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teaching at the Université de Paris VIII and the College International
de Philosophie, and helping to found a journal, Futur Antérieur ,
which developed autonomist theory and other radical ideas. In
Futur Antérieur Deleuze and he interviewed each other, and, at
around the same time he collaborated with Guattari on a short
topic, Nouveaux alliances de liberté , 33 which proclaimed the need
for a revivified communism, appropriate for the realities of post-
Fordist capitalism. To some degree Negri's work had already opened
up these questions and laid the groundwork for such a project.
Seen from his vantage point, the industrial antagonisms that swept
through the developed world necessitated the kind of technolo-
gical and managerial innovations in the operations of capitalism
described by the Operaisti . In this case the so-called 'third industrial
revolution' enabled capital to supersede the Fordist-Taylorist para-
digm, and, exploiting developments in computing and telecommu-
nication, turned information into the most important productive
force. As we have seen, for some this was the realization of a 'post-
industrial' society, in which the antagonisms of industrial capitalism
were supplanted under the benign auspices of information. In the
absence of the traditional groupings through which class antago-
nism could be expressed such an idea seemed convincing and
continues to underpin the neo-liberal ideology described in the last
chapter. But for others, such as Negri, capitalist society continued to
involve class struggle, exploitation, alienation and commodification
much as before. 34 All that had changed was the location where these
took place. In developed countries at least, the factory worker had
become, in many instances, a controller of the complex cybernetic
processes of automated manufacture (though of course it must be
pointed out that traditional manual labour and assembly-line work
still took place, though largely in the developing world). For many
others labour had become 'immaterial', involving producing the
'cultural content' of the commodity. 35
It is in this new definition of the composition of the working class
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