This is an extract from a
text written in Italian by Carlo Scarfone, here only partially translated.
Click here
for the full version.
Lean production (just-in-time production)
follows directly market demands. The increase of productivity drives under
Fordism the increase of quantity of commodities produced and their devaluation
(price decrease). Productivity in lean production is driven by its capacity to
adapt to the need of consumption of the market.
Lean production is
characterised by the production of a great quantity of different commodities
and by the overcoming of capital tendency to overproduction. The exigency to
organise production around the market needs renders the role of communication
of the industry with the market essential.
‘ One could say that with
lean production communication and information fluxes enter directly the process
of production’. (Marazzi 1994). Communication allows for the most flexible
structuration of the productive process,[1]
as the lubrifying agent of the relation between points of distribution and
sales and points of production.
From the point of view of production,
communication and information exchange coordinates the operations of different
working positions, which become situated on a horizontal plane making the need
for a centralised management superfluous. The productive chain is not silent
anymore, and technologies might be regarded as ‘linguistic machines’ (Marazzi
1994). Marketing becomes crucial both for the investigation of consumers trends
and the creation of needs.
While in Fordist production the labour force
parcellisation and specialisation were fundamental, under Postfordism the
labour force is extremely flexible and the worker primarily requires
communicative skills.
Instrumental action is confined to economic
rationality, to action within the technical and mechanical spheres of the
market. It is subordinated to economic calculation and excludes
value-judgements, that are instead part of the discursive mediation, of
language, and the intellect.
Under Fordism there was a neat separation
between the economic (entrepreneur) and the political, administrative and
institutional system (political subject). This separation was visible within
the single factory, as the separation between the executive labour of the
worker in the chain of production and the work of planning of methods and
timetables, of white collars, which was a difference represented in the
remuneration, life-styles, economic and social possibilities, class-relations.
Communication in the industrial phase of capitalism was posed outside of the
productive process. The economic structure and the discursive superstructure
could still be identified separately. Communication, to say it in Hegel’s
terms, was a collective reflection made by subjects who were engaged in
different activities, and it constituted the system within which society built
social, judicial and institutional relations.
At the same time, in a separate location and
at a different time, the socio-political system, based on the communicative
action of individual economic subjects, acted upon each subject fixing rules,
behaviours, roles, laws, norms, collective aims etc.
In Postfordism the coincidence of production
and communication becomes the driving force of economic development,
simultaneously causing a short-circuit in the institutional transition from
individual to collective interests. Representation in the form of a party of
class, rank, social group, becomes increasingly complex. Each individual tends
to represent himself. ‘The entrepreneur, by virtue of being such,
becomes politician, subject of government, writing off the separation, typical
of representative democracy, between the economic and the political sphere’.
(Marazzi 1994) His being at once the subject of instrumental action and of
communicative action makes him trustworthy, invests him of the aura of a
political subject, of the virtues of the Machiavellian Prince.
At the same time the instrumental use of communication
reveals another problematic transition. Instrumental action works according to
the means-ends logic. Once the end is individuated there is only one best way
to obtain it in the best possible time and in the most profitable way.
Communicative action functions in a radically
different way, through pluridirectional processes. In our relation with the
external world language allows the construction of multiple world-views,
theoretically equivalent to the multiplicity of the subjects expressing them.
Consequently, once the end is individuated,
the means to attain it can be modified continuously during the process, to the
extent that the result can radically differ from the one that was initially
planned. From the age of metanarratives, omnicomprehensive languages,
explanation of reality we have moved to an age of totalised and globalised lack
of certitude. This is because our uncertainties not only give raise to multiple
possible solutions, but are also less socialisable and communicable to one another.
Living in this state of uncertainty also means
confronting the world of labour without the guaranties that used to regulate it
and stabilise it until some years ago. In a situation of general
transformation, where flexibility and precariousness become the fundamental
characteristics of productive activity, those who have the privilege to work,
in a stable and continuous manner, have to be completely available in the face
of the variations of the internal state, moods and fluctuations of their
employers.
