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EDITORIAL
This issue of Endnotes has been a long time com ing. Its
publ ication was delayed due to experiences and con
versations that compelled us to clarify our analyses, and
at times to wholly rework them. Many of the articles in
this issue are the products of years of discussion. Some
articles spilled over i nto such lengthy pieces that we
had to split the issue in two. Endnotes 4 will therefore
be forthcoming, not in another three years, but rather,
i n the n ext six months. H ere, by way of explanation
for the delay, we describe some of the q uestions and
quandaries that gave birth to this issue and the next.
1 N EW STR U G G LES
1
That said, the m i l ieu of which we form a part - the so- 1 R.S., 'The Present
called comm u nising cu rrent - did offer an analysis of Moment', SIC 1
struggles, which we fou n d attractive. (November 2011), 96.
Endnotes 3 2
:i.ctivism ) were to be overcome in a retu rn to basics :
:i.bandoning a class position, from within the workplace,
Nas going to be possible only as the generalised over
::om ing of class society.
Editorial 3
2 S U RPLUS POPU LAT I O N S
Endnotes 3 4
3 TH E G E N D E R D I ST I N C T I O N
Since the publication of our last issue, "Comm u nisation 2 Benjam i n Nays, ed.,
and the Abolition of Gender" appeared in the anthology Communization and
Communization and its Discontents.2 This text was the its Discontents (Minor
product of a ripening debate with Theorie Communiste, Compositions 2011),
which has since turned a l ittle rotten. 219-236.
Editorial 5
and contrad iction were not clearly demarcated ( other Richard G u n n , 'Marx
wise it would be necessary to come u p with a d ifferent ism and Contrad iction'
contrad iction for every antagonism ) . Common Sense 15
(1994).
The point is that social antagonisms, in capital ist society,
are articulated and rearticulated in relation to capital 's
contradictory logic. As "The Log ic of Gender" demon
strates, i n this issue, gender i n capital ist societies is
constructed around the d isti nction of spheres, one of
which we cal l "directly market-med iated " and the other
"indirectly market-mediated". Th is d istinction is not sepa
rate from class society. I nstead, it is fundamental to the
production of value. The capital ist mode of production
could not exist without a d isti nction of spheres, which
until now has never been rigorously defined. I n this issue,
we devote ourselves to a clarification of concepts, to
understand ing the basis and transformation of the gen
der relation in capital ist society. Th is clarification allows
us to better g rasp the processes of de-natu ral isation of
gender - what B utler calls its troubling - as well as the
complex dynamics, first, of gender's ongoing deconstruc
tion (the loosening of com pulsory heterosexuality, the
possibility of affirming gender-queer and trans-identities)
and, second, gender's constant re-imposition, especially
in l i g ht of the recent crisis and austerity m easu res.
4 N O N - CLASS I D ENTITI ES
Endnotes 3 6
workers (wh ite, male, citizen) over others with i n the
class. Equal ly, that pushed the struggles of those "oth
ers" into channels where they ended u p repl icating the
prod u ctivist perspective of t h e workers' move m e n t :
w o m e n demanded that their labours i n the home b e
recogn ised a s produ ctive, v i a the wage; formerly colo
n i sed popu lations u n d e rtook their own programs of
heavy industrialisation, with all that that entailed, namely,
a vast toll of h uman suffering.
Editorial 7
On the one hand, many proletarians lived out large parts
of their l ives outside of the capital-labour relation, lan
guishing in the home as housewives. On the other hand,
i n workplaces, capital profited from the employment of
workers who were not formally free (or not entirely so) :
slaves, " natives", the undocumented, women. I n the
cou rse of the twentieth centu ry, " race" continued to
play a major role i n determ i n i n g who would be formally
free, who would get work, and especially, who would get
"good" work when it was available. Processes of raciali
sation and abjection have been intensified - though also
transformed - during this period of the disintegration of
the capital-labour relation, when many proletarians find
themselves excluded, partially or ful ly, from that relation.
