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Title: The Interregnum
Author: Your Lazy Comrades
Date: 2022/01/07
Language: en
Topics: George Floyd uprising, insurrection, COVID-19
Source: https://haters.noblogs.org/post/2022/01/07/the-interregnum-the-george-floyd-uprising-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-the-emerging-social-revolution/

Your Lazy Comrades

The Interregnum

We believe that 2020–21 is a period of generalized social struggle that,

for the first time in at least five decades, has pushed the so-called

United States to the brink of revolutionary transformation. We have been

thinking of this struggle as The Great Refusal.[1] We offer these theses

as provocations and building blocks for further elaboration and action.

After more than a decade of increasingly militant and intensive

struggles, both the scope and the imaginative power of the George Floyd

Rebellion was such that the movement didn’t simply leave the streets,

but translated itself from the streets into workplaces, homes, schools,

prisons, families, social gatherings, in other words, into proletarian

everyday life. While these previous struggles–Occupy, Black Lives

Matter, Standing Rock, prison strike, Occupy ICE, antifascism, Metoo

etc–had remained overwhelmingly political, despite many insurrectionary

and anti-political tendencies within them (refusal of demands, assertion

of the value of Black and indigenous lives full stop), the George Floyd

rebellion spilled fully over into a totalizing social struggle, the only

kind of struggle capable of destroying this world.

The most visible aspect of this social struggle has been generalized

labor refusal, what economists are calling The Great Resignation, which

has seen over 30 million Americans quit their jobs in 2021 alone. But

The Great Refusal can also be seen in a huge increase in more

traditional labor action and organizing; in instances of mass looting

divorced from more obvious movement and riot contexts; in the breakdown

of school grading and testing regimes; in a broad expansion of mutual

aid; in an even broader recognition of the psychic violence and

alienation of everyday life intensified and made painfully visible by

the pandemic, and a concomitant acceptance of mental health care,

laziness and pleasure seeking; in a general open hatred of work.

The emergence of the social revolution reflects a qualitative, rather

than simply quantitative, shift in the struggle. Whereas previous waves

were driven by tactical innovations in response to state and capitalist

attack, The Great Refusal represents a distributed, class-wide offensive

against state, capital, white supremacy and property. The qualitiative

shift seen in the Great Refusal phase of the George Floyd rebellion

expanded the target: from confronting direct domination and its

antiblack origins (police, prisons, courts) to confronting indirect

domination (work and all it entails). Where the first phase of the

rebellion launched a deep questioning of policing, incarceration and

what justice could mean in the US, this second phase calls into question

the destructive place of work in the lives of proletarians struggling to

make ends meet, as well as the threat to the entire world ecologically.

This is a deepening of the lived critique of life under the racial

regime of Capital.

Because of its offensive and distributed character, The Great Refusal

has been almost entirely invisible to the organizer and activist left

(“the left” here will be used in its most broad definition, as people of

any tendency who engage in the struggle for liberation as a way of

life). For the left, the period after 2020’s summer rebellion has seemed

a lull like any other. Ever generals fighting the last war, this milieu

resigns itself to the depressing planned-obsolescence rhythms of

political movement waves at the very moment that rhythm is being

superseded. Further, the Electoral Left has taken this moment to return

to their admonishment of proletarian self-activity that does not fit

into their antiquated frameworks, an admonishment that was briefly put

on pause when the George Floyd rebellion showed itself to be much more

powerful and enduring than their campaign efforts.

The social revolution is significantly harder to reduce to data

points, stirring and heroic scenes, organizations and causes, slogans

and demands, in other words, into images, than the political revolution.

In the topsy-turvy world of the Spectacle, anything whose material and

tangible character can’t be reduced to images feels less real. The more

the real movement to abolish the state of things shies away from images

of struggle toward the transformation of everyday life, the more the

left shies away from that movement. This shying away from becoming more

reproducible Spectacle is one of the key strengths of this phase, not

because becoming clandestine is a value in and of itself, but because

Left politicians have nothing to stand in front of and claim as their

own. The very content of this phase is one that the Left has no real use

for, and if anything they would like to see it disappear.

Despite this seeming opposition between political and social struggle,

the George Floyd rebellion must be understood as the culmination of the

previous decade’s political struggle. This can be seen in the return of

all of that decade’s tactics –the blockade, the riot, the occupation,

the mass march, the call-out, the prison strike, the anti-fascist

mobilization, the highway shutdown–during the months of the rebellion’s

heights. The supersession of the political into the social would not

have been possible without the reinvigoration of the political through

the previous decade of struggle. The only way out is through.

