Νέα κείμενα
* Some thoughts on Whither America?
Floris’s text, notwithstanding certain disagreements from our part, has the merit of covering a wide range of issues, with each one of these requiring a separate analysis in order to be dealt with properly. Therefore, we deliberately left out of our commentary certain aspects of US reality, not because we regard them unimportant but because we focused on what constitutes our basic line of argumentation in relation to the points of divergence with Floris’s text.
We largely agree with his theoretical explanations on the industrial decline in the US, however, we consider it to be only a part of a broader historical process that we call a crisis of reproduction of the capitalist social relations dating from the late 60’s – early 70’s.
This period witnessed the beginning of the decomposition of capital-labour relations in the West, as they were consolidated after the war, with Keynesianism, as a model of domination and disciplining-integrating class antagonisms, reaching its limits because of wildcat strikes, urban riots, sabotage, absenteeism, high turnover, the subjective (at times even individualist) revolt against social privileges and state regulations of all kinds, in short a revolt against inflexible models of work in factories and offices and oppressive reproductive models in society at large.
Equally important with what the text says about the falling rate of profit because of the rise in the organic composition of capital were the wage rises as a result of labour insubordination, because of which the extraction of surplus value became more expensive.
Apart from the rise of the direct cost of exploitation, what was new in this period, historically speaking, was the rise of the indirect cost of exploitation, the expenses of the welfare state. Since the capitalist state, as a welfare state, incorporated more and more aspects of everyday life, the alienated social organization, society as a factory, generated movements against state control and around education, housing, health, transportation, consumer models etc. It was the period when the struggles of wageless housewives, the ethnic minorities, the so-called “surplus population”, for more benefits and less control came to the fore. It was through these struggles that the contradictory relation between the working-class and the welfare state became obvious: the increase in benefits presupposes subordination to the alienating form of the capitalist state, but it was the state itself that had become a terrain of class antagonism and its control was crushed from within.
The struggles in the factory to disconnect wages from productivity and for control over the labour process and the struggles of proletarian subjects such as blacks, women and the unemployed for increases in social benefits, for income without work, were the two sides of the same coin, of the same revolt.
The welfare state came under a crisis, being blamed for causing the crisis itself. The focal points of the new strategy of capital’s counterattack were the restructuring of state expenses and the production sphere, the strengthening of the police functions of the state and the deepening of divisions within the working class. The crisis of the welfare state or else the “fiscal crisis of the state” was the outcome of the social and class struggles over state expenses.
We had to dwell on that because we think that Floris’s argument that “large capitalist concerns no longer accepted the social wage and supported the social welfare state” (p.3), is insufficient in order to describe the crisis of the capitalist state itself when its basic but contradictory functions, the capitalist accumulation and the legitimization of the capitalist relations, came to an acute crisis. We think that his text underestimates the role of the capitalist welfare state as the most powerful agent of capitalist activity and at the same time the mediator of class struggles and it fails to present it as the irreversible historical result of the post-war class compromise on western democracies until nowadays.
It’s also misleading, in the sense that instead of presenting neoliberalism as a capitalist strategy of both political forms of capital in US politics (Republicans/Democrats, right-wing/liberal), as political forms of capital faced with the crisis, in the text it is only the “Neo-Right” that it is identified with the neoliberal program.
Actually, in the first period of the capitalist counterattack, in the late 70’s, Keynesianism was replaced by a monetarist, deflationary politics. It was J. Carter, of the Democratic Party and Volcker as head of the Federal Reserve, the ones who applied monetaristic, deflationary politics through the restriction of money supply to curb inflation (an underlying reason of which was, among other factors, the power of the working class to increase the direct and indirect wage). Starting with the bank and municipal attack against the New York City working class in the mid 70’s, it was the Democratic Party that inaugurated neoliberalism with a series of anti-Keynesianist policies aiming at the destruction of the local and federal states’ old redistributive function. The first major cutbacks in federal social spending were imposed through Carter’s administration’s budget for 1980 “which called for “austerity” and “restraint” in the provision of government services. While defense spending, social security, and health-care payments were increased (the latter two because the benefits are tied by law to the rate of inflation), other programs were level-funded or cut. The 1981 budget continued these trends, with increases for defense spending and austerity for domestic programs; the Reagan administration’s economic program only accelerated these shifts in the public sector.”
