#division between capital and labour

[rotenotes]

TAKAHISA OISHI - The Materialist Interpretation of History and Marx's Critique of Political Economy

The Materialist Interpretation of History and Marx’s Critique of Political Economy TAKAHISA OISHI Professor of Economics Takushoku University Tokyo, Japan Introduction In my latest paper[1], I examined the editing problems of “I Feuerbach” of The German Ideology (1845-1846)–hereafter FEUERBACH–. Here I am concerned with the so-called ‘materialist interpretation of history’, which has been said…

[opstandelse]

TAKAHISA OISHI - The Materialist Interpretation of History and Marx's Critique of Political Economy

The Materialist Interpretation of History and Marx’s Critique of Political Economy TAKAHISA OISHI Professor of Economics Takushoku University Tokyo, Japan Introduction In my latest paper[1], I examined the editing problems of “I Feuerbach” of The German Ideology (1845-1846)–hereafter FEUERBACH–. Here I am concerned with the so-called ‘materialist interpretation of history’, which has been said…

[apas-95]

Have you read Faggotization and The Extant Gender Ternary (https://thesizhensystem.substack.com/p/faggotization-and-the-extant-gender)? I'd like to know your thoughts on it

I have, and I think it's not a useful or consistent model of gender. I have three main issues with it.

Firstly, it fails to justify itself. It does not demonstrate the necessity and actuality of the terms it presents; it fails to demonstrate that there exists a division between so-called "legible" and "illegible" genders; and it fails to even discuss the division of labour in its supposed class structure. What relations give rise to gender? In the Marxist view, put forth by Engels, Kollontai, Zetkin, etc., the gendered division of labour is quite straightforward - as the first class division in ancient society, it separated between those people who were made to perform reproductive labour (that is to say, labour that reproduces the conditions of labour, such as cleaning, feeding, clothing, etc) and those that were not. The Marxist view also describes the breakdown of these gender relations, as capitalism does away with the domestic sphere of labour, and reproductive labour is increasingly socialised among the proletariat. In the supposedly "extant" gender ternary, what is the division? "Power" - power to do what? In this regard, the model of gender presented is vague and abstract, and lumps together various types of oppression through simplification.

Secondly, it is not a useful model in practice. The vagueness aforementioned does not lend itself to use in describing and critiquing oppression in concrete situations. Whether a trans man is the same 'gender-class' as cis women, or as trans women (and certain gay men, and sex workers) could be argued either way in the framework depending on the trans man in question. It has the problem of many 'theories of everything' - for instance, describing both the oppression of trans women and of sex workers with the same mechanism ends up weakening both. How are the categories of "faggot-subaltern", "not-power", and so on useful when organising? How do these direct practice, rally people towards doing away with these systems? The analytical model of transmisogyny, that which posits that trans women are oppressed because they are women, and because they are transgender, is straightforward and useful in practice. It is immediately clear where common interests lie, and with whom.

Thirdly, it represents a regressive trend in transgender theory. There is, at this point, a longstanding precedent in bourgeois academia of 'third-gendering' trans women. Generally, it is directed at the global south: a bourgeois academic notes the existence of trans women in a global south nation, notes that they are treated differently than both cisgender women and men, and declares that they are a 'third gender', which they name whatever the local equivalent of 'faggot' is. The newer development is opposition to this process - of transgender women in the global south rejecting the colonial claim that they are a third gender, and asserting themselves as women. While the supposed impetus behind the "extant gender ternary" is Marxism-Leninism, the 'class' system posited is almost anarchist in character; and, in its existence as applying imperialist sociology to the imperial core, it could easily, if inflammatorily, be described as approaching some sort of 'gender fascism'.

Overall, I do not think it is an accurate theory, nor do I think it is a useful model. I understand it is intended to be rudimentary, but its central issue is that it is working in the wrong direction, not that it doesn't go far enough.

[fatehbaz]

Between 1970 and 1973, rent strikes erupted in towns and cities throughout the Republic of Ireland. These were organised by local tenants’ associations, most of which were affiliated to the National Association of Tenants Organisations [NAoTO] [...], an umbrella organisation for local associations established in 1967. [...] [O]rganisers claimed that at its peak almost half of all council tenants in the state, or approximately 50,000 households, were withholding their rents. These localised campaigns coalesced into a state-wide movement in late 1972 with [NAoTO] declaring a “national rent strike” which lasted until August 1973. At this point, the government conceded to [NAoTO]'s demands including revisions to the B scale differential rent system, a rent freeze for those on fixed (non-differential) rents, [and] better terms for tenant purchase [...]. [T]he long-term consequences are more ambiguous [...]. Nonetheless, it was described in an article in the Irish Times as “undoubtedly the most dramatic [...] victory ever achieved in this century by tenants versus landlords” [within Ireland]. [...]

Despite the scale and significance of these rent strikes, before this project started there was effectively no information available about them. The [Community Action Tenants Union Ireland] CATU rent strike history project aimed to address this situation, which we understood as an important gap in the collective memory [...]. The project set out to leverage the history of the rent strikes to engage people and involve them in the contemporary housing movement by providing an example of the power of collective action and building connections [...]. The project has been ongoing since late 2021 [...].

---

Gray (2018a, 2022) argues that, beginning in the 1960s, the urbanisation of capital created a new [...] working-class struggle in Italy, [...] characterised by divisions related to suburbanisation and geographical fragmentation. [...] Clare's (2020) analysis of [...] clandestine textile workshops in Buenos Aires highlights the importance of the spatial dimension [...] by describing how workshops are located according to a distinct socio-spatial strategy that divides the workforce and minimises outside interference, thus ensuring access to cheap, vulnerable labour. [...]

There are [...] connections between political decomposition and the loss of memory and knowledge of struggle, such as in the case of workplace restructuring after conflict to prevent the transmission of knowledge and experience between different generations of workers [...]. Responding to this situation, there has been a growing interest in recovering forgotten or suppressed histories of housing and urban struggles [...].

---

The background to the CATU rent strike history project is the so-called “housing crisis” in Ireland, which, contrary to the idea of a specific moment of crisis, has been a continuous feature of Irish society since at least the 19th century [...]. A persistent challenge faced by CATU and other similar movements is that of overcoming a pervasive sense of disempowerment and persuading people that it is worthwhile to engage in collective action [...]. [T]he [housing] crisis [is not necessarily] a unique moment of dysfunction in the housing system [but is] rather [...] a persistent feature of Irish, and increasingly international, capitalism [...]. [L]and and housing have been deeply interrelated with anti-colonial struggles including the Land War of the late 19th century, the civil rights movement, and anti-internment rent strikes in the 1960s [...].

