Activity

The strategy of refusal builds on the notion of the flight from work. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, ‘the refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics’. However, they also add to this that ‘the refusal in itself is e…

[...] As Mario Tronti put in clear terms, ‘we have to invert the problem’; instead of starting with capital, ‘change direction, and start from the beginning – and the beginning is working-class struggle’. The difficulty with this approach is that there are not a wide variety of open struggles from …

[...] In the workplace the manager is formally in control, yet still has to achieve this in practice. Goodrich uses the notion of a ‘frontier of control’ in the workplace to capture this dynamic. Imagine the workplace as a battlefield. On one side is management, and on the opposing side workers. Th…

The workplace is therefore a ‘contested terrain’, to quote the title of Edwards’s book. There are three component parts that form a ‘system of control’ or ‘the social relations of production within the firm’. The first is ‘direction’, the way in which workers are instructed to complete tasks. The s…

[...] Bentham argues that when dealing with workers: ‘whatever be the manufacture, the utility of the principle is obvious and incontestable, in all cases where the workmen are paid according to their time’. He foresaw an application for the Panopticon to remedy the indeterminacy of labour power. B…