ABSTRACT
As these are ongoing changes in the character of a capitalist economy, understanding them requires a political-economy approach that acknowledges this and also recognizes that there are limits to capital (Harvey, 1982). The ways in which, and the perspectives from which, we represent the world are certainly important. These are, however, competing accounts of a material world, socially produced according to 'rules of the game' in which people make historical geographies of employment and production. The economy remains subject to the structural class relations and boundaries that define capitalism. Consequently class relations, especially those between capital and labour in the labour market, in the wage relation and at the point of production, remain of central significance. Class relations in the workplace can be reconfigured but they cannot be erased. It is for this reason, and because such relations are treated in a one-sided and idealized fashion which seeks to deny their class character in much of the literature on new post-Fordist forms of work, that they are the focus of attention here. Companies must be able successfully to purchase labour power and then organize and deploy it to ensure the production of surplus value and the possibility of profitable production. This emphasis on the central importance of the class relation between capital and labour, of value analysis in emphasizing the asymmetrical but mutually defining power relations between capital and labour, may smack to some of essentialism (Barnes, 1996). But insistence upon the pivotal significance of capital-labour relations in a capitalist economy does not deny the significance of other processes and relationships which are deeply involved in the reproduction of this class relationship; nor does it reduce them to mere reflections of it (cf. Massey, 1995). Capitalist societies are not simply divided along class lines. There are also divisions along dimensions such as gender and ethnicity, which are intertwined with those of class in a variety of ways. Attempts to understand the ongoing restructuring of production and work that fail to acknowledge the class basis of these changes are, thus, at best partial, theoretically impoverished and politically dangerous.
