Dispersed Fordism and a New Organisation of Labour

The following is a transaction of a text from the June '91 edition of
the Spanish magazine Etcetera based loosely around the Spanish truck
drivers' strike of October 1990. It could equally apply to the French
truckers' strike of July '92. The occasion doesn't matter too much as
basically the text deals with the re- organising of production in the
80s. How a highly efficient managerial offensive is equally highly
vulnerable to a sectorally limited action which due to the new
totalitarian invasion of capital cannot have much visionary edge but
could prove to be one of the decisively destructive components of the
new upsurge from below we are beginning to see all around the world.
(not from translators:BM Blob). 

DISPERSED FORDISM AND A NEW ORGANISATION OF LABOUR.
TOWARDS A NEW TYPE OF STRUGGLE.  
From the 10th to the 20th October 1990 the road haulage industry in
Spain, which according to sources in  the Confederation of Spanish
Industry carries 75% of goods in transit became the scene of some of
the most violent conflicts in recent years because of a strike call by
the self employed unions. 

Basically the strike could be cited as a typical conflict of interest
between large and small haulage firms. That is, a confrontation
between the large firms who control the majority of the long distance
transport market and small proprietors (owning from one to five
lorries). As a conflict of interest between two fractions of capital
the platform of demands by the unions calling the strike which
according to the press represented upto 15% of the sector - it led to
a series of requests relating to the defence of an operational niche
within the profitable transport market. This required the intervention
of the government against "illegal" lorry drivers for example, and
other aspects relating to the fixing of rates, inspection, pensions
etc. In other words from the point of view of the forces at work, the
lorry drivers' strike does not justify the interest granted to it in
these pages. As has become habitual in the latest conflicts in Spain,
the strike unfolded within a strict corporatist sphere, although it
was capable of generating a very tense atmosphere (confrontation with
the police, attacks on scabs and the blocking of entrances and exits
on the main roads and motorways). But its real significance was not to
be found here. As the media recognised in its haste to discredit the
strike, only a minority of lorry drivers obeyed the strike call and
that not in all areas. Nevertheless one must recognise the
extraordinary impact of the strike action. Within a few days of
drivers having drawn their lorries across motorways and mounted
pickets the disruption to supplies to the large towns became evident,
to the point where shelves were emptied in supermarkets (Bilbao,
Catalunya) and some products became scarce (fish amongst them) in the
Madrid and Barcelona markets. But the consequences to the industrial
sector were of much greater magnitude. Although the Confederation of
Spanish Industry and the larger bosses organisations tended to
exaggerate the losses (they mentioned figures which oscillated between
50,000 million pesetas and 200.000) the fact is the threat of total
closure hung over the industrial belts of the principal regions
(Madrid, Zarragoza, Barcelona, Guipuzcoa). By way of example - General
Motors closed down, Firestone, Nissan and Seat halted their assembly
lines as did Citroen. many other firms suffered interruptions to the
productive process like Fasa, Renault, Michelin Ford (who commandeered
a fleet of 25 aircraft to fly in components from their factories in
the U.K. and Germany), the chemical industry in Tarragona and an
endless number of smaller industries. The Irun frontier town was
blockaded by lorries. 

THE VULNERABILITY OF THE PRODUCTIVE PROCESS IN DISPERSED FORDISM.
In spite of the spectacular character of some incidents, given
prominence by the mass media  in their campaign to discredit the
strikers and spread alarm amongst the population -people hurried to
stock-up as if a war was imminent- the lorry drivers' strike took on a
telling dimension that exceeded the limits the strike had formally set
itself. 

And this significant challenge not only referred to the enormous
economic/social repercussions from what was in any case no more than a
minority action, but because it brought out the deep structural
weaknesses of the productive process arising from capitalist
restructuring in the 80s' and the objective limits of modern
techniques of organisation and control of the labour force. 