---

27 oral history interviews were carried out with people who participated in the rent strikes in the 1970s [...] from various towns and cities across the Republic of Ireland [...]. Approximately 2,000 relevant articles published in local and national newspapers between 1966 and 1973 were identified and subject to close reading [...] Further data was gathered through a review of 161 articles about the rent strikes in radical newspapers [...]. Previous analyses have emphasised the atomisation of new suburban council estates and how these were part of a concerted effort to undermine working-class radicalism (McManus 2003). Beginning in the late 1950s, suburbanisation was further accelerated by the state's policy to attract [...] speculative investment in commercial office space and the displacement of working-class communities, in particular from inner-city Dublin [...]. However, [...] that fragmentation was countered in the late 1960s and early 1970s through the widespread, rapid formation of tenants’ associations organised around shared interests [...].

The interviews and newspapers produced by local tenants’ associations demonstrated the organisational density and array of community organisations [...] that fought to improve the conditions of everyday life [...]. Some of the forms of organisation that existed across many areas included collectively built and managed community centres, women's and youth committees, sports clubs, social activities for elderly people, and food cooperatives, amongst others. Illustrating the scale of community organising, in August 1973 the [NAoTO] newspaper reported that the West Finglas Tenants Association was running regular outings to the seaside that were attended on average by 2,000 people transported in 20 double-decker buses. [...] As described by [P.], a rent strike organizer in Ballyfermot:

"Street committees didn't just run the rent strike, they also ran summer programmes. If there was old people to come around at Christmas, we'd arrange for someone to cook an extra bit of dinner. It was more a living thing. It wasn't just a single issue. [...]"

---

All text above by: Fiadh Tubridy. "Militant Research in the Housing Movement: The Community Action Tenants Union Rent Strike History Project". Antipode Online Volume 56, Issue 3, pages 1027-1046. May 2024. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[bimboficationblues]

Marx, Capital, Volume I, 13.5: "The Struggle Between Workers and Machines":

Much of what has been invented since 1830—certainly enough to fill a whole volume—was brought into the world expressly to serve capital as a weapon for combatting workers’ mutinies. The self-acting mule is the first thing to mention here, since it launched the new epoch of the automatic system. Ure remarks about the coloring machines made for calico printing, “At length capitalists sought deliverance from this intolerable bondage [namely, those so onerous conditions set forth in their contracts with workers] in the resources of science, and were speedily re-instated in their legitimate rule, that of the head over the inferior members.” On the topic of a machine for making dressing wraps, which was invented in response to a strike, he says, “The combined malcontents, who fancied themselves impregnably intrenched behind the old lines of division of labour, found their flanks turned and their defenses rendered useless by the new mechanical tactics, and were obliged to surrender at discretion.” He has this to say about the invention of the self-acting mule: “A creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes. . . . This invention confirms the great doctrine already propounded, that when capital enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility.” Although Ure’s book appeared 30 years ago, or at a time when the factory system was still in its early stages, it remains the classic expression of the factory spirit, with its frank cynicism but also owing to the naïveté with which the author parades the mindless contradictions in capital’s head. He articulates the “doctrine” that capital, having put science on its payroll, will always teach the “refractory hand of labour” to be “docile,” but then he waxes indignant because the “physico-mechanical science has been accused of lending itself to the rich capitalist as an instrument for harassing the poor.” And he sermonizes at length about the advantages workers derive from the rapid development of machinery, only to warn that if they go on strike, machinery will develop even faster. “Violent revulsions of this nature,” he says, “display short-sighted man in the contemptible character of a self-tormentor.” The opposite is the case just a few pages earlier: “Had it not been for the violent collisions and interruptions resulting from erroneous views among the factory operatives, the factory system would have been developed still more rapidly and beneficially for all concerned.” Ure proceeds to exclaim again, “Fortunately for the state of society in the cotton districts of Great Britain, the improvements in machinery are gradual.” “It [the introduction of such improvements] is said to lower the rate of earnings of adults by displacing a portion of them, and thus rendering their number superabundant as compared with the demand for their labour. It certainly augments the demand for the labour of children and increases the rate of their wages.” On the other hand, having offered such consolation, this same writer defends the paltriness of children’s wages, arguing that if they were higher, parents would send their children to the factory at too young an age.

The whole point of Ure’s book is to justify the unrestricted workday. Legislation that prevents thirteen-year-old children from being worked to the bone twelve hours a day reminds his liberal soul of the darkest moments of the Middle Ages. This doesn’t stop him, however, from admonishing factory workers to say prayers of thanks to Providence, which uses machinery as a means of supplying workers with “the leisure to think of their immortal interests.”

[sophie-frm-mars]

Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher's greatest success, shifted the image of the labour party into the chic neoliberal image obsessed world of PR politics where symbolism and focus groups reign supreme. Electoral politics has been a bourgeois world of distraction and suppression of working class radicalism since its inception, but the move that Blair brought to UK politics shifted the divide from crusty socialists vs radical free enterprise finance perverts to a blurry divide barely legible within the framework of capital, so that the finance perverts became the wallpaper and radicalism was simply no longer in the room.

Starmer, in reincarnating Blair's ghost on a landslide victory that a huge amount of the population feel no enthusiasm for and at best relief that he's not technically the Tories ant more if they haven't been paying much attention to his policies, is reaffirming that the division is not between differently coloured ties you decide on at the ballot box but (as it has always really been) between the ruling class and the working class. He is positioning himself ready to do the most by the book straightforward statesman ship possible, which is to say to mediate class tensions in favour of the ruling class. His victory should only be a reminder that 99% of politics is outside the polling station and now is the time to get organized.

Socialists still involved in the machine of elite politics like Corbyn should absolutely make a socialist party that can catch labour defecters in the same way that Reform will inevitably catch tory ones as the next 5 years go on. If that goes well, there may be a chance that our votes are meaningful in 2029, but if not it'll just be the game liberals want it to be, a game of keeping The Bad Party out. It is more important not to be the bad one than it is to ever do anything good.

But if we think about 2029 elections, 2034, 2039 and so on, assuming that the GEs happen when they're scheduled (🤷‍♀️) then we so quickly run into a world devastated by climate change that we realise spending any of our energy thinking about electoralism over organising is a waste.

