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DAY 2 P resentation S ynopsis
host DAY 2
Michael Birchall (university of wolverhampton)
INTRODUCTION
This panel presents a range of perspectives focusing on new economic forms and how changing the way we work, consume and produce may offer alternatives and change the systems of control. Under the influence of globalization, information systems, and the changing roles of economic and political governance, has transformed advanced capital, producing new situations, where an increasing number of workers have become engaged in precarious labour. Post-Fordism expanded with the revolts of 1968 and the fiat strikes of the 1970s; immaterial labour began to constitute this hegemony for all forms of production, including material and agricultural labour. Paolo Virno describes a number of signs of post-Fordist capitalism that mark radical changes in developed nations production systems relation to labor in the last 40 years. He states that, “post-fordism has annulled or complicated the traditional marxist correlation between the workers labour time and the degree of his or her exploitation”1. As labour is de-materialized and the division of labour in industrial production erodes, capital not only occupies the working hours during which products or goods are produced, It absorbs all of the workers time, as well as their existence. This exploitation can be seen in the labour of cultural workers – curators, artists, architects, designers, musicians, actors. These workers have become experts at balancing intermittent bouts of barely profitable creative work with additional routine jobs in the creative and service industries. Therefore, as cultural workers, are we able to devise solutions to the problems associated with advanced capitalism? Can work itself be the answer, since it has already altered our lives so much. As Kathy Weeks describes: “Work is not only a site of exploitation, domination, and antagonism, but also where we might find the power to create alternatives on the basis of subordinated knowledges, resistant subjectivities and emergent models of organisation”2. During this period of perceived economic recovery – from what is arguably the largest economic crisis since the second world war – what new economic forms have emerged as alternatives to neoliberal and capitalist
FREEHOUSE: RADICALIZING THE LOCAL