So, although it’s true that capital’s counter-attack escalated by the Reagan administration, it had already started earlier during the 70’s: the new conservatives of both the Republican and the Democratic parties launched an ideology and a practice that combined individualism and economic “rationalization”, reaching to social inequality as a supposedly natural human condition, thus disciplining the working-class by deepening the divisions within it. Instrumental for this was an “attack” on the Big State, “particularly the distant, unresponsive bureaucracies of the federal government, … a crucial element in eroding support for the regulatory and social-wage elements of the state, and for building support for the pro growth and military-spending elements”.
But if neither the content of neoliberalism can be attributed exclusively to the Neo-Right’s program, as the text claims, nor its origin dates back in Reagan era, then a disproportionately long analysis of the New Right is hardly necessary, if not confusing. On the contrary, what is missing from a revolutionary perspective is what the limits of the social and class struggles were then and how both political forms of capital helped consolidate the neoliberal policies and ideology.
For example, was the “tax revolt” just a “‘single issue’ rightist ‘social issues’ struggle”? More generally, didn’t the 1978 changes in the federal income and payroll taxes further accelerate the inequality of the tax structure with capital gains taxed more lightly under the personal income act, while rates were increased on wages and salaries below certain maximums? Wasn’t the property tax a very regressive tax, favoring mostly the wealthy ones? The more well-to-do segments of the working class (whether right-wing or liberal) got involved in the interclassist movement for tax cuts and it would be very interesting to show how “the Right used it as a wedge to cut business taxes and taxes for the wealthy, as well as social services”, that is how parts of the bourgeoisie used the anger and insecurity of an increasingly threatened working class to create a movement that favored them and how they promoted cuts in expenditures that attacked first the weakest parts of the class and in the long term even those parts of the class that were involved in the “tax revolt”.
Furthermore, would it be possible for the conservative anti-proletarian, “populist” and individualistic propaganda to gain ground, if the power of the organized working-class had not been already undermined by the liberals on the city and state levels and if the ability of the working class to fight on its own terrain (i.e. the practical critique of the wage relation in all its dimensions) had not been undermined by the left liberal citizen-action, public-interest groups and the practice of citizenism in general?
The long history of neoliberalism from the 1970s up till now had its ups and downs. It was not an even historical process culminating in Trump, as Floris suggests.
Reagan was successful in attacking labour legislation favorable to workers and through tax cuts made it easier for capital to relocate from the unionized “rust belt” to the non-unionized southern or western regions of the country (even abroad to Mexico and Southeastern Asia) or reorganize itself in other areas of the economy or new companies free of unions and collective bargaining – a process which continued during the Bush and Clinton’s administration. But as Harry Cleaver had noted,
“Although, once again, as in the 1970s there were successes in cutting social programs, especially in the first year of the first Reagan Administration, there were also failures. The defensive counter-mobilization of a wide variety of targeted groups, from those defending food stamps for the poor to those defending social security for the middle class, succeeded in preventing much of what had been slated for elimination under Reagan’s supply-side program. Given the successful resistance to such cuts, the Reagan program of reduced taxes but not-adequately-reduced expenditures produced a skyrocketing budget deficit which could only be funded by massive foreign borrowing from Europe and Japan. The result was that when business discontent over the depression and over federal crowding-out in money markets combined with the threat of Mexico to default in the debt crisis, Volcker was forced to ease up on monetary policy and lower interest rates in the Fall of 1982. When he did so, his explicit emphasis was on stimulating consumption, not investment. The long slow recovery that followed had something of a Keynesian flavor to it, much to the distaste of monetarists and supply-siders. The fact that the pattern of unemployment, income tax cuts and financial deregulation had had the effect of shifting money income from waged workers to salaried workers and managers – financing the yuppy generation – meant that this “consumption-led» recovery was based on a new class composition, but it was not the investment-led growth envisaged by the supply-side policy makers”.
Despite the growing importance of productive investments in the reorganization of information flows, science and technology, vast amounts of money were re-deployed in the direction of paper and speculative (stock market and real estate market) investments. This move by industrial concerns had the merit of restoring profit rates and atomizing workers through credit but could not strengthen the link between money and extraction of surplus value, with the result of continuous financial bubbles since 1987.
