Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

[...] 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 which to draw conclusions. A potential remedy is directing attention onto the class composition of workers in the call centre. As Gigi Roggero argues, ‘our challenge is to begin once again from the blockages experienced by the struggles of the precarious’ understanding how ‘the political composition of the class is crushed within the sociological mold of its technical composition’. This notion of class composition is an important contribution from the Italian Workerists. It begins with a consideration of technical composition: the organisation of the labour process, the use of technology and the conditions of the reproduction of labour power (the focus of previous chapters). Political composition, on the other hand, relates to the specific forms and relations of struggles, a complex factor continually subjected to processes of re-composition. These ‘blockages’ are therefore the result of the technical composition of the working class at a particular point, preventing sustained struggles and giving the surface impression of calm in many workplaces. For example, the limitation of most trade union demands to the questions of wages can result in the abandonment of struggle over the labour process itself. By failing to contest control over the organisation of work by management, workers themselves are left in a difficult structural position. The drastic shift in the frontier of control in the workplace means that it no longer appears as something that can even be contested, leaving significant power in the hands of management. However, these blockages facing precarious workers are neither permanent nor immovable. In seeking to shift the blockages it is first necessary to understand the conditions of the workplace and the class composition at particular points.

—p.113 Moments of Resistance (97) by Jamie Woodcock 5 years, 3 months ago