[lbo-talk] Hardt/Negri's Commonwealth as reviewed in WSJ

Bhaskar Sunkara bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com
Fri Oct 9 09:17:11 PDT 2009


Maybe because the international working class has never been bigger? Negri obviously doesn't think much of the Indian peasants being transformed into proletarians.

On Oct 9, 2009, at 11:40 AM, Asad Haider <noswine at gmail.com> wrote:


>> H&N were primarily arguing that it really is a post-Fordist (I
>> can't stand
>
>> that term) world we live in? The economy's actually shifted to
>> emphasizing
>> language and communication? That interpretation makes it worse
>> than the
>> one
>> I couldn't take.
>>
>
> I don't know why. Of course, language and communication don't
> exhaust the
> economy--maybe we could call their economic functions
> ("consumerism"/branding/service work etc), following Raymond Williams,
> "emergent cultural formations." To me it certainly seems like a
> productive
> move to say that they don't represent something outside the economy,
> or a
> transcendence of the relation of exploitation, but are actually part
> of the
> production process and therefore sites of class struggle.
>
> Far better than business-crazy futurists who think that we have
> transcended
> work, and grouchy left-wing traditionalists who see new forms of
> cultural
> production as the decline of civilization.
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