stem from? One answer was the flaws of welfare democracy which, far from ensuring consent, was digging its own grave. In the eyes of neoconservatives as much as neoliberals, it was the state itself that was becoming ungovernable. Hence these questions: how could politics be dethroned? How could democracy be limited? (Part VI.)
For my investigation, I have gathered various heterogeneous sources from different disciplines; I have taken the decision to intertwine ‘noble’ and ‘vulgar’ sources when they have the same object – thus a Nobel Prize-winning economist may rub shoulders with a specialist in ‘busting’ trade unions. Their writings are all strategic texts in a struggle, and they all provide answers to the question ‘What should be done?’ They are texts that set out procedures, techniques and tactics – either very concretely, for example in practical guides or manuals for managers, or more programmatically, through reflections on discursive strategies or overall practices. This corpus comprises mainly English-language sources: as far as managerial thinking and economic theories of the firm are concerned, the United States has been the birthplace of new notions that have quickly spread worldwide.
I often keep myself in the background in this book, so as to reconstitute, by cutting and editing quotations, a composite text whose assembled fragments are often worth less individually, through their attribution to a singular author, than as characteristic utterances of the different positions to which I strive to give a voice.
Notes
1 1. Louis Barré, Complément au Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, vol. 2 (Brussels, 1839).
2 2. Willis W. Harman, ‘The Great Legitimacy Challenge: A Note on Interpreting the Present and Assessing the Future’, in Middle- and Long-Term Energy Policies and Alternatives, Appendix to Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 25–31 (p. 27).
3 3. Michel Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’, in Dits et écrits, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard-Quarto, 1994), p. 94.
4 4. Eve Chiapello, ‘Capitalism and its Criticisms’, in Paul du Gay and Glenn Morgan (eds.), New Spirits of Capitalism?: Crises, Justifications, and Dynamics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 63.
5 5. André Gorz, Misère du présent, richesse du possible (Paris: Galilée, 1997), p. 26.
6 6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 240).
7 7. Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce que la critique? Critique et Aufklärung’ (1978), Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 84, no. 2, April–June 1990, pp. 35–63 (p. 38).
8 8. Lenin, ‘“Left-Wing Communism”: An Infantile Disorder’, in Vladimir I. Lenin, ‘Left-Wing Communism’: An Infantile Disorder (Chippendale, Australia: Resistance Books, 1999), pp. 27–99 (p. 83).
9 9. Foucault sometimes uses the two terms interchangeably. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 70. On this notion, see Jean-Claude Monod, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une “crise de gouvernementalité”?’, Lumières, no. 8, 2006, pp. 51–68.
10 10. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 196.
11 11. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 318.
12 12. Ibid., p. 320.
13 13. Barthélémy Prosper Enfantin, Oeuvres d’Enfantin, vol. XI (Paris: Dentu, 1873), p. 125.
14 14. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 136.
1 INDISCIPLINE ON THE SHOP FLOOR
Put thirteen small bits of card into thirteen small holes, sixty times an hour, eight hours a day. Solder sixty-seven pieces of sheet metal per hour and then find yourself one day placed in front of a contraption that needs 110. Work amid noise, […] in a fog of oil, solvent, metal dust. […] Obey without answering back, be punished without right of appeal.
André Gorz1
Tommy passes a joint to Yanagan who draws the smoke deep, then hands it to me. […] The smoke striking into my lungs sends my blood leaping. And soon the flying sparks, the hot steel, the raging, exploding furnaces above us seem like frivolities on carnival night.
Bennett Kremen2
‘The younger generation, which has already shaken the campuses, is showing signs of restlessness in the plants of industrial America’, warned the New York Times in June 1970. ‘Many young workers are calling for immediate changes in working conditions and are rejecting the disciplines of factory work’.3 ‘Labour discipline has collapsed’, observed an internal report at General Motors the same year.4
If discipline means gaining ‘a hold over others’ bodies’,5 Indocile behaviour is manifested by an irresistible longing for disengagement: don’t stay where you are, run away, get out of the business, take back your own body and make off with it. But this was exactly the set of feelings that factory life was starting to generate on a large scale at the time, as there was among the younger generation of workers a ‘deep dislike of the job and […] a desire to escape’.6
In the US automobile industry, turnover was huge: more than half of the new unskilled workers were leaving their positions before the end of the first year.7 Some were so repelled by their first contact with the assembly line that they took to the hills after the first weeks. ‘Some assembly-line workers are so turned off’, managers reported with astonishment, ‘that they just walk away in mid-shift and don’t even come back to get their pay for time they have worked’.8
At General Motors, 5 per cent of workers were absent without any real justification every day.9 On Mondays and Fridays this rose to twice the figure. In summertime, in some factories, it could reach 20 per cent. ‘What is it like on a Monday, in summer, then?’, one factory worker was asked in 1973. He replied, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been in for one’. Another worker, when asked ‘how come you’re only working four days a week?’ replied, ‘because I can’t make enough money in three’.10 A third was asked what exactly he was looking for, and replied ‘for a chance to use my brain’, a job where ‘my high school education counts for something’.11 Factory life? ‘You’re like in a jail cell – except they have more time off in prison’, replied another.12
In factories, your body was ruined and your mind was exhausted, you felt dead: ‘I sing, whistle, throw water at a guy on the line, do anything I can to bust the boredom’.13 Unable to endure the infinite repetition of the same any longer, you aspired to create rather than to produce: ‘Sometimes, out of pure meanness, when I make something, I just put a little dent in it. I like to do something to make it really unique. Hit it with a hammer; deliberately to see if it’ll get by, just so I can say I did it’.14
Ordinary acts of indiscipline, just like the disciplines of which they are the counterpart, involve an art of detail. They require
