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.”
This is some good ass analysis and I 100% agree. There is something very off about this moment, things have normalized a little too much too quickly. I hadn’t even thought to consider the proactive role of the bourgeoisie media in actively suppressing the organic fermentation of class consciousness and labor power. :sad Gramsci:
I have a comrade in Florida and they tell me that they have literally just shut off the unemployment spigot to try and force people back to work and it seems to be working somewhat. But for anyone interested, google “Florida DEO office” and read the 1500+ negative reviews of people who are being starved out of their homes. The cruelty is breathtaking but it speaks to the bind that the neoliberal establishment is in.
They don’t have any tools left to compel people back to work that don’t give up their true right wing nature and reveal that there is truly no difference between them and the republicans ideologically. In fact it’s worse for them to unleash these cruel devices on people because they’ve invested all this political capital into being seen as the more “humane” face of capital. They do not have options except to put people through the meat grinder after spending 4 years talking about how horrible it is that Trump just puts people through the meat grinder.
I agree 100% that they are preparing for counter revolution. It’s terrifying but it’s the best explanation I’ve heard yet for why Biden is being allowed to continue his lifelong pattern of growing and bolstering the police state. They can smell there own blood in the water and so no one is going to take the political risk to push back on that, even ostensible “progressives”. Plus they’ve already laid the groundwork for why they can’t “defund the police” by barely winning the presidential election and the georgia runoffs.
Good ass post comrade
I just went out for the first time since the pandemic and decided to test the waters. I basically always talk about organizing and try to help people understand their labor power when I go out (usually service dives). Before the pandemic i’d usually find like 3 or 4 people per night that even knew what a union was, the other day I had 15 people all express vociforous interest in radical action and unionization. This is in a town with no union presence. There’s two small one shop unions that just got charterd from IWW a few months ago but that’s it.
Not only did I get that many, but I also had people who were doing what I was doing totally separately. It literally felt like the light switch had been flipped on and instead of discussing what a union is and why we should have one, we were discussing how we should form one and what we should do with it…
What we see as taking action against a potential revolution is not a cognizant coordinated effort directly against it, though. Those powers don’t really meet up to coordinate such things, not directly (edit:or at least, they don’t do so yet. The Western public’s mindset is still under their yoke). They think in terms of “stability” and maintaining their rate of profit throughout these crises, which as you mention brings up these contradictions that can’t be resolved cleanly with their tools of preference. We vs. they essentially speak different languages, but the shared medium of communication is material conditions and political fights (political defined broadly).
They don’t have any tools left to compel people back to work that don’t give up their true right wing nature and reveal that there is truly no difference between them and the republicans ideologically. In fact it’s worse for them to unleash these cruel devices on people because they’ve invested all this political capital into being seen as the more “humane” face of capital. They do not have options except to put people through the meat grinder after spending 4 years talking about how horrible it is that Trump just puts people through the meat grinder.
Do they even need to maintain the facade? It seems that no matter how much imperialism and neoliberalism democrats do, libs still think of them as the good party who you absolutely must support at all times because republicans are worse.
Good question, I think the democrats feel the need to maintain that facade. Whether it actually is convincing to anyone but those who are already fully bought in on the Democratic Party is another question. I think to the extent it is useful, it’s useful for convincing a very small sliver of voters A la the wealthy suburban districts that allowed Biden to just barely squeak in a victory. Things like Kamalas Guatemala comments could create a lot of cognitive dissonance for those voters and that’s why they’ve been happy to throw her under the bus even though she’s theoretically the heir apparent. But that’s just my read on it.
Bourgeois solidarity is fading, their organizations are collapsing and a new world is struggling to be born
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.
Our hazard pay is probably ending today and most of my store will be looking at at least a 3 dollar an hour paycut. I’m pissed I don’t have an organizing committee set up already but most of my coworkers have been convinced it would last a little longer and have shied away from union talk. When I go in tomorrow it’s my first priority to hunt down as many people who’s pay will be/ has been cut and tell them how to win it back.
If you’ve never been part of a unionization effort, reach out to an existing union (even AFL-CIO, I know, I know) for help and read as much as you can on strategies for workplace organizing in the US.
It’s easy to do things “wrong” and, of course, there’s an inherent power imbalance so you’re taking on a risk. What you choose to ask for and what you’re open about vs. trying to hide are very important. Sometimes people try to be too secretive when open organizing would actually assist them legally and make them harder to disrupt. Sometimes people try to go straight for unionization and it’s too big of an ask and they get pretextually fired without much recourse, including too few co-workers having their back, whereas a smaller ask (restore our pay + sick outs) can build needed solidarity and is also protected action. It all depends on your coworkers and your asks.
Example: do you have a list of everyone’s phone numbers? What percentage would be on board for demanding to keep current wages? That’s a great first step and you can acquire it in a way that looks more like part of a “collaborative” campaign to have a conversation with management, but it’s the building block of organization.
You’ve got this, comrade!
I would also include the legitimacy crisis that’s about to come crashing down when voting restrictions come into effect and are subsequently upheld in their fullness by the supreme court. People will have nothing but contempt for their “elected” officials.
We can only hope that liberal discourse will finally break through the obvious contradiction between “all politics is :vote: remember to :vote:”, and widespread voter suppression being brought into full effect. For a brief moment late last year the illegitimacy of the US state was palpable, but really this was a momentary response culminating from the Summer rebellions, a downright genocidal COVID response, and the media spectacle of Trump’s lame-duck period. We will see what the majority response to a more prolonged crisis will be, maybe people will become acclimated to a constant stream of “temporary” crises–maybe we have already fallen to this type of thinking. Hopefully not…
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.
