ABSTRACT
That the working class is changed in cycles of struggle which alter both its technical and political composition—the use of machinery and division of labour that shapes the class, and the degree and forms of challenge it makes to capital—was the thesis of operaismo (workerism). This school of composition traced how the resistances of skilled workers in early capital were in the Taylorist and Fordist factory transformed into the powerful organisations of the mass industrial worker. At the end of the twentieth century, however, capital halted and rolled back the wage and welfare state gains of the mass worker in North America and Europe in a campaign that conjoined corporate, state, and, crucially, techno-scientific power. The computers and networks of the cybernetic revolution developed in the Cold War, which would in 1989 drive the USSR to death by military competition, were also deployed at home.
