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/