"Labor as Revolutionary Praxis:  A Red Critique of the 'Post-Work'
Ideologies"
Rob Wilkie

One of the fundamental assumptions in discussions of the "New
Economy" and of cyber-technologies is that capitalism has entered a
"post-work" stage characterized by "a shift from the materiality of
labor and product...to forms of production that are discursive, or
symbolic" (Casey). Central to these "post-work" theories is the idea
that, as the means of production have advanced, the conditions
materialized in the working day have evaporated. Specifically,
"post-work" theorists argue that by fostering a global network of
"interactivity," cyber-technologies have collapsed the relations
between producers and consumers (Deleuze), transforming wage-labor
from a brutal site of exploitation into a "hybrid" site of pleasure
and self-creation (Negri, Haraway).   However, as Marx argues,
"nothing is more absurd than to see in machinery the antithesis of
the division of labor."  In other words, far from a new stage of
capitalist relations in which technology "liberates" wage-labor from
exploitative constraints, such theories represent the crisis arising
from capitalism's inherent contradictions (between the concentration
of the forces of production and the production of profit from the
extraction of surplus value) as one of "post-work" in order to update
the workforce to the level of productivity required by global
capitalism today.  That is to say, in response to the increasing
abstraction of labor, the subject of these "post-work" theories is
conditioned to recognize herself in the international division of
labor not as a wage-worker, but rather as a social "entrepreneur":  a
flexible subject equally adapted to work in a factory, in front of a
computer, in a class-room, in a mall. . . .  In opposition to
"post-work" ideologies wherein "the sellers of labour-power learn. .
[merely] to sell their commodity on better terms" (Lenin) this
paper will argue that what is necessary for the revolutionary
transformation of social relations is not the production of social
entrepreneurs but rather cadres of socialist theoreticians guided by
the concept of labor as revolutionary praxis.