From: Tom Walker <knoWWare@MINDLINK.BC.CA> To: Multiple recipients of list LABOR-L

<LABOR-L%YORKVM1.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU> Subject: Labour Day 1995

1. Left to its own "internal laws of development", capitalism would have long ago succumbed to the contradictions inherent in the processes of production, circulation and accumulation of surplus value.
2. Capitalism has not succumbed, but has undergone successive mutations that have allowed for periods of renewed vitality.
3. These mutations have involved appropriating, to the capitalist process, processes and qualities that are not identical to the production, circulation and accumulation of surplus value.
4. The appropriated processes are, by definition, *labour* processes.
5. These non-capitalist labour processes may be termed (following Habermas) political and socio-cultural labour processes.
6. Political and socio-cultural labour processes cannot be explained by analogy with the capitalist "economic" labour process.
7. "Neo" and "post" marxisms have highlighted the political and socio-cultural contradictions of late capitalism but have failed to articulate an integrated theory of the distinctively political and socio-cultural *labour processes*.
8. Economic, political and socio-cultural labour processes are ideal types. All actual labour takes place under some specific combination of features of each.
9. Social class can not be extrapolated from the capitalist relations of production (ownership and non-ownership of the means of production) because it is *always* mediated by political and socio-cultural relations.
10. Conversely, social class can not be extrapolated from either political or socio-cutural relations because it is always mediated by economic relations.
11. An integrated theory of labour processes would take into account three distinctive forms for organizing decisions about the allocation of resources: markets, hierarchies and networks.
12. Markets, hierarchies and networks each offer unique structures of motivation, means of communicating decisions, standards of reciprocity and crisis tendencies.
13. As the capitalist labour process successively appropriates features and characteristics of complementary labour processes, its structures of motivation, means of communicating decisions, standards of reciprocity and crisis tendencies are correspondingly transformed (Habermas, Legitimation Crisis).
14. Historically, capitalism has successfully negotiated four epochal transformations of the labour process, which have preserved the hegemony of capital.
15. The dilemma for late capitalism remains: how to continue to transform the labour process and preserve the hegemony of capital.
16. As Marcuse wrote in Eros and Civilization: "But the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of domination dissolve."

Tom Walker
knoW Ware Communications
knoWWare@mindlink.bc.ca
http://mindlink.net/knoWWare/