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.”
We can only hope that liberal discourse will finally break through the obvious contradiction between “all politics is :vote: remember to :vote:”
This is one thing I wouldn’t count on. We need only look at how the Supreme Court interceded in the 2000 presidential election and how quickly that was memory-holed. Or more recently, how the press has selectively covered the Supreme Court’s decisions, manufacturing the idea that the post-Trump bench is not as extreme as we predicted.
The Liberals will never abandon the institutions. They would rather remain silent than point out their flaws, because if they pointed out all the problems these institutions face, people would put no faith in them. There’s a reason why there is no mainstream initiative to undo Citizens United, fix the FEC, ban gerrymandering, abolish the Electoral College, expand the Supreme Court bench, etc. etc. They’re hesitant to even make much of a fuss about the filibuster.
There are a lot of “liberals” who understand how important all these reforms are, who are growing radicalized by the complete lack of intent to address them, but we will see no institutional pivot towards fixing these problems. Those individuals will learn sooner or later that the whole thing needs to be burned to the ground.
Citizens United was one of those things that really made everything click for me. I remember a bunch of lib outlets talking about it like it was bad and how we need to :vote: to fix it without a hint of irony.
Like you’re sitting here telling me that it’s now legal for corporations to buy elections and you’re still telling me to vote?! That’s like telling someone you just cut their brakes then screaming at them to slow down.
This will most likely be the case. Current events will continue to convince some people to join the burgeoning left in the US, but the reason I wrote about crisis specifically was that these things tend to produce more seismic shifts in society. Something like climate change will, initially at least, effect everyone unlike something like State violence which is almost exclusively focused on a specific segment of society.
One thing I am not sure about is the statement “The Liberals will never abandon the institutions” as an absolute. The issues you brought up, in my opinion, have a discursive effect of what amounts to capturing and controlling dissent. In this sense there is never an expression of fundamental issues of the institution, but it is always transformed into something like: “Oh if only we could repeal Citizens United–then things would function correctly!”, etc. This is why Trump was so interesting because it pulled back the curtain a bit to expose just how artificial all these governmental norms, and unwritten rules really were. Following that train of thought will inevitably lead to discovering the true nature of politics: naked power. “I’m going to do whatever I want and there is nothing you can do to stop me.” When reform is precluded that is when it becomes delegitimatized. However, recognizing this fact does not necessarily make oneself non-liberal as you can still be subservient to an idealized form of institution. Sudan could be an example of this.
Ya’know after writing this I’m pretty sure we are saying the same thing.