The party who nakedly despise the working class are no longer in power, the party who have to pretend not to despise the working class are in. You still can't ask them for anything, you have to take it. Now is the time for strikes, protests, and parallel community structures refusing to delegate responsibility to the state to push harder and harder and harder still

[ghelgheli]

According to Marx, metabolic rift appears in three different levels and forms. First and most fundamentally, metabolic rift is the material disruption of cyclical processes in natural metabolism under the regime of capital. Marx’s favourite example is the exhaustion of the soil by modern agriculture. Modern large-scale, industrial agriculture makes plants absorb soil nutrition as much as and as fast as possible so that they can be sold to customers in large cities even beyond national borders. It was Justus von Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry (1862) and his theory of metabolism that prompted Marx to integrate an analysis of the ‘robbery’ system of agriculture into Capital. [...]

Liebig harshly criticized modern ‘robbery agriculture’ (Raubbau), which only aims at the maximization of short-term profit and lets plants absorb as many nutrients from the soil as possible without replenishing them. Market competition drives farmers to large-scale agriculture, intensifying land usage without sufficient management and care. As a consequence, modern capitalist agriculture created a dangerous disruption in the metabolic cycle of soil nutrients. [...]

Marx formulated the problem of soil exhaustion as a contradiction created by capitalist production in the metabolism between humans and nature. Insofar as value cannot fully take the metabolism between humans and nature into account and capitalist production prioritizes the infinite accumulation of value, the realization of sustainable production within capitalism faces insurmountable barriers.

This fundamental level of metabolic rift in the form of the disruption of material flow cannot occur without being supplemented and reinforced by two further dimensions. The second dimension of metabolic rift is the spatial rift. Marx highly valued Liebig in Capital because his Agricultural Chemistry provided a scientific foundation for his earlier critical analysis of the social division of labour, which he conceptualized as the ‘contradiction between town and country’ in The German Ideology. Liebig lamented that those crops that are sold in modern large cities do not return to the original soil after they are consumed by the workers. Instead, they flow into the rivers as sewage via water closets, only strengthening the tendency towards soil exhaustion.

This antagonistic spatial relationship between town and country – it can be called ‘spatial rift’ – is founded upon a violent process of so-called primitive accumulation accompanied by depeasantization and massive urban growth of the working-class population concentrated in large cities. This not only necessitates the long-distance transport of products but also significantly increases the demand for agricultural products in large cities, leading to continuous cropping without fallowing under large-scale agriculture, which is intensified even more through market competition. In other words, robbery agriculture does not exist without the social division of labour unique to capitalist production, which is based upon the concentration of the working class in large cities and the corresponding necessity for the constant transport of their food from the countryside. [...]

The third dimension of metabolic rift is the temporal rift. As is obvious from the slow formation of soil nutrients and fossil fuels and the accelerating circulation of capital, there emerges a rift between nature’s time and capital’s time. Capital constantly attempts to shorten its turnover time and maximize valorization in a given time – the shortening of turnover time is an effective way of increasing the quantity of profit in the face of the decreasing rate of profit. This process is accompanied by increasing demands for floating capital in the form of cheap and abundant raw and auxiliary materials. Furthermore, capital constantly revolutionizes the production process, augmenting productive forces with an unprecedented speed compared with precapitalist societies. Productive forces can double or triple with the introduction of new machines, but nature cannot change its formation processes of phosphor or fossil fuel, so ‘it was likely that productivity in the production of raw materials would tend not to increase as rapidly as productivity in general (and, accordingly, the growing requirements for raw materials)’ (Lebowitz 2009: 138). This tendency can never be fully suspended because natural cycles exist independently of capital’s demands. Capital cannot produce without nature, but it also wishes that nature would vanish. [...]

The contradiction of capitalist accumulation is that increases in the social productivity are accompanied by a decrease in natural productivity due to robbery [... i]t is thus essential for capital to secure stable access to cheap resources, energy and food. [...]

The exploration of the earth and the invention of new technologies cannot repair the rift. The rift remains ‘irreparable’ in capitalism. This is because capital attempts to overcome rifts without recognizing its own absolute limits, which it cannot do. Instead, it simply attempts to relativize the absolute. This is what Marx meant when he wrote ‘every limit appears a barrier to overcome’ (Grundrisse: 408). Capital constantly invents new technologies, develops means of transportation, discovers new use-values and expands markets to overcome natural limits. [...]

Corresponding to the three dimensions of metabolic rifts, there are also three ways of shifting them. First, there is technological shift. Although Liebig warned about the collapse of European civilization due to robbery agriculture in the 19th century, his prediction apparently did not come true. This is largely thanks to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented the so-called Haber-Bosch process in 1906 that enabled the industrial mass production of ammonia (NH3) by fixing nitrogen from the air, and thus of chemical fertilizer to maintain soil fertility. Historically speaking, the problem of soil exhaustion due to a lack of inorganic substances was largely resolved thanks to this invention. Nevertheless, the Haber-Bosch process did not heal the rift but only shifted, generating other problems on a larger scale.

The production of NH3 uses a massive amount of natural gas as a source of hydrogen (H). In other words, it squanders another limited resource in order to produce ammonia as a remedy to soil exhaustion, but it is also quite energy intensive, producing a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) (responsible for 1 per cent of the total carbon emission in the world). Furthermore, excessive applications of chemical fertilizer leach into the environment, causing eutrophication and red tide, while nitrogen oxide pollutes water. Overdependence on chemical fertilizer disrupts soil ecology, so that it results in soil erosion, low water- and nutrient-holding capacity, and increased vulnerability to diseases and insects. Consequently, more frequent irrigation, a larger amount of fertilizer and more powerful equipment become necessary, together with pesticides. This kind of industrial agriculture consumes not just water but large quantities of oil also, which makes agriculture a serious driver of climate change. [...]

[T]here remains a constant need to shift the rift under capitalism, which continues to bring about new problems. This contradiction becomes more discernible in considering the second type of shifting the metabolic rift – that is, spatial shift, which expands the antagonism of the city and the countryside to a global scale in favour of the Global North. Spatial shift creates externality by a geographic displacement of ecological burdens to another social group living somewhere else. Again, Marx discussed this issue in relation to soil exhaustion in core capitalist countries in the 19th century. On the coast of Peru there were small islands consisting of the excrement of seabirds called guano that had accumulated over many years to form ‘guano islands’. [...]