5 STRATEG I C V I S I O N S
Endnotes 3 8
action".5 For Toscano, there is a lot of preparatory work 5 Alberto Toscano, 'Now
to do: for example, we need to figu re out how to read and Never', i n Noys,
the log istical infrastructure, not as something that needs ed., Communization
to be torn down, but rather, as a site of "anti-capitalist and its Discontents, 98.
solutions".6 Since the com m u n ising current lacks a posi
tive conception of how to get out of capital ist society 6 Alberto Toscano,
(that is, other than abstractly negat i n g that society) 'Logistics and
Toscano has called it an " intransitive politics", and he Opposition', Mute
l i n ks this perspective, symptomatically, to a lack of a 3:2 (January 2012).
strategic t h i n king.7 With this label, Toscano el ides two
ideas, one concern i n g the transition from revo l ution 7 Toscano, 'Now and
to comm u n ism (the "transitional state") , and the other Never', 87-
concerning the transition from present-day struggles to
revolution ("transitional demands") . With respect to the 8 I bid., gg.
latter, it is of course true that the revolution will not fal l
from the sky. I t wil l not come from nowhere and suddenly
be everywhere. If revolution is to emerge at all, it will do
so only i n response to the l i m its that actual struggles
confront, i n the cou rse of their u nfolding. The rupture
must be a produced rupture. That is the "transitive" posi
tion that Endnotes has put forward si nce its i nception.
Editorial 9
is not simply the site of a spasmodic reaction to capital's 9 Toscano sees our per
i m positions, but the place where the contradictions of spective as abstract
capital ism play out, i n ways that are i m manent to prole (in its 'intransigence'
tarian experience. It is only i n the course of intensifying and concern with
struggles that the strategic q uestions of an era can be 'theoretical purity'),
asked and answered, i n a concrete way ; only here that but it is Toscano who
tactics, strategies and forms of organisation - and even poses the problem
the meaning of comm u nism itself - can take concrete of revolution i n an
shape. Strategies emerge as responses to the specific abstract manner, by
l i m its of a sequence of struggles. They cannot be im suggesting that a so
posed from the outside.9 l ution could be found
to strategic problems
6 CO M M U N IST PROSP ECTS i n abstraction from
the concrete ways in
Endnotes 3 t h u s tries to fash ion tools with which to which those problems
talk about present-day struggles - i n their own terms, emerge in the course
with all their contradictions and paradoxes brought to of actual strugg les.
light, rather than b u ried. The q uestion remains, h ow do
those struggles relate to revolution? Here, we insist:
revolution is a possible outcome of struggles today, but
only as comm u n isation. That's because the revolution
will have to be the abolition of the valu e form, for that
form is no longer a viable way to organise our existence.
D i rect h uman labour accou nts for a d i m i n ishing portion
of social produ ction, while an i m posing mass of tech
nolog ies and i nfrastructures, destroying the ecological
conditions of h uman life on earth, confronts us as the
primary force in social l ife. Yet the buying and sel l i n g of
labour stil l structu res every aspect of l ives, and capital
remains our main mode of i nteraction with one another.
H ow m i g ht we actually g et on without it? There are no
easy answers - especially considering that the repro
d uction of each of us, today, depends on a prod uct ive
apparatus fl u n g far across the continents. The q u es
tion of revolution is nonetheless sti l l posed - abstractly,
speculatively, but necessarily so - by the contradictory
character of the central relation on which society pivots.
And this question can only begin to approach concretion
i n struggles themselves.
Endnotes 3 10
THE HOLDING PATTERN
The ongoing crisis and the
class struggles of 2011-2013
12
I n 2007, fol lowing the deflation of the housing bubble 1 On the long-term
that had held it aloft, the world economy p l unged into decl ine, see below,
a deep d epressio n . H o meow n e rs fou n d themselves p. 24, as well as
underwater. Firms were inundated. U nemployment shot 'Misery and Debt' i n
upwards. Most d ramatically, the financial architecture of Endnotes 2 .
the world economy nearly collapsed. Pirouetting their
way onto the scene, government m i nisters u ndertook
coordinated action to prevent a repeat of the 1 930s.
