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[...] 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. The ‘frontier of control’ is like the invisible border between the two. Skirmishes can push this border further onto one side or the other. Attempts to do this provoke a response, while gains in one area can be lost in others. The location of the frontier is not a given, rather it is in flux and constituted through struggle.
useful concept
[...] 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.
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 empty’. Therefore, the key to answering the puzzle of contemporary class struggle is not only identifying those moments of resistance, but also understanding the potential of these lines of flight from work; simply refusing is not enough.
[...] work under contemporary capitalism can be categorised into three types based on the direction of struggle [...] The first is work in which the demand for workers’ control does not makes sense. The call centre is an obvious example as it would be difficult to imagine why it would be brought under workers’ control: who would you want to bombard with high speed sales calls? This is because the development of the call centre has been tied closely to the use of methods of surveillance, speed-up and control. Rather than seizing the means of production, a more attractive option is to simply go and do something else. The second kind of work is that which could be fulfilling and useful if it could be radically reorganised. An example of this is privatised care work. In the UK a large proportion of this kind of work is done on a highly casualised basis with low pay, often organised on a highly regulated basis in which limits are put on how long workers may spend with each user. If this work could be socialised and organised in a different way, it could have a significant impact on both workers and users. The third form is work in which workers retain a higher level of autonomy and the main aim would be to take control of the workplace and run it democratically. An example of this might be lecturers, who could still research and teach, but away from the pressures of managers. In these three cases there are clearly differences in the resistance that emerges and that might be successful. If there is an element of the work that is socially important, fulfilling or indeed enjoyable, then it is worth staying and fighting. In these cases, the flight from work does not take on the same importance. However, when work is stripped of these features almost entirely, then the refusal of work not only becomes a useful strategy, but it is also something that emerges organically from the labour process itself.
[...] the issue of pay was ‘seen as being unwinnable’. This was partly due to the charity fundraising that the call centre was engaged in. As mentioned earlier, the managers would apply a kind of ‘moralism’ to workers: soldiering at work would only hurt the charity, a pay rise would mean less money for the charities, and so on. The ‘moralism’ that surrounds charities can be deployed by management in an attempt to encourage workers or deflect their grievances. This is despite the fact that charity call centres, in general, are not charities themselves. Instead they are a sector of outsourced call-centre operations which compete for contracts to raise money on behalf of charities. The call centre is therefore itself a profit-making venture. Michael and the other workers started an investigation, looking through the company’s accounts to prove that a pay rise could come from the profits rather than the funds raised for the charities.
hmmm interesting
The concept of organising – perhaps opposed to selling services, though not necessarily so – is used to outline how union renewal could be achieved. This can refer to the introduction of specialist functions to represent different groups of workers, for example to cater specifically to the needs of casual workers. There is, however, an ambiguity in what is meant by the term organising. Melanie Simms and Jane Holgate illustrate this by arguing that the new approaches have ‘tended to see organising as a “toolbox” of practices rather than as having an underpinning political philosophy or objective’. This has created a situation in which organising is being adopted without asking ‘the fundamental question of what are we organising “for”?’ The move towards focusing on organising is nevertheless positive. The response by ‘key policy makers at the TUC and in affiliate unions’ was to look towards ‘US programmes such as the Organising Institute and Union Summer which were explicitly intended to attract underrepresented groups into the union movement’. Part of the problem is that ‘existing labor unions’ – in the UK, as well as globally – ‘have proved incapable of mobilizing mass rank-and-file militancy to resist the ongoing deterioration in workplace conditions and the systematic erosion of workers’ power’. Immanuel Ness continues to point out that despite this, ‘workers are developing new forms of antibureaucratic and anticapitalist forms of syndicalist, council communist, and autonomist worker representation’. These experiments in new forms of organisation are important because they are ‘rooted in the self-activity and democratic impulses of members and committed to developing egalitarian organizations in place of traditional union bureaucracies’.
Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to "soften" the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity," which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands—whether of individuals or entire peoples—need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.
Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend—conditioned by the myths of the old order—to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them.
The "fear of freedom" which afflicts the oppressed, a fear which may equally well lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined. One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the pre servers consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the op pressor.
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human com pletion.
[...] In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. This perception is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberation; it must become the motivating force for liberating action. [...]
[...] Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause consider able anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical posture. If what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms, true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these "beings for another." The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.