Clinton’s presidency was the era of extreme financialization and neoliberal populism; workfare was introduced and the social security system was largely privatized.
The Clinton years witnessed a continuation of neo-liberal policies by signing up to NAFTA, slashing welfare (with the welfare reform bill that dismantled the federal welfare system known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC)) and abandoning federal assistance to the old industrial “heartland” in favour of the computer and information industries in the South and West. On the other hand, the median household income increase in African-American households (by 25 percent, twice as fast as it did for all households nationwide) during that time, together with African-American unemployment rate fall (from 14.1 percent to 8.2 percent) simply meant that class divisions within black population deepened. With the US having the highest rate of incarceration in the world when Clinton left office in 2001 (because of the 1994 crime bill, with its three-strikes provision and increased number of capital crimes) and African-Americans constituting 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, the true jobless rate for young, non-college-educated black men, including those behind bars, was 42 percent as government statistics on poverty and unemployment rates did not include incarcerated people. Clinton’s period best exemplifies the expansion of the penal side of the welfare state if we take into account that funding for public housing got slashed by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent), while funding for corrections was boosted by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent); this transformation, according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant, “effectively makes the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”
Direct wages (both minimum wage and salaries) were increased during the second Clinton Administration, but thanks to the expulsion of 6 million people from welfare, the slashing of housing benefits and the everyday practice of dismissing those workers who were involved in the organization of trade unions and workers’ groups (10,000 every year), the only beneficiaries of this increase were salaried workers and the managerial strata of the working class, who were also considered to be credit-worthy.
After the bubble of the so-called “New Economy” burst in 2000, there followed a period which could be described as a form of “military Keynesianism” i.e., the use of government funds directed to the military to stimulate economic activity in a period of decreasing private investment and profitability. This mixture of neoliberalism (privatization) and Keynesian deficit spending to get and keep US capital out of a crisis and at the same time, the promise of non-union jobs in a hugely expanded and privatized “national security” sector to some citizen workers while further driving immigrant workers into illegality, or else the “Bush Deal”, had as key parts the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act. They were components of a strategy of increased expenditure combined with the guarantee of not strengthening the working class through a massive use of non-union private contractors. In essence, the “war on terrorism” was a strategy of a dramatic transformation of class relations and the temporary reversal of the profitability crisis. It was also a means to reaffirm the monopoly of US dollar as the main reserve currency. Therefore, it is in this framework that we put the importance of the 9/11 events and not in an abstract critique of “national mythology”.
The reduction in interest rates and the loosening of credit was even greater after the collapse of the “New Economy” in 2001 and this kind of “privatized Keynesianism” was extended to more and more people who were encouraged to borrow to sustain demand. Gradually, the disciplining/divisive role of the debt expansion was seriously undermined in the years before the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis as speculative investments in the derivative markets connected with consumer and mortgage debt got autonomized, thus leading to a total relaxation of the rules and criteria for providing credit: even unemployed black families were able to get mortgage loans.
Consequently, the bursting of these new bubbles in the beginning of 2008 brought the global banking system on the verge of total collapse and the global economy in deep recession. The US government under Obama chose to deal with this situation through the even greater burgeoning of the “sovereign debt” with the provision of astronomical sums of money to bail out banks and boost capitalist growth. The use of trillions of dollars of government funds to take control of the banking sector and the demand of a specific restructuring of the auto industry were urgently undertaken among “a wide spectrum of actions that appear[ed] ‘collectivist,’ ‘socialist’ and ‘commonist’ to a doctrinaire neoliberal”, since Obama’s administration also saw as its duty to help reverse the legitimacy crisis of the capitalist state brought about by the meltdown in 2008 while bringing the economy back to its pre-crisis state. Neoliberal trends continued as usual and “the number of US families living under the World Bank’s global poverty line (2 dollars per person, per day) more than doubled since the mid-1990s, reaching 1.5 million households in 2011”. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in the supposedly “post-racial” era under an African-American president, deportation of undocumented immigrants was more than 2.5 million and police murders of predominantly black proletarians increased.
Trump enters the picture when the previous administrations’ failure to reverse capitalist profitability crisis for certain capitalist fractions and mitigate the consequences of neoliberal policies for large swathes of the working class reached a point that could seriously endanger the reproduction of capitalist relations.