Shortly thereafter, those same m i n isters were forced to
i mplement austerity i n order to assu re bondholders that
they remained in control of the slow-motion catastrophe.
Public employees were sacked ; those that persisted
saw t h e i r wages slas h e d . Schools, u n iversities a n d
hospitals faced massive cuts. Meanwhile, i n spite o f
the crisis, food and o i l prices remained elevated. U n
employment, too, remained stu b bornly h i g h , a n d youth
unemployment above all. Final ly, despite the best efforts
of politicians - or perhaps, precisely because of those
efforts - some national econo m i es fou n d themselves
m i red i n not one or two but three separate recessions,
i n the space of a few years.
1 T H E M OVE M E NT O F SQUAR E S
Endnotes 3 14
the slum-dwellers and the new homeless. Nevertheless,
besides chas i n g a few ageing d i ctators d own from
their perches, the movement of squares achieved no
lasting victories. Like the 2008- 1 0 wave of protests,
this new form of struggle proved u nable to change the
form of crisis management - let alone to challenge the
dominant social order.
Endnotes 3 16
I n the twentieth centu ry, proletarians were able to u n ite
under the flags of the workers' movement, with the goal
of rebu ilding society as a cooperative commonwealth .
The coordinates o f t h i s older form o f l iberation have been
thoro u g h ly scrambled. The i n d u strial workforce was
formerly engaged i n building a modern worl d ; it could
understand its work as having a pu rpose, beyond the
reproduction of the class relation. N ow, all that seems
ridiculous. The industrial workforce has been shrinking
for decades. The oil-automobile-industrial complex is not
building the world but destroying it. And since cou nt
less proletarians are employed i n dead-end service jobs,
they tend to see no purpose i n their work, besides the
fact that it allows them to "get by". Many proletarians
today produce l ittle more than the conditions of their
own domination. What prog ramm e can be put forward
on that basis? There is no section of the class that can
present its i nterests as bearing a u n iversal sign ificance.
And so, instead, a positive project would have to find its
way through a cacophony of sectional interests.
Ou r c o n t e n t i o n i s t h at the m o v e m e n t of s q u ares
t o o k this form for a reas o n . In essence - altho u g h
certainly not i n every manifestation - its struggle was
Endnotes 3 18
is a sym ptom of the inability of the state - in the face
of decades of slow g rowth and period ic crisis - to do
anything except to continue to temporise. That, it has
done, for now. Order reigns.
After recovering in 2 0 1 0 from two years of deep reces- 6 I n the us, unemploy-
sion, G D P-per-capita g rowth-rates in the high-income ment levels have
cou ntries began to decelerate i n 2 0 1 1 and 2 0 1 2.5 In fal len to 7.3 percent
the latter year, they grew at a meagre rate of 0. 7 percent. (in Autu m n 2013);
The recovery has been h istorically weak - the only rival, however, this fal l was
i n terms of the length and severity of this downturn, is only ach ieved through
the G reat Depression - and is weake n i n g further. I n a massive reduction
fact, i n t h e high-income countries a s a whole, G DP per i n the labour force
capita i n 2 0 1 2 was sti l l below its 2007 peak. That has partici pation rate
made it extremely d ifficult to red uce u n e m ployment (LFPR). The latter fel l
( especially g iven that, i n the i nteri m , labour productivity from 66 percent i n
has contin ued to rise ) . U nemployment levels peaked at 2007 to 63 percent
1 0 percent in the US and over 1 2 percent in the Euro in 2013. That's the
zone - they have hardly fallen to the present.6 I n some lowest LFPR, in the
hard-hit countries, unemployment is much higher. In mid US, si nce 1978. In
2 0 1 3, it continues to g row: in Cyprus, unemployment fact, 2000-2013 saw
levels h ave reached 1 7. 3 percent ; in Portugal, 1 7. 4 the fi rst sustained
More potentially explosive are recent developments in the 7 Statistics taken from
so-called emerging markets which seemed - for a moment 'Unem ployment in the
at least - to be capable of pulling the entire world economy Eu rozone', The Wash-
forward. N ow, all are slowing down. In Turkey and Brazil, ington Post, Aug ust
per-capita G DP growth-rates fell precipitously, in 201 2, to 11, 2013.