At the moment of greatest achievement for the Left, its own

supersession through the generalization of the struggle, it has,

melancholic, turned inward. Seeing itself ‘reduced’ from the moral high

ground of vanguardish leadership to the simple equality of participation

by the mass character of events, and having learned to only look at its

own organizing efforts as the marker and measure of class strength, it

attempts, deflated, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Great Refusal is a crucial hinge point for revolutionaries: we can

accept the collapse of the classical workers movement and its forms and

(continue to) develop and experiment with new ways to move and analyze,

or we can double down on the impoverished image of past victories and,

in our desire for power, recognition and leadership, become the cutting

edge of counterrevolution. This latter tendency was seen in the streets

during the uprising, when “revolutionary” organizations pushed their way

to the heads of marches and crowds, only to lead them in circular

parades until everyone’s legs gave out, to route them onto freeways with

no plans of evasion or escape, or to push them toward purely symbolic

conflict with the police, typified by non-resisted arrest of

demonstrators.

If we instead take inspiration from the struggle itself, we might join

The Great Refusal by withdrawal from any leftist formations we may have

helped build and constitute up until now–and here we don’t simply refer

to organizations but to milieus, projects, social scenes or methods of

practice–that are proving themselves unsuitable to events.

Proto-revolutionary scenarios emerge very rarely, and we have to move

away from our own dogmas and certainties if we want to act and move with

effectiveness.

The novel coronavirus pandemic was a necessary but insufficient

condition for the George Floyd Rebellion and The Great Refusal.

Anti-blackness, ableism and xenophobia were also necessary but they are

not novel, though the pandemic saw a deepening of these societal codes.

The deep biopolitical, social, psychic and economic disruption of the

pandemic and its management offered many impetuses for revolt, but the

global pandemic did not lead to uprising everywhere on the globe.

The factors provided specifically by the pandemic were many: the

experiences of mass death, illness and unemployment; the relief thrown

on the nature of school and work as some experiences and tasks remained

‘essential’ while others disappeared without fanfare; a questioning of

domestic and gendered life created by partially enforced house arrest;

the lack of sports, TV, bars, clubs and other bread and circuses to give

us something to talk and think about beyond our liberation; the un-even

burden of pandemic sickness & death in Black, Native and nonwhite

populations; the fury at the active acceleration of the pandemic by far

right leaders acting on behalf of petit-bourgeois landlords and small

business owners who wanted us ‘back to work’; extra cash in hand from

the sudden windfalls of unemployment increase and stimulus; eviction

moratoria; deep frustration, boredom and alienation from the collapse of

even the simplest modes of social reproduction like friendship,

religious services, parties, family gathering; etc. etc. All of these

factors were brought to bear in the United States on a society already

buckling under the Black revolution in motion, increasingly powerful

Indigenous resistance, staggering inequality, debt, gentrification and

poverty, a deep hatred for the president and the Republican party,

accelerating ecological catastrophe, healthcare system failure, broadly

abhorred mass-incarceration, and the many smaller morbid symptoms of

this collapsing empire. These social, affective and economic winds

created the perfect storm of The Great Refusal.

While The Great Refusal is not totally global, it is also not limited

to the United States: its contours are visible in Vietnam, Chile,

Germany, and much of the Caribbean. Of particular note is a similar

explosion of antiwork consciousness and antisocial action among younger

workers in China.

In the US this mass withdrawal of labor, this general strike, has led

to a huge improvement in wages, benefits and working conditions,

including the largest year-on-year national wage increase in decades.

However, these concessions are not satisfying the working class, who in

October continued to leave their jobs at an accelerating rate. It seems,

therefore, that the question is not the kind of work, or the level of

remuneration, but rather work itself.

This antiwork action and consciousness represents a continuation of

the anti-police action and consciousness of the George Floyd Rebellion.

The police, the boss and the landlord form the unholy trinity of

proletarian oppression. Without having to pay rent we wouldn’t go to

work for a boss, without a wage offered by a boss the landlord couldn’t

extract wealth by hoarding dwellings, without the police we would tell

boss and landlord alike to fuck off. But with eviction moratoria and

cash in hand, and having recently told the police to fuck off, up to and

including burning down their pig pens, workers are increasingly

recognizing the parasitic nature of the boss and the workplace, and are

duly refusing it.

It is in connecting this antiwork consciousness with the abolitionist

and decolonial struggles into a total refusal of this society where we

see the most hope of our efforts bearing fruit.

