ABSTRACT
The demands of networked post-Fordism and the increasingly central role of communications at every stage and level of the production process result in a generalised connectivity that is potentially far more explosive than the old Fordist factories. Productive labour in the Fordist mode was linked to the production of physical commodities, what Virno calls ‘activity-with-end-product’. In the post-Fordist mode of production, the Autonomist argument goes, productive labour itself tends to become virtuosic. Workers no longer merely produce products; they now produce the conditions for production as such. As post-Fordist modes of production are now directly exploiting this capacity and bringing it under the wage relation, it is necessary to reclaim the general intellect by giving it a de-commodifying form of publicness.