In the 19th century, guano became ‘necessary’ to sustain soil fertility in Europe. Millions of tons of guano were dug up and continuously exported to Europe, resulting in its rapid exhaustion. Extractivism was accompanied by the brutal oppression of Indigenous people and the severe exploitation of thousands of Chinese ‘c**lies’ working under cruel conditions. Ultimately, the exhaustion of guano reserves provoked the Guano War (1865–6) and the Saltpetre War (1879–84) in the battle for the remaining guano reserves. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (2009) argue, such a solution in favour of the Global North resulted in ‘ecological imperialism’. Although ecological imperialism shifts the rift to the peripheries and makes its imminent violence invisible in the centre, the metabolic rift only deepens on a global scale through long-distance trade, and the nutrient cycle becomes even more severely disrupted.

The third dimension of metabolic shift is the temporal shift. The discrepancy between nature’s time and capital’s time does not immediately bring about an ecological disaster because nature possesses ‘elasticity’. Its limits are not static but modifiable to a great extent. Climate crisis is a representative case of this metabolic shift. Massive CO2 emissions due to the excessive usage of fossil fuels is an apparent cause of climate change, but the emission of greenhouse gas does not immediately crystallize as climate breakdown. Capital exploits the opportunities opened up by this time lag to secure more profits from previous investments in drills and pipelines. Since capital reflects the voice of current shareholders, but not that of future generations, the costs are shifted onto the latter. As a result, future generations suffer from consequences for which they are not responsible. Marx characterized such an attitude inherent to capitalist development with the slogan ‘Après moi le déluge!’ (Capital I: 381).

This time lag generated by a temporal shift also induces a hope that it would be possible to invent new epoch-making technologies to combat against the ecological crisis in the future. In fact, one may think that it is better to continue economic growth which promotes technological development, rather than over-reducing carbon dioxide emissions and adversely affecting the economy. However, even if new negative emission technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) are invented, it will take a long time for them to spread throughout society and replace the old ones. In the meantime, the environmental crisis will continue to worsen due to our current inaction. As a result, the expected effects of the new technology can be cancelled out.

Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene

[troythecatfish]

"it is only on the basis of capitalist production, hence also of the capitalist division of labour within the workshop, that. all products necessarily assume the commodity form, and all producers are therefore necessarily commodity producers. It is therefore only with the coming of capitalist production that use value is first generally mediated through exchange value.

3 points.

1) Capitalist production is the first to make the commodity the universal form of all products.

2) Commodity production necessarily leads to capitalist production, once the worker has ceased to be a part of the conditions of production (slavery, serfdom) or the naturally evolved community no longer remains the basis [of production] (India).

From the moment at which labour power itself in general becomes a commodity.

3) Capitalist production annihilates the [original] basis of commodity production, isolated, independent production and exchange between the owners of commodities, or the exchange of equivalents. The exchange between capital and labour power becomes formal." - Karl Marx, Draft chapter VI of Capital

[dailyanarchistposts]

From class struggle to identity politics

It’s not that we’ve forgotten the meaning of revolution; on the contrary, it’s the refusal to let go of the old meaning that’s holding us back. With every passing moment, the state of the world changes irreversibly. Perspectives that once commanded utmost dedication begin to stagnate, losing touch with the tides of a reality that swirls in constant motion. Even the brightest ideas are bound to accumulate dust. And so too those offered in response.

To this day, most dreams of revolution come grounded in some variant of Marxian analysis. On this account, class is the central principle, both for understanding oppression as well as resisting it. History is taken to consist primarily in the drama of class struggle; different historical phases, meanwhile, are defined by the mode of production that sets the stage. The current phase is capitalism, in which the means of production – factories, natural resources, and so on – are owned by the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) and worked for wages by the working class (the proletariat). Almost everyone in capitalist society is split fundamentally between one of these two molar heaps – bosses or workers, exploiters or exploited. Whilst the basic solution, as Marxists and anarcho-syndicalists traditionally see it, is the application of workplace organisation towards the revolutionary destruction of class-divided society. In concrete terms, that means the proletariat rising up and seizing the means of production, replacing capitalism with the final phase of history: communism – a classless, stateless, moneyless society.

Having risen to predominance in the West around the end of the 19th century, this current of revolutionary struggle approached its climax towards the beginning of the 20th. At this point, the mutinies that closed down the First World War avalanched into a wave of proletarian uprisings that shook Europe to its core. Beginning with the Russian Revolution, 1917, the reverberations soon catalysed major insurrections in Germany, Hungary, and Italy. Two decades later, this unmatched period of heightened class struggle culminated in the 1936 Spanish Revolution, arguably the single greatest feat of workers’ self-organisation in history. Centred in Catalonia, millions of workers and peasants put the means of production under directly democratic control, especially in Barcelona – amongst the most industrially developed cities in the world. Yet the glory days of the revolutionary proletariat were in many ways also its last stand; in Italy and Germany, the fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler already reigned supreme. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, the initial promise of the Russian Revolution had long since degenerated into Bolshevism, diverting most of the energy associated with socialism towards authoritarian ends. Apparently both fascism and Bolshevism succeeded in annihilating the possibility of workers’ control all the more effectively by simultaneously valorising it. Never again would organised labour come close to regaining its former revolutionary potential.

What followed was a period of relative slumber amongst the social movements of the West. This was eventually undone by a wave of social struggles that broke out during the 1960s, which in many places put the prospect of revolution back on the table. But something about this new era of revolt was markedly different: besides its various labour movements, here we see the likes of second-wave feminism, black liberation, and queer struggle begin to occupy the foreground. No longer was class struggle regarded as one and the same with the overall project of human liberation. And that began to profoundly undermine the neat old picture you get with Marxian class analysis. Maybe there’s no primary division splitting society any more, no single fault line upon which to base the totality of our resistance? The situation has instead been revealed as much messier, exceeding the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, if not capitalism altogether.

That said, something vital you still get with Marxian analysis, even centuries after it was first formulated, is its timeless emphasis on the material features of oppression. After all, it’s not as if the classical concerns of revolutionaries – in particular, the state and capital – have since just melted away. One of the biggest problems with many contemporary social struggles is their readiness to turn a blind eye to these structures, forgetting the key insight worth salvaging from Marx: genuine liberation is impossible without securing the material conditions of autonomy. On the other hand, though, classical revolutionaries tend to emphasise these concerns only at the expense of neglecting those which are in a sense more psychological, defined by matters of identity rather than one’s relationship to property. There’s something reassuring in that, given that treating class as primary allows you to take the entirety of problems we face – social, political, economic, ecological – and condense them into one. But such an approach has little chance of reflecting the complexity of power in the 21st century, with all divisions aside from class soon being neglected.

