For eleven days in October, 1990 (10th-20th), the road transport sector in Spain, carrying around 75% of all goods according to sources of the CEOE, witnessed one of the most violent labour conflicts in recent memory in a strike conducted by the joint associations of "owner-operators" in the trucking industry.
Given the nature of the demands raised by the strikers, this strike could be dismissed as simply another conflict between big and small capital; that is, between the large employers' organizations controlling the major part of the longhaul transport market and the little guys who own and operate from one to five trucks. As a conflict of interests between two fractions of transport capital the demands of the organizations calling the strike - they represent around 15% of the sector according to the press - centered around a series of demands aiming at the defense of traditional ways of regulating the transport market (government intervention against "illegal" truckers, as well as intervention with regard to the fixing of tariffs, inspection of vehicles, etc.). As such, considering the forces at play, this struggle would necessarily be of little interest to the readers of this paper.
Like so many other conflicts in Spain in recent times, this strike remained strictly within the limits of corporatist demands, although it brought with it wide-ranging disruption and tensions (confrontations with police, persecution of scabs, burning of trucks, blockades of entrances and exits of roads and national highways). But its real significance lies elsewhere. As has been underlined by the press, trying eagerly to minimize its importance, the strike was only followed by a minority of the truckers, and it did not affect all the provinces of Spain. Nonetheless we have to acknowledge the extraordinary impact it had.
Within a few days of the strike's beginning, once truckers had blockaded the roads and picketing had begun, its impact on the big cities could be seen in the empty shelves of the major supermarkets in Bilbao and Catalonia, and in the scarcity of goods (among others fish) in the central markets of Madrid and Barcelona. Disruption in the industrial centers was even much greater. Although claims made by the CEOE and the major employers' associations tend to exaggerate the losses (with reported losses ranging from 50,000 to 200,000 million pesetas), it is a fact that a total blockade was effective in the industrial belts of the main Span ish provinces. Just to give a few examples: General Motors had to close; Fire stone, Nissan and Seat shut down their assembly lines, as did Citroen. Many other enterprises suffered similar interruptions in the production process. Fasa-Renault, Michelin, Ford (which had to hire 25 airplanes to fly in supplies from its plants in Great Britain and Germany), the chemical industry of Tarragona and many lesser industries were hit by the strike. In addition, the border at Irun was blockaded by the strikers.
Apart from the spectacular character of some of the conflicts, put into relief by the so-called mass media in a campaign of slandering the strikers and by signs of alarmism in the population (people began to hoard products as if it was question of an imminent war), the truckers' strike takes on a significance which exceeds the limits of its formal characteristics.
That specific significance - leaving aside the economic and social repercussions of what was no more than the action of a minority - has very much to do with how this battle highlighted the profound structural weaknesses in the production process growing out of the capitalist restructuring of the 1980's, as well as the objective limits of modern techniques for organizing and managing the workforce.
The cycle of capitalist restructuring of the past two decades has been marked by the deployment of a double strategy: A first result has been what has come to be called "the decentralized factory" or dispersed Fordism. The aim of such mana gerial strategies was in the first place to defeat the resistance of workers and their power to put pressure on capitalists within production itself, by dispersing the masses of workers which had concentrated around the poles of production centers having developed after the Second World War (especially with the growth of the auto industry and other mass consumption industries).
This massive concentration of the labour force around the assembly lines of the giant manufacturing complexes was at the base of a cycle of capital accumulation extending till the beginnings of the 1970s and presupposing the culmination of the scientific organization of work put into practice by Ford half a century before; an organization which, apart from the massive concentration of workers, found ex pression in the segmentation and decomposition of physical movements of work ers on the assembly line which then became the origin of numerous acts of resis tance, strikes and sabotage. But the industrial agglomeration equally resulted in workers constituting a power which was able to exert economic and social pres sure. In successive cycles of (trade union and autonomous) struggles workers succeeded in eroding the base of the rate of accumulation in the industrialized countries. At the end of the 1970s the profit crisis had reached a point where it became inevitable to completely reorganize the management of the labour force and to seek to intensify the exploitation of labour power in order to bring about a renewed rise of the rate of capital accumulation. This is the epoch of social pacts, of politics of austerity, of the neo-liberal models that have shaken the foundations of the welfare state.
