then appeared: to discipline one’s own workforce, one should give free rein to economic and social insecurity in the world outside. If people continued to work in conditions that they hated, explained the militant worker John Lippert in the late 1970s, at a time when the economic tide was turning, this was not ‘because of any internal control the company has on the workers. The control is more external: the economic hardship would be too great if the workers did what their every instinct tells them to do: leave that place behind forever’.32
Discipline is not imposed in the same way in closed institutions, those which you can leave only by escaping, such as prisons, as it is in open institutions, those from which you can always resign, such as businesses. In the former, discipline reigns in a vacuum, preventing subjects from leaving; in the latter, it works by threatening you with forced expulsion. On the one hand, confinement, on the other, dismissal. In institutions that subjects are ‘free’ to leave, the rigours of internal disciplinary power are not enough to obtain docility. This requires in addition, in the absence of sufficient positive motivation, the negative incitement of external disciplinary effects. The notion is a disciplinary power inside and disciplining pressure outside, in a pattern where the intensity of the latter determines the degree of a tendency to submission in the former.33
The generations born after 1973, those who grew up in the era of perpetual ‘crisis’, successively internalized the idea that each generation would generally be worse off than the previous one. They learned, again, to be afraid. This was a historic reversal that could also be read as a kind of group psychotherapy, a mass re-education in ‘frustration tolerance’.
Notes
1 1. Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Well-Wisher to Mankind (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971; first published in 1786).
2 2. Judson Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, Fortune Magazine, July 1970, reprinted in Lloyd Zimpel, Man Against Work (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 61–75 (p. 66).
3 3. ‘Adam Smith’, Supermoney (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 274. He also writes: ‘The “sacrifice consensus” is breaking down’. These days, nobody is going to think: ‘I am doing this for my family, I am working so that my son has a better life than I do’ (p. 280).
4 4. ‘Adam Smith’, Supermoney, p. 275.
5 5. Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 66.
6 6. Malcolm Denise, quoted in Weller, The Lordstown Struggle and the Real Crisis in Production, p. 4 (my emphasis). He wrote: ‘Employees in the 1970’s are (1) even less concerned about losing a job or staying with an employer; (2) even less willing to put up with dirty and uncomfortable working conditions; (3) even less likely to accept the unvarying pace and functions on moving lines; and (4) even less willing to conform to rules or be amenable to higher authority’ (Malcolm L. Denise, ‘Remarks by Malcolm L. Denise, Vice President, Labor Relations, Ford Motor Company at Ford Management Conference, The Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, November 10, 1969’, pp. 5–6, quoted in B.J. Widick, ‘Work in Auto Plants: Then and Now’, in B.J. Widick (ed.), Auto Work and its Discontents (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 1–17 [p. 10]).
7 7. Saul Rosenzweig, ‘A General Outline of Frustration’, Character & Personality, vol. 7, no. 2, December 1938, pp. 151–60 (p. 154).
8 8. Ibid., p. 154.
9 9. Earl Bramblett, quoted in Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 65.
10 10. See Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Crise et sortie de crise, Ordre et désordres néolibéraux (Paris: PUF, 2000), pp. 32ff.
11 11. The formation of this line of argument has been studied in detail by John David Truty, ‘Ideas in Disguise: Fortune’s Articulation of Productivity 1969–1972’, PhD dissertation, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, 2010.
12 12. Truty, ‘Ideas in Disguise’, p. 141.
13 13. See Brenner, ‘Rank-and-File Rebellion, 1967–1976’, p. 32.
14 14. ‘Adam Smith’, Supermoney, p. 276. Note, however, that neoliberals were divided over the decisive factor in inflation. While the Friedmanians concentrated ‘on the immediate causes of inflation – the injection of newly printed money into the economy’, the Hayekians insisted on ‘the capacity of trade unions to exert a causal influence on the process of monetary creation’ (Gilles Christoph, ‘Du nouveau libéralisme à l’anarcho-capitalisme: la trajectoire intellectuelle du néolibéralisme britannique’, PhD dissertation, Université Lyon 2, 2012, p. 368).
15 15. In 1975, Raford Boddy and James Crotty, echoing the arguments in the Wall Street Journal, wrote: ‘We view the erosion of profits as the result of successful class struggle waged by labor against capital’ (Raford Boddy and James Crotty, ‘Class Conflict and Macro-Policy: The Political Business Cycle’, Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 7, no. 1, 1975, pp. 1–19 [p. 1]). Their thesis was immediately criticized for its monocausal character by other authors of the same general tendency. See Howard Sherman, ‘Class Conflict and Macro-Policy: A Comment’, Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 8, no. 2, summer 1976, pp. 55–60.
16 16. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999), p. 37. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso, 2006); Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism (London: Monthly Review Press, 1981); and, in particular, John Bellamy Foster, ‘Marx, Kalecki and Socialist Strategy’, Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 11, April 2013, pp. 1–14.
17 17. Quoted in Brenner, ‘Rank-and-File Rebellion, 1967–1976’, p. 65. As Life Magazine reported in 1972, ‘much of the fear of being unemployed has disappeared, along with the notion that hard work is a virtue in itself’ (‘The Will to Work and Some Ways to Increase It’, Life Magazine, 1 September 1972, p. 38).
18 18. ‘The U.S. Can’t Afford What Labor Wants’, Business Week, 11 April 1970, p. 106. Quoted in Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 156.
19 19. ‘Adam Smith’, Supermoney, p. 275.
20 20. Michael Perelman, The Pathology of the U.S. Economy Revisited: The Intractable Contradictions of Economic Policy (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 40. See also Alan S. Blinder, Economic Policy and the Great Stagflation (New York: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 107ff.
21 21. Arnold Weber, head of the ‘Cost of Living Council’ under Nixon, in Business Week, 27 April 1974, quoted in Perelman, The Pathology of the U.S. Economy Revisited, p. 41.
22 22. Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970: Angry, Aggressive, Acquisitive’, p. 40.
23 23. Horst Brand, of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, quoted in Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970’, p. 40.
24 24. In the early 1980s, the trio of Marxist economists Weisskopf, Bowles and Gordon proposed the notion of the exit cost, defined as the proportion of the standard of living that an employee can expect to lose in the event of dismissal or resignation: ‘the higher is the cost to workers of losing their jobs, the more cooperative they are likely to be at the workplace. The lower is the cost of losing their jobs, in contrast, the less responsive they will be to employer efforts to boost productivity’ (Thomas E. Weisskopf, Samuel Bowles and David M. Gordon, ‘Hearts and Minds: A Social Model of U.S. Productivity Growth’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 2, 1983, pp. 381–441 [p. 387]). Their calculations show that the cost of losing a job, after
