Living thinkwork: where do labour processes come from?

tags

Labour Employment

Notes

Prologue

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The unknown citizen - To JS/07/M/378 this marble monument is erected by the State

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Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

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The return of the native

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Bring in Winkhorst

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serious, scholarly, rigorous work with ideas is very hard work.

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BSc, MSc PhD: Bull Schitt, More Schitt, Piled higher and Deeper,

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being careful about abstraction and yet remaining committed to theoretically transcending the obvious in everyday experience.

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Individual lives are determined by general conditions, and the particular sphere of my employment in industry - the design and innovation function - is central in determining many of these conditions

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There is a division of labour whose 'mental' aspects are especially significant, and whose understanding is of the utmost importance for socialist activists.

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the division between serious theoretical work and other kinds of practice is one that has to be overcome

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We tend to assume that we can always understand what somebody else does, if we take the trouble (which we rarely do, especially when it comes to what we do at work). I think, on the contrary, that it is very hard to find out what people's lives are filled with, and to figure out what they think they are doing.

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In the course of this book I shall be hanging together an idea of a general kind of practice within which concrete knowledge has an understood and politically significant place. The way to reach the kind of understanding and significance I'm arguing for is not to consume my book (or anyone else's) but to work at making that place exist.

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Rather than seeking some kind of abstract security in the face of always less-than-complete experience (an intellectual approach which marries with conservatism in practice), what I require from it is an ability to inform action, now.

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It is an attempt to think beyond the obvious without losing touch with the possible.

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Part one Strange days at the rationality factory

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1 Ideological journey

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After fifteen years of schooling the experience of having to find and solve real practical problems was incomprehensible. What is worth doing? Just who is it all for? And who is a friend or an ally?

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A note of discord had begun to creep into this beautiful romance between me and my brain. Maybe we weren't the sunrise the world was waiting for? Perhaps being well behaved and consuming books doesn't equal happiness?

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they weren’t prepared to put time and effort into it and talk openly about work and how it could feel better. They didn’t really care; this, as much as anything, is what made me feel foreign in their world.

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Self-management, a public issue of the late '60s, turned out (as I was introduced to it) to have 'private' relations at the centre: immediate relations of dominance and deference between people sharing the same practice.

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So I looked for a technical way of seeing the world, and cybernetics (‘the science of control and communication in man and machine') was my bet.

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Inside the whale, with a video-pack

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knowledges are only worth something (indeed, you only know them as knowledge) when you can use them to come to terms materially with whatever it is that the knowledge is 'about'.

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sciences, being practices (systems of action located in society and history), had a politics, and that for the most part this was a politics antipathetic to the realisation of self-management in practice.

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ICI was my employer; but I was working for Chemco, a workers' re- appropriation of ICI. During the time I was employed by ICI, Chemco was almost entirely ideas; it's little more than that now.

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hatred was the source of release. To spend all day in an alienated environment which offered defined technical challenges and material comforts and conveniences (a phone, a restaurant, central heating, secretarial labour on tap) was the easy option. Pauline, at home, was confronted with things that must be done, and done right, because we have to live with the outcome; and with human demands from Ben that must be recognised, because not to do that would be to stifle too directly a life too obviously related to ours; and with a physical environment populated by symbols of what (by bourgeois convention, as the home-maker) claimed to be her inadequacies. There was no way she could let up being. But me, I couldn't give a fuck whether what I was going to do all day gave the Company what it wanted or not.

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Such structure! You feel that such ramification must be rational. The sheer technical task of getting your mind round it sets back by a lifetime or two the task of being Subject to this multi-level Object.

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Like viruses, computer systems are on the threshold between life and non-life.

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In the face of a demand for simulation power at the works, MSD had had to respond with decentralisation, or it would have blown its 'services' cover.

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Our present nine-till-five determined existence polices the roles much more rigidly than before.

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there’s satisfaction of a kind, cursing the bosses’ nine-till-five world as it sucks you towards it through the pissing rain; embracing dis- satisfaction and recognising it as the one obvious fact of existence.

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Maybe this luxury of being irresponsible (in a quite rigorous sense, as an employee of capital, alienated but intensely occupied) is the only thing that the Breadwinner really wins.

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Resist the bloody idiot inside who says: look in at the computer room as you pass. If there's any stuff waiting it can wait can't you bloody STOP! It's you that gets the pain in the brain and ICI that gets the 'improved level of manpower productivity'.