0.9 and 0 percent, respectively. The Chinese and Indian
juggernauts are also decelerating. In China - despite one a On surplus capital and
of the largest sti m u l u s programs i n world history - eco- surplus population,
nomic g rowth rates fel l , i n per capita terms, from 9.9 in s e e 'Misery a n d Debt'
2 0 1 0 to 7.3 in 2 0 1 2 . In Ind ia, g rowth rates fel l further, in Endnotes 2, and
from 9 . 1 i n 2 0 1 0 to 1 .9 i n 2 0 1 2 (the latter is I n d ia's figure 1 , opposite.
l owest per capita g rowth rate in over two d ecades) .
Endnotes 3 20
surplus capital
arbitrage
investment employment
Figure 1: Surplus capital and surplus population as disi ntegrating circu its of capital and labour
which, i n the last centu ry, were i n Latin America i n the 9 See Richard Duncan,
mid-1 970s, Japan in the mid- 1 980s, and East Asia in the The Dollar Crisis
mid- 1 9 9 0s. In the lead u p to this crisis there were the (Wiley 2005) Chapter
US stock market and housing b u bbles of 1 9 9 8-2007.9 7, 'Asset Bubbles and
Banki ng Crises'.
As US stock market i ndexes and house prices c l i m bed
ever higher, individuals with assets felt richer. The val ue
of their assets rose towards the sky. Rising asset val
ues then led to a long-term decline in the savings rate.
And so - i n s p ite of decl i n i n g rates of i nvest m e nt, a
long-term slowdown in economic g rowth-rates, and an
i ntense i m miseration of the workforce - bubble-d riven
consumption kept the economy ticking over, and not only
in the US. The US economy sucked in 1 7.8 percent of
the rest of the world's exports i n 2007. US i mports were
equivalent to 7 percent of the rest of the world's total
G DP i n 2007. Suffice to say: it was a huge sti m u l u s to
the world economy. But debt-based consu mption in the
US was not allocated equally across the US population.
Proletarians increasingly find that they are superfluous
to the capitalist production p rocess; the demand for
Endnotes 3 22
has opened u p a so-called "spending gap". The private 13 See Richard Koo,
economy would shrink if the government did not step i n 'OE2 has transformed
t o fi l l that gap. T h e p urpose o f fiscal sti m u l u s today is commodity markets
not to restart g rowth. That would only happen if people i nto liquidity-driven
spent the money that the sti m u l u s put i n their pockets. markets', Equity Re
I n stead, households are using that money to pay down search, May 17, 2011
debts. I n the present crisis, the point of state spending
is to buy time - to g ive everyone a chance to reduce
debt-to-asset ratios without causing deflation . 1 3 By low
ering asset val ues, deflation would make those ratios
even worse, causing a debt-deflation spiral.