Therefore, it is important to repeat what several comrades have stressed so far, that it was primarily a defeat of Clinton rather than a victory of Trump, relativizing his supposed electoral “triumph” as a contingent response to Obama’s neo-liberal political economy. Consequently, we view Trump more as an expression of the predicament capital finds itself in and of working-class frustration than as the “deepening” or the “culmination” of a “neo-Right political culture, nascently neo-liberal and, today, more or less openly neo-fascist”, as Floris says. The “anti-establishment” stance he tried to take during his campaign (mobilizing the electoral base of the Republicans to a large extent against the party apparatus) and his populist narrative indicate a deep crisis within the political forms of mediation in the US politics (in both the Republican and the Democrat Party) rather than a homogeneous strengthened neo-Right, as Floris asserts.
While we do not underestimate Trump’s effort to normalize white supremacy, sexism and militarism, we find it more productive to question the material basis of the racist deal that he seemed to offer to the (“white”) working-class before his election. It is there, however, that we note that instead of keeping the long list of promises he gave (as a candidate) to a deeply disillusioned working-class (raising of taxes on the rich; tax changes that would not benefit the rich; breaking up of the largest US banks by reinstating old Glass-Steagall regulations; price controls on prescription drugs; a $1 trillion infrastructure package etc), what Trump and his cabinet have so far accomplished is that a whole program of regular right-wing demands stalled for decades has been turned into law within a very short time (the tax bill, that has dramatically reduced the corporate tax rate; environmental deregulation, increase in the military budget, charter school proliferation, defunding of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency etc).
This standard boiler-plate from the right-wing agenda since the New Deal will hardly satisfy the less well-to-do segments of what, according to Floris, constitutes a “neo-fascist oppositional bloc” and we could also risk suggesting that its working-class segment will feel very alienated if not betrayed at the end of Trump’s presidency. Couldn’t one also predict that these standard neo-liberal “accomplishments” will make Trump’s cabinet “redundant”?
For all these reasons we concur with dissenting voices in the American Left, like Phil Neel, who wrote that
“the majority party in the U.S. is the party of non-voters. This is particularly true among the poor. And this shouldn’t be a great mystery, either. People aren’t really that dumb, and it’s not terribly hard to see that neither major party offers anything to anyone other than the rich and those within its patronage network. Talking to people from these places [the “far” hinterland, which is “a sort of abandoned zone, dominated by informal work and black markets”] you definitely see support for Trump—often almost exclusively out of spite for spineless liberals—but for every Trump supporter you’ll find two people who say fuck both parties, they don’t have our interests in mind. And remember that rural America is nowhere near exclusively white, either… As a “material force,” Trump is not particularly important. He obviously cannot offer any sort of true economic revival, because he’s not able to put through the type of severe tariffs and massive public projects that would be necessary to do so (albeit temporarily). The trade policy he’s pursued has been haphazard at best. In the social sphere, there’s a lot of talk about how he “enables” these far-right mass movements, but the evidence is actually quite mixed. Generally, far-right mass movements tend to grow fastest and strongest under center-left Democratic regimes, because they thrive off these confrontations with an unpopular federal government… And here is the real meat of the issue: when you actually compare the data, you see that Democratic regimes were obviously not much better, and there’s no reason to assume that the Democratic alternative would have been any different”.
Even more certain is that there can be no historical analogy with fascism. We have major disagreements with Floris on what historical fascism was and even more so on its resemblance with the modern capitalist regime, however, as a proper analysis would be too long for this text, we will just confine ourselves to some short comments. There are no “structural similarities” between the neo-liberal US state and the Nazi state. The Nazi regime was a state capitalist economy, a “closed commercial state”, characterized by protectionist tariffs, full employment and a state-subsidized domestic industrial and agricultural production. The Nazi government had tried to keep peasants tied to their land and there were also regulations against working class mobility between industries. What is more, German society under Nazis was a racist Volksgemeinschaft, totally different from the individualist American society which is characterized, as Floris rightly observes, by inter-racial educational institutions that develop “de-racialized sensitivities” and institutions like affirmative action. Moreover, in German society under Nazis there were only hidden forms of working class resistance because there was no freedom of press and collective action. Finally, the German national capital tried to solve its lingering overaccumulation crisis, by violently exporting it to other countries, leading to the massive devalorization of constant and variable capital alike during the world war II massacre.
