by
Nancy Fraser
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Whatever our uncertainly regarding the endpoint, one thing is clear: if we fail to pursue this option now, we will prolong the present interregnum. That means condemning working people of every persuasion and every color to mounting stress and declining health, to ballooning debt and overwork, to class apartheid and social insecurity. It means immersing them, too, in an ever vaster expanse of morbid symptoms - in hatreds born of resentment and expressed in scapegoating, in outbreaks of violence followed by bouts of repression, in a vicious dog-eat-dog world where solidarities contract to the vanishing point. To avoid that fate, we must break definitively both with neoliberal economics and with the various politics of recognition that have largely supported it - casting off not just exclusionary ethnonationalism but also liberal-meritocratic individualism. Only by joining a robustly egalitarian politics of distribution to a substantively inclusive, class-sensitive politics of recognition can we build a counterhegemonic bloc capable of leading us beyond the current crisis to a better world.
The left in general has a lot of work to do at a programmatic level. I think we know what the values are. We know what is wrong, what is bad, what has to be gotten rid of. We know the economy needs to be de-financialized and de-carbonized, that there needs to be planning and a big rise in the share of income that goes to the working classes and so on.
What we don't know yet is whether some new, yet-to-be invented form of capitalism could satisfy those imperatives - or whether the only possible solution is a postcapitalist society, whether we want to call it socialist or something else. Maybe more important than knowing that for sure right now is knowing what the new rules of the road should be for a political economy that is both pro-working class and globalized. [...]
we need a socialist compass!!
[...] how much of the bourgeois order is based upon fantasy, upon a dream world in which ruling fantasies become true because those who rule really believe they're true, because they make these fantasies come true. Through active will and not a little force, the bourgeoisie turns its economic pleasure principle into a political reality principle, and vice versa.
Take the greatest bourgeois fantasy of all, the world's biggest pipedream we all know is somehow true: the stock market. How much of that is predicated on fantasy and wishful-images of the future, on hope and desire, on the capacity of rampant imagination to create a purely fictitious looking-glass realm of riches? Here, participates recognize such a reality because they believe in it, because they see what they believe. [...]
i want to read more substantial theorising of the stock market but i guess this will do for now
[...] Do people around the world need Marx to reveal the root of their misery, to correct the illusions and lacunas of their vision of everyday reality? Don't they know this all too well themselves? Aren't they bludgeoned by a system that's all too obvious to them, that has absolutely no desire to conceal anything because it's based on raw, naked and highly visible power, on a brute force that doesn't need unmasking by anyone? Isn't it more the case that this ruling force wallows in the obviousness of its shenanigans because it knows that its opposition is too weak and feeble to stand up to its power? [...]
arguing against Holloway's interpretation of Marx. I disagree here cus I do think ideology is an important factor to consider, but this interpretation is useful too
[...] The non-coincidence reveals the limit of power's political desire to control totally, of its quest for ultimate and indomitable mastery. No system of control can ever be ultimate and indomitable mastery. No system of control can ever be total, can ever be without possibility, contingency, inconspicuous cracks, without little holes in the net, glimmers of light and pockets of fresh air. There is always leakiness to culture and society, a non-coincidence between capitalist subjects and capitalist society, always unforeseen circumstances buried within the everyday, immanent moments of prospective subversion. [....]
[...] those who don't rule, the bulk of us, are an assorted and fragmented layering of disparate peoples who are neither conscious of class nor motivated to act in the name of any class. Nevertheless, these peoples are often motivated by a desire to act against a ruling class, against a system that this class so evidently props us, a system from which a non-class feels alienated and abused by. We might say that these people aren't so much class-conscious as collectively-conscious of an enemy, conscious of their desire to do something about that enemy, conscious about wanting no truck with that enemy's game. As Gorz remarks, this non-class "is no more than a vague area made up of constantly changing individuals whose main aim is not to seize power in order to build a new world, but to regain power over their own lives by disengaging from the market rationality of productivism. [...]
the abolition of work will only be emancipatory if it also allows the development of autonomous activity. The abolition of work doesn't mean abolition of time and effort, the desire for activity, the pleasure of creation, the need to cooperate with others and be of some use to the community. Instead, the abolition of work simply means the progressive, but never total, suppression of the need to purchase the right to live by alienating our lives.
quoting Andre Gorz
[...] one huge mass of people is confined to either manual torment or mental boredom, while another much smaller group monopolizes skills, dominates knowledge and expertise, and prospers from that domination and monopolization. This division of labor is pernicious in the sense that the real possibility of lightening the work load, spreading the burden, is transformed into its dialectical other, a system of repression and repetition, of obsessive and odious work. Work as the instrument of man only betokens man the instrument.
mildly good encapsulation (in the first sentence)
Perhaps, during crises, we can hatch alternative programs for survival, other methods by which we might not so much "earn a living" as live a living. Perhaps we can self-downsize or even refrain from work itself, and at the same time address a paradox that goes back at least to Max Weber: work is revered in our culture, yet at the same time workers are becoming superfluous; you hate your job and your boss, hate the servility of what you do, and how you do it, the pettiness of the tasks involved, yet want to keep your job at all costs. You see no other way of defining yourself other than through work, through what you do for a living, through the "honor" of being employed. Perhaps there's a point at which we can all be pushed over the edge, "set-free" as Marx said, voluntarily take the jump only to discover other aspects of ourselves, other ways to fill in the hole, to make a little money, to maintain our dignity and pride, and to survive off what Gorz calls a "frugal abundance." Perhaps it's time to get politicized around non-work. [...]
this writing style is exhausting but i get the point
[...] The manager of the Gayety Theater in South Chicago agrees to stop the film and turn on the lights and allow us to speak about immigration rights. I work with others distributing the National Lawyers Guild leaflet and also collect contributions from people in the theater to offset the costs of the campaign.
In support of this effort, the Workers' Rights Center takes an effective educational initiative. A comrade, Noel Ignatiev, has written a pamphlet called "Since When Has Working Been a Crime." It is aimed at black and white workers. The object is to promote class solidarity with Latino workers threatened by La Migra. The pamphlet tells the story of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and compares the abduction of escaped slaves in the North to the Migra raids today. It also gives examples of resistance from that time. The point of the pamphlet is that it is in the interest of all workers to participate in the resistance to the 1970s version of the Fugitive Slave Acts. The Workers' Rights Center distributes the pamphlet to workers in the neighborhood.
so cool https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/sojournertruth/mexicans.pdf