Table 1: GDP per capita percentage growth rates for selected countries, 2008-2013
the Arab Spri n g . 1 4 At the same time, OE also gave rise 14 M. Lag i, K.Z. Bertrand,
to m assive fore i g n -exchange carry trades: investors Y. Bar-Yam, 'The Food
the world over have been borrowing at extremely low Crises and Political
interest rates i n the US, i n order to i nvest in "emerg i n g Instabil ity in North
markets". That strengthened some low-income countries' Africa and the Middle
c u rrencies, severely weake n i n g what had previously East', 2011 (arXiv.org).
been vigorous export mach ines. States i n low-income
cou ntries counteracted that weakening with huge pro
grams of fiscal sti m u l u s (partly relyi ng on the i nflows
of foreign capital to do so) . That sti m u l u s explains why
low-income cou ntries were able to recover so q u ickly
from the Great Recession, compared to the high-income
countries. But they recovered - not on the basis of a real
increase in economic activity - but rather, through the
sort of bubble-fueled construction booms that pulled
Endnotes 3 24
2007 2013 change
I reland 25 122 +97
Greece 107 179 +72
Iceland 29 92 +63
J apan 183 245 +62
Spain 36 92 +56
Portugal 68 122 +54
U nited Kingdom 44 94 +50
U nited States 66 108 +42
N etherlands 45 74 +29
France 64 93 +29
I taly 103 131 +27
D enmark 28 52 +24
Finland 35 57 +22
N ew Zealand 17 38 +21
Canada 67 87 +21
Australia 10 28 +18
Czech Republic 28 45 +17
B elgium 84 100 +16
Germany 65 80 +15
A ustria 60 74 +14
Table 2: Government debt as a percent of GDP for selected OECD countries, 2007-13
the rich cou ntries along in the 2000s. N ow, with the
possibil ity that OE will come to an end, it is not only the
weak recovery i n the US, but apparently also the bubble
fueled recovery in the emerg i n g markets, that has been
put in danger. States will have to keep spend ing to keep
the temporary fixes they've put in place from falling apart.
And so, at the start of this crisis, debt levels were already
much higher than they were in 1 929. For example, on the
eve of the Great Depression, US public debt was val ued
at 1 6 percent of G DP; ten years later, by 1 93 9 , it rose
to 44 percent. By contrast, on the eve of the present
crisis, i n 2007, the US public debt was already valued
at 6 2 percent of G D P. It reached 1 00 percent just fou r
years later. 1 5 That's why rising debt levels have raised the
spectre of default, throughout the high-income countries.
Endnotes 3 26
These two pressu res - to spend in order to stave off
deflation and to cut spending in order to stave off de
fault - are equally i m placable. Thus, austerity is not only
the capital ist class attacki n g the poor. Austerity has
its basis in the overg rowth of state debt, which is now
reaching an i mpasse (as it had i n the low-i ncome coun
tries i n the early 1 9 80s) .
Endnotes 3 28
We can't rule out the possibility that they will be right:
after all, a massive accu m u lation of d e bts - held by
corporations, households and states, and always in
novel ways - has deferred the onset of a new depres
sion over and over agai n, for decades. Who is to say
whether the present pattern will be maintained only for
a few more weeks, or for a few years?
3 T H E R ETU R N O F T H E S O C I A L QU ESTI O N
That's why austerity never means just tem porary red uc
tions i n social spending i n the m idst of an economic
downturn. On the contrary, social-spending programs
have not only been cut back; they are being gutted or
done away with entirely. I n many cou ntries, the crisis is
being used as a lever with wh ich to destroy long-held
rig hts and entitlements, including the right to organise.
And everywhere, the crisis has served as an excuse to
further central ise power in the hands of tech nocrats,
acting i n the service of the most powerful states (the
US, G ermany) . These manoeuvres are not merely cycli
cal adjustments in response to an economic downturn.
Endnotes 3 30
They are about restoring profits in the most d i rect way 1& Bru n o Astarian, 'Crisis
poss i b l e : s uppressing wages. The Keynesian notion Activity and Com
that, if states were acti ng rational ly, they could some m u n isation', Hie Salta
h ow convince capital not to press its advantage, i n the (hicsalta-com m u n isa
cou rse of the downturn, is the pu rest ideology. tion.com).
