The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

192 Political-economic capitalist transformationpriation. The nature and composition of the global working class hasalso changed, as have the conditions of consciousness formation andpolitical action. Unionization and traditional 'left politics' becomevery hard to sustain in the face, for example, of the patriarchal(family) production systems characteristic of South-East Asia, or ofimmigrant groups in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Genderrelations have similarly become much more complicated, at the sametime as resort to a female labour force has become much morewidespread. By the same token, the social basis for ideologies ofentrepreneurial ism, paternalism, and privatism has increased. .We can, I think, trace back many of the surface shifts in economicbehaviour and political attitudes to a simple change in balance betweenFordist and non-Fordist systems of labour control, coupled with adisciplining of the former either through competition with the latter(forced restructrings and rationalizations), widespread unemploymentor through political repression (curbs on union power) andgeographical relocations to 'peripheral' countries or regions andback into industrial heartlands in a 'see-saw' motion of uneven geographicaldevelopment (Smith, 1984).I do not see this shift to alternative systems of labour control(with all its political implications) as irreversible, but interpret it as arather traditional response to crisis. The devaluation of labour powerhas always been the instinctive response of capitalists to fallingprofits. The generality of that conceals, however, some contradictorymovements. New technologies have empowered certain privilegedlayers, at the same time as alternative production and labour controlsystems open up the way to high remuneration of technical, managerial,and entrepreneurial skills. The trend, further exaggerated bythe shift to services and the enlargement of 'the cultural mass', hasbeen to increasing inequalities of income (figure 2.15), perhaps presagingthe rise of a new aristocracy of labour as well as the eme(gence ofan ill-remunerated and broadly disempowered under-class (Dahrendorf,1987; Wilson, 1987). This, however, poses serious problems ofsustaining effective demand and raises the spectre of a crisis of underconsumption- the kind of manifestation of crisis that Fordism­Keynesianism proved most adept at avoiding. I do not, therefore, seethe neo-conservative monetarism that attaches to flexible modes ofaccumulation and the overall devaluation of labour power throughenhanced labour control as offering even a short-term solution to thecrisis-tendencies of capitalism. The budget deficit of the United Stateshas, I think, been very important to the stabilization of capitalismthese last few years, and if that proves unsustainable, then the pathof capitalist accumulation world-wide will be rocky indeed.What does seem special about the period since 1972 is the extra-38363432302826242220% 02.12.01.91.81.7x 1.5 -C1l"t:IcoAssetspercentage of US assets owned bywealthiest 1 % of the population70170777,9:.>.;7,9(96'Figu.re 2.15 Inequality of asset ownership (1810-1987) and in incomes(1963-1985) in the United States(Souces: Historical Statistics of the United States, Economic Reports to thePresldent, Harrison and Bluestone, 1988)