The cycle of capitalist restructuring which characterised the past
decade had as its aim a double strategy, the result of which has been
what is called the dispersed factory or dispersed fordism. It was for
industrial strategy a question in the first instance of overcoming
workers' resistance (and the pressures exerted on the terrain of
production itself) by dispersing the great mass of workers which had
formed around the productive centres which had appeared after World
War I (and above with the rise of the car industry and consumer
goods). 

In this period the massive aggregation of the labour force around the
production lines of the large factory complexes was the basis of the
cycle of capital accumulation.  This extended into the 70s' and implied
the culmination of the scientific organisation of labour put into
practise by Ford half a century earlier. It was an organisation which,
alongside the massive numbers of workers, revolved around
the parcelisation - breakdown of the physical movement of the worker on
the production line-and this was the source of many acts of
resistance, strikes and sabotages. But the industrial conglomerations
also implied the establishment by the workers' of a social  and
economic force able to exert pressure and who through a successive
cycle of struggles (trade union inspired and autonomous) eroded the
rate of accumulation in the industrialised counties. At the end of the
70s' the crisis of profitability arrived at a point which made a
reorganisation of the labour force inevitable as regards reorganising
control of the labour force and intensifying the exploitation of the
latter. A recovery in the rate of capital accumulation was then
possible. It was the era of social contracts, the politics of
austerity and neo-liberal models resulting in undermining the
foundation of the "state of well being". 

As a consequence, the second strategic orientation of capital in the
restructuring achieved in the past decade was apparent in the
recomposition of the productive process. In addition to overcoming the
resistance of the mass-worker, this was capable of dynamising the
cycle of accumulation by relying on the implantation of electronic
technology and the new system of industrial communication. This 
brought into being a double strategy : the territorial disaggregation
of productive processes. Increased flexibility was generated by virtue
of the requirements of a type of flexible demand which made necessary
the production of a limited number of products (factories attempted to
achieve a greater market share based on the introduction of design,
fashion etc.). 

Over the last few years we have witnessed the displacement of the
process of assembly and finishing of products towards the capitalist
periphery, put together by countries with a price advantage as regards
the labour force and labour penalties (Turkey, South Korea,
Philippines, Brazil, Mexico). This dispersion on a world scale had its
counterparts on the regional plane in the industrialised countries
themselves. Thus we have observed the breaking up of the big
industrial complexes into  small productive units increasing the
incidence of sub-contracting through which the big industrial
corporations shifted some stages of production to other firms of a
smaller size, which took on the task of allocating services and
supplying pieces and components necessary for the final finishing. In
this sense the car industry, the real motor of economic growth in
capitalist countries upto the 70s', is the prime example. 

JIT & ZERO INVENTORY: THE LOGISTICAL CHAIN OF ADDED VALUE
Understandably, in such an industrial landscape, new techniques
regarding the organisation of labour and the management of production
are a pressing necessity. And this is how there began to proliferate
the precepts and watchwords of the new enterprise culture
(just-in-time, zero inventory) which sort to cheapen costs, release
tied-up capital, total quality control, control of human resources
etc.). In fact this designated new enterprise culture was in response
to a new stage in the division labour between firms and warrants being
called the logistical chain of added value. Take for example, a car -
which involves in its manufacture a large number of component
factories - which carry out intermediate assembly stages and operate
in conditions dictated by the big firm which sells the finished
article. For efficient dispersal of production, a perfect
co-ordination of the movement between secondary firms and the
corporations with whom they maintain subcontacting links is
necessary.  This means that everything functions according to the
principle of JIT. In the words of the Nissan president, the first firm
to put it into practice in order to link-up their factories in Japan
and Britain, JIT consists in having the necessary components "at the
required time, in the required quantity and in the appropriate
place". 

It was only one more manifestation of the subordination of small
capital (subsidiary firm) to big capital (the firm that fixes the
contract price). It is, of course, a strategy for transferring profit
from small productive units to big industrial corporations who shift
storage costs (zero inventory) in this way and the tying up of capital
that the existence of stocks carries with it. At the same time it
permits the shifting of the stages of the productive process that
yielded less added value to subcontracted firms. 