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The ability to work in a team, they call it. Or the ability to subordinate yourself to the organic self-reproduction of capital. Either way, it seems to work, and cogs mesh pretty well. Most of the time it doesn't feel like thinking at all,

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My brain clicks into gear to solve some problem, and I enjoy it - or at least, I am absorbed by it.

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As a computer-person by job definition and a socialist by commitment, I have difficulty coming to confront the personal and economic reality of my work through the managerial mist.

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2 Thinkwork

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What designers work on

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So the design team produces . . . marks on paper and sounds? And its objects of labour are paper and air? Come off it, you're saying, stop playing the mad materialist. Well, I'm not. This is quite serious. Do you think that it's merely crude materialism to point out that because of the properties of matter these sounds can not reach ears elsewhere; that these papers are, physically, on certain desks and will never be found in other than a limited number of locations? I don't.

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The conceptual product of the team is 'the design'.

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labourers and architects are not the same people.

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the collective labourer is relatively more powerless, more ignorant, because of the existence of this knowledge-producing estate.

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Any knowledge implies a definite material system of practices,

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Design and social control - preconceptualisation

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relations of production determine what kinds of power can lie with which groups in society.

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The labour to be 'saved' is by no means simply manual; 'manual' functions are people functions, functions requiring living labour.

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The key skills of a designer lie in thinking-through capitalist relations of production in concrete terms. The objective is to give these relations an expanded or new embodiment, in the material form of direct practical connections between living labour (process workers, maintenance workers, production managers) and dead labour (process plant, the on-line computer, the maintenance workshop, the chemical product).

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these issues are resolved in a straightforward 'scientific' or 'economic' manner, with no suggestion that the control of workers' unauthorised behaviour is a major but hidden aspect of design

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The concept of what work may and may not produce, the open- or closed-ness of the forces of production in relation to collective social effort, is not written on the face of reality as the workers confront it. The social process lies behind the plant and the daily routine, and although its social and political content can be read back into it, the fact has to be stressed that all the living labour embodied in the plant took place at some other time, in some other place, involved some other workers: effectively a different world. The dead conceptual labour of the designers confronts living labour in the designed labour process with a flat challenge: Either do the obvious (which we have actually made obvious so that you will not have to think about it) or unravel the social and historical conditions that are woven into the situation - and do it in your spare time, because you are not paid to think. This is the reality of what I shall be calling preconceptualisation.

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3 Coordinate point

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When I did go back into the industry, it was as a person working politically with others, and not as the self- cultivating philosopher of middle-class life that I had seen myself as

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despite the strong intellectual dimension of my life, much of my sense of identity is tied up with technical work in industry,

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'lying prostrate before theorists of their choice’.

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the theory of scientific and technical work was, and is, so fragmented that a strategy of 'principled eclecticism' (Bob Young's phrase) is the only sensible one.

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knowledge, for me, had to work, I had to be able to use it to order my own personal day-to-day experience of scientific and technical work. My question was: What can you do for me Habermas, Althusser?

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Why them? what about process operators, craft workers, cleaners, computer operators, bottle-washers; or catering staff, typists, secretaries, clerks; or departmental heads and directors, for that matter?

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Time and emotion study

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A nine-till-five job imposes severe limits on the disposability of time,

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Trade-union activism, political work, family life: all compete for ‘free' time - and what about just playing, having fun?

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In the fact that people can share experience and commitments lies the potential solution to the dilemmas of time-economy. The real practical crunch, then, comes in the extent to which people are prepared to share their lives with each other, to consolidate and expand their existence self- consciously in material links with others' practices.

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The shared-commitment/time-economy crunch is not just a logistic fact, but also a crisis of identity.

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the family is the only broadly sanctioned locus of support, love, affection, understanding, and help.

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If you have opened up to your loved ones and trusted them with the knowledge of your aspirations and hopes, then when you fail to get from them (and give to them) the necessary support, and when events outflank you, failure can be absolute and final. The economy of emotions, paralleling the parcelling of time, maps the logistical dilemma (of allocating time) into an existential dilemma.

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I have plenty of other things that I want to do with my life and I know I can’t do them all. The problem is how to act productively in the world without throwing too much away that is of value.

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sharing a political commitment with someone must be seen as sharing their life,

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The bum’s rush

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I could go in there and build those classy models from computer Meccano all day; but if there's nothing you value corning out then there's no buzz from doing it. If you think that your product is crap, poisonous crap at that, then you can't bear to feel that so much of yourself is channelled into it.