Endnotes 3 32
Of c o u rse, s l u m-dwe l l e rs were neither t h e o n ly n o r 18 Pau l Mason, Why
even the principal constituents of this new wave. Who It's Still Kicking Off
else located themselves in the squares? Paul Mason, Everywhere (Verso
a B B C journal ist who was on the g round for most of 2012), 61.
the movements, identified three class fractions, which
all played key roles in the 2 0 1 1 movement of squares : 19 See 'A Rising Tide
g rad uates with no future, the youth underclass, and Lifts All Boats', in this
organised workers . 1 8 It is the first i n this l ist - that is, issue.
indebted graphic designers, impoverished administrative
assistants, unpaid interns and, in North Africa, graduates
on long waiting lists for bu reaucratic jobs - who take
the centre stage in Mason's accou nt. However, looki ng
back on 2 0 1 1 , it is apparent that the strugg les of these
disaffected graduates only became explosive when they
were i nvaded and overwhelmed by the poor. I n Egypt,
as we saw, the January protests took off because the
you ng activists started their marches i n the slums. The
same was true in Eng land : a key turning point i n the
2 0 1 0 student protests was the entry of the young and
restless, who came out i n force to protest the d iscon
tinuation of the Education Maintenance Al lowance . 1 9
Endnotes 3 34
that broke the protest movements' strength : hence, the 22 Jbid., 57 and 'A Rising
disj u nction between the "black bloc" tearing u p Oxford Tide Lifts All Boats'.
Street and the TUC demonstrators massing in Hyde Park,
for the biggest (and most ineffectual) trade-union demo in
British h istory. 22 Hence also, we m i g ht add, the strained 23 In Spain and Portugal,
relation between the I LWU longshoremen's union on the where the gen-
West Coast of the U n ited States and Occupy. From the eral strikes generated
first port blockade on November 2 against the repression more momentum, it
of Occupy Oakland, to the second blockade on December seems to have been
1 2 in defence of the union in Longview, tensions rose as precisely because
both sides feared co-optation. Things played out similarly the organ ising was
in G reece. Partly in response to the Syntagma Square not dominated by the
occupiers and other social movements, the Greek unions u n ions, i nstead taki ng
annou nced one-day general strikes. But i n spite of their the form of blockades
high t u rnout those stri kes had only a m i n imal i mpact, i nvolving n u m erous
and this im pact d i m i n ished over time. In response, the class fractions.
u n ions increased the frequency of the general strikes,
at t i m es exten d i n g t h e m to 48 h o u rs i n stead of the 24 I bid, 2t
usual 24; yet the strikes remained auxiliaries to the mass
demonstrations and riots taking place on the same days,
in which u n ion stewards were reduced to bystanders.23
A m o n g t h e protesters, t h e re w e re t h o s e w h o ex
p e r i e n c e d t h e c r i s i s as a n exc l u s i o n from s e c u re
employment: students, you ng precarious workers, ra
cial ised m i n orities, etc. But among those who were
a l ready i n c l u de d in s e c u re e m p loyment, the c r i s i s
was experienced a s one more th reat to their sector.
I n short, "youth" were locked out of a system that had
fai led them ; whereas the organised workers were con
cerned with trying to preserve what they knew to be a
very frag ile status quo ante. That status quo ante had
to be preserved - not merely agai nst the onslaug hts of
the austerity state, but also against the hordes of stu
dents and the poor who were trying to force their way
in. That became clear in the aftermath of the protests,
when, continuing an earl ier trend, "youth" were easily
rebranded as "immigrants", stealing jobs from deserving
citizens. Here, we are concerned with the q u estion of
the content of the struggle. But what were protesters
fighting for, in 2 0 1 1 ?
4 TO B E D E L I V E R E D F R O M T H E B O N DAG E O F C O R R U PT I O N
Cairo and Tu nis, Istan bul and Rio, Madrid and Athens,
New York and Tel Aviv - a great cacophony of demands
was on d isplay in the occupied spaces of these cities.