As for the workers, this new industrial order represents a new turn of
the screw, intensifying the exploitation of the labour force. The
splitting up of the great aggregations of masses of workers is
transposed into a relative loss of the capacity to exert pressure,
characteristic of the " old workers movement" having as its prime
consequence the devalorisation of labour power  and the worsening of
work conditions. It is the state of affairs we know as lack of
security. A reality which took shape in a myriad of examples of
(temporary) contracts existing in subsidiary firms which are, in
addition, the only firms in the labour market to take on workers, just
as they have reduced wages all round and limited the rights and
resources of workers' (flexibility). 

All this has resulted in a potent hierarchy, the dis-aggregation of the
mass-worker class components, a neo-corporatist and trade conscious
conduct that counterposes employed to the unemployed, temporary to fixed
contracts, advanced sector workers (information technicians) to the
marginal sector (operatives, cleaners), the skilled to the unskilled
etc. 

Attempting to remedy the compact resistance of the mass-worker, the
new organisational and managerial formula for the socialised
production of commodities has given a different dimension to the
contradictions inherent in the social relations between capital and
labour. The dissemination of production substantially increases the
vulnerability of the process. In fact, in order for the new
organisational techniques to no longer function as theoretical models
but in productive practice, it is necessary to eliminate the
possibility of any delay, eventuality or unforeseen situation that
could shutdown the continual flow of commodities and components as
defined by JIT (as much in the process of production proper as in the
realisation or marketing).  It becomes  necessary  that "all"
connecting links in the process are adequate to the end preset by the
decision making center. The least error at any one point in the
logistical chain whether voluntary (sabotage) or voluntary has a
progressive effect on the whole and leads inevitably to the collapse
of the process (in the productive and distributive sphere and of even
both) This was born out in the strike in Fords U.K.  the Spanish lorry
drivers strike which we began the text with and the French lorry
drivers in 1992. 
 (1) footnote -extract from text:
In this way the formally subjective vulnerability resulting from the
aggregation of the mass worker in the factory, whose intervention
could put the productive process in jeopardy, has been resolved by
dispersed Fordism by means of the transformation of formally
subjective vulnerability into the formally objective, functional
vulnerability of the new productive organisation. If our individual
tragedy is to be labour power, precisely because we recognise
ourselves as a constituent part of capital - that is of the social
relation consisting in the transaction of the exchange value of our
labour power - of the forms of social domination founded on the basis
of capitalist production it moves by tending to negate (suppression of
living labour) the real source of valorisation which is living labour,
capable of valorising technology.  Suggest this paragraph taken out of 
text to avoid people switching off! 

Seen as a social relation, capital is not a force exterior to us. It
is only so formally, that is in the social forms of domination which
it clothes itself with. From here there comes about the insoluble
contradiction between the affirmation of the forms of formal
domination (financial/technological decision making centres) that
require the physical suppression of the potential for conflict that
labour power brings with it and the necessity of incorporating and
intensifying the exploitation of labour power as the means of
guaranteeing the continuation of the process of the extended
accumulation of capital. 

THE OBJECTIVE LIMIT OF CAPITAL IS SUPPRESSED SUBJECTIVITY UNDER THE
FORM OF LABOUR POWER.
Whether in the classical ford type organisation or in the actual
expression of dispersed fordism, the reality is that the
contradiction between capital and labour continues to appear and
change, each time more fundamentally. The real limits (objectives) of
the growth of the accumulation of capital is located in labour power,
or, to put it in another way, in suppressed human existence as labour
power. Without exception the automisation of industrial plant puts its
dependency vis a vis living labour power in greater relief. And this
is true not only in respect to the knowledge integrated into
technology, but also as regards the functions of control, supervision,
maintainence and related services -that go from the most advanced
sector to cleaning functions - the most devalorised labour.  Without
whose coordinated intervention automisation is not possible. 