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that day of aggro and adrenalin made me realise with sudden force how well-veiled the realities of the capital-labour relation are. Even as a ‘militant' I hadn't been prepared for the direct confrontation.

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Time and emotion study, continued

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They're part of me and I want to use them, regardless of whether some bugger who has 'work to give’ feels it's worth paying me to use them for his purposes. I don’t need to be ‘given' work, I carry it with me all the time

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I guard that sense of what is possible (Gramsci called it the role of the 'organic intellectual') very jealously now. But it's a tenuous under- standing, because the practice it relates to is a tenuous practice.

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accused me of immoral behaviour, consuming taxpayers’ money in higher education then refusing to pay it back in years of xxxxxx wage-labour while others like him felt bound to sweat it out.

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only where there is real autonomy can you talk of responsibility and therefore reasonable guilt.

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the criterion of immediate, personal, perceptible use-value is extremely important. Only when it is taken seriously in political activism and political theory can we have any systematic attack on problems of sectarianism and apathy.

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If the struggle for socialism is anything, it is creative in the fullest practical sense: the enabling, each for the others, of lives that have not been liveable before, in which social relations can be experienced as relations (not necessarily harmonious, but changeable) between people rather than between eternalised Objects dressed up in pound notes.

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Part two Politics of production

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4 Why theorise? Architects & labourers

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what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.

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Living and dead labour

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Dead labour’s not a problem, we do it all the time

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For a marxist, the material is the social.

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The craft- worker's detailed know-how, the management team's collective feel for a problem, the research worker's painstaking lab work, all vanish in their products: a fine table, a production plan, a newly-isolated protein. But the particular qualities (that is, material connections) of the living labour pass over into dead labour, the product,

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dead labour passes out beyond the individual labourer or group into society, and is separable from the individuals whose labour made it. This latter, objective, form is what marxists traditionally mean by dead labour,

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In many forms of society dead labour is a systematic threat to living labour and labour power. In capitalist society there is a built- in, constitutive, intentional tendency for dead labour to dominate living labour, confronting the worker as an external and alien force: Capital.

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Cultural production, apparatus and preconceptualisation as central in ‘advanced’ Capital

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Before living labour and dead labour are ever brought together in the new plant, under the supervision and guidance of managers and engineers, thinkworkers have been developing new labour power which will serve them in that role, while 'non-think' workers are systematically deprived of an equivalent run-in to the new situation.

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Thinkwork selectively and systematically enhances some workers' labour power and (relatively and absolutely) diminishes others' and it is preconceptualisation that determines this inequality.

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The forces of production comprise not just machines and tools, but the whole system of practices

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What I mean by culture is the structured totality of labour-power in a historical practice.

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'material culture', the furnishings of day-to-day life in a society.

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Theorising deskilling : the socialisation of labour and an unhelpful politics of obviousness

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I am not prepared to chase after rigour at the expense of utility in activism.

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that kind of logic chopping is not really my concern. There is more to capitalist society than Capital, and more to practice than apparatus.

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What is wrong with the umbrella concept 'deskilling', from this point of view, is that it is not precise or large enough to illuminate the constraints on possibility, in an agitational context.

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what I might have written under the arrow was labour-power. But I chose 'knowledges' to symbolise the subjective conditions of living labour,

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labour power is analytically distinct from living labour, and that the unity of labour power and living labour need not finally lie in the workers whose living labour it is.

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Deskilling, as a term, seems to direct attention to losses in particular immediate labour processes. What needs to be done, though, is to examine the recomposition of the totality of labour power.

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one kind of labour power can be created for the specific purpose of depriving another of legitimate deployment. Capitalists (and professions, and educational institutions) constantly and consciously wield this power.

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One labour process necessarily connects with another through products.

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The crucial point is whether they are connected in a merely objective way, as elements of an apparatus.

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What the term fragment- ation refers to, but does not describe, is the subjective isolation of workers.

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What remains when knowledges are located in another class: routinisation

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What remains when knowledges are located in another class: routinisation

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Process workers' knowledge is notoriously specific to individual chemical plants, which is one of the conditions that ties the unskilled chemical worker to his or her job and makes, objectively, for conservatism.

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Managers, in contrast, have a well developed idea of how the physical and social organisation of the new process is likely to operate.

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Preconceptual- isation systematically determines the relative power of different workers in different labour processes, by determining, objectively, their ability to know.