It is along with these characteristics of
Postfordist production, in the compression of purchasing power, in the
unpredictability, the real time adaptations, that the spaces of universal
rights and judicial guarantees are closed.
Unpaid extra-time, changing working hours,
mobbing. `Whilst the unemployed population rises, labour assumes pre-capitalist
features, far remote from the workers’ statute and trade unions’ guarantees
attained with the struggles of the 60-70’s.
The commodities produced by immaterial labour
are not exhausted by the act of consumption but contribute in a determining way
to the construction of the cultural environment occupied by the consumer. It is
not the object of consumption that develops the need to consume; this process
is intrinsic to social communication. ‘Publicity has become a labour-process’.
(Lazzarato 1997).
Immaterial labour produces a social relation
and extracts an economic value from this reproduction. Following this then it
is subjectivity (consumer’s and communicator’s) that constitutes the raw
material on which Postfordist production is based. Immaterial labour then
produces at the same time subjectivity and economic value, bringing to light
that Marx called real subsumption of labour under capital, i.e. that phase of
capitalism when the social is directly transformed into the economic.
According to Lazzarato, in
order to fully understand the subsumption of the social into the economic, for
the workings of the labour of communication, it is possible to use an aesthetic
model, a model of creativity, rather than the classical model of material
production.
This aesthetic model is based on three
elements: the author, the reproduction and the reception. These elements and
moments cannot be related to a single individual. They are the product of a
social and collective process and the articulation of a real cycle of
production. This cycle is subsumed under the logic of capitalism and hence
transformed into a commodity, yet it is still posed as a model of aesthetic
production and of the relation between the author and the public. ‘The author
loses his individual dimension and becomes a productive process industrially
organised (through division of labour, investment, command); reproduction
becomes a mass reproduction organised according to the imperatives of
profitability; the public (recipient) becomes consumer/communicator. It is
through this process of socialisation and subsumption under the economic of
intellectual activity that the ideological product tends to acquire a commodity
form.’ (Lazzarato 1997).
Using communication and interpersonal
relations for production causes a shift in the form of requirements for work.
Whilst under Fordism the quality of labour was linked to ‘the professional
formation and training’, the curriculum and specialisations, education and
specific work experience, under Postfordism the quality of labour is directly
proportional to social relations, to the ability to create sociability and
build communities. The process of valorisation and the extraction of surplus
value, that allows the accumulation of capital, is carried out by means of an
exceeding of social relations, of a surplus-community, rather than a surplus of
labour. This is due to the externalisation of labour and its pulverisation, to
the transformation of the Fordist factory into the Postfordism social factory.
The labour force of immaterial production is
dislocated in space. It is placed within the relation of the production of
value, however the sphere where this occurs is deterritorialised.
The social fabric is optimally utilised.
Social life becomes the fundamental source and creation of value. Social
cooperation constitutes the web of relations established in the life of the
subjects. Each relation is ‘put to work’ and, independently of its formal
recognition hence retribution, it is in itself productive. Whether one works or
not, one never ceases to produce. The separation between labour-time and
free-time collapses. The only distinction can be made between waged and unwaged
life-time. Between life formally subsumed within the relations of capital,
labour-time and wage, and life really subsumed within the relations of capital
and productive time, which includes both the time spent working and not.
Marazzi C., Il posto dei calzini,
Bollati-Boringhieri,Torino, 1999
Lazzarato M., Lavoro Immateriale, Ombre Corte Edizioni,
Verona, 1997
(a cura di) S.Bologna, A.Fumagalli,Il lavoratore autonomo
di seconda generazione, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1997
DeriveApprodi N.18, Primavera 1999
[1]
"Si potrebbe dire che con la
produzione snella, la comunicazione, il flusso di informazioni entrano
direttamente a far parte del processo produttivo" (Marazzi, 1994) La
comunicazione permette di strutturare il processo produttivo nel modo più
flessibile, permettendo di realizzare una sorta di "lubrificazione"
dei processi dal punto di distribuzione-vendita, al punto di produzione.