However, since then the capitalist accumulation, seen as a whole, has evolved into incorporating globalized networks of surplus value extraction, supply/consumption and financing. In that sense, the de-industrialization of the West and the rapid massive accumulation of fixed capital in Eastern Asia are connected, both reflecting the new division of labour exploitation on the global scale that emerged as a temporary spatio-temporal fix to the crisis of reproduction of capitalist relations in the West. The current dynamics of valorization/devalorization strongly depend on the cooperation of the capitalist class to set up such fixes, interconnecting local regimes of accumulation to ever greater degree. It is this very material basis of labour exploitation under capitalist relations that prevent us from seeing a direct linkage between current “tariff or trade wars”, to the extent that these are actual intercapitalist “wars”, and a “renewed imperialist world war”.
So-called “tariff wars” should also be examined under the perspective of simultaneous intra-capitalist competition and cooperation. Trump’s tariff-based policy, focusing on bilateral agreements that would largely favour the US, seem to have been halted by temporary agreements with EU and Canada, while, and this is equally important, such protectionist policies may be beneficial to all trading sides, to a certain degree at least. For instance, the Chinese government has long been pursuing a more balanced accumulation model (both investment and internal consumption-driven), in response to the rising production costs in China due to working class unrest and as a tactical shift to partially disengage local production from (currently largely) unstable global demand.
Finally, we can’t see what’s the use of the dystopian science fiction, apocalyptic totalitarian scenario that Floris presents at the end of his text. If it is true that the far-right organises localist self-reliance initiatives in areas faced with declining government services, thus bypassing the central issue of exploitation, then the only solution still remains the autonomous multiracial, multi-gendered organization of the working class around the central issue of work and wages. What are the possibilities of strengthening such universalist organizations both in workplaces and the sphere of reproduction? What are, for example, the prospects and the dynamics of the multiracial, multi-gendered Fight for $15 movement? Is it an independent working class movement or a public relations movement under the patronage of the Democrats and DSA? From a revolutionary point of view, such, among others, would be for us a more productive and grounded attitude towards the real movement of our times, instead of highly questionable, apocalyptic hypothetical series of events on which, moreover, proletarian organization seems to have no influence whatsoever.
TPTG
January 2019
A theoretical postcript
Our modest analysis in the form of the above short and incomplete comments has been informed by the theoretical assumption that currency issues and trade-currency wars are mystified forms of appearance of problems that arise within the relations of production, i.e. within the relations of exploitation. Money is neither a simple means of trading and profit accumulation, nor is it a simple mechanism for regulating production. Money is the most abstract, capitalist form of social wealth; it is the contradictory, mystifying social power through which social reproduction is subject to capitalist reproduction. Behind the US effort to support the dollar and make money out of money lies the inability of capital to increase work productivity in a way other than reducing the cost through redundancies. Trump’s decisions, like those of his predecessors, show the inability to create a new model of exploitation of labour and integration of the whole working class without at the same time encouraging its demands; in other words, they show the failure to impose a productive and profitable disciplining of the working class. On the other hand, competition among different forms of capital or between companies or even national capitals is not the essence of capitalism; it is one of the ways of sharing the total socially produced surplus value (another way is the co-operation of the individual capitals). Because labour is forced to produce surplus value under the dictate of capital as a whole, the strongest capitals – national or supra-national ones- do not only aim at increasing their individual profits, but, most importantly, they try to achieve this by promoting their own overall solution to the problems of global surveillance, exploitation and reproduction of the planetary labour power. Thus, although true that the overall strategy of capital emerges through competition, the obsession of anti-imperialists (whether left or liberal) with inter-capitalist conflict conceals the real content of this conflict: the joint domination of many capitals over the undisciplined labour powers.
* The Social Crisis in Greece
INTRODUCTION: The Capitalist Crisis in the European Union
Before discussing the conditions in which the social crisis in the South of Europe has been developing, we should refer first to the more general context of the crisis in the EU itself.
For us, the global “economic recession” and the “financial” crisis of the recent years are only forms of appearance of the permanent crisis of capital reproduction which started in the early 70’s, that is, the crisis of reproduction of capitalist social relations. Despite the fact that there were periods of “recovery”, e.g. the partial restoration of non-financial profit rates in many major capitalist economies from 1982 to 1997, no long-term solution to the crisis has been found.