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5 Capital & class

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capital's functionaries must nevertheless continually resolve the problem of subordinating workers, concretely and day by day, in practice. They do not always, or even usually, do this by threatening the sack. Just how this subordination is accom- plished is a problem which is central

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Hegemony : culture control

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Barbara and John Ehrenreich define the PMC as a class whose members are non-owners of the means of production, and whose work is mainly concerned with the reproduction of culture and capitalist social relations.

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PMC work is wage work which produces and reproduces culture in monopoly capitalist society.

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This mechanical materialist prejudice that ideas are ephemeral ('merely superstructural') is incompatible with the labour process approach because, as soon as 'the economic' is thought of as a material constellation of practices, then subjective conditions - ideas among them - appear within 'the base'.

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The PMC and real ownership of the means of production

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Politics to me means the production and reproduction of relations of production, and classes are practices on a large scale which have definite and overt political content.

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a relation of conceptual production: preconceptualisation.

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Through simplification and standardisation and automation of the design labour process, cheaper labour power has been given a place in ICI

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ICI's power to dequalify positions in the labour process in this way is bestowed on the Company by its PMC workforce.

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As a wage labourer, the process design engineer is not a legal owner of the means of design production (confidential technical knowledge, pilot plant equipment, computers, drawing office equipment, means of inter-city communication, &c). But once in the office, and equipped with a phone and a set of valid cost-accounting charge codes, the worker has a considerable degree of autonomy.

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despite protracted efforts by employers to find ways of measuring white collar work which workers will accept, the work of PMC workers is not easy to account for in cost terms, or to supervise in any simple operational way.

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Preconceptualisation is a relation of material separation, between practices which produce and objectify concepts, and practices in which the real objects of the concepts figure in use.

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The aggregate of knowledges is overwhelmingly with the PMC section of the workforce. Process workers could not choose what to do with the plant even if they wanted to.

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Even sabotage or (a better illustration) a work-to-rule presupposes an amount of real control over the process of production, based in a particular knowledge that workers have of the process.

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labour power thus objectified in machine form is effectively lost to a large part of the 'professional' community.

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assumptions become implicit rather than actively present in the consciousness of the design worker, and in this way practical alternatives may be closed by default. Freedom may be lost because technique and instruments obscure the possibility of choice.

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managers find that 'aids' to decision making infringe on what they experience as their autonomy.

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understanding the struggle around the material ownership of the means of production is of particular importance for the political activist; and that we need to go beyond the framework of what usually passes for Marxism to get this understanding.

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putting material obstacles in the way of people as they move, wittingly or unwittingly, in directions of alternative or oppositional power.

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systematically pre-empting certain forms of productive practice, certain actualisations of labour power.

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full-time trade union officials (increasingly recruited from the ranks of graduates) are PMC, not working class. Both they and 'their' members often perceive their interests to be radically divergent.

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the PMC cannot be trusted to go it alone. Socialism has to be the hidden curriculum of PMC self- education.

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What distinguishes socialist production from capitalist production is that living labour dominates dead. Actual human choices and works employ the artefacts of past practice, rather than things employing people

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Whose use value?

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The use value of a thing is the set of material attributes (its material valencies, you might say) which enables it to figure in a practice, as an object of labour, instrument of labour or labour power.

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But PMC work is not only degraded (this is true of working class work too), and PMC workers are also degraders.

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cry of 'proletarianisation' among PMC workers is an appeal for specific differences from the working class to be maintained or restored, which allow them the luxury of seeming to be 'superior to society'.

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PMC workers do oppress wage labourers (including themselves, collectively),

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Capital is not class, culture makes the difference

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historical possibility of giving objective form to what capital disenfranchises as 'merely subjective',

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At the deepest level, Marxism carries a belief that people are essentially creative, and that this ability to see possibilities and make them real is what distinguishes them from members of other species.

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Labour power, and the spans of life and work which either seem too insignificant for capital's agents to want to extend their hegemony there, or are too intimate for hegemony to be imposed against our will.

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relatively unexplored ground on which socialists must nevertheless move, both because it is systematically depopu- lated by capitalist rationality, and because it is where people become decisively human.

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Part three Saying it without semicolons

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Part four Adventures in class geography

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6 Making labour power

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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge; where is the knowledge we have lost in information; where is the information we have lost in the bloody filing cabinet??

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Liberated time : collective bargaining, lay members and The New Technology

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what happens overall is not the easing of work. What we see, over the last two hundred years or so, is the intensification of skilled work, the downgrading of skilled to unskilled work, and the exchange of unskilled work with unem- ployment.

