Immanence Changes Everything: A Critical Comment on the Labour Process and Class Consciousness

Abstract

This paper discusses a number of problems with labour process accounts of worker subjectivity. They are manifested as ambiguities about the meaning of worker behaviour, and have their origins in conflicting ideological requirements of Marxism and assumptions of immanence. We argue that it is these theoretical precepts, rather than cumulating empirical knowledge, which have driven debates on the labour process and interpretations of behaviour in the workplace. We show how essentially similar activities are construed as either reproducing capitalist relations or resisting them, according to the theoretical needs of the labour process pardigm. Compounding this interpretive problem is the insistence of labour process theorists that the point of production is the key source of worker consciousness in capitalist society. We conclude that labour process is incapable of theoretical growth because of its non-cumulative circulation of explanations and fixation on the workplace. In its place we advocate more inductive empirical approaches to the study of consciousness.