No he isn't. I'm disappointed that H&N don't seem to have developed or modified their analysis much since they wrote Empire, but when people _keep_ putting forward such an obvious misunderstanding of what they think, I guess it's not surprising that they feel the need to repeat themselves.
> 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.
Yes, and nothing in H&N's argument goes against this. The idea of a shift from Fordism to post-Fordism doesn't mean that the economy is shifting from widgets to symbols. It means that changes in symbolic forms of production have an affect on widget-based production. The way in which the number of people involved in industrial production has expanded is an example of this, as the ability of western companies to use manufacturing labor in non-western countries was enhanced by various developments in symbolic labor (the logistical ability to manage longer supply chains, for example). The paradigmatic post-Fordist company isn't Microsoft, it's Walmart, which directs the production and distribution of material goods from all around the world.