To note, there are conceivable responses here: some have made a point of extending Marxian analysis beyond an exclusive focus on class. Of the arguments offered, perhaps the most influential contends that structures such as white supremacy and patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia, are strengthened by the ruling class in order to divide and rule the working class; therefore, any prudent take on class struggle must take care to simultaneously oppose them all, or else fail to build the unity necessary for overthrowing capitalism. Such is exactly the kind of discourse used to give the impression that Marxian analysis is equally concerned with all oppressions. Granted, this approach is more sophisticated than claiming any deviations from the class line are mere distractions, as some do even today. But still, you shouldn’t be convinced too easily: lurking beneath the sloganeering here is the basic assumption that, even if class isn’t the only form of oppression, it remains the central one, underpinning the relevance of all the rest. Other oppressions are important to oppose, yet hardly on their own terms; their importance remains secondary, pragmatic, warranting recognition only insofar as they serve as a means within the broader class struggle. This shortcoming has long since been a call for new forms of struggle to emerge. Ones which recognise that class isn’t the only oppression worthy of intrinsic concern.

* * *

The fading of the Old Left, along with its fixation with Marxism and class struggle, soon gave rise to a “New Left” in Europe and America. Amongst other factors, this transition has been defined by the growing predominance of identity politics over class struggle. Identity politics follows from the presumed usefulness of coming together around various shared identities – say, being black, a woman, gay, transgender, or disabled – as a means for understanding and resisting oppression. This eagerness to treat all liberation struggles as ends in themselves did away with the primacy of class; rather, efforts were split more evenly between different minority groups, adding depth to previously neglected concerns.

At first, this trend offered a fair degree of revolutionary potential. The Black Panther Party, for example, recognised that black power was inseparable from achieving community autonomy in fully tangible ways, as was manifest in a range of activity that included everything from armed self-defence to food distribution, drug rehabilitation, and elderly care. Also in the US, the Combahee River Collective – who introduced the modern usage of the term “identity politics” in 1977 – saw their own liberation as queer black women merely as a single component of a much larger struggle against all oppressions, class included. Even Martin Luther King, currently a favourite amongst pacifist reformers, emphasised not long before his death that anti-racism was meaningless when separated from a broader opposition to capitalism.

As time passed, however, identity politics drifted irretrievably from its antagonistic origins, eventually coming to be associated with the separation of issues of identity from class struggle altogether. Broadly insensitive to the material features of liberation, the term nowadays suggests political engagement that’s heavily focused around moralistic displays and the policing of language – something that, quite inadvertently, can easily end up excluding the rest of the population, especially those lacking an academic grounding. Any larger political strategies, meanwhile, are typically focused not on dissolving the institutions of politics, business, and law enforcement, but instead on making them more accommodating to marginalised groups, thereby conceding the overall legitimacy of class-divided society. It’s no coincidence that this reformist, essentially liberal approach to social transformation only took off in tandem with that unspoken assumption, cemented since the ‘80s, regarding our chances of a revolution actually happening any more. In short, identity politics has been contained within a fundamental position of compromise with power, taking it for granted the state and capital are here to stay.

Perhaps the central problem with identity politics today is that, having had the good sense to abandon Marxian analysis, it loses the ability to account for what’s common to the plethora of social problems we face. If oppressive relations cannot be reduced to class, then what’s the underlying structure that binds them all together? The only alternative is to treat different oppressions as disconnected and remote – problems that can, in their various forms, be overcome without challenging the system as a whole. Identity politics thus lacks the conceptual bridge needed to draw different social movements into a holistic revolutionary struggle. Particularly in its most vulgar forms, liberation struggles are treated as isolated or even competitive concerns, inviting the reproduction of oppressive relations amongst those supposed to be fighting them.

Having said that, an explicit response to these limitations was offered by intersectionality, which began gaining traction in the ‘80s. The point of this theory is to demonstrate how different axes of domination overlap, compounding the disadvantages received by those exposed to more than one oppressive identity. By focusing only on gender, for example, feminist movements tend to prioritise the experiences of their most privileged participants – typically white, wealthy women. In order to undermine patriarchy effectively, therefore, feminism must embrace a much larger spectrum of concern, inviting the narratives of marginalised women to the forefront. A key virtue of intersectionality has thus been its emphasis on the interconnected nature of power, predicating the effectiveness of different liberation struggles on their ability to support one another. Unlike with Marxian class analysis, moreover, it does so without positing that any single axis of domination is somehow primary, which offers a vital contribution for going forward.

Despite its utility for revolutionaries, however, intersectionality has generally failed to avoid co-optation by neoliberal capitalism. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, with its numerous references to the likes of the “combined effects of intersecting issues that impact communities of color,” is but one example. Or else look at its seamless application by the mega-corporations nowadays, to the extent that Sony Pictures even has its own Director of Intersectional Marketing, a role designed to ensure that “marketing campaigns achieve maximum outreach to targeted multicultural and LGBT demographics.” How has a seemingly radical theory been diverted towards blatant reactionary ends? A first problem with intersectionality, as with identity politics more generally, is its abandonment of classical revolutionary concerns. At best, class is discussed merely in terms of “classism,” namely, an individual prejudice that can be undone simply by changing opinions, rather than abolishing class-divided society overall. Meanwhile, the state – a concrete institution, not an identity category such as race, gender, or class – is typically ignored altogether, inevitably resulting in toothless political programmes.

Moreover, this distinct lack of material analysis leads to a second problem, apparently the inherent defect of any take on identity politics: the inability to locate a common thread to the constitution of oppression as such. By setting out ever more subcategories of oppressed identities – not just being a black woman, for instance, but also a black trans-woman, a black disabled trans-woman, and so on – the consequence is an endless process of compartmentalisation. This emphasis on complexity could easily be a source of strength, opening up multiple fronts of diffuse engagement, inviting greater numbers to participate without having to assume a secondary role. Yet by focusing only on particularities, any notion of a common enemy against which to generalise revolt soon vanishes. Only when combined with a broader, concretely revolutionary vocabulary can intersectionality be used to promote diversity rather than fragmentation, undermining power as a totality.