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1. THE SO-CALLED “DEBT-CRISIS” UNFOLDING IN GREECE
Coined in bourgeois mystified terms as a “crisis of competitiveness” and a “crisis of sovereign debt”, the crisis of capitalist reproduction in Greece led to an explosion of all its contradictions with the global recession in 2008.
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2. RESTRUCTURING THE REGIME OF ACCUMULATION IN GREECE
The implementation of “internal devaluation” politics has partially re-shaped the local regime of accumulation, by accelerating the restructuring of both the labour market and production base of the Greek capitalist state.
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3. CLASS STRUGGLES AGAINST THE POLITICS OF “INTERNAL DEVALUATION”: New forms of struggle and their effectiveness/limitations in counterattacking capital’s restructuring
After the implementation of the devalorization policies in Greece, the working class moved to a wide range of forms of struggle from traditional ones, like strikes, demos or occupations of public buildings, to more or less new ones, like the occupation of open public spaces, self-reduction of prices and the constitution of “popular assemblies” in the cities’ neighbourhoods.
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4. Lack of an internationalist direction
Overall, the previous cycle of struggles was, unfortunately, almost completely confined within national and sectoral borders as it was predominantly waged either in isolated workplaces or against the results of the so-called “debt crisis” in Greece, without any substantial links with similar struggles abroad.
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5. ΤΗE EFFECT OF “DEBT CRISIS” AND CLASS STRUGGLES ON ALL MEDIATIONS: The legitimation crisis and how they got over it
To sum up: As the Greek political personnel has made the strategic choice of remaining within the Eurozone and under the constant pressure of the debtor-states, the radical and violent restructuring of the productive and reproductive mode of accumulation, the gigantic devalorization process is getting deeper and deeper.
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6. THE STATE MANAGEMENT OF THE REFUGEE-IMMIGRANT INFLUX: Recent struggles and their limits
Let’s start with some necessary general remarks first: the capitalist state ensures the subjugation of workers in general to capital in general. The capitalist state protects and develops productively both capital and labour power, in general, or at least it is forced to do it. Capitalist accumulation is therefore dependent on the abundance, mobility and availability of labour power, while, on the other hand, during crises of reproduction of capitalist relations that end up in the devalorization of surplus capital, labour power may be made redundant to a large extent. Migrant populations, whether they are refugees or not, or whether they have left a middle class life behind or not, are part of the global working class, driven away (mainly) by local or global devalorization policies. Therefore, an analysis of their use or non-use by capital should be placed within a broader analysis of global, supra-national and national processes of capital accumulation. Consequently, any analysis which is dominated by a discourse on “anti-immigrant” or “pro-immigrant” state policies is quite misleading and irrelevant – in the same way that it would be misleading and pointless to claim that the state could be either “anti-worker” or “pro-worker”.
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* Ολόκληρο το τεύχος 16-17
