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First off, you are dead right that I've not engaged directly in any labor organizing or action. I have been trying to rectify my ignorance on the topic in a variety of ways, but it is a slow process.
That said, my ignorance on the topic has largely been swayed in the opposite direction you suggest. In short, I am much more likely to be overly romantic about what organized labor has or can accomplish than the opposite. I grew up in a suburb in TX, where there is no culture of labor organizing, or at least not of the deep, fundamental kind that there is in the Northeast or cities like Chicago. I never met anyone who was a labor organizer and had no real idea what that meant until I was in graduate school, met people involved with strikes and protests, and was made to think about labor and political economy more directly--and only in the last few years can I say I actually understand what the labor movement means and has meant.
For much of my life this ignorance meant I would easily believe that labor organizations could do nothing to help. Then I reflexively believed they were good, as per the liberal left line of general support without any real sense of what this meant. I have was only just beginning to understand (probably over the last five years, in part from lurking on this list), for instance, the depth of the class war that has been underway against labor in general and how this relates to the absence of any clear, organized "countervailing force."
And just as I'd begun integrating class more militantly and centrally into my courses (I was/am a professor at an arts and media college), Wisconsin blew up. Suddenly the tacit, only occasionally explicit and certainly underreported purpose of neoliberalism as a form of class warfare was made fully visible before everyone's eyes. I realize it had been going on piecemeal for years, but the all out strike made it clear how vital labor was - if only by how hard the right was fighting to get rid of what organizations we have.
This was followed by Occupy Wall Street, which seems to have a general suspicion about organized labor, but nevertheless focused the country's attention on class. Since the EPI came out with that interactive graph that shows how muck of the growth went to the top 10% over the last 30 years, I've been showing that to my students regularly, harping on the significance of this for all of us - and, in many cases, being one of the few people who'd ever mentioned this to many of them much less shown them any proof for its existence. Occupy Wall Street has made this data completely mainstream. When I have these discussions with my students in the future, we can move directly past the "Seriously, this is really what it looks like" phase and straight to the "what do you think we should do about it?" phase. The sublime horror of the information, its depressing depiction of reality, takes too long to sink in - especially if there is the vocal acolyte of one of the Friedmans (Thomas or Milton) squawking about freedom and liberty and our benevolent capitalist rulers who have made life better for everyone, God bless them.
In any case, one of the main issues I'll need to get my head around in order to have this discussion is what form the struggle can take now. It is a mundane problem for those involved in actually shaping this struggle - discussion is pointless, action is all, or whatever Carrol (Glad you're better, BTW) or anyone might say to my flagrant violation of the 11th thesis as an academic. I try to play my part in the hegemonic struggle and I'm not sure I'm wired to do much else (though I'm sure the Skinner Box of the market could force me into a new behavioral pattern.)
All of this is a roundabout way of saying I think you're completely right about both me and the position I aped in the passage you cite. On the other hand, when I said this in the passage you cite, I meant to be putting words into the mouths of Hardt and Negri (and the anti- or at least "meh"-union crowd.) And, more importantly, I meant to disagree with the conclusion they arrive at through what I (and you, evidently) find to be a faulty and largely reprehensible set of premises.
You largely sum up what I find problematic about those premises, though I confess I am not as confident as you in my ability to marshall the facts so decisively. My sense of those strikes (like the rank and file battles here in the US) was that, though they obviously attacked the union structure as well, it was the framework of the union, the solidarity of it and the organization of the workers it created which made those rank and file struggles possible. I think this was probably true in the 1930s as well, though, again, I'm a slow, late learner here. The original post I linked to in response to Bhaskar rehearses some of this in relation to Hardt and Negri, but what this fact says to me is that while the union leadership are bought and sold (a point I'm getting from some of the book /Staying Alive/) the deep organization of the workers was an important institutional resource for the rank and filers who wanted to ignite the wildcat strikes of the time.
