The left must abandon Fordist nostalgia while still embracing release from repetitive labor

Evidence

Yet autonomist theories continue to be crucial because they give us some resources for constructing a model of what leftist political organisation could look like in the post-Fordist conditions of mandatory flexibility, globalisation and just-in-time production. We can no longer be in any doubt that the conditions which gave rise to the “old left” have collapsed in the global North, but we must have the courage not to be nostalgic for this lost Fordist world of boring factory work and a labour movement dominated by male industrial workers. As Antonio Negri so powerfully put it in one of the letters collected in the recently published Art And Multitude, “We have to live and suffer the defeat of truth, of our truth. We have to destroy its representation, its continuity, its memory, its trace. All subterfuges for avoiding the recognition that reality has changed, and with it truth, have to be rejected. […] The very blood in our veins had been replaced.” Even though the shift into so-called “cognitive” labour has been overstated — just because work involves talking doesn’t make it “cognitive”; the labour of a call centre worker mechanically repeating the same rote phrases all day is no more “cognitive” than that of someone on a production line — Antonio Negri is right that the liberation from repetitive industrial labour remains a victory. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1585

Categorization

• SEED: Fisher’s point that ‘cognitive labour’ is overstated — call centre work isn’t cognitive — offers a sharp angle for an essay on how tech-industry rhetoric mislabels routinized work.
• XREF: connects to: The Left seeks liberation of labor rather than liberation from labor. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 114; 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desire to escape Fordist routine, trapping the left — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1405; Political movements weakened by nostalgia for obsolete forms need institutional memory to learn — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2232

Broader Connections

• Capital absorbed workers’ own desire to escape Fordist routine, trapping the left #expands (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1405