Η κρίση αναπαραγωγής των ταξικών σχέσεων ως θεωρητικό υπόδειγμα και ως ιστορική πραγματικότητα
Όπως είχαμε γράψει στο προηγούμενο τεύχος, η παγκόσμια οικονομική ύφεση και η χρηματοπιστωτική κρίση των τελευταίων ετών είναι οι πιο πρόσφατες μορφές εμφάνισης της διαρκούς κρίσης αναπαραγωγής του κεφαλαίου που ξεκίνησε στις αρχές της δεκαετίας του ’70 και δεν ξεπεράστηκε ποτέ οριστικά παρά τις βραχείες περιόδους οικονομικής άνθισης. «Στρεβλές» μορφές εμφάνισης θα έπρεπε να είχαμε προσθέσει, γιατί το κεφάλαιο δεν είναι ένα πράγμα που αυξάνεται ή μειώνεται αλλά μορφή κοινωνικών σχέσεων: αποτελεί την τρέχουσα ιστορική μορφή αντικειμενικότητας, ένα σύστημα διαμεσολαβήσεων ανάμεσα στο υποκείμενο και το αντικείμενο όπου η συγκρότηση του κόσμου φαίνεται να λαμβάνει χώρα πίσω από την πλάτη των υποκειμένων, τη στιγμή που αποτελεί δικό τους έργο. Μέσω της γενικευμένης εμπορευματικής ανταλλαγής, των χρηματικών σχέσεων, του έμφυλου-ιεραρχικού καταμερισμού της εργασίας και των εξουσιαστικών-εκμεταλλευτικών παραγωγικών σχέσεων υπό την ειδικά καπιταλιστική μορφή τους, της αλλοτρίωσης των εργατών από το περιεχόμενο, τα μέσα και το προϊόν της εργασίας τους και της επιταγής της «συσσώρευσης για χάρη της συσσώρευσης», η εργασία –«η ζωντανή φλόγα που δίνει μορφή στα πράγματα, η παροδικότητα και η χρονικότητά τους»– αντικειμενοποιείται και παγιώνεται στις ανταλλακτικές αναλογίες μεταξύ πραγμάτων. Μέσω της πειθάρχησης που επιβάλλουν οι «στοιχειωμένες» διαμεσολαβήσεις η εργασία παράγει και αναπαράγει τις συνθήκες και τις σχέσεις κυριάρχησής της: αυτός ο αντεστραμμένος κόσμος είναι η τρέχουσα μορφή της ταξικής κυριαρχίας. Επομένως όταν μιλάμε για κρίση αναπαραγωγής του κεφαλαίου αναφερόμαστε στην κρίση αναπαραγωγής των καπιταλιστικών κοινωνικών σχέσεων, δηλαδή των ταξικών σχέσεων εξουσίας όπως εκδηλώνονται σε κάθε πλευρά της κοινωνικής ζωής.
Για να γίνει αυτό περισσότερο κατανοητό, πρέπει να εξετάσουμε τη συνολική διαδικασία αναπαραγωγής του κεφαλαίου, δηλαδή την ενότητα της φάσης της παραγωγής του και της φάσης της κυκλοφορίας του, τις μορφές πολιτικής νομιμοποίησής του, τις μορφές κοινωνικής αναπαραγωγής και τις ψυχικές δομές, τις υποκειμενικότητες (ακόμα και τα προσωπεία) που προϋποθέτει και δημιουργεί. Ο Μαρξ είχε την ευφυΐα να αντιληφθεί ότι η καπιταλιστική σχέση «δεν δημιουργεί μόνο ένα αντικείμενο για το υποκείμενο αλλά και ένα υποκείμενο για το αντικείμενο», αλλά ποτέ δεν εμβάθυνε την ανάλυσή του για την αλλοτρίωση, την κατανάλωση και την εργατική υποκειμενικότητα (η τελευταία έννοια αναφέρεται στο γεγονός ότι το προϊόν –το παραγωγικό υποκείμενο– δεν υποτάσσεται στους νόμους της παραγωγής του). Περιορίστηκε στην ανάλυση των φάσεων της παραγωγής και της κυκλοφορίας του κεφαλαίου. Αυτή η ανάλυση όμως αποτελεί το αναντικατάστατο θεμέλιο της έρευνάς μας.
(…)
* The big deception, deception.pdf
*Το καπιταλιστικό κράτος-κρίση, η αριστερή διαχείρισή του, η πολιτική της αφομοίωσης και οι προλεταριακές ανάγκες, kratos-krisi_aristeri-diaxeirisi_politiki-afomoiosis_proletariakes-anagkes.pdf
*60 days older and deeper in debt. Postscript to «SYRIZA and its victory in the recent general elections in Greece», 60days.pdf
* On SYRIZA and its victory in the recent general elections in Greece, on_syriza.pdf
* Αντιφασισμός εναντίον φασισμού: την πρώτη φορά σαν τραγωδία, τη δεύτερη σαν φάρσα. Ολόκληρο το κείμενο από το νέο τεύχος: antifasismos.pdf
* «Κουρδικό ζήτημα», Ισλαμικό Κράτος, ΗΠΑ και περίχωρα. Il Lato Cattivo (Οκτώβρης 2014). Μετάφραση από τα ιταλικά: kurdish.pdf.
Η μετάφραση είναι προδημοσίευση από το 18ο τεύχος των Παιδιών της Γαλαρίας. Δεν περιλαμβάνονται τα κριτικά σχόλια των Παιδιών της Γαλαρίας που θα συνοδεύουν την έντυπη μορφή του κειμένου των Il Lato Cattivo.
