New Criticals


These conditions – long working hours, low wages, mechanization, an endlessly and totally viable workforce (not to mention the introduction of a diverse management hierarch, "management"also being the essential term during the growth of early 90's capitalism) – partially illustrate the nature of industrial capitalism, especially as it changed into its then-current form. But, as we shall see, those conditions persist in forms of capitalism that have evolved beyond industrial manufacture. As capitalism attempts to navigate a new economic, productive, and social landscape in dominant post-industrial countries that have seen the outsourcing of traditional manufacturing to other, “less-developed” parts of the globe, the emergent principles perfected in industrial capitalism are reworked and re-applied (sometimes by the very actors and voices contra capitalism) contemporarily within the territories manufacture has vacated. Some reach their logical end point (completely free labor) while some change qualitatively into manifestations of the same principles (the dramatic reduction of physically taxing forms of labor), but the past of capitalism becomes visible in the present; one just needs to know where to look.