Of course, none of the failures of identity politics should detract from the gains hard-won over the years. Even if transphobia continues to lag behind, overt racism, sexism, and homophobia are rarely tolerated by mainstream politics in much of the Global North – something unthinkable just a few decades ago. The uncomfortable fact, however, is that capitalism has been quite happy to adapt to these changes, taking on this or that superficial tarnish, yet remaining wholly the same in terms of its core operations. Women have flowed into the workforce, just as the nuclear family continues to disintegrate; nonetheless, human existence remains dominated by wage labour, property relations, and value accumulation. Amidst all the profound historical shifts, the misery of employment remains constant: workers in Amazon’s warehouses – as contemporary a workplace as you could imagine – are subject to intense surveillance and control, with many too fearful of their productivity quotas to even use the bathroom. No joke: only recently, various companies have begun microchipping their workers to keep track of them better. The opportunity to vote for a black or female head of state, or for queers to marry or join the military, poses little threat to the operation of business as usual. If anything, it only strengthens the liberal paradigm, allowing people to convince themselves – despite the gap between rich and poor growing consistently worldwide, as well as each new day dragging us closer to the brink of ecological meltdown – that somehow things are actually getting better. Decades of alleged ideological progress, only to be met with the turning of a circle: the basic features of authoritarian society, at least as strong as they were a century ago.

Such is the impasse we’re faced with. Taken by itself, class struggle fails to account for the complexity of oppression, attempting to subsume each of its forms into the monolithic category of economic exploitation. Identity politics, on the other hand, breaks out of this formula, yet only by abandoning any semblance of a revolutionary perspective. Rather than collaborating to produce a tangible threat to the existent, therefore, all that class struggle and identity politics did was swap their problems. Both trends offer their own vital insights, but neither charts the possibility of new worlds altogether – not even close.

[itty-clover]

To really get to the root of why I advocate socialism, and revolutionary scientific socialism, at that, as the only available or practicable root towards a solution to the question of trans liberation, we have to consider the fundamentally irreconcilable contradiction between the system of reproduction of labour under capitalism and the conditions of life present in being transgender.  As transgender people, we pose a real and significant threat to the ideology necessary for the reproduction of labour under capitalism.  This is a system that divides labour according to primary and secondary sex characteristics, and as transgender people, we cannot be neatly incorporated into this system, as we, by our very nature, cannot fulfill the roles expected of us because of our possession of particular primary and secondary sex characteristics and our relationship to that fact.  We are expected to fill the role of men due to our possession of a penis or the role of a woman due to our possession of a vagina.  Even more complicated problems arise if we possess ambiguous genitalia, i.e., are intersex.  This division of labour into one category of people expected to do the bulk of wage labour and another expected to do the bulk of social reproductive labour is not something that we can be integrated into.  For us to live, truly live, equally and fully, we must abolish these relations of social reproduction, but the capitalist class will not give up this system willingly and without a fight, a real, violent fight, which they are engaging in right now against us but that we, due to our isolation and ideological confoundment, are not waging in turn.  In order for us to be free, we must abolish the relations of production that facilitate our oppression, and in fact make that oppression necessary, in service to the interests of the capitalist class.  In short, our bodies and our relationships to our bodies are incompatible with capitalism, and the capitalist class will not relinquish their control of the means of production without a prolonged and violent struggle.

[transmutationisms]

omg more meillassoux opinions, please? do you have any recommendations of critiques of his work to read alongside his books?

this essay sums up my critique of meillassoux:

In engaging this burgeoning new materialist paradigm, my aims are strategic and critical. By positing the contemporary separation of the mental and material as a structural feature of capitalism, I seek to offer a counter-narrative and corrective to what I take as a crippling lacuna at the core of the new materialism paradigm: the absence of any account of the division of the mental and material as itself situated upon the terrain of social struggle or antagonism. That is, I argue that in attending to the relationship between thought and world through ontological speculation, new materialist theorists tend to hold a voluntarist notion of the scope and scale of politics. At stake is the way we theorize the conditions for social struggle today. This essay sets out to assess the politics that emerges from out of new materialist theories by outlining three exemplary new materialist attempts to posit an epistemic escape from the prison house of social constructivism: those of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad. This is a choice of thinkers predicated upon the relatively varied array of theoretical strategies for thinking a world beyond the limits of social constructions they represent.3 Yet despite these differences, I will show that these theories are plagued by conceptual and political voluntarism. In the process of my account, I seek to pose another materialist elucidation of the relation between the mental and material, its impulse drawn from a thinker who himself claimed the mantle of materialism in his own time. In the Grundrisse, Marx frames my claim in the following terms: It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and their active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour to capital. (Marx, 1993: 489, emphasis added)

i still think he's incredibly fun to read and probably imprinted on him a little because he was the first serious challenge to the post-kantian transcendentalist hellscape that i read. he is also just an extremely elegant writer (i find this to be the case in both french and english) and if nothing else is a case study in rhetoric. i believe his father was an academic marxist so it's not really surprising this is the kind of shit he ends up doing but like it's literally fun. i honestly wonder if he would ever write fiction because he clearly does have opinions on it lol. true xsf has never been tried before &c &c

[fatehbaz]

[In] the making and unmaking of amphibious urban modernity in Recife in the Northeast of Brazil [...] the transformation of the city was predicated on [...] [a] notion of whiteness that required the enclosure of wet, amphibious space to make dry land. [...] Racialised groups - of black, indigenous, and mixed heritages - and the houses, marshlands, and mangroves where they lived, were subject to eradication [...]. [F]rom the 1920s to 1950s, during the rise to hegemony in Brazil of [a particular form of nationalism,] [...] [the] idea's heartland [was] the Northeast. This period gave birth to Brazilian urban modernity [...]. [F]orests, wetness, and the spectre of commonly held land were understood as threats to whiteness and its self-association with order, purity [...]. To answer the question of why the racial division of nature was so important, [...] turn to the hygienic, boundary-making practices of the Brazilian Estado Novo [...] [and its] eugenic visions [...].

Nature is deeply imbricated in the processes of white supremacy [...]. Recife is one of the largest cities in Brazil, and one of the oldest. [...] Recife is also a centre of Brazilian black culture [...]. One of the key sites in Brazil's slave and sugar trades [...], the city was [...] [a] hub. Many of these people lived in what came to be called mocambos, a word that designated an informal dwelling, but came to mean much more. The population of the mocambos included not only black Brazilians, but sertanejos from the backlands, black and indigenous caboclos, and others [...]. Enclosure was the crucial mechanism of this division.

