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CB: Yea, again.
Recall that Marx and Lenin thought of the big factory and proletarian ghettos as giving workers a feeling of the power in their mass numbers. The revolution in transportation and communication allows the capitalists circa 1980 to scatter geographically the points of production, while retaining high enough profits. These developments in mechanization allow negation of what Marx called cooperation. Mechanization and cooperation were the twin pillars of the industrial phase of capitalism. Now mechanization has developed so much as to allow negation of cooperation (big factories)
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>>> seamus at accessone.com 11/06/00 05:12PM >>>
I don't know about this. For instance, global logistics firms like UPS,
FedEx and DHL exhibit very high degrees of both co-ordination and
co-operation within their networks, and this despite plenty of adversarial
dynamics between bosses and everyone else. Similarly, Boeing has lots of
co-operation within various aspects of it's production teams and the usual
amount of contentiousness due to the cost-cutting fascism of the bosses [so
much so that they have the FAA breathing down their necks]. So co-operation
and co-ordination have a fractal like dynamics depending on which
observation scale you choose.
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CB: I have no problem with some analysis that cooperation recurs as in a sublation at a different level. Afterall, overall the global restructuring of capitalism is still an increase in the division of labor, specialization, socialization of labor. But the classic big factory, big factory town, like Detroit or Pittsburgh and big urban proletarian ghettos of factory workers has been strategically altered. Especially, moving the points of production from the city to the suburbs, from the North to the South, in the U.S. and from the U.S. to overseas and elsewhere, with world cars, just in time production, containerization, mass truck transport.
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The negation of co-operation that you speak of may have it's uses up to a point of diminishing returns that is always changing due to the uncertainties of market dynamics; uncertainty beyond the firm's boundaries leading to changes in the co-operative dynamics within it.
Ian