[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> A review of Negri and Hardt's Empire from ananarchist perspective

[Bradford DeLong <jbdelong@uclink.berkeley.edu>]

>The point is not that info tech hasn't infiltrated old
>economy production - clearly it has. It's everywhere. But the
>experience of being a truck driver or an assembly line worker is not
>predominantly one of "inellectual, immaterial, or communicative"
>labor. They involve lots of mind-numbing manual work in the world of
>things. It's easy for intellectuals to forget this. In this passage,
>I also pointed out that about half of humanity lives in the rural
>Third World, where the main occupation is tilling the soil. Such
>workers barely appear in Empire, if at all.
>
>I say this not out of hostility to the book, in which I find a lot to
>admire, but to counter a lot of overheated perceptions of
>postmateriality that are almost everywhere you turn, whether it's to
>Alan Greenspan or Irish anarchists.
>
>Doug

With respect to being a truck driver or a grocery store 
scanner-driven checkout clerk, "postmateriality" shows up as your 
bosses knowing exactly where you are, or how many items you have 
scanned in the past minute. It shows up as real-time maps showing 
where you are or where you need to go, or as an enormous reduction in 
the cognitive commodity price memorization load of the job. Those are 
important changes. With respect to the rural Third World... Stan 
Fischer said in the late summer of 2000 that what struck him the most 
was that he no longer thought it weird for his phone to ring while he 
was in a canoe in the Niger Delta and for Michel Camdessus to be on 
the line, or for him to be watching the Republican National 
Convention on the banks of the Zambezi one evening, and then going in 
to the villages the following day and finding that the village elders 
had also been watching the RNC and had strong views about it.

It's not all sweetness, it's not all light, it's not the 
transformation of work into "intellectual, immaterial, and 
communicative" labor. But something is coming...


Brad DeLong

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