But if one demand stood out, from among the many, it
was to put an end to "crony-capitalism". The shibboleth
of the occupiers was "corruption", to get money out
of politics was their goal. I n every square, one found
signs painted with d isgust : corrupt businessmen and
politicians had destroyed the economy. Under the cloak
of freeing up markets, they helped one another to the
Endnotes 3 36
spoils. Perhaps that clarifies some of the other generic 25 Neoli beral ism has
demands of the movements: demands for "democracy" also become a catch
and "equal ity" were precisely demands that everybody all term for an entire
count as one, in a world where some i n d ividuals clearly era, one that all-too
cou nted for m u ch more than others. easily conflates state
policy with economic
I n opposing corruption, the occupiers found themselves turbulence, d istract
taking up two m utually contrad ictory positions. ( 1 ) They ing from the capital ist
criticised neoli beral ism in terms of its own ideals: they tendencies that really
wanted to erad icate corruption - handouts for the cro un ite them.
nies - to establish a level playing field for the play of
market forces. At the same time, (2) they called for the
replacement of neol i beral ism with a more egalitarian
form of patronage: they wanted to red i rect government
patronage from the e l ites to the masses (a popular
bailout to replace the bailout of the banks) . It is worth
pausing to consider these demands - to try to fig u re
out what was behind them, and why their appeal was
so u n iversal, across the global movement of squares.
Endnotes 3 38
by the large-scale bribery of corrupt privatisation deals
and p u b l i c i nvestment p rojects - w h i c h flow to t h e
wealth iest c l ients. The fam ily m e mbers of d i ctators,
Gamal M ubarak above all, have become prime targets
of popu lar hatred, for that reason. The massive payouts
they receive look all the more egregious now that ( 1 ) the
state is supposed to be erad icating corruption, and (2)
those lower down are no longer i n on the game. This
is why neol i beral ism is about inequ ity: when old forms
of patronage are undone with the promise that new
sources of wealth will come to replace them, the fail u re
of that promise reveals the new as a version of the old
patronage, only now more eg reg ious, more unfair.
Endnotes 3 40
The target of this discourse were the u n ions, as well U n ited cam paign
as anyone d rawi n g state benefits. As we saw above, against corporate
however, the biggest handouts went not to the u n ions personhood, was also
or the ultra-poor, but q u ite visibly to the ultra-rich . They centrally about the
made out l i ke band its, w h i l e everyon e else suffered , undue i nfluence of
through not o n ly eco n o m i c crisis, but also austerity. corporations on the
To get money out of pol itics would m ean : to force the government. Such
u ltra-rich to take responsibil ity for their own actions. sentiments were
constantly on view at
2) At the same time, to the extent that venal politicians were occu py, e.g. 'I can't af
cutting supports for the poor while handing out money ford my own pol itician
to the rich, the occupiers demanded, not a levelling of so I made this sign:
the playing field, but rather, its tilting in their favour. State
patronage should be d i rected away from fat cats and
towards populist constituents ("the nation"). Occupiers
thus demanded a popular bailout, both out of a sense
of what is freq u ently called "social j u stice" and also
because, l i ke good Keynesian economists, they hoped
that a popular bailout would restore the economy to health.
Endnotes 3 42
with bri bes and kickbacks that are extracted from the
poor. Daily interactions with the pol ice thus reveal the
latter to be some of the last remaining beneficiaries of
the old corru ption. At the same time, in squeezing the
most vulnerable sections of the popu lation, the police
enforce the new corru ption : they q uash any resistance
to an increasingly wealthy, neo-patrimon ial elite.
The police do not only extract money from the poor; they
are also out for blood. The overgrowth of police forces
has everywhere been accompanied by a rise in arbitrary
pol ice violence and police kil l i n gs, often the trigger for
riots. Each time another body hits the ground, a section of
the population receives the message loud and clear: "you
no longer matter to u s ; be gone". Th is same message is
on display, in a more punctuated way, in the anti-austerity
protests. The police are there, on the front-l ines of the
conflict, making sure that the population stays in line and
does not complain