Post-Fordism
Concept for a stage of capitalism which came after the dominance of the industrial mass worker, i.e. Fordism. This concept has been used a lot in the Autonomist tradition.
Excerpt from an interview with Paolo Virno:
"PV: I have never used the expression “immaterial labor"; to me it seems equivocal and theoretically inconsistent. Post-Fordism certainly cannot be reduced to a set of particular professional figures characterized by intellectual refinement or “creative" gifts. It is obvious that workers in the media, researchers, engineers, ecological operators, and so on, are and will be only a minority. By “post-Fordism," I mean instead a set of characteristics that are related to the entire contemporary workforce, including fruit pickers and the poorest of immigrants. Here are some of them: the ability to react in a timely manner to the continual innovations in techniques and organizational models, a remarkable “opportunism" in negotiating among the different possibilities offered by the job market, familiarity with what is possible and unforeseeable, that minimal entrepreneurial attitude that makes it possible to decide what is the “right thing" to do within a nonlinear productive fluctuation, a certain familiarity with the web of communications and information.
As one can see, these are generically human gifts, not the result of “specialization." What I hold true is that post-Fordism mobilizes all the faculties that characterize our species: language, abstract thinking, disposition toward learning, plasticity, the habit of not having solid habits. When I speak of a “mass intellectuality," I am certainly not referring to biologists, artists, mathematicians, and so on, but to the human intellect in general, to the fact that it has been put to work as never before.
If we look carefully, post-Fordism takes advantage of abilities learned before and independently of entrance into the workplace: abilities brought forth by the uncertainty of metropolitan life, by uprootedness, by the preceptual shocks of technological mutations, even by video games and the use of cellular phones. All this is at the base of post-Fordist “flexibility." These experiences outside the workplace become afterward, in the production system known as “just in time," authentic and proper professional requirements." (http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/01/17/2225239)