by
Gary Kamiya
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When I moved here, I imagined some kind of consensus that we were all players on the same “good team.” After all, each of us wakes up each morning to see the most beautiful mountains and somehow-still-blue water as we listen to the public radio report on the state’s governor signing one bill after another that will make our state a better place: nonprescription HIV medicine; healthcare for gig economy workers; a sanctuary city for immigrants. I was returning to a place where a lot of us go to sleep at night thinking about how we can wake up and make the California dream available for all.
lol
[...] Georg Lukács criticized this view, noting the alignment between Bukharin’s analysis and the ideology of the capitalist world’s view of science: “The closeness of Bukharin’s theory to bourgeois, natural-scientific materialism derives from his use of ‘science’ (in the French sense) as a model.” Lukács insisted that a true historical materialist analysis meant that science and technology could not be divorced from the class system in which they were embedded. “In its concrete application to society and history,” he wrote, “it therefore frequently obscures the specific feature of Marxism: that all economic or ‘sociological’ phenomena derive from the social relations of men to one another .” For Lukács, this meant that capitalist production is not so easily divorced from capitalism’s class structure and its prerogatives to rule and control workers, particularly at the point of production [...]
idk i just saved this
[...] Here Benjamin sounds similar notes as the Wobbly proponents of sabotage. Redemption from capitalism and its violence will not come from a simple appropriation of its devices. Instead, he suggests, it is borne on the backs of those sedimented experiences of the nameless people who fought against them, who broke, jammed, sabotaged—who grabbed for the emergency brake—in their circumstances. This is the raw material of future emancipation [...]
In other words, the priority for production during the war was consistency and control, not saving time or increasing profits, though wartime demand and wage controls kept corporate coffers full. An alternative form of automation popular among machinists, “record-playback,” was never seriously pursued, although it was also efficient. Unlike numeric control, the record-playback method was analog, storing the precise movement of a machinist, and so still required a skilled hand. Rather than pursue efficiency, management sought to wrest control of production away from the machinists.
King understood that automation was a weapon to be used against organized labor: “This period is made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into impotency by viciously attacking it at every point of weakness.” And the unions’ only chance to take control of the course of automation was to forge a common cause with the civil rights movement: “The political strength you are going to need to prevent automation from becoming a Moloch, consuming jobs and contract gains, can be multiplied if you tap the vast reservoir of Negro political power.” 57 Malcolm X, in contrast, argued that the threat of automation justified a separatist strategy. “At best,” he cautioned, “Negroes can expect from the integrationist program a hopeless entry into the lowest levels of a working class already disenfranchised by automation.”
thought: falc as a possibility is what makes me think that radicalism is possible but realising it’s not a possibility doesn’t make me abandon the new moral necessity. there was always enough for everyone. even without everything being automated we can make it so
This was an analysis that the Black Panther Party took into the heart of their organizational philosophy, which was geared toward organizing the “lumpenproletariat”: the class cut off from wage labor. As Eldridge Cleaver spelled out, the lumpen, which included those “who have been displaced by machines, automation, and cybernation,” represented a real contradiction within the proletariat. 72 Indeed, machines were, in part, responsible for this bifurcation. The polarization of skill meant that “every job on the market in the American Economy today demands as high a complexity of skills as did the jobs in the elite trade and craft guilds of Marx’s time.”
Instead of taking operator demands seriously, union leadership praised automation for its promise of leisure. For instance, Communications Workers of America President Joe Beirne stated, “For ourselves, we welcome automation because we see in it a level for higher wages, longer vacations, shorter hours, and ultimately, greater security for ourselves and the American people.” 79 If these beneficial effects were to come— and they largely were not—they would be at the expense of operators, who found themselves out of jobs [...]
There can be no question that Marx saw far beyond the horizon of his century and that Capital, as the Economist (which Marx read faithfully) pointed out a few years back, remains startlingly contemporary even in the age of Walmart and Google. But in other cases Marx’s vision was limited by the anomalous character of his chronological niche: arguably the most peaceful period of European history in a thousand years. Colonial interventions aside, liberal London-centered capitalism did not seem structurally to require large-scale inter-state warfare as a condition of its reproduction or as the inevitable result of its contradictions. He died, of course, before the new imperialism of the late 1880s and 1890s led to zero-sum conflicts amongst the major powers for shares of the world market. Nor could Marx, even after the massacre of the Communards, have possibly foreseen the horrific price that counter-revolution in the next century, including Thermidorean Stalinism, would exact from rank-and-file anarchists, socialists, and communists: at least 7–8 million dead.7 Since the youngest and most politically conscious tended always to be in the front lines, these repeated decimations of the vanguard entailed incalculable consequences—ones that have been almost entirely ignored by historians.
In the epilogue to my 2006 book Planet of Slums, I asked: To what extent does the informal proletariat, the most rapidly growing global class, possess that most potent of Marxist talismans, “historical agency”? Although I was not aware of it at the time, Eric Hobsbawm had asked exactly the same question in an interview given in 1995. (He is quoted at the beginning of the next chapter.) Neoliberal globalization over the last generation has recharged the meaning of the “wretched of the earth.” Hobsbawm’s “gray area of the informal economy” has expanded by almost 1 billion people since his interview, and we should probably subsume the “informal proletariat” within a broader category that includes all of those who eke out survival by day labor, “micro-entrepreneurship,” and subsistence crime; who toil unprotected by laws, unions, or job contracts; who work outside of socialized complexes such as factories, hospitals, schools, ports, and the like; or simply wander lost in the desert of structural unemployment. There are three crucial questions: (1) What are the possibilities for class consciousness in these informal or peripheral sectors of economies? (2) How can movements, say, of slum-dwellers, the technologically deskilled, or the unemployed find power resources—equivalent, for example, to the ability of formal workers to shut down large units of production—that might allow them to struggle successfully for social transformation? and (3) What kinds of united action are possible between traditional working-class organization and the diverse humanity of the “gray area”? [...]
At a high level of abstraction, the current period of globalization is defined by a trilogy of ideal-typical economies: super-industrial (coastal East Asia), financial/tertiary (North Atlantic), and hyper-urbanizing/extractive (West Africa). “Jobless growth” is incipient in the first, chronic in the second, and virtually absolute in the third. We might add a fourth ideal-type of disintegrating societies, caught in a vice of war and climate change, whose chief trend is the export of refugees and migrant labor. In any event, we can no longer rely on a single paradigmatic society or class to model the critical vectors of historical development. Imprudent coronations of abstractions like “the multitude” as historical subjects simply dramatize a poverty of empirical research. Contemporary Marxism must be able to scan the future from the simultaneous perspectives of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and Lagos if it wants to solve the puzzle of how heterodox social categories might be fitted together in a single resistance to capitalism.