THE MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES & THE IDEOLOGY OF THE FIRM
However abstract the former observations might appear, they are
corroborated  daily in the conduct of firms. From Japan to the U.S.
and Europe one of the main preoccupations of the big multi-national
firms is"the management of human resources". That is the management of
electronic technology requires a complimentary strategy that entails
the generating of a consensus amongst the different levels of the
functional hierarchy of labour. This seeks to evade any translation
into a class identity, as was the case with the mass-worker. This
renders possible a certain "enterprise culture" in which each worker
takes on (interiorizes) the objectives fixed by the
financial/technological decision making centre(the hegemonic
industrial corporations). With the constellation of firms that form
around the dispersed process of production, the taylorist
authoritarian formulas are juxtaposed to the formulas of the new
culture. this pretends to implicate the workers in the attainment of
the objectives fixed by management. For example, the competition
agreement proposed by the Minister Solchaga goes in this direction by
proposing that negotiations concerning wage increases are a function
of productivity indexes. 

The growing importance insecurity plays amongst sections of working
people indicates a limitation to class consensus. Industrial
strategy arising from this tends towards a differential treatment for
each worker according to their relative importance in the logistical
chain. This determines a rigid, functional and wage hierarchy within
the firm.  In fact the new organisational techniques of the labour
process relies on the necessity of obtaining an explicitly assumed
consensus by everyone belonging to the productive and distributive
chain. Now, the pace of the business cycle and the level of technical
and historical development of the exploitation of the workforce which
has led to the dispersed organisation of the productive process,
makes the promotion of consensus the cornerstone of social
submission. 

JIT, quality control are watchwords emanating from the most aggressive
Japanese multinationals. Not only are they in the forefront in terms
of technology but also in ideology. Until now we have been used to
equating capitalist growth with protestant morality. But
protestantism, the cult of reason matured in the Enlightenment
maintains a separation between individual liberty and actual
submission to the new order typified by the organisational process of
work. This separation is parallel to the invention of individuality in
the western democratic system. The totalitarian
domination of capital extends in a dual direction: qualitative -over
the individual and his/her physical capacities; and quantitative- over
social expression in its entirity. This is becoming more and more
totalitarian. 

With ideology such a quest for total domination is the "end of
ideology". The ideological functionaries that propagate such a total
view have ceased to be formally independent of the material interest
this represents.  Ideology arises in the process of valorisation itself
and is concretely expressed in the cult of money (as a generalised
sociological manifestation) and in the private accumulation of wealth
as the be all and end all of existence. Truly, the imaginary
individual is handed over to the principle of money, the cult of value
quantified in the possession of things. The ideology of the enterprise
culture then constitutes the basis of consensus that expresses the 
productive process. 

Different capitalist blocks go about the promotion of consensus by
different methods. In the present retrograde era for capital, the
Japanese approach has the ascendancy over the European "state of well
being". The greater part of the technologies of control and
organisation of labour come from Japan, in conjunction with its
aggressive technological and financial penetration of Europe and the
U.S.A. 

The technologies of control are integrated in the process of
automation. In order to carry out the physical control of the
productive sequence this requires that these corresponding techniques
of control be interiorised by the employees throughout the productive
process. The automation  ideal is to achieve the self-regulation of
the process: in the comprehensive sense of human and technological
components. 

