The Bleak Left - On Endnotes. By TIM BARKER
TIM BARKER
Marxists have waited
long enough that Marx is right again: we have a surplus population… Not only
communists believe this time may be different. As the Economist, put it in 2014: “Previous
technological innovation has always delivered more long-run employment, not
less. But things can change." Around the world, more than a billion people can
only dream of selling their labor power. From the point of view of employers,
they are unneeded for production, even at the lowest wages.
Even in China, the
new workshop of the world, there were no net industrial jobs created between
1993 and 2006. The size of China’s industrial workforce - around 110 million
people - is vast in absolute terms. But relative to the population of China,
the number suggests the limited demand for industrial labor, not just in
Detroit but around the world… Endnotes takes the view that
these billions are “pure surplus” whom the system will never find an interest
in exploiting. “It exists now only to be managed: segregated into prisons,
marginalized in ghettos and camps, disciplined by the police, and annihilated
by war.” Even in the US, the low official unemployment numbers conceal millions
of prisoners literally locked out of the formal economy.
Endnotes 1:
Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the 20th Century, 2008.
Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value Form, 2010.
Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes, 2013.
Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation, 2015.
Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value Form, 2010.
Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes, 2013.
Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation, 2015.
IT’S NO SECRET that the collapse of international
communism from 1989 to 1991 forced many Marxists into defensive positions.
What’s less well understood is why so many others took the opportunity to
abjure some of Marxism’s most hallowed principles. Perry Anderson, in a surprisingly
admiring review-essay on Francis Fukuyama from 1992, concluded by soberly
assessing what remained of socialism. At the center of socialist politics, he
wrote, had always been the idea that a new order of things would be created by
a militant working class, “whose self-organization prefigured the principles of
the society to come.” But in the real world, this group had “declined in size
and cohesion.” It wasn’t that it had simply moved from the developed West to
the East; even at a global level, he noted, “its relative size as a proportion
of humanity is steadily shrinking.” The upshot was that one of the fundamental
tenets of Marxism was wrong. The future offered an increasingly smaller,
disorganized working class, incapable of carrying out its historic role.
In 1992, calling
oneself a “socialist” was an anachronism. Today it is a label with which
millions of Americans identify. A self-described “democratic socialist” came
agonizingly close to winning the Democratic Party primaries in 2016. And the
premise that Anderson felt we should abandon has been nonchalantly reassumed.
Articles in Jacobin, the most popular socialist publication to
appear in the United States in decades, routinely conclude with a reaffirmation
of the place of the working class at the center of socialist politics.
But lost in the heady
rush of leftist revival is the still-nagging problem of agency. The fortunes of
the organized working class have never been more dire. In the advanced
capitalist core, unions have recovered some prestige but not even a fraction of
their midcentury power, while the historical European parties of the Socialist
International continue their slow collapse. In the Global South, the Brazilian
Workers’ Party (PT) and South Africa’s ANC–Communist–trade union alliance, rare
bright spots after 1989, are losing credibility after decades of accommodation
to private economic prerogatives. There are, in absolute terms, more industrial
workers than ever, and probably as much industrial conflict. But there is no
sense that as the working class becomes larger, it is becoming more unified.
The end of the end of history has not seen the resumption of the forward march
of labor.
In fact, Marxists have
been worried about workers for a long time. After 1917, workers tried to take
power in Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Spain; their defeat led to fascism.
Beginning with Antonio Gramsci, Marxists outside the Soviet Union tried to
understand what went wrong. As fascism and armed resistance gave way to social
democracy and a moderated capitalism, some radicals consigned the working class
to history altogether. It was harder, though, to discard the idea that someone,
somehow, would bring socialism to the world. Peasants, national-liberation
movements, students, and the incarcerated all provided substitutes. With the
emergence of movements like environmentalism and gay liberation after the
1960s, many decided that the whole idea of a revolutionary subject was
misguided. Why not recognize a plurality of movements, emerging unpredictably
and united not by objective interest but by creative alliances? Today, even as
discussions of economic inequality abound, this pluralism remains common sense
in activist circles.
see also
"Those who are obsessed by language finally come to the conviction that there is nothing but interpretation" Stanley Rosen in Hermeneutics as Politics (1987)
Militarism and the coming wars
Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies - The New School for Social Research
The Abolition of truthHeilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies - The New School for Social Research
Yesterday once more - 50 years after Naxalbari