---

The Recifense geographer Josué de Castro contended that the mangroves were a kind of commons [...]. Zélia de Oliveira Gominho (2012) characterises the city's transformation [from 1920 to 1950] through the oscillation between its twin faces of “mucambópolis” and Veneza Americana (the Venice of the Americas). [...]

Mocambos were seen as [...] the place where exploited labour was kept out of sight. [...] They were also [...] the inheritance [...] of the quilombo - the community of escaped slaves. [...] Gilberto Freyre was perhaps the single most influential figure in producing this defining national myth in Brazil. In 1936, he wrote a book on the Mucambos do Nordeste [...]. Josué de Castro wrote very differently about the mangroves and mocambos. [...] He analysed Recife as “amphibious”: built half in and half out of the water [...]. When Josué de Castro [...] [wrote] in the early 1930s, the city was in the midst of political turbulence. As land values increased, the city expanded, and [...] [oppressive] politics intensified [...].

---

With the installment of the [...] [oppressive] Estado Novo regime in 1937, and its project of creating a “new man,” hygienist modernisation gathered speed. In July 1939, the proto-fascist administration [...] of Agamenon Magalhães, put in place by Getúlio Vargas' repressive Estado Novo, launched the Liga Social Contra o Mocambo (Social League Against the Mocambo, LSCM).

The League emerged out of a tellingly named “Crusade” against the mocambos. [...] Mocambos were characterised as repellent, unhygienic, and dangerous: “the mocambo which repels. The mocambo which is the tomb of a race … a sombre landscape of human misery … which mutilates human energy and annuls work [...].

The LSCM couched its civilisational, modernising mission in the conjuncture of techno-scientific discourses of medicine and planning with clear eugenic tones [...]. [T]he LSCM commissioned a fresh census of the 45,000 mocambos in the city. They brought the mocambos/mangroves into being as objects of knowledge on behalf of the economic elite and local, national, and international capital. In the 1923 census in Recife, “of 39,026 dwellings surveyed, 51.1% were considered ‘deficient’ mocambos.” [...]

---

These were the decades of the embranquecimento of the Brazilian population through public policies of immigration, miscegenation, and sterilisation [...]. This white supremacist ideology was inseparably a politics of nature. Magalhães wrote:

The idle life, the life that the income of the mocambos provides, is a life without restlessness and without greatness. It is a life of stagnant water. … [that] generates in its breast the venom of larvae, which are the enemies of life. Enemies of life, as are the mocambos and the sub-soil of cities, where the polluted waters contaminate pure waters, which come from the deepest layers of the earth. (Magalhães, 1939c, n.p.)

---

Attempts to “cleanse” the city functioned through a distinct process: aterramento, the making of land. [...]

Or as 1990s mangue beat [mangrove beat] musicians [...] put it, “the fastest way also to obstruct and evacuate the soul of a city like Recife is to kill its rivers and fill up its estuaries” [...]. This racial division of nature - in alliance with, bound up with, a racial division of space - facilitated the production of spacialised white supremacy.

---

All text above by: Archie Davies. "The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume 46, Issue 2, pages 270-283. First published 29 November 2020. At: doi dot org slash 10.1111/tran.12426 [Bold emphasis and paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for teaching, commentary, criticism purposes.]

[feministdragon]

"Obviously, it is not enough to say that all women are exploited and oppressed by men. There is not only the hierarchical division between the sexes; there are also other social and international divisions intrinsically interwoven with the dominance relation of men over women. That means the feminist movement cannot ignore the issues of class, or the exploitative international division of labour, and imperialism. On the other hand, the old argument, put forward by scientific socialists, that the ‘woman question’ is a secondary contradiction and belongs to the sphere of ideology, the superstructure or culture, can no longer be upheld to explain reality for women, particularly since everywhere the feminist rebellion was sparked off around the issue of violence.

The unresolved questions concern the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism, in other words, the relationship between women’s oppression and exploitation and the paradigm of never-ending accumulation and ‘growth’, between capitalist patriarchy and the exploitation and subordination of colonies.

These are not academic questions. They concern every woman in her everyday life, and the feminist movement in its political goals and existence. If we are unable to find plausible answers to these questions, the danger arises that the feminist rebellion may be co-opted by the forces that only want to continue the destructive model of capital accumulation and which need the vitality of this movement to feed the slackening ‘growth’ process."

...

"In the course of time, it became clear to me that the confusions in the feminist movement worldwide will continue unless we understand the ‘woman question’in the context of all social relations that constitute our reality today, that means in the context of a global division of labour under the dictates of capital accumulation. The subordination and exploitation of women, nature and colonies are the pre­ condition for the continuation of this model.

The second thing which became clear was the realization that women in their struggle to regain their humanity have nothing to gain from the continuation of this paradigm . Feminists everywhere would do well to give up the belief expressed by scientific socialism that capitalism, through its greed for never-ending accumulation or ‘growth’, has created the preconditions for women’s liberation, which then can be realized under socialism. Today, it is more than evident that the accumulation process itself destroys the core of the human essence everywhere, because it is based on the destruction of women’s autarky over their lives and bodies. As women have nothing to gain in their humanity from the continuation of the growth model, they are able to develop a perspective of a society which is not based on exploitation of nature, women and other peoples."

Patriarchy Accumulation On a World Scale, Maria Mies, p1-2

the pdf of this book

[communist-manifesto-daily]

The Communist Manifesto - Part 2

[ ◁ First | ◃Prev | Table of Contents | Next ▹ ]

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune*: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

* This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition] “Commune” was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

[ ◁ First | ◃Prev | Table of Contents | Next ▹ ]

[thevividgreenmoss]

Capital socially binds, represses and harnesses the material available for production including labour power before it engages it. The social category of control as such and the power platforms attendant upon the actual or ideological standing of the working classes precede the formation of prices. Making the Arab working classes more insecure, more vulnerable in the forms of their political organisation, means more profits accruing to central capital--in one facet of this one may envisage that the power-setting influences prices. The pittance spent in money form on control or destabilisation, whether it is the financing of Islamic fundamentalism or the US aid to Egypt, generates value for capital by the degree to which prices of Third World resources fall below value or, more significantly, the degree to which capital exercises control over value-forming processes. By tearing apart old ways of maintaining a living, inflating the ranks of the unemployed and driving people into poverty, capital inexpensively re-engages in production non-money assets (human beings) that had been disengaged by mass unemployment. (Of course, the same measures apply to all other resources-since to the imperialist, Arab working-class people are one more commodity to be devalued). Moreover, the images of dying Arab children, the cause of whose misery is assigned to cultural and identity politics, by 'demonstrating' that Arabs are culturally and nationally inferior, boost racism-laced nationalisms in the centre. Absurd scarcity and lifeboat theories bringing the Third World poor to First World safe havens acquire momentum and ideologically bear the weight of capitalist dynamics. The function of these campaigns is to conceal the fact that wars and their consequences in famines and chronic hunger are necessary to reproduce the ideological tools of capital. Deaths in Third World wars, famines and hunger are advertisements for imperialism (Avramidis 2005).