As a consequence, the second part of the strategic orientation of capital in at tempting to restructure the labour process in the past decade has consisted in a recomposition of the production process which, in order to defeat the resistance of the mass worker, was meant to facilitate a renewed dynamic development of the cycle of accumulation. The means for achieving this end was to be the implan tation of modern electronic equipment and a new system of industrial communications. Putting into practice this double strategy, then, has resulted in a territorial decentralization of production processes and increased flexibility in re sponse to the requirements of a type of flexible demand which has made neces sary the production of small series of products (with the enterprises intending to gain a higher quota of the market by putting emphasis on varying design, chang ing fashions, etc.).
In past years we have witnessed the displacement of much of the assembly and finishing process towards the capitalist periphery, composed of countries which offer advantages in the availability of cheap labour (Turkey, South Korea, Phil ippines, Brazil, Mexico). This dispersion on a world scale has its counterpart on the regional level within the industrialized countries themselves. Thus we witness the decentralization of the big manufacturing centers transformed into smaller production units, and the extension of subcontracting, through which big corpora tions shift certain phases of production (and their costs) to smaller firms which charge themselves with the task of providing the parts and components for the final product. In this respect the automobile industry, motor of the economic de velopment of capitalist countries up to the 1970s, is an exemplary case.
JIT and zero stock: The logistic chain of surplus value production
It is easy to understand that such a new industrial landscape manifestly puts new demands on the techniques of organizing work and of managing production. Hence the proliferation of all kinds of conceptions and guidelines of a new man agement philosophy (just-in-time, zero stock which intends to save costs and to avoid the immobilization of capital, total quality, human resource management, etc.). In fact, the so-called new management philosophy corresponds to a new phase in the division of labour between different enterprises along the lines of what has come to be called the logistic chain of surplus value production; a model of establishing a hierarchy of different enterprises participating in the production of a specific product (e.g. a car which requires the cooperation of a large number of enterprises fabricating components or performing intermediate phases of as sembly and operating under conditions dictated by the big corporation selling the final product).
In order for this new production process to function in practice, it becomes in creasingly necessary that each link in the production process chain, every move ment between the service firms and the corporations with which they maintain links of subcontract, be perfectly coordinated. In other words, if everything is to function according to the principle of JIT, it is absolutely indispensable that each necessary component - to say it in the words of the president of Nissan, the first enterprise putting it into practice in order to connect its factories in Japan and Great Britain - be at its destination "at the proper time, in the correct quantity and in the right place".
In reality we are confronted with what is only another expression of the subordi nation of small capital (the subsidiary enterprise) to big capital (the enterprise fixing the scale of demand). This is therefore a strategy of transferring the bene fits of small production units to the big industrial corporations, ridding themselves in this way of the costs for keeping stock (zero stock) and for the immobilization of capital as a result of keeping stocks; at the same time this permits them to shift those phases of the production process which produce less surplus value to the subcontracting firms.
As far as the workers are concerned, this new industrial order represents another turn of the screw in the process of intensifying the exploitation of the labour force. The dissolution of the large concentrations of masses of workers translates itself into a relative loss of the ability to put pressure on the capitalists, an ability which was so characteristic of the "old workers' movement". One of the first con sequences has been the devalorization of labour power and the worsening of workplace conditions. This is the phenomenon which we know as temporal work, a reality expressing itself in a multitude of contract models (for temporary work) in the subsidiary firms which are for the rest the only ones keeping the labour market in flux, as well as expressing itself in a net reduction of wages and the limiting of other resources and rights at the workplace (flexibility).
All this has resulted in the emergence of a massive hierarchy of wages, the demolition of the class tradition associated with the struggles of the mass worker, and the neo-corporatist or sectional elements in working-class behavior, pitting employed against unemployed, temporary workers against permanent workers, the workers of the advanced service sectors (computer specialists) against the workers of the backward service industries (state employees, cleaners), skilled against unskilled, etc.
But the new formula for the organization and management of socialized com modity production, by attempting to get rid of the kind of resistance which has consolidated itself around the figure of the mass worker, has opened a new di mension for the development of contradictions inherent to the social relations between capital and labour. The decentralization of production substantially in creases the vulnerability of the entire process. The logistic network of the dis persed unities of production inevitably leads to a proliferation of elements to be linked with each other, and these links are the soft spots of the system. In fact, if these new technologies of organization are to function properly, not just as theo retical models, but in the daily practice of production, it becomes necessary to eliminate the possibility of any irregularity, setback or unforeseen event which might lead to a breakdown in the continuous flux of goods and components within the limits set by the JIT system (not only in the production of capital, but also in its realization).
In fact, if everything is to function perfectly, it becomes necessary that "all" the elements of the process to be linked, including the workers, operate in total har mony with the aims established by the centers of decision making. A minimal er ror in any part of the logistic network, whether intended (sabotage) or not, has a multiplier effect on the entire system and inevitably leads to the collapse of the process of production or distribution or of both of them at the same time. This is what happened in the Ford strike in Britain, or more recently in the Spanish truckers' strike which we discussed at the beginning of this article.
In this way, the formally subjective vulnerability associated with the conglomera tions of mass workers in the factory whose intervention could well obstruct the production process, has been eliminated in dispersed Fordism through the trans formation into a functional, formally objective vulnerability of the new production organization. Our individual tragedy consists in being labour power, precisely because we recognize ourselves as a constituting element of capital - i.e. of the system of social relations requiring the realization of the exchange value of our labour power; the tragedy of the forms of social domination which are at the base of capitalist production is rooted in the fact that they have to negate ( by suppres sion of living labour) the real source of value production, i.e. living labour which is capable of valorizing technology.
Capital, as a system of social relations, is not something which is exterior to our selves. Only formally is it an exterior element, i.e. only in the forms of social domination which it entails. This is the origin of an insurmountable contradiction between the forms of formal domination (the centers of financial and technologi cal decision making) which require the physical suppression of the disruptive po tential embodied in the labour force, and the necessity to incorporate the labour force as well as to intensify its exploitation as the only means of guaranteeing the continuity of the capitalist accumulation process.
Whether in the classical Fordist organization or in the actual variants of dispersed Fordism, it is a fact that the contradiction between capital and labour continues to appear as something with ever more fundamental connotations. The real (objective) limits to the further development of capitalist accumulation are rooted in the labour force or, to put it in another way, in the human existence being sub ordinated to its role as mere labour power. The automation of the industrial plant puts ever more into relief its dependency on living labour. And this is not only true with regard to the knowledge incorporated into the technical apparatus, but also with regard to the functions of control, of supervision, of maintenance and of complementary services (stretching from the advanced service sector to the most devalorized labour of cleaning) without whose coordinated contributions automa tion is impossible.
Though this kind of reasoning might seem to be quite abstract, its correctness is indeed confirmed by the most concrete plans of daily corporate practice. From Japan to the United States and Europe, one of the principal preoccupations of the transnational corporations is the "management of human resources". Management of the electronic technology demands a complementary strategy based on the necessity of generating a consensus among the different levels of the functional hierarchy at work, strictly avoiding the resurgence of a new class identity like the one that has been expressed by the ideologies developing with the rise of the mass worker. This is to make possible a certain "corporate culture" in which each worker assumes as his/her own the objectives determined by the technical-finan cial center. It is clear that this refers to the hegemonic industrial corporations, because in the specific constellation brought about by the dispersed production process taylorist and authoritarian models coexist with models of this new culture which tries to imply workers in the implementation of objectives which are laid down by management (the proposal of Solchaga with the "Pact of Competitivity" goes in this direction in that it intends to link wage increases to an index of pro ductivity).
But the nature of the dispersed production process, which makes the situation of increasingly larger sections of the workforce ever more precarious (characterized by the growth of part-time and temporary workers), sets narrow limits to achiev ing such a consensus. For this reason, corporate strategy orients itself towards a differential treatment of each worker, according to his/her relative importance in the logistic chain, establishing a rigidly stratified hierarchy of wages and func tions within the enterprise. In fact, the new techniques of organizing the labour process have to be seen in the context of the necessity to achieve a consensus which is explicitly accepted by every single element in the chain of production and distribution. If it is true that the search for a consensus has been essential for the capitalist system ever since its beginnings (and has been incorporated into all forms of the prevailing power structure) and up to the present day, the ever more hectic ups and downs of the trade cycle and the level of the technical and histori cal development of exploitation of labour power which have led to the dispersed organisation of the production process have made the goal of obtaining a consen sus the corner stone of the underlying forms of social life.
Just-in-time, total quality, and other watchwords put forth by the most aggressive Japanese transnationals are in the technological, as well as ideological, vanguard of this process. Up to now we have been accustomed to identify capitalist devel opment with the Protestant ethic. But protestantism, the cult of Reason as devel oped in the Enlightenment, as well as the invention of individuality in the western democratic system, maintain a balance between individual freedom and the func tional subordination to the new order forced upon us by the organizational proc ess of labour. The mediation of the new techniques of organization and manage ment of labour activity spreads more and more into sectors which have so far been looked upon as sacrosanct spheres of the individual. The totalitarian domi nation of capital extends in two directions at the same time, with a qualitative di mension (concerning the individuality and its psychic functions) and a quantita tive dimension (concerning the entire arc of expressions of social life), and in doing so it exhibits signs which are more and more visibly totalitarian.
In the present phase of capitalist domination the ideological sphere has been to tally subordinated to the material force of the process of accumulation. This is what the ideological highpriests of the system have called "the end of ideologies". The production of ideology has ceased to be formally independent from the proc ess of material production. Ideology originates in the same process of valoriza tion, and it takes concrete form in the cult of money (as a generalized social mani festation) and of the private accumulation of wealth as the beginning and the end of existence. Indeed, individual imagination is heavily imbued with the monetary principle: the cult of value finds expression in the possession of things. In this way the process of generating and realizing values - or, the dynamics of com modity production - reconstitutes itself in the generation and realization of ideo logical forms corresponding to the new phase of capitalist development. The ide ology of a "corporate culture", then, represents the basic element of a consensus which makes it possible to attain the goals set forth by management.
But the forms of obtaining this consensus differ from place to place. In Europe the welfare state, to the extent that it still exists, serves this role. But as the re cession points towards the abolition of the welfare state, capital increasingly is turning towards the Japanese capitalist block which has demonstrated a lot of dynamism in generating formulas of consensus. The major parts of the modern technologies of managing and organizing work have come to us from Japan, in accordance with its aggressive policy of technological and financial penetration in Europe and in the United States.
The technologies of surveillance and control that are integrated in the automation process in order to enforce the physical control of the productive sequence de mand corresponding techniques of interiorized control on the part of living labour intervening in the process along the production chain. This implies, therefore, to extend the technology of control of the material processes to techniques of con trolling the subjective factor. The goal is to create the absolute "ideal" in automa tion, a self-regulating process in which humans and machines are fully integrated.
This desperate search for a consensus nonetheless has its limits in the way the imperatives of optimizing and maximizing profits are respected. Although this sounds like a voice of the past, it has to be recognized that the capitalist mode of production, with all its electronic paraphernalia, is an intrinsically contradictory reality. While the increasing complexity of production processes requires the con sensual submission of all the elements of the logistic chain of surplus value pro duction to a centralized command, the lowering of costs and the absorption of an ever larger part of surplus value by the centre leads to a hierarchy of subcontrac tors encompassing a multiplicity of differing interests. The transport strike is paradigmatic in this sense. The big corporations (e.g. in the automobile industry) have managed to rid themselves of all those phases of the production process which for technical and organizational or strictly economic reasons could well be taken over by other subcontracting firms. Centering in this way their activity on the segments of the logistic chain which promise higher surplus value, the mo nopolistic firms also dictate the rates (for transport, e.g.). Simultaneously, the same big corporations are strictly dependent on the subcontractors from the point of view of logistics (truckers and suppliers of parts, e.g.). With this they are con fronted with an element of potential conflictuality between the various interests at play which has given rise to the October strike.
But what has undoubtedly been a conflict of interests between two forms of capital, also made manifest the weaknesses and the potentiality of conflicts exist ing in the dominant mode of dispersed Fordism. In the last years we have wit nessed a multitude of conflicts often erupting in specific segments of the produc tion chain and related services which would have to be classified as merely "sectional" forms (the machinists of Renfe, the air traffic controllers, the cleaners, buses, health sector, etc. - to refer only to the Spanish case). At first sight they all appear to be strongly sectional and corporatist in character, with demands being specifically tied to the respective professional category of the workers within a new industrial hierarchy.
In their formal appearance (rank and file committees) these struggles tend to question the traditional trade unions, but nevertheless they remain firmly im planted within the horizon of traditional trade union demands, with their forms of solidarity corresponding to the phase of dispersed Fordism, in the same way as mass actions were the expression of the mass worker issued from the classical Fordist strategy which was characterized by big industrial concentrations of the labour force. To criticize its sectoral or focal character is simply useless. Or it is another consequence of our being entangled in forms of ideological thinking which gave rise to the "grand projects" of proletarian emancipation, more appro priate for communist reminiscences than for a radically critical view of the new realities.
The real solidarity, the kind of social life which is possible today, is the one being practiced in the process of struggle and resistance to the process of reproducing capitalist relations. There is a correspondence between an atomized organization of the labour process and atomized forms of solidarity and resistance. The capac ity of global control of the process is rooted precisely in the technical and scien tific management of each of the elements of the social production chain; they fa vour in particular the integral components at the expense of those excluded from the process (old workers, young people, women, etc.); and thus they establish a hierarchy of privileges within specific industrial categories, based on their relative importance for the functioning of the process, i.e. on their contribution to the logistic chain of surplus value production.
The dissolution of the old forms of solidarity and resistance of the mass worker supposes in fact a process of adaptation of the forms of proletarian resistance to the new conditions under which labour power is exploited. This is the end of the teleological concept which maintained the objective necessity of communism and the corresponding vision (based on the recuperation of forms of community be longing to the past) which has been the traditional source of inspiration of the movement of opposition to wage labour. In fact, the implantation of Fordism already marks the beginning of a process in which the perspective of "going be yond" capital is abandoned in favour of a concept of "living with capital".
Insofar the absence of a social project and the falling-back into the immediacy characterizing the new cycle of proletarian struggles ultimately demonstrate sim ply the absence of a project on the part of capital itself in its phase of total domi nation in which the process of accumulation is completely transformed by the reduction of capital's circulation time to zero, negating in the concrete practice of accumulation its capacity of cyclical generation of administered time. Thus the ideal of progress which constituted the (bourgeois) project of rising capitalism, tied to a trade cycle which implied some promise - and a risk - with regard to the future, has transformed itself in the present phase into a trade cycle pursuing its aim (namely, augmenting the mass of capital) in instantaneous form, without considering any perspective of projection into the future. In fact, in the context of dominant ideology the future only appears as a residual, spectacular category (futurism) so characteristic of a model of civilization sinking back into itself.
The destruction of the formal expressions of resistance represents in fact the pos sible dissolution of the dominant forms of organizing the production process. There is a correspondence between the phenomenological reality of capital as the totalitarian control of the world - presenting itself under the aspects of extensive domination (world market) and intensive domination (aimed at the potentialities of subjectivity) - and the structural reality of its dispersed organization.
As in any form of totalitarian civilization, in which the trend towards total domi nation coincides with the emergence of centrifugal forces, menacing its stability from inside, the model of civilization based on the accumulation of capital is characterized by a similar contradiction, even if under new conditions for the concrete, historical realization of its domination. This is to say, the total realiza tion of capital - or of the world subjected to capital - is at the same time the reali zation of the limits of totalitarian control. If the globalization of the cultural forms finds its counterpart in the forms of social fragmentation (along lines of national ity or of identities generated within the horizon of the capitalist model), then the totalitarian realization of the capitalist production process finds its counterpart in the expressions of fragmentation which appear in the concrete forms of the ex ploitation of labour power.
The total domination of capital presents itself as merely an abstract unification of the world on the basis of the commodity and of money. But the unification on the basis of these abstract categories (commodities are values, have a certain value) implies in fact a dissolution of underlying forms of social life, precisely because the access to the commodity (and to buying power) depends ever more markedly on the position a person occupies inside the logistic chain of the production of surplus value; it is this criterion which also assigns to employed persons a more or less advantageous position at the time of entering negotiations within the con text of transactional relations (being the essence of those social relations which are usually called capital). Precisely because the present model of social life is characterized by the prevalence of immediacy (private consumption of things), there is no social project "inside" the coordinates of the commodified forms of social life so typical of capitalist relations.
This crisis of social life becomes most evident at the very center of the capitalist system. The emergence of the fourth world in the "rich" countries, the Thatcherite theory of the two-thirds society, the deterioration of living conditions in the met ropolitan agglomerations and the spreading of pathological forms induced by the accumulation of capital itself, from contamination to drug abuse, the pockets of marginality, etc., - all this feeds precisely on those elements which have been ex pelled from work on the logistic chain.
The unstable equilibrium in which the reproduction process is maintained in the capitalist countries and its implicit recognition on the part of the dominant tech nocracy has favoured the generalized implantation of a system of industrial blackmail represented by the destabilization of work conditions (at the same time retraceable to other reasons for intensifying the exploitation of labour power) and direct repression whenever a conflict becomes manifest.
