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.
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.

But this solution has not satisfied everyone. In 2008, a slim journal published by an anonymous collective began to circulate within the thinning ranks of the revolutionary left. Its cover was solid green except for the journal’s name, Endnotes, in white, and a subtitle, “Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the Twentieth Century,” in black... read more: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/reviews/the-bleak-left/

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)
The Abolition of truth
Yesterday once more - 50 years after Naxalbari



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