More often than not, diplomatic means of resolving conflicts are doomed to fail in the AW. None worked in the past unless the peace terms exacted more of a human toll than war. Egypt after the Camp David Accords is a case in point: after thirty years of growth, one out of three of its children is malnourished (IRIN 2010). That the empire will not take yes for an answer is not haphazard; war is necessary to circuitously reproduce the international division of labour attendant on accumulation by militarisation. Thus, despite the embargo on Iraq acting as a slow-motion WMD and the capitulation of its leadership, Iraq had to be invaded to crush even its remaining traces of sovereignty (Gordon 2010). Those on the Left who argue that the differences in wages across the globe are primarily derived from degrees of technological advancement, relative to differences in productivity (relative surplus value), forget that productivity in an integrated world is indivisible and that criminally wasted lives have gone into what is being produced. Accumulation and productivity do not start in the factories of the West; they begin in the Congo and Iraq. The concept of socially necessary labour and the reproduction of labour power presumes that wages are not exclusively determined by biological factors but by historical and sociological ones (Emmanuel 1972). The formation of value is an integrated historical process, in which all social moments participate in the realisation of the commodity, and not a statistical exercise accounting for distorted or power-brokered prices. The politics of imperialist aggression grapple with the growing rift between the US-led capital's bloated share of private appropriation and the redistribution of value to a complex global production structure (the shares of other imperialists). In the age of financialisation, this rift is magnified by the fetish incarnate in the dollar-based price system. The more acute the contradictions, the more developing nations have to be stripped of their security before they are deprived of political will and national resources.

Wars trace the outer limits of encroachment in the accumulation process. They are entwined with expansion by commodity realisation-- that is, the process by which commodities are brought to market and sold to realise their value. Wars also pre-empt revolutionary consciousness because they delink progressive reforms from their intermediation in revolution. In view of labour's abundance, those who perish in war reduce the number of labourers by so little relative to the huge total (an insignificant reduction of the labour-power commodity) such that they reduce the value of those remaining alive. When central-nation working classes are estranged from their own humanity (the alienated majority vote for the war machine) and under the incessant barrage of scaremongering associated with 'terrorism' and alleged resource scarcity, their initial attitude of compassion for and solidarity with Third World dead or skeletally starved people transmutes into its opposite--- deepening nationalisms and other identity forms to the benefit of capital. It is this ideological input of war distorting revolutionary consciousness that lays the ground for new wars. That wars are justified by fabricated information time and again is not a series of gaffes or mistakes; it is, as often said, a systemic calculus of mass crimc. Just as wars contribute to the reproduction of social conditions under capitalism, so also they buttress the ideology of capital, which must be continuously reproduced and is never separate from the expropriation of Arab formations. The epitome of war-making ideology was justifying what is utterly unjustifiable under the Charter of the United Nations--launching a war to protect 'a way of life'. During the ideological and media whip-up for the Second Gulf War, the distortion of humanist consciousness became so profound that some ideologues went so far as to quote Hegel's philosophy out of context in a manner that resembled the language of Mein Kampf.

Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment

[jacobwren]

"How should we imagine a capitalism which is not dependent, for the sake of social cohesion, on a bloated credit system that promises to underwrite unlimited consumption standards of which everybody knows by now that they are not generalizable? A credit system, for that matter, whose promises seem increasingly irredeemable and that ever fewer creditors believe in. These questions have been addressed in various ways by conservatives, like Meinhard Miegel, or progressives such as Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. But we know – or ought to – that a break with the self-destructive mass consumerism that currently has the world in its grip will only be possible if greater sacrifices can be extracted from those who have profited most from the recent transformations of the capitalist economy, as opposed to those who have seen their life chances decline during decades of liberalization and globalization. A democratic departure from the life-threatening sedation provided by cheap-money capitalism would require new solutions to the problems which the latter has only worsened. Consumer credit as compensation for stagnating wages and a growing gap between top and bottom could become superfluous if all earned a decent wage. Better living and working conditions for the great majority would alleviate the need for yet more consumer toys to compensate for status anxiety, competitive pressure and increasing insecurity. This will not be possible without a revitalized trade-union movement that would help to end the ever more destructive exploitation of the human capacity to work and nurture families. At the same time, debt financing of public expenditure would have to be replaced by more effective taxation of the incomes and assets of liberalization’s winners. States should no longer have to carry out the tasks mandated by their citizens for society as a whole with borrowed money, which then has to be repaid with interest to the lenders, who in turn bequeath what has remained of their wealth to their children. Only if the trend towards deepening social division – the signature of capitalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – were reversed would it be conceivable that modern society could free itself from the compulsion to assure domestic peace through the unchecked production of toxic assets to engineer synthetic growth. This theme is anything but new. What should worry us is not the fact that it suddenly occurred – or recurred – but that its democratic solution appears so impossible today that we shy away even from naming it, so as not to seem stuck in the past. ‘Just as ancient peoples had above all need of a common faith to live by, we have need of justice’, Emile Durkheim wrote in his seminal work on the division of labour. Since the end of the post-war era, it is all water under the bridge, much of which has flowed down the Hudson River, past the southern tip of Manhattan from where the world is governed these days. Trade unions are disappearing, capital listens only to presidents of central banks, not to political parties; and the money of the rich is everywhere and nowhere, gone in an instant when strapped tax states reach for it. We can only wonder what form of opiate of the people the profiteers of late capitalism will come up with, once the credit doping of the globalization era stops working and a stable dictatorship of the ‘money people’ has yet to be established. Or may we hope they will have run out of ideas?" - Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?