All of these events have occurred without the massive financial

collapse which everyone seems to agree has been lingering, just out of

sight over the horizon, for the last three or four years. The real

economy has been facing severe contraction, from infrastructural and

logistical failure emptying shelves in Imperial heartlands to sudden

fluctuations in energy costs to inflation beyond the control and

management of the central financial institutions. And yet financial and

housing markets rise, in no small part thanks to pandemic stimulus and

seemingly unperturbed by the social and economic strife defining our

everyday lives. Some revolutionaries have argued that debt and

financialization have fully divorced the upper echelons of the economy

from the material processes of work and commodity production, in which

case we are no longer living under capitalism per se but a kind of

techno-feudalism, and so the collapse might be permanently deferred. But

the crypto myth is simply the affirmative side of this coin: preceding

every epochal crisis, many convince themselves that the problem of the

social nature of value has been solved once and for all. On this one

fact we are inclined to agree with the economists: this is unsustainable

and a collapse approaches. If workers bring this collapse about

themselves, we will have actively entered a revolutionary period.

Global leadership responded to the pandemic emergency with the same

greed, apathy and utter disregard for our lives they’ve always shown.

Looked at as a trial run for increasingly drastic medical and ecological

catastrophes, capitalist democracy has indicated its total willingness

to sacrifice us and everything we hold dear to the death head of profit.

No one is coming to save us.

In the United States, the Democratic Party has decisively failed its

historic role of coopting and containing movement. Too acclimated to

working as the left hand of the Republican party, they failed to see

that Bernie Sanders represented their best hope of heading off this

revolutionary conjecture, despite the dogged efforts of the social

democratic left to show them.

The ignoble defeat of the electoral social democratic movement by the

Democratic Party pulled the rug out from under the right wing of the

left, sending their media leadership into a spiral of navel gazing

irrelevance and pushing most of the on-the-ground organizers either out

of movement activity or toward more actively confrontational and

revolutionary projects, at the exact moment the state needs all the

dampers on revolutionary movement it can get.

Joe Biden is the prototypical example of a leader about whom

historians gravely intone that, had a more decisive, popular or crafty

leader been at the helm of state, the crises to follow could have been

averted. He would make an excellent last president.

The failed fascist coup on January 6^(th), 2021, marks an important

watershed in the level of right-wing political movement in the United

States. While the particular organizational forms represented by the

alt-right were largely defeated by antifascist organizing, the

persistence of the fascist movement reflects a global reactionary

response to trends away from nation-states and liberal democracy (trends

driven, we should underline, by capitalism itself, in particular its

drive for totally free-flowing globalized logistics and labor markets),

the outcome of four years of Trumpist power, and the culmination of

decades of ideological and political work by the right in the US.

However, as the street-right is always tactically three steps behind

the proletarian movement, the right now finds itself in a movement lull

of the same kind we found ourselves in across the 2010s. Their coup was

only half-heartedly routed by the state, and they have been given plenty

of time, space, and media opportunities to lick their wounds. This is,

perhaps, the first movement lull of this type this generation of

fascists have faced.

In this lull they have returned to the culture war patterns and local

political capture to which they have been acclimated since at least

Reconstruction, a pattern they engage in in periods of liberal federal

power as they bide their time and try to push things ever rightward

before their next grasp of the reins.

They will achieve, as ever, many horrifying and violent victories in

this period of retrenchment. However, the lesson they seem to have

learned from the coup is that, increased calls for secession and

“independence” notwithstanding, their best chance for power is the 2024

election of Donald Trump. There is therefore something of a three way

race between the proletarian movement, the 2024 election cycle, and

Donald Trump’s physical health. The death or incapacitation of Donald

Trump would represent a blow to the American fascist movement as

currently constituted that would require at least another election cycle

for them to recover from.

Because of the distributed and non-imagistic nature of The Great

Refusal, the right has managed to seem more active, powerful, loud and

successful over the last year than the left. Indeed, they have been, to

the extent that the left represents the directly political side of the

liberation movement. The greatest victories of the left this year have

been in the rising tide of union organization, strike and recognition, a

powerful trend, though one that is dwarfed by the Great Resignation.

Liberals have successfully shut the rest of the left, particularly in

its anti-racist and abolitionist tendencies, out of the duel for control

of governmental institutions as it attempts a (pathetically ineffective)

reformation of centrist passivity and non-politics. The Great Refusal

represents an attack not in this duel but beneath and against it. While

right, liberal and left battle for the deed to the house, the termites

burrow through the foundations.

Everything feels poised on a knife’s edge, ready to pounce or fall, to

explode into action or implode into catastrophe. We should pay close

attention to this feeling of unease, anticipation and anxiety. It is not

the sure sign of an uprising to come, but is a definite sign of the

conditions of possibility for an uprising.

In the current balance of forces, it is the proletarian movement that

is the most organized, active and capable. Were an uprising to emerge in

the near future, the revolution must shatter the chrysalis of the Left

in which it has grown, and take flight. Otherwise the dead weight of

politics will once again drag us down to defeat.

[1] In 2016, a collection of essays about New Left philosopher Herbert

Marcuse was released under this title. We have not read it, and claim

neither affinity nor antagonism to it.