In other words, the hardest part of getting people to strike collectively, to want to strike, and to feel supported in the strike was in creating the explicit and visible organization of the workers as workers by labor organizations in the past. For better or worse, they chose a clear definition of what a worker was, what labor was, and what the difference were between the interests of capital and labor. They didn't bother (or at least needn't bother) creating complex gradations of exploitation: if you were a worker you had rights in your relation with capital, you had solidarity with other people in your same structural position, and you should stand with them just as capital stands with capital. This, as I say, is likely an overly romanticized version of what labor organizations were or did, but in so far as it is true, then I can't see how this social, cultural, and political infrastructure wasn't largely if not absolutely instrumental to the rank and file rebellions. In a sense, the failure of the leadership made them all the more useful since the organizations were no longer really serving this ideal purpose, making the energy from below all the more contingent on the framework set in place by its mythic legacy.
So, in short, I agree completely that, at its heart what H&N preach (in so far as it recommends the abolition of these kinds of structures) is somewhat, or even "utterly," reactionary. Though, to be fair, many of the leaders of the labor movement in the 70s were quite a bit more reactionary so the desire to fight them equally makes a fair amount of sense, excepting the obvious caveat created by what I just said above.
As for Smythe, which Lasko mentions: I am quite aware of him and see him as an interesting North American variant though the immaterial part of Smythe isn't integrated into a theory of political power in quite the same way as Hardt and Negri have it. His interest is almost totally in the economic value this kind of immaterial labor creates. It's been a while since I read him directly so I may be projecting through the lens of my dissertation work on him, but my sense of him has always been that his major argument is with others in communication and cultural studies who haven't considered the largely commercial institutions of modern communication as capitalist organizations. The audience commodity and his notions of unpaid labor or laboring during liesure time are, like immaterial labor, largely undeveloped as clear concepts in relation to actual value production. they are suggestive, helpful, and prescient, all of which makes them (like immaterial labor) a useful canvas for people to paint on. I think the closest analog to a Smythian appropriation of Hardt and Negri is Adam Arvidsson's essay on the Administrative Class that sops up the profits created by these creative communities. Haunting it's background is his own notion of the ethical economy among those creative communities, but for the most part, he is focused only on the value producing process of immaterial labor and not the [supposedly automatic] political implications.
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-1arvidsson.pdf
However, on this topic (Smythe) what is striking to me is how completely ignorant Hardt and Negri seem to be on that tradition: you'd think that, if one were venturing into a new theory of political economy, in which communication and culture were central they might find some time to look at the loads of research and theory produced by Smythe, Herbert Schiller (and now his son), or other people writing in the political economy of communications. Not one citation of Smythe by any Italian Autonomist I can find. They aren't necessarily contemporaries, so H&N, were they to look anywhere this topic was discussed in the past, would likely have come across Smythe (for instance, Sut Jhally's "The Codes of Advertising" from the early 90s completely reengineers Smythe to talk about MTV and how every part of it is an advertisement therefore it is effectively an increase in the absolute surplus value in Marxian terms - or something like this.) Doing so might have enriched their work, or at least shown them a fellow traveler. I'm willing to believe, however, that they were just too busy reading Spinoza.
And, sharp as Smythe was, I'm pretty sure he would have thought that was a very roundabout way of getting to the social action this new situation might allow for. I don't have evidence for that, but the main thinker I see as being closely related to his legacy - Vincent Mosco - certainly has some clear ideas. Mosco's last few books (coedited with Kathleen McKirchner) have been on the role that communication worker unionization can help revive the overall labor movement. He mentions the concept of immaterial labor quite often, usually attributing it to H&N and the Italians rather than tying it to Smythe directly, but much of his understanding of their idea is like what Arvidsson or Smythe might describe it.
This is to say that, like Joanna, they use the concept to simply name a new quality to some kinds of labor and the relations of production and exploitation they entail. If conditions have deteriorated in the way she describes, than maybe Mosco and McKirchner are on the right track ("Will communication workers of the world unite?"); on the other hand, part of me does worry (as one of these immaterial workers myself) that too much of it is unnecessary, that threatening to revoke that labor is not a powerful threat. But the writer's strike a few years ago had a lot of public support precisely because it was about something they could see and understand as a kind of work they value. And, obviously, there was money at stake for both sides. I don't think the settlement was totally a win for the writers, but the public support they received is nothing to sneeze at.
thanks to you all for the comments.
Sean