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

[Asad Haider]

> Because he (Negri) is mistaking the redistribution of existing labor for
> the
> supercession of "banging on a widget" production generally. The fact that
> an
> increasing number of First Worlders are engaged in symbolic work is surely
> important, but it doesn't mean that the world capitalist economy is
> shifting
> from widgets to symbols overall. As Bhaskar points out, there are more
> widgets and more people producing them than ever.
>
>
This is touched on in some ways in Empire, which speaks interestingly of
"Toyotism" rather than post-Fordism. If you are banging on a widget that
will be bought by several different companies who have already advertised
them according to various cultural logics and will brand them accordingly,
you are participating in a new system, one which includes old industrial
forms just as much as newer communicative ones.