💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › endnotes-la-theses.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:37:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: LA Theses Author: Endnotes Language: en Topics: surplus population, Endnotes, communization, 21st century Source: Retrieved on Nov. 18, 2021 from https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/endnotes-la-theses
[]
fundamentally the crisis of societies organized in a capitalist mode.
Indeed, the employment relations that govern production and consumption
in capitalist societies are breaking down. The result has been the
reappearance of a structural condition that Marx called
surplus capital alongside surplus population
. Technological transformations continue to take place in spite of
economic stagnation, giving rise to a situation in which there are too
few jobs for too many people. Meanwhile, huge pools of money scour the
earth for profits, leading to periodic expansions of bubbles that burst
in massive blowouts. Rising job insecurity and inequality are symptoms
of the increasing impossibility of this world as such.
capitalist societies, are set to explode. The 2008 crisis was one
manifestation of this. It gave rise to a global wave of struggles that
is still unfolding today. In order to gain some control over a simmering
crisis, states organized coordinated bailouts of financial and other
firms. State debt rose to levels not seen since World War II. Bailouts
of capitalists thus had to be accompanied by punishing austerity for
workers, as states sought to manage their balance sheets while also
recreating the conditions for accumulation. Yet these state actions have
been only partially successful. Rich economies continue to grow ever
more slowly even as they take on huge quantities of debt at every level.
Poor economies are also faltering. We call this global situation
and assert that further economic turbulence is likely to issue in a
capitalist crash landing.
still do today. But then, their defensive battles were part of an
offensive struggle: workers sought to organize themselves into a
, which was growing ever more powerful. This movement would sooner or
later expropriate the expropriators in order to begin to build a society
organized according to the needs and wants of workers themselves.
have spelled its end, led to a deep crisis of the labor movement itself.
Its project is no longer adequate to the conditions workers face. Most
fundamentally, this is because of the decline of the centrality of
industrial work in the economy. With the onset of
and the decline in the manufacturing share of employment (which was
itself one of the fundamental causes of the expansion of surplus
populations), the industrial worker could no longer be seen as the
leading edge of the class. In addition, due to rising levels of
greenhouse gases, it is apparent that the vast industrial apparatus is
not only not creating the conditions of a better future – it is also
destroying them. Most fundamentally of all, work itself is no longer
experienced as central to most people’s identities. For most people
(although not everyone), it no longer seems as if work could be
fulfilling if only it was managed collectively by workers rather than by
bosses.
multiplicity of other
, organizing themselves in relation to struggles that had, until then,
been more or less repressed. The resulting “new social movements” made
it clear, in retrospect, to what extent the homogeneous working class
was actually diverse in character. They have also established that
revolution must involve more than the reorganization of the economy: it
requires the abolition of gender, racial and national distinctions, and
so on. But in the welter of emergent identities, each with their own
sectional interests, it is unclear what exactly this revolution must be.
For us, the surplus population is not a new revolutionary subject.
Rather, it denotes a structural situation in which no fraction of the
class can present itself as the revolutionary subject.
longer possible. This might seem to be a pessimistic conclusion, but it
has a converse implication that is more optimistic: today the problem of
unification is a revolutionary problem. At the high points of
contemporary movements, in occupied squares and factories, in strikes,
riots and popular assemblies, proletarians discover not their power as
the real producers of this society, but rather their separation along a
multiplicity of identity-lines (employment status, gender, race, etc.).
These are marked out and knitted together by the disintegrating
integration of states and labor markets. We describe this problem as
: diverse proletarian fractions must unify but do not find a unity
ready-made within the terms of this unraveling society.
struggles in detail. It is only in those struggles that the
revolutionary horizon of the present is delineated. In the course of
their struggles, proletarians periodically improvise solutions to the
composition problem. They name a fictive unity, beyond the terms of
capitalist society (most recently: the black bloc, real democracy, 99%,
the movement for black lives, etc.), as a means of fighting against that
society. While each of these improvised unities inevitably breaks down,
their cumulative failures map out the separations that would have to be
overcome by a
in the chaotic uproar of a revolution against capital.
only be the
. In the fight for their lives, proletarians must destroy that which
separates them. In capitalism, that which separates them is also what
unites them: the market is both their atomization and their
interdependence. It is the consciousness of capital as our
unity-in-separation that allows us to posit from within existing
conditions – even if only as a photographic negative – humanity’s
capacity for communism.