Abstract
This chapter introduces and condenses the book’s approach, argument, and structure. The chapter opens by describing how the concept of language put to work, borrowed from the tradition of autonomist Marxism, is used to describe the remarkable rise of the transnational call centre workforce and one of the fastest-growing and paradigmatic workspaces of our time. The chapter lays out the analysis to call centre work adopted in the book by applying the insights of Harry Braverman, Jodi Dean, autonomist Marxists, and practitioners of the worker enquiry to a broad-based transformation within capitalist economies and the associated rise of a newly communicative workforce. Taking call centres on three continents as its focus, the book argues that the making of the cybertariat is a contested process, one that is producing new subjectivities and new forms of collective organization within a sector that carries out an increasingly crucial set of functions within the capitalist economy.
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Notes
- 1.
The translation has been slightly modified from the version offered in Gülsen’s account. I would like to thank Esin Gülsen and Ergin Bulut for their assistance in going over this translation.
- 2.
In using the term post-Fordism, Virno draws on the work of the French Regulation School to describe the political, economic, and cultural regime of accumulation that has asserted itself across developed countries out of the crisis of Fordism in the late 1960s. While this shift has taken different paths in different regions, post-Fordism is marked by shifts towards service sector employment, leaner and more flexible production processes, increasing financialization of the economy, unprecedented mobility for capital, the expansion and intensification of communications networks, and the increasing valourization of language, communication, and affect (see Virno, 2003). In this book I use the term Fordism to refer to the regime of accumulation (or stage of capitalism) that became ascendant in the post-World War II period. In using this term, I place a special emphasis on the logic of production which was the driving force of Fordism—a logic characterized by mass production, scientific management, and the assembly line. For a more in-depth discussion of this transition and the role of call centres within it, see Chap. 7.
- 3.
Post-operaismo is usually referred to in English as autonomist Marxism. For a more detailed discussion of this tradition, see Chap. 2. The phrase which gives this book its title can be found in the writings of the philosopher Paolo Virno (2003), but it also signals the growing attention on the part of post-operaismo’s scholars to the ways in which capitalism has incorporated communicative, linguistic, and affective dimensions of life (see Fumagalli, 2007; Marazzi, 1999; Vercellone, 2007).
- 4.
- 5.
One could think of these resistant practices as constituting labour’s vernacular, a culture of defiance that is produced from below in response to the submission of language to value in the call centre. The concept of the vernacular, as collective activity practiced in spite of and against attempts to control and homogenize the diversity of human expression, comes to me by way of the work of the anthropologist James C. Scott (2012).
- 6.
As a result, for Braverman “[m]ental labour” was reduced “to a repetitious performance of the same small set of functions” (Braverman, 1974, p. 220).
- 7.
Like Virno after him, Bell also underscored the central role of communication within labour in post-industrial society: “The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society” (1973, p. 163).
- 8.
Braverman’s inquiry into the transformation of labour was extended and shaped after his death by other scholars keen on understanding class dynamics on the factory floor. This research would become the foundation for a Marxist analysis of work known as “labour process” theory (see Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1979). Notable in this school is the work of sociologist Michael Burawoy (1979), who pointed out that, far from a simple affair, the securing of profit by owners resulted from diverse combinations of conflict and consent on the shop floor. Examining the way in which the tenuous relationship between management and workers unfolds, or as Burawoy put it, asking why “workers work as hard as they do” (p. xi) became one of the key concerns of this critical tradition.
- 9.
Braverman’s work foreshadows this transformation however: “In recent years, motion-time study (…) have had their logic and arithmetic assigned to computers, so that the time allowance for various job elements is worked out by the computer on the basis of standard data, perhaps supplemented for time study observations” (1974, p. 123).
- 10.
For a more detailed discussion of communicative capitalism, see Chap. 2.
- 11.
For a summary of this research, see Chap. 2.
- 12.
This fact is also noted by Thomas Hastings, who notes of the call centres he studied in Scotland: “the pacing and direction of work was technically controlled across the majority of the cases—as in a factory production line—and this heavily impacted upon the autonomy of agents within each centre” (Hastings, 2011, p. 138).
- 13.
For a discussion of studies seeking to connect call centre work to the growth of “knowledge work” and post-industrialism, see Chap. 2.
- 14.
This project has continued in the pages of the journal Huws edits, Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation.
- 15.
As Braverman (1974, pp. 26–27) readily admits, “this is a book about the working class as a class in itself, not as a class for itself.”
- 16.
“Post-operaismo” names the incarnation of the tradition that emerged after the political repression of the Italian extra-parliamentary left at the end of the 1970s. Following this break, key figures within operaismo entered into a dialogue with French post-structuralism and the political economy of the French Regulation School, focusing increasingly on the role of language and communication in productive processes as well as emergence of new forms of resistance within them.
- 17.
According to this perspective, one that has been picked up by some of the more notable interpreters of Karl Marx in the informational era, classes come into being along with the struggles that produce them. Sergio Bologna (2014, para. 13) describes this approach to class analysis: “For the workerists … the working class was an unexplored universe, extremely differentiated and complex, or, better, the point of arrival of a very long process, fraught with obstacles, in the course of which labor-power became aware of its own role and its own strength, and appeared on the scene of society as a protagonist, not as an appendage of the system of capitalist production.” In other words, these scholars saw class struggle as completely immanent to class formation. In another formulation, Nick Dyer-Witheford suggests that “[i]nsofar as workers, rather than being organized by capital, struggle against it, they constitute the working class” (1999, p. 66). Jodi Dean (2012, p. 72) proposes a similar understanding: “The proletarian is not just the worker; the proletarian is the worker radicalized, the worker politicized.”
- 18.
The Cátedra Experimental sobre Producción de Subjetividad, The Experimental Chair on the Production of Subjectivity, or, more recently, the Experimental University (2007b, para. 1). For a discussion of the worker inquiry carried out by the Cátedra Experimental into call centre labour in Rosario, see Chap. 2.
- 19.
The work of Vincent Mosco and Catherine McKercher (2008) remains a significant exception to this tradition in that while retaining the terms “knowledge work” and “information society” it also sees labour relations as conflictual, characterized by capital on one side and labour on the other.
- 20.
See the discussion of labour process research on the call centre in Chap. 2.
- 21.
As the labour activists associated with Kolinko and Gurgaon Workers suggested in 2012, these narratives “formed part of the general propaganda proclaiming the ‘end of the working class’, which has prevailed since the 1980s—while at the same time concentrating and ‘proletarianising’ large sections of previously ‘white collar’ workers under one roof and subjecting them to a Taylorised ‘factory mode’ of production. Instead of individualising neoliberal subjects, call centres simply extended the industrial system into the office world and collectivised a section of the working class, such as bank clerks or administrators, who previously saw themselves as ‘educated employees’. As a labour intensive and mobile industry, call centres quickly combined labour in different parts of the globe” (para. 1).
- 22.
One might add here that when established trade unions sign contracts enshrining insecure employment against the wishes of the workers they represent, or neglect their responsibility to organize unorganized workers, or support punishing austerity programs (all examples encountered in the research undertaken for this book), then the history of past experiences “serves us so that we may liberate ourselves from them” (Tronti, 2005, p. 11).
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Brophy, E. (2017). The Subterranean Stream. In: Language Put to Work. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95244-1_1
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