Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 23:06:20 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com>
Subject: pomo mark


Some thoughts on Labor…

During the period of modernity, the labor force worked to disrupt the
disciplinary conditions in which workers were  directly constrained.
State power was directed with extreme violence against this mobility.
Mobility and mass worker nomadism express a refusal and a search for
liberation: resistance against the conditions of exploitation. Only
rarely has history the history of the production been considered from
the standpoint of the worker, maore rarely still has it considered from
the perspective of the worker’s desire for mobility. The norm has been
to consider  the development of capital (of modernity as a consequence)
from the perspective pf capital’s regulation of the technological
conditions of labor.

Post-modernism marks a significant change – because of the extraordinary
levels of labor mobility and migration movements. Nothing in human
history, not even the invasion of North and South America is anything
close to the massive population movements of the post-modern era. The
state powers of the post-modern era are completely in alliance against
these migrations,  they are all failing. All legal and state estimated
numbers are partial, the actual numbers are enormous, national borders
are completely porous.  What is this post-modern event? On the one hand
(negatively perhaps) it exists because of terrible economic and cultural
oppression all over the world. On the other  (positively perhaps?)  the
desire f or better conditions and the gathering of expressive and
productive capacities that globalisation engenders in the consciousness
of the subject. This I suggest is a post-modern form of class and social
struggle… The relations to Lyotard’s work seem obvious.

What is the difference between modernist and post-modernist relations to
labor, production and work?

(a slogan for the PM days: think global, act global. A
counter-globalisation movement defined against globalisation).

regards
sdv