From technological utopianism to the theory of unequal development of automation

The article counters popular predictions of a coming ?post-work society? with the argument that the capitalist development of technology leads to an uneven introduction of automation into production processes, paralleled by the expansion of wage labour in the service sectors of social reproduction and the circulation of capital in the centre of the capitalist world-system, as well as in labour-intensive production in the periphery. We draw our argument from a critical reading of Italian operaismo whose development we trace in the terms of the sequence ?from official Marxisms to a re-interpretation of Capital, from Capital to Grundrisse and back to Capital?. The operaists made an epistemological break in the study of the relationship between the forces and relations of production by identifying the capitalist development of technology as a key site of class struggle. They also introduced a theoretically fruitful distinction between the concepts of the technical composition of labour power and the political composition of the working class. By introducing the concept of the social composition of labour power, we aim to draw attention to certain negative tendencies within operaismo that led to its vulgarisation by post-operaismo authors, while at the same time correcting it in line with contemporary processes of capital accumulation on a world scale.