitute meaningful resistance to attention capitalism #corroborates (0.88) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 143
• Resistance to surveillance capitalism requires deliberately creating friction against its smooth flows #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1657
• Individual resistance is too weak to counter coercive organizational pressure #qualifies (0.82)
• Collective refusal transforms individual self-discipline into public spectacle of noncompliance #expands (0.78) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 282