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major threat to job control. 'Job control' is the ability of those workers in the job to out-think management in terms of immediate permutations of practice in the workplace,

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New Technology will 'release' vast amounts of labour time from direct production and administration. In a sense, then, there will be a lot of time and effort up for grabs at a general social level.

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In ICI, forty to fifty percent of the labour employed is disposed of in producing knowledge and information for management use

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sweeping mechanisation of information- processing which will have a similar effect on entry into the knowledge 'market’. The means of producing knowledge - the means of knowing what is going on, in sufficient detail and fast enough to respond in time - may be taken right out of the hands (and heads) of non-managers.

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workers must decide that they are going to get some direct use out of the vast storehouse of ability (their own ability, for goodness' sake) which is daily placed at the disposal of employers.

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A full time staff cannot match the collective effort of the membership and shouldn't be vain enough to try. Its distinctive and important contribution is to help members link up and use their own stock of knowledge and know-how across internal and external union boundaries.

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information is no more than the dead product of a live process of producing knowledge, and it is the process that matters.

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There are no neutral facts. When data are turned into information, and information into knowledge, it is always for a purpose

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it's not a slice of the cake you need - it's the bakery.

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One danger of a simplistic consumptionist approach to disclosure is that workers' reps may be swamped with data as a result of 'success', only to find after painful experience that the data only make sense, part of a coherent picture, from some other point of view: management's point of view.

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Knowledges do not grow on trees or in filing cabinets; not even in executives' waste-paper baskets, nor on floppy discs. They are created by hard work and collaboration - living labour- organised in a way compatible with the practical aims of whoever controls the practice in question.

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many full-time officers will oppose a genuinely autonomous movement among the people they 'represent'.

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Beyond detached partisanship

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What the Church did to ideas of the human essence in Marx's time, Science does for ideas of knowledge now;

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'Where do correct ideas come from?' is a question which finds an all-too-ready answer in our culture: they come from detached, objective, scientific research, and they coalesce into a great, monolithic and universal Body of Knowledge. Well, sod that for a theory.

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Knowledges are use-values and therefore just as 'attached' as any other kinds of use- value.

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Landscapes and earthmoving in Knowledge-Land

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To socialise labour power means to make it possible for all to know what any can do, and what would be necessary for them to actually do it; not necessarily so that all can do it, but so that they can grasp the meaning and the objective conditions of others' actions.

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it's our responsibility to make the living labour as obvious as possible in the product: no conjuring tricks, no elitist elegance.

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the product has to carry (as clearly as we think necessary) the signs of how it was made, so that others can do the same kind of thing, or rework the thing, when they need to.

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Non-academic workers are far from incapable of making tremendous inroads into the unexplored lands of class knowledge; the only qualification you need is that you feel ignorant about too many things, and resent it.

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7 Working for Chemco

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there is much less mystery about the world of industry than many intellectuals project into it.

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the multi-sect splits so visible in the rarefied political atmosphere of a university campus practically vanish in a context where anybody is on your side who doesn't think that the sun shines out of the Company's arse.

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The Combine promised a broader 'data base' and a wider spread for any findings. But if ICI unions are weak at local level (they are), the Combine is unlikely to be much better organised. There are reasons now to believe that more - wider - impact would have been made if we'd gone deeper and narrower at the level of a single, well-organised site.

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Making the paper is not as much fun as the quality of the content needs it to be.

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'Chemco is a company as seen by workers who want to look after themselves, not be managed into everything - including Trade Unionism.'

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But because of the nature of the process, the politics of Chemco News is an intrinsically socialist politics. If the paper survives in the long term it will be because ICI workers have organised themselves, for the purpose of examining the past and present, and creating a future.

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The gamble which the research-group strategy makes, in this psychological game, is that people's satisfaction and self respect come basically from what they produce, not what they consume; from what they make and especially what they make of themselves.

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What workers want to know (and often daren't ask, because an answer would take them too close to the edge of the existential gulf) is why working for the ICIs of this world is so fucking frustrating, so strangely empty despite all the activity, and so insecure - as routine and even as mere employment.

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those in 'work' who feel the need for a clearer under- standing of their practice as workers, trade unionists, stewards, activists, are likely to be made neurotic by their inability to pull the two together.

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8 Living abstraction

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a constant vicious undertow of bad vibes on the Left. With personal time and existential security at such a premium, socialism becomes more a movement of desperation than liberation, and in such conditions is it surprising that one desperate faction becomes locked in mortal combat with another when things fail to go right? Is it surprising that most of the people we meet outside 'political' venues are apathetic towards politics?

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9 Postscript : write on

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Bibliography

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