Particularly problematic here is the tendency to see the welfare state as external to the risk dynamics of capitalism and to view its effects in terms of the decommodification of labor.  Conceptually inclined historians such as Ewald (1986) and Castel (2003) have insisted, by contrast, that the midtwentieth-century welfare state was never external to the market but rather central in organizing its risk logic.  The welfare state represented less a "balance" between a capitalist economy and a social-democratic polity than an integration of the population into the mechanisms of capitalism in ways that transformed those mechanisms at their core.  If the work of these authors has focused mostly on Europe, such insights hold a fortiori for the United States, whose welfare state was always a capitalist institution in more overt ways.  Class compromise was brokered not through the suppression of finance but precisely through its state-sponsored expansion.  The most significant aspects of this were the creation of the so-called government-sponsored enterprises, which supported the ability of the financial system to flexibly extend various forms of household credit; and the institution of deposit insurance, which undercut the phenomenon of bank runs and so permitted a normalization of the role of commercial banks in everyday life.  The post-New Deal era saw the progressive socialization of American workers into the mechanisms of credit and debt.  The emergence of a Fordist regime of full employment and a living wage was never the foundation of an unindebted life or the suppression of finance, as many now imagine, but was precisely the basis on which households entered into contracts of consumer and mortgage credit.  In an important sense, the New Deal was a key step in the direction of what under neoliberalism has become more recognizable as "the capitalization of almost everything" (Leyshon and Thrift 2007), the measurement of human capacities in terms of their ability to provide a flow of revenues (cf. Nitzan and Bichler 2009:158).

The general intellect, or public intellect, if it does not become a republic, a public sphere, a political community, drastically increases forms of submission... The sharing of linguistic and cognitive habits is the constituent element of the post-Fordist process of labor. All the workers enter into production in as much as they are speaking-thinking... The publicness of the intellect, when it does not take place in a public sphere, translates into an unchecked proliferation of hierarchiesas groundless as they are thriving.

From the tube strikes to the postal strikes, to the upcoming round of public service cuts, and festering in every political blog’s foetid comments box and every wretched rancid letters page of the right-wing London free-sheets, a striking psycho-cultural phenomena emerges: negative solidarity. More than mere indifference to worker agitations, negative solidarity is an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, declining pension pot, erasure of job security and increasing precarity) then everyone else must too. Negative solidarity can be seen as a close relation to the kind of ‘lottery thinking’ the underpins the most pernicious variants of the American Dream. In lottery thinking we get a kind of inverted Rawlsian anti-justice- rather than considering the likelihood of achieving material success in an unequal society highly unlikely and therefore preferring a more equal one, instead the psychology of the million-to-one shot prevails. Since I will inevitably be wealthy in the future, this line of thinking runs, I will ensure that the conditions when I become wealthy will be as advantageous to me as possible, even though on a balance of realistic probabilities this course of action will in fact be likely to be entirely against my own interests. More than lottery thinking, which is inherently (if misguidedly) aspirational in nature, negative solidarity is actively and aggressively anti-aspirational, utterly negative in the most childish fashion, and drives a blatant “race-to-the bottom”. Negative solidarity operates under the invisible, though clearly contradictory and self-refuting, assumption of reflexive impotence. I will endeavour to campaign for the lowering of working standards since I must suffer the same lowered standards, because there is only one direction in which the thermodynamic system of socio-economics can run: towards the abject exploitation of sump-end post-Fordist (faux-free market) Neoliberalism.  ... This is solidarity as plasticity, rather than the static brick-like form of Fordist labour solidarity, capable of flowing and shifting, yes, but also of fixing into position and assuming a hardened form where necessary. This form of solidarity must be inclusive of the new protest and occupation movements which have emerged in recent years, which although they have been largely ineffectual to date, have certainly led to new and interesting configurations of interest groups. What has been lacking however are the necessary cybernetic coordination systems to effectively enable these disparate and fragmentary groups to achieve the status of a counter-hegemonic power, a “class” power in the broadest sense of the term, one which is capable of counter-balancing effectively the rapacious if discredited centres of neoliberalism. Indeed it is this which must be formulated as the political conclusion of theories of post-Fordisation, rather than any kind of fantastical and strictly imaginary political subject such as the multitude.

When workers are given more responsibility and more discretion, and particularly when the job involves providing services and instilling in clients and customers certain kinds of emotional or affective states, the worker’s performance is more difficult both to measure and to monitor. How does one determine an individual employee’s contribution to increasingly cooperative labor processes, particularly those that draw on workers’ affective, cognitive, and communicative capacities? […] Strong work values are thus increasingly highlighted in management discourse as a significant remedy to the new problem of the surveillance simply because they render it less necessary. Thus, we see a growing trend in the United States and elsewhere to both select and evaluate workers on the basis of their attitudes, motivation, and behavior.

…our attitudes toward work take on renewed significance in the context of post-Fordism. First, worker’s investment in the work ethic is increasingly relevant because in many forms of work – for example, in many service sector jobs, employers want more from their employees than was typically demanded in the factories of the industrial era: not the just the labor of the hand, but labors of the head and the heart. Post-Taylorist work processes therefore tend to require more from immaterial laborers than their sacrifice and submission, seeking to enlist their creativity and their relational and affective capacities. It is not obedience that is prized, but commitment […] If originally the work ethic was the means by which already disciplined workers were delivered to their exploitation, it serves a more directly productive function today: where attitudes themselves are productive, a strong work ethic guarantees the necessary level of willing commitment and subjective investment.