Right now we’re seeing a crisis of both circulation and labor power, as well as a crisis of the accumulation of difference that scaffolds capitalist production.
I think we’re in a labor power crisis they’re not letting on to directly. I’ve gotten like 5 different recruitment emails, I’m seeing “no one wants to work” articles all over the place, everyone I know’s been able to find a better job, and I’m hearing stories of mass quitting in response to the end of telecommuting.
I think that people aren’t working for a couple reasons. One is that a lot of our economy was held up by elderly people who couldn’t afford to retire, and chronically stressed poor people who are now dead.
The other is that the people who can afford not to work are quitting to look for jobs that let them telecommute or won’t have the same crunch conditions a lot of jobs imposed in response to covid.
The last is that eviction moratoriums have a lot of poor people quitting their jobs because they have guaranteed housing.
The result is a crisis of capital’s reproduction from lack of labor power. If you were ever thinking about going on strike, asking for a raise or finding a new job, now’s the time. They’re keeping this on the DL because workers who know their power use it.
This is also a circulation crisis because just in time production relies on every part of the supply chain working as intended. If any one part breaks from increased demand or reduced labor power, the whole thing works less well. It’s also a circulation crisis because unemployed people have time to riot, and we’ve seen another round of BLM protests, and what do they do? They block traffic, loot stores, and prevent policemen from enforcing the commodity form, all of which contribute to a circulation crisis.
We’re also seeing a crisis of the reproduction of difference. BLM is challenging the racial order, the proliferation of queer teens are challenging the gender and sexual order, and poverty induced group housing is challenging the nuclear family. There are still significant heirarchies of difference scaffolding capitalism, but they’re seeing significant attacks.
I think the emphasis Biden’s placing on policing and security is a preparation of counter revolution in the event that the dispossessed classes should take advantage of this triple crisis to implement social change as they did in the 14th, 19th and 20th centuries. The media’s focus on the circulation crisis over the labor power crisis is so they don’t encourage worker action. When they do cover the labor power crisis, it’s “people don’t want to work” and not “labor is growing in power comparative to capital.”
If all of this is true, it could portend some serious violence.
There are some CHUDs in my hobby. Hearing their interpretation of the current situation is nuts. Since the George Floyd uprising, they’re all convinced that riots and looting are just around the corner, and have been arming themselves heavily. They’re also staunchly pro-cop, but paradoxically think the federal gov’t is about to do some major crackdown.
I’ve been reading Jakarta Method lately and the shit that the US/Suharto pulled there is fucking horrifying. Like one day most people were in trade unions and passively or actively supported the communists, then literally a week of disinformation propaganda about communist women murdering fascist generals and praising Satan naked in the woods lead to a million people dead and women in unions being raped and murdered.
The similarities between “Judeo Bolshevism”, “Communist Witches”, and the newly forming “Critical Race Theory” reactionary propagandists is striking.
All we need is one instance of violence that gets twisted by propagandists into some insane story about race war and Biden passively supporting it to have another genocide here.
