INDUSTRIAL structure is undergoing change across the world with the rise of local and international networks of production. The Fordist regime of vertically integrated production organisation is gradually being replaced by modularised horizontal and diagonal networks coordinated often by MNCs or TNCs and spread across the globe. The essential difference between the two regimes is the element of flexibility that redefines the nature of contract both between capital and capital and capital and labour. This is being facilitated by new technology that drastically reduces transaction and coordination costs. Production not only can be organised at a distance but also can be coordinated from a distance allowing dispersion of productive activities.

On the demand side, there has been a significant rise in the demand for customised and differentiated goods and services in place of standardised products. Products are not only bundles of crude utility rather use values are embedded in aesthetic presentations that enter into the value of the product. The decline of the vertical structure and dispersion of production together with possibilities of distant coordination have given rise to immense possibilities of labour and asset arbitrage. This allows capital to relocate production and source raw materials, labour and intermediate goods where it is available at the lowest cost. It increases competition at each node of the network and the scope of arbitrage out of differential costs emerges to be the major source of profit. In other words, competition based on scale advantage, that is by producing at a larger scale, reducing average costs and hence deriving gains in competition, is being gradually replaced by taking advantage of the scope of arbitrage. This change in the production organisation however shouldn’t be misunderstood as the decentering of capital’s control. In fact concentration of capital has increased enormously in the neoliberal regime but the articulation of command and control which was earlier vertical in nature is being replaced by flexible competing networks. This has immensely impacted the geography of production, nature of flexibility in contracts and capital-labour relationship. This for obvious reasons brings change in the dimensions of resistance and contestations.

FLEXIBILISATION OF PRODUCTION
The ‘flexibilisation’ of production as it is often called has resulted in relocation of production to the global south. The new international division of labour entails production chains spread across the globe using low cost labour and other resources from the south and transfer surplus to the global north. As a result the share of global workforce involved in manufacturing is largely located in the developing countries while the return to capital is still concentrated in the advanced capitalist countries. In the global context this has increased participation of developing countries in world trade and made the global reserve army of labour accessible to global capital. The flexible networks and capital mobility in many cases allows drastic shift in production location creating credible threats to respective nation states.

Since capital-labour contestation mitigating institutions are large anchored to the nation states, weakening of the nation states essentially reduces the scope of intervention in balancing forces between capital and labour. Instead, the change in production structure facilitated by capital mobility leads to a ‘race to the bottom’ among developing countries and a discourse of competition entirely dependent on lowering labour costs. The chain of production and the logic of profit is also extended to the domain of the domestic economy where flexibilisation is actualised by increased casualisation of labour and sub-contracting relationship. Ephemeral contracts and opening up of possibilities of multiple sourcing reduces both market based and strategic position based bargaining power of workers. The architecture of control is further embedded in the governance of finance. Maximising shareholder returns assumes supreme importance and indicators favourable to speculative gains are interiorised in managerial performance indicators. The governance of finance influences state policies and the neoliberal nation state internalises the interest of monopoly finance capital. The post-war social compact which recognised the balance between capital and labour articulated through mass production based Fordist-Keynesian welfare mechanism is completely overturned. The assumed stability between productivity and real wage is jeopardised and the gap between the two has increased worldwide.

But one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the post war welfare state was not intrinsically linked to Fordist structure of production. Fordism was capital’s response to heightened class struggle in the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was a process of deskilling of labour, militarisation of production organisation introduced primarily to alienate the radical vanguards of the working class from the mass of working people. It was meant to atomise the working class and destroy the collective identity of the class in the making. But eventually capitalists’ strategy backfired and the division of labour spread across the assembly line became the premise of the rise of a new collective subject the ‘working class’ which any political combination of the twentieth century could hardly ignore. The social democratic compact in the form of welfare state was nothing but an unwilling acknowledgement of this existence of the working class subject that forced the ruling class to introduce welfare measures and protective labour institutions particularly in the presence of a socialist state.

NETWORK OF RESISTANCE
Fordist structures are on the decline and labour process extends to the home based units through the value chain. Factory is not the only space of production and verticality of production is not predominant. On the other hand commodification of each and every aspect of life of production and reproduction: health, education, care, affection, emotions have created an expanding service economy. From aesthetic labour involved in designing and fashions to education and health workers, entertainment, tourism, delivery workers to sex workers, it is the extended scope of exploitation and expropriation that encompasses the whole society much wider than the boundaries of factories.

With the decline of factory, the twentieth century regulatory image of the worker: unionised and organised proletariat is also undergoing change. Work contracts are unstable, production sites are modularised, individual contracts with the employer predominates instead of collective bargaining; differentiated labour and uncertain work relations keep the labour force in a continuous state of flux. Protests and resistance however didn’t stop because of this, but in many cases it is much more sporadic and instantaneous. The sheer absence of long term contracts make younger workers live for the day, their horizons are shorter, transient and they have to negotiate with numerous uncertainties in everyday life. This is the predominant image of the twenty first century worker. This scenario demands multi-dimensional mode of resistance and a proposition for a new social compact that is radically different from the previous Fordist regime.

The Fordist vertical structure in any case is not going to return back and the working class organisations that could master the art of class formation in the previous factory regimes have to rework their art of organising. The predictable, stable and sustained protests of established trade union activities have to combine with the unpredictable, sporadic networks of protests of workers in different segments, build solidarities and engagement with occupation based or community based collectives, support the more vulnerable sections of the workforce, champion the struggle against ethnic, caste and gender based oppression in the work place. It has to be a combination of work place trade unionism, community organisations, temporary networks of particular segments of workers, cooperatives and solidarity initiatives which apparently may appear to be conflicting with each other but with continuous interaction and learning may give rise to the much needed convergence of a wider network based on shared experience of exploitation and oppression. It needs to be reiterated that the Fordist structure in itself didn’t bring class solidarity in the twentieth century, rather the opposite, it is working class resistance that led to the social compact of the welfarist regime. Hence, as the structure of production and labour relations change, the idioms of resistance have to undergo necessary changes. That would once again give rise to the collective subject of the twenty-first century involving a wider array of working people in the process of class formation and enforce a new social compact for the immediate future.