Απόσπασμα από το κείμενο:
«Το κείμενο… είχε ετοιμαστεί αρχικά για μία εκδήλωση –που πραγματοποιήθηκε στην Μπολόνια στις αρχές του Σεπτεμβρίου 2014– με τον Ντανιέλε Πεπίνο, συγγραφέα του άρθρου «Kurdistan. Nell’occhio del ciclone» [Κουρδιστάν. Στο μάτι του κυκλώνα] (Nunatak, ν. 35, καλοκαίρι 2014). Αδυνατώντας να συμμετέχουμε στην εκδήλωση, ξαναδουλέψαμε το αρχικό κείμενο και αυτό που ακολουθεί μπορεί να διαβαστεί είτε σαν μία σειρά σημειώσεων στο περιθώριο του προαναφερθέντος κειμένου είτε σαν ένα αυτόνομο κείμενο.
Το «Kurdistan. Nell’occhio del ciclone» έχει το αδιαμφισβήτητο προτέρημα ότι παρουσιάζει με σαφήνεια τις πολιτικές δυνάμεις που είναι ενεργές στην περιοχή του Κουρδιστάν, όμως το άρθρο εγείρει κάποια ερωτήματα με τα οποία εμείς θα θέλαμε να ασχοληθούμε. Πέρα από μία απλή αξιοποίηση της επέμβασης των πολιτοφυλακών του ΡΚΚ προς υποστήριξη των κούρδων Γεζίντι που απειλούνται από το Ισλαμικό Κράτος (IS) στο βόρειο Ιράκ, ο συγγραφέας εμφανίζεται σαν απολογητής αυτής της οργάνωσης και της υποτιθέμενης «ελευθεριακής» στροφής της (ο αποκαλούμενος «δημοκρατικός συνομοσπονδισμός»). Επιπλέον, η απουσία μίας περιγραφής των κοινωνικών και ταξικών δυνάμεων που εκφράζει η κάθε δύναμη, κάνει τις ενέργειές τους να εμφανίζονται ως το προϊόν απλών υποκειμενικών επιλογών, τις οποίες κάνουν ακαθόριστα άτομα. Τέλος, διάφορα ζητήματα, από τη χρηματοδότηση του ίδιου του ΡΚΚ μέχρι τις συμμαχίες που διαμορφώνονται στη Μέση Ανατολή, εξετάζονται επί τροχάδην. Φυσικά για να αναλύσει κανείς εξαντλητικά όλα αυτά τα ζητήματα θα έπρεπε να γράψει ολόκληρα βιβλία, και για αυτόν το λόγο πιστεύουμε ότι οι σημειώσεις που ακολουθούν θα είναι εξίσου ελλιπείς. Όμως νομίζουμε ότι θα μπορέσουν να ρίξουν ένα διαφορετικό φως τόσο στις πρόσφατες εξελίξεις στο «κουρδικό ζήτημα», όσο και στα όσα συμβαίνουν για ακόμα μια φορά στη Μέση Ανατολή. Χωρίς να ξεχνάμε ότι, εάν αυτό μπορεί να έχει κάποια χρησιμότητα για εμάς ή για άλλους, αυτή βρίσκεται στο γεγονός ότι μπορεί να θέσει όχι το ζήτημα της αυτονομίας (ό,τι κι αν σημαίνει αυτή), αλλά του κομμουνισμού.»
* Από τους αποτυχημένους αγώνες ενάντια στην «κρίση χρέους», δηλαδή την υποτίμηση της εργασιακής δύναμης… στην «κινεζοποίηση» των εργασιακών σχέσεων;
Το υλικό για την εκδήλωση-συζήτηση με σύντροφο από τη συλλογικότητα Gongchao που πραγματοποιήθηκε στη Βίλα Ζωγράφου το Σάββατο 8/6/2013 είναι διαθέσιμο εδώ: material_final.pdf
Περιεχόμενα:
Τα παιδιά της γαλαρίας:
– Καταγράφοντας ήττες
– Μίλα μου κινέζικα: το νέο “success story” του ελληνικού κράτους;
Φίλοι του Gongchao:
– Αριστερά Αδιέξοδα ή Καταστρεπτική Κριτική;
– 10 Παράγραφοι Εναντίον 1 Σάπιου Μήλου (της Apple) – iΔουλεία στη Foxconn