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[...] Sitting down again, he said we’ll soon get used to Marina, she’s a good girl and he likes her. It’s true. He likes her because she’s pretty. He, like Riccardo, smiles when he sees her around, because she possesses that animal meekness that men take for sweetness. Not even what happened between them serves to make Michele suspicious: he thinks she’s an example of loving, female obedience that flatters him, too, because he’s a man. But I know what a different idea he has of a woman like Clara, for instance, even if he doesn’t talk about her or complain that she never called. [...]
I still remember the day I told my mother I was going to start working. She stared at me for a long time, in silence, before lowering her eyes, and, because of that look of hers, my work has always weighed on me like a sin. Mirella disapproves of this feeling, I know perfectly well. Maybe she even despises it and intends, by the way she lives her life, to rebel against me. She doesn’t understand that it was I who made her free, I with my life racked between the old, reassuring traditions and the call of new demands. It was up to me. I’m the bridge she’s taken advantage of, the way young people take advantage of everything, cruelly, without even noticing that they’re taking, without paying attention. Now I, too, can collapse.
[...] I was working and she was studying, as she often does now, until late at night, because she’s decided to take a lot of exams. “Lucky you!” Riccardo said to her yesterday: “I have other things to do now, I can’t prepare my thesis. And in September, when I start at the bank, I’ll have even less time.” [...]
this triggers me lol, i hate him
[...] But as soon as I held the notebook, I lost my sense of peace. In it, the image of Guido emerges everywhere between the lines: his words, written, acquire unthought-of echoes, bewildering appeals. I should have said yes the first day he invited me to leave since, in reality, I desire nothing else. My giving it up is only another proof of that lack of courage that Mirella calls hypocrisy. Facing these pages, I’m afraid. All my feelings, thus dissected, rot, become poison, and I’m aware of becoming the criminal the more I try to be the judge. I have to destroy the notebook, destroy the devil that hides in its pages, as in the hours of a life. At night, when we sit at the table together, we seem transparent and loyal, without intrigues, but I know now that none of us show what we truly are, we hide, we all camouflage ourselves, out of shame or spite. Marina gives me long looks every night, and I’m afraid that, looking, she sees in me this notebook, knows the subterfuges I use to write in it, the cleverness with which I hide it. She’s certain to find it someday and find in it a motive to dominate me as I dominate her for what she did with Riccardo. Sitting opposite me, she waits with the inexorable patience of people without intelligence.
[...] the most important effect of the hypermobility of capital on labor movements is not so much its direct impact on workers, but its indirect impact. In this view, the hypermobility of capital has weakened de facto state sovereignty . And as states become incapable of effectively controlling flows of capital, their capacity to protect their citizens' livelihoods and other workers' rights; including the welfare state and substantive democracy, also declines (Tilly 1995; Castells 1997: 252-4, 354-5). States that insist on maintaining expensive social compacts with their citizens, including their working classes, risk being abandoned en masse by investors scouring the world for the highest possible returns. From this perspective, the most consequential aspect of the "race to the bottom" takes the form of pressure on states to repeal social welfare provisions and other fetters on profit maximization within their borders. The rocky debut of the new European currency (the Euro) has been taken as one example of this process, with European countries being "punished" for failing to dismantle social protection schemes at a sufficiently rapid pace to suit a hypermobile capital.
Contentions about the state of world labor are based on assumptions about the impact of contemporary globalization on workers' bargaining power. A useful starting point for differentiating types of workers' bargaining power is Erik Olin Wright's (2 000: 962) distinction between associational and structural power. Associational power consists of "the various forms of power that result from the formation of collective organization of workers" (most importantly, trade unions and political parties). Structural power, in contrast, consists of the power that accrues to workers simply from their location ... in the economic system." Wright further divides "structural" power into two subtypes. The first subtype of structural power (which we shall call marketplace bargaining power) is the power that "results dIrectly from tight labor markets." The second subtype of structural power (which we shall call workplace bargaining power) is the power that results "from the strategic location of a particular group of workers within a key industrial sector." Marketplace bargaining power can take several forms including (1) the possession of scarce skills that are in demand by employers, (2) low levels of general unemployment, and (3) the ability of workers to pull out of the labor market entirely and survive on nonwage sources of income.8 Workplace bargaining power, on the other hand, accrues to workers who are enmeshed in tightly integrated production processes, where a localized work stoppage in a key node can cause disruptions on a much wider scale than the stoppage itself. Such bargaining power has been in evidence when enture assembly lines have been shut down by a stoppage in one segment of the line, and when entire corporations relying on the just-in-time delivery of parts have been brought to a standstill by railway workers' strikes.
If the hypermobility of capital is widely seen as having undermined marketplace and associational bargaining power, related "post-Fordist" transformations in the organization of production and labor process are widely seen as having undermined labor's workplace bargaining power. Thus, subcontracting and other forms of vertical disintegration are seen as having reversed the historical trend toward increased workplace bargaining power that was brought about through the spread of Fordist systems of mass production. Fordism tended to dramatically increase workplace bargaining power by increasing the vulnerability of capital to workers' direct action at the point of production. To be sure, continuous flow production (including the assembly line) tended to decrease labor's marketplace bargaining power by homogenizing and deskilling industrial work and by making it possible (indeed preferable) to draw on latent reserve armies of labor with little or no industrial experience. Moreover, continuous flow production tended to weaken associational power by bringing into the proletariat "a mass of unorganized workers" who could not be easily absorbed into the existing artisanal unions or left political parties.
[...] we can draw on Immanuel Wallerstein's notion that historical capitalism is characterized by a "system-level problem." That is, profits can be made - even with the partial de-commodification of labor and the establishment of expensive social contracts - as long as those concessions are made to only a small percentage of the world's workers. As Wallerstein put it, with reference to the post-Second World War social contracts: "One could cut in several-hundred-million western workers and still make the system profitable. But if one cut in several billion Third World workers, there would be nothing left for further capital accumulation" (1995: 25).
[...] The U.S. labor movement's success in having open immigration outlawed in the 1920s set the stage for the stabilization of the U.S. working class and contributed to the subsequent CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) victories in the 1930s. At the same time, however, this U.S. labor movement "success" shut off what had been an essential social safety valve for Europe in the nineteenth century. It thereby transformed the terrain on which workers' movements operated in Europe and, according to E. H. Carr (1945), helped set the stage for the defeat of European labor movements and the rise of fascism.
On December 30, 1936, workers occupied General Motors' Fisher Body Plants No. 1 and No. 2 in Flint, Michigan. By March 12, 1937, General Motors (GM; the United States' largest industrial corporation with vast financial resources and a network of anti-union spies) was forced to capitulate and sign a contract with the United Auto Workers (UAW). This was the beginning of a flood of strikes that brought unionization to the mass-production industries of the United States, at a time of both high unemployment (i.e., weak market-based bargaining power) and feeble labor organization (i.e., weak associational power).
A key to the UAW's success was labor's workplace bargaining power: the ability of the workers to exploit their position within the complex division of labor characteristic of mass production. The Flint sit-down strike that paralyzed GM's Fisher Body plant was planned and executed by a "militant minority" of autoworkers who by "unexpectedly stopping the assembly line and sitting down inside the plant ...catalyzed pro-union sentiment among the vast majority of apathetic workers" (Dubofsky and Va n Tine 1977: 255). The strike wave demonstrated the limits of the assembly lines' technical control of the workforce: a relatively small number of activists could bring an entire plant's production to a halt. As Edwards (1979: 128) put it, "[technical] control linked the entire plant's workforce, and when the line stopped, every worker necessarily joined the strike."