Page 260 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

248 LOOKING BACK AT NEW TIMES AND ITS CRITICS

found in the New Times collection to task for its capitulation to the
rhetoric of the right and for its abandonment of a left programme in favour
of an alliance-based politics of accommodation with capital, on the excuse
that flexible specialization is somehow progressive. Anna Pollert’s
‘Dismantling flexibility’ makes a number of points (Pollert, 1988). Post-
Fordism is much less extensive as a new practice of production than the
New Timers suggest. Where it does exist it offers secure jobs only to a
small minority of highly skilled middle-aged men. ‘The quality craft work
that Sabel discovers is work for middle aged Emilian men’ writes Pollert on
the economic miracle of the so-called ‘third Italy’. And it relies, she
continues, on the insecurity of those forced onto the periphery to play the
role of buffer against the instabilities of the marketplace. More than this,
the shift to post-Fordism represents a long-term strategy developed on the
part of capital to circumscribe and sidestep the established strength and
radicalism of the workers. Pollert also argues that where labour has co-
operated and has won some concessions, such as participation in decision-
making, these have also been the result of long years of struggle. And
within the post-Fordist factories the establishment of work teams and the
introduction of flexibility in the working day have to be set alongside the
disappearance of space for autonomy and resistance. There is no longer the
possibility of shopfloor culture where an integrated and less overtly
hierarchical workforce watch each other in the workshop, and over the
dinner table. And the consequences of post-Fordism for those excluded
from the secure jobs is to consolidate the casualization of work for the rest
and in the longer term to create a more divisive society, one with a real
rather than simply an imagined underclass. Post-Fordism in its more
alluring guise is, according to Pollert, nothing more than an ‘ideology’
which conceals the radical restructuring which capital has found it
necessary to undertake as the older post-war economic and social
settlement fails to produce the profit levels necessary to shield off
international competition. As she puts it, ‘the “discovery” of the flexible
workforce is part of an ideological offensive which celebrates pliability and
casualisation, and makes them seem inevitable’. She continues to argue that
this is nothing more than telling people ‘how to live with insecurity and
unemployment and learn to love it’ (72).
In Simon Clarke’s response to New Times this argument is extended to
include a strong critique of the emphasis on the market. He sees the
seriousness with which the New Timers take the market as either a
theoretical flaw or else as a sign of capitulation to the language of
Thatcherism and thus an abandonment of socialism or indeed marxism.
Clarke and Pollert refuse to engage with Hall’s earlier reformulation of
the social meaning of the market. In The Hard Road to Renewal he argues
that ‘the left has never understood the capacity of the market to become
identified in the minds of the mass or ordinary people, not as fair and