ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the political and economic context for the restructuring of labor in the contemporary moment, as well as an introduction to the dynamics of capitalist crisis. I present a multicausal explanation of the late 1960s crisis in Fordism as an organization of production and Keynesianism as an ideology of political and economic governance that centers on social struggles. I then describe transformations in capitalist production through a survey of theories of post-Fordist production, underpinning the emergence of neoliberalism as an ideology of governance. A flexible, continually changing arrangement themselves, post-Fordist transformations have rendered work and social relations flexible, precarious, informal, and globally dispersed, accompanied by neoliberal subject formations that recompose workers as entrepreneurial. To shore up profits, capital extended the commodification of media, culture, and information, and thus, its control over work in these sectors, and secured ownership through strengthened intellectual property rights.