THE NEW CYCLE OF STRUGGLES OF DISPERSED FORDISM.
This desperate search for consensus however encounters its limitations
in fulfilling the imperative of optimisation and maximisation of
profits. Although it sounds like something from the past, we must
recognise that the capitalist mode of production, even with all its
electronic paraphernalia as an intrinsically contradictory reality. The
growing complexity of the productive process requires the submission
by consent of all the links in the productive chain of added value.
Thus the cheapening of the costs and the absorption of a continually
greater part of added value, leads to the hierarchisation of the
subcontracting of services that causes a multiplicity of different
interests to appear. In this sense the lorry drivers strike is
paradigmatic.  The big companies such as the car industry have dispensed
with all these stages in the productive process which for
technical-organisational or strictly economic reasons are carried out
by other subcontract firms. In this way, while centering activity in
the logistical chain with greater added value, it exerts a
monopolistic dictatorship over tariffs including transport.
Nevertheless  this same big factory finds itself in a position of
close dependency from the logistical point of view as regards the
subcontractors - lorrydrivers or component suppliers being an example.
With this there opens a fissure for potential conflict amongst the
interests present, which is what caused the October strike to break
out.. 

The conflict of interests between two forms of capital brings out the
weaknesses and the potential for conflict existing in the prevailing
model of dispersed fordism. In the past few years we have witnesses a
multiplicity of intensely localised conflicts in segments of the
productive chain and complimentary services. This is more than
corporatist: Renfe train drivers, airport controllers, cleaners,
buses, hospitals etc.. Most of these disputes specifically relate to
trade/professional status in the new industrial hierarchy. 

Rank and file committees, even if they exist within the framework of
traditional union demands, are the expression of the forms of
solidarity corresponding to dispersed fordism.  In the same way, mass
actions were the expressions of the mass worker in classical fordism,
with powerful industrial concentrations of the labour force. To
criticise its sectoral or narrow character is simply useless. To the
atomised organisation of the labour process there corresponds atomised
forms of solidarity and resistance. More precisely, the capacity for
global control of the process is rooted in the technico-scientific
control of each one of the links of the social productive chain. A
hierarchy of  privilege within the distinct industrial categories is,
as a consequence, established on account of their relative importance
in the realisation of the process. That is, according to their
contribution to the logistical chain of added value. 

The dis-aggregation of the forms of sociability and resistance of the
mass worker brings in a reality where contemporary proletarian
resistance is attuned to the new conditions of exploitation. It is the
end of the teleological concept that deduces the objective necessity
of communism and of hallowed concepts. These were anchored in the
recuperation of previous forms of community which up to now had
provided inspiration to the movements opposed to the wages system. 

 In fact with the implanting of fordism, the perspective of "going
beyond" capital was already being abandoned to a new realism of
"living in capital". The absence of a project  deives from an
absorption in the immediate. This typifies the new cycle of
proletarian struggles and is itself a reflection of the stage of total
domination. the absence of any new project by capital itself
corresponds to a process of accumulation turning into a zero tendency.
That is, in the reduction to zero of the time of capital rotation
which denies in the concrete practice of accumulation its capacity for
cyclical generation of administered  time. As a result the ideal of
progress that constitutes the (bourgeois) project of ascendant
capitalism linked to a business cycle, which used to carry a stake -
and a risk-- in the future, has been transmuted into a business cycle
that dedicated to increasing the mass of capital. This instantaneous
form does not contemplate any perspective of projection in the future.
In reality, the future only remains in the dominant discourse as a
residual spectacular category proper to a model of civilisation that
is lost in itself. 

THE UNSTABLE DIS-AGGREGATION
The dis-aggregation  of the formal expression of resistance represents
in fact the breaking up of the forms of organisation  of the ruling
productive process. The phenomenological reality of capital is a world
wide totalitarian reality. This is carried into effect as extensive
domination of the world market and intensive weighing down on
potential subjectivity. This is the structural reality corresponding
to such dispersed production. 

 The emergence of such centrifugal forces threaten the whole from
within. With the world levelling of cultural diversity there
corresponds particular erosion of national or other identities
generated by the dictates of capital. Similarly, such global
dis-aggregation changes the methods of labour force exploitation in
harmony with the totalitarian realisation of the domain of capital.
However, a world under the sway of capital is also the actualisation
of its totalitarian limits but subject to contradictions that threaten
this domain. 

The total domination of capital confirms itself as a mere abstract
unification of the world around the commodity and money. But the
unification around these abstract categories (commodities are
value, have a value) imply in fact a break down of thwarted
sociability. This is precisely because access to the commodity, and to
purchasing power, is ever more stamped by the position each person has
within the logistical chain of added value. This is determined by the
more or less advantageous position each person can negotiate as a
transaction within the social relations we define as capital.
Precisely because actual sociability takes place in the concrete
circumstances of the immediate (private consumption of things) there
is no room for a social project."Within" the coordinates of 
commercial forms of  sociability only capitalist social relations can
exist. 

The manifestation of these crises of sociability is made obvious in the
centre of capitalism itself. The appearance of the 4th world in  the rich
countries, gives rise to the theory of the 3 "thatcherite" stages": the
deterioration of living conditions in the metropolis, the extension of
pathological forms feeding off  capital accumulation such as drug
addiction and the homeless in 'cardboard cities', those who are surplus
to the logistical chain. 

THE REPRESSIVE UNIFICATION OF THE WORLD UNDER THE SWAY OF CAPITAL
The unstable equilibrium in which the process of  reproduction in the
capitalist countries is maintained and its implicit recognition by the
dominant technocracy, has engendered the generalised introduction of
the systems of industrial blackmail represented by the lack of job
security and direct repression when conflict breaks out. 

But the insecurity that accompanies dispersed fordism implies a
potential limit to consensus. The instability of employment generates
disaffection and places difficulties in the way of generating "loyalty
to the firm" . The strategy of differential control that privileges
and recompenses in a structured form each category of the industrial
hierarchy, tends to breed insecurity, especially amongst those who
contribute less to the chain of added value following the notions of
political economy that are dominant in reality. 

Even the present success in terms of techniques of control will reach
limitations. These are manifest in the growing need to valorise all
the stages of the productive chain in order to maximise the surplus
value at each level of the productive chain. Although strategies of
divide and rule have prevented a unified solidarity amongst workers
this has not prevented strategically significant stoppages such as the
cleaning workers in Madrid airport recently. 

Insecurity in the labour force reflects the unstable equilibrium and
the promotion of consensus is backed up by openly repressive options.
The extra recruitment of police, the restriction of so-called
democratic rights, the criminalisation of insurgent minorities or
exponents of dissent, are all features of modern democracy. With an
increased gulf between the Political and social spheres, democratic
liberties are reduced to propaganda, masking technocratic control of
public life, increasingly totalitarian in application. 

Democratic legitimation does not now correspond with the reality of a
world based on functional and productive dis-aggregation. A pivotal
interest group in the financial or social sector can devastate the
process of social reproduction perhaps as a response to disruption
elsewhere in the chain. 

Such is the concentration of capital, democratic mediation rarely
interferes with its autonomous operation. Equally the dispersal of the
productive process dictated by the laws of accumulation makes any
reference to democracy banal. Democracy merely legitimates, rubber
stamps the power of multinationals. In the case of 14D(3), anti-Nato
or anti-Gulf War actions they inhabit a ritualised space harking back
to the era of the mass worker and are peripheral to the present
system. When an organisation threatens the logistical chain - as in
the Paris transport conflicts - the propaganda apparatus of the State
& mass media mobilises public opinion against the "anti-social"
minority. 

Experience demonstrates that conflicts are neither cumulative nor are
they orientated toward an imaginary goal of emancipation. They boil
down to prompt acts of resistance pointing toward a real guerilla
social struggle. However, these acts are fundamentally radical because
our existence is increasingly defined as a source of valorisation in a
world in which capital constitutes itself as an intrinsically
conflictual social relation. Outside the space that determines the
social relation of capital there are no real options. However, it is a
social relation that involves us in conflict. To affirm oneself in
conflict and to consciously renounce hope is perhaps the last
existential option to those reduced to being labour power with
nothing at all to lose not even their illusions.
 
Translation from Here & Now 13, Glasgow, Autumn 1992 