But the increasing importance of non-guaranteed labour accompanying dispersed Fordism sets a potential limit to achieving consensus. The instability of labour generates disaffection and makes it difficult to develop a "corporate spirit" (incessantly preached by the theoreticians of new industrial relations). The strat egy of differential management offering privileges and recompense in a planned form to each of the various categories of the industrial hierarchy tends to destabi lize precisely those strata whose contribution to the chain of surplus value pro duction is less important, quite in line with today's dominant conception of politi cal economy.
This is the only possible escape route when applying modern techniques of man agement, and not the resolution of the existing contradiction between capital and labour. But even using this escape route has its limits in the growing necessity of valorizing all the phases of the production chain, according to the criteria of maximizing the results (surplus value), criteria which are to be applied to every single element of the production chain. This is to say, the strategies of differential management of human resources has so far succeeded in preventing the intercate gorical consolidation of a politically active subject, but they have not succeeded in finally achieving the configuration of the capitalist reproduction process as a totality, extending over the entire territory and over all of the faculties of individuals in which each of the integral parts functions as a determinant of the final result. Thus, for example, the strike of the airport cleaners of Madrid brought chaos and the threat of flights being canceled to the airport.
Precisely because the increasingly precarious position of the labour force denotes the precarious state of a production system in a kind of unstable equilibrium, the management of consensus has to be complemented by the implantation of openly repressive mechanisms. The growing tendency of policing everyday life, the re striction of the so-called democratic rights (right to strike, rights of expression), the criminalization of insurgent minorities or minorities who are exponents of whatever form of dissent, the purely propagandistic and fetishized affirmation of democracy at a time when the gap between official policy and the reality of eve ryday social practice keeps widening - all this has contributed to making the democratic rights appear as a simply propagandistic category in a context of technocratic management of public life as subordinated to capital which in prac tice more and more takes on the character of totalitarianism.
The democratic legitimation does not correspond anymore with the reality of a world whose dissolution of social functions and of the production chain has made it possible that the activity of a social group in a strategic position within the lo gistic chain of surplus value production (be this the power of finance capital or of any other social segment) could well cause the process of social reproduction to collapse through its influence on a segment or just a single element of the proc ess.
The formal polarization apparently resulting from the relations between capital and labour has had two effects: On one side it has led to a higher level of the con centration of capital so that decision making has now gained the status of total autonomy with respect to any democratic instance or mediation whatsoever; on the other side the real dissolution of the production process, subjected to the laws of accumulation, has turned any references to democratic rules into a mere banal ity. The "majority" is nothing but an empty formula to legitimize the unilateral decision of capitalist managers as to the fate of society as a whole. In fact, the material conditions on which the present forms of social life are based have made irrelevant the democratic postulates of all kind, which are nothing but a fetter, a political prejudice of the past. Hence the various expressions of democratic ac tion, remaining firmly within the universe of a fictitious role of the majority (in the style of the campaign led with the strike of 14 December, 1988, or the campaign against the NATO or the campaign against the Gulf war), at the same time being located on the periphery of the reproduction chain (in the case of the 14 Decem ber strike campaign carefully organizing their activities in such a way as to avoid the interruption of the chain), and deliberately imitating forms of action developed by the mass worker, have degenerated into a mere ritual of testimony bound to end in frustration and failure (just in case that they actually have any objective at all).
An organization which restricts itself to affirming the principle of immediacy (i.e. the traditional demands) cannot be seen as questioning the totality that is repre sented by the logistic chain and the process of social reproduction (in this case as well as in the conflicts taking place in the nerve centers of capitalism - as in the transport strike in Paris - the propaganda machine of the State and of the com munication media orients itself on mobilizing the rest of the urban masses against the "anti-social" minority).
Experience has taught us that such conflicts have no cumulative effect, nor do they insert themselves in a perspective of emancipation; they turn into isolated acts of resistance, adding up to a kind of social guerrilla warfare. But they are fun damentally radical acts because each time it becomes more evident that our exis tence is defined as being a source of valorization of a world in which capital constitutes itself as a system of intrinsically conflict-ridden social relations. There are no real options outside the limits set by the social relations of capital - social relations which leave us no other choice except conflictuality. Maybe to accept this burden of conflictuality and to consciously renounce to vague hopes will be the last existential option remaining for us who - in a situation of being reduced to the status of labour power - have nothing to lose except our illusions.
(Translated from: Fordismo disperso y nueva organizacion del trabajo: ‰Hacia un nuevo tipo de luchas? in: Etcetera n. 18, junio 1991, p. 55-69)