D-W's examples

One of the things that is missing for me from D-W’s account of how workers locate sites of struggle and mobilize around them is a developed theory of ideology. It is undeniable that the examples he finds of groups that appropriate new technologies into particular struggles represent the fact that many technological objects, especially new media, are multivalent with respect to their subjective meanings. He argues that what is “particularly notable” about the autonomists’ perspective is that it “grasps the new forms of knowledge and communication not only as instruments of capitalist domination, but also as potential resources of anti-capitalist struggle” (130). I would agree that this is particularly notable—but I am not sure to what extent it offers us a useful or unique perspective for thinking about how anti-capitalist struggle might materialize outside of the minute instances D-W documents. While the appropriations of new media he discusses represent a glimmer of hope, it would seem that in the context of labor struggles as a whole this glimmer is quickly being extinguished.

One of the examples D-W returns to over and over is the labor union. He documents the ways in which some labor unions have reassigned meanings to technological devices to make them serve purposes contrary to those of domination and control (which in some cases may have been the express intention behind the design of the device). However, it is worth noting that labor union membership as a whole has been declining steadily since the 1950s (especially in the US). So, regardless of small tactical losses, the overall strategy of capital that seeks to eliminate worker agency in the market seems to be working quite well. After some quick research on the web, it appears that the consensus for why this is so is in some part due to the fact that workers are not interested in being in unions. In other words, a large portion of workers have become convinced that unions cannot provide enough benefits to outweigh the cost of union dues. This is no doubt due to a number of causes, including increased employer resistance, however structural changes in the labor market have been proven not to be responsible for the decline (i.e., the number of potential union jobs has not declined at the rate union membership has dropped). We can say then that ideology, or the imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence of workers, is a force that undercuts the emergence of resistances, and thus needs to be the primary target of critique. I don’t see D-W drawing much attention to the ideological restraints that by and large articulate new technologies to consumption much more effectively and consistently than to resistance or autonomy.

What we seem to be left with in D-W’s account is a number of relatively isolated instances of emergent forms of worker resistance. There is no clear way, however, that these instances will become articulated together into a large-scale program of resistance that will lead to things like the reform of labor laws. D-W appears to rely on the “groundswell” argument, where after enough of these instances accumulate workers will realize that they have at their disposal the tools required to organize effectively and make demands. Perhaps I am misreading his argument, but as far as I can tell, there is no explicit connection made between the micro-resistances he documents and a macro-resistance that will at some point emerge to reverse the macro-trends like declining union membership and a widespread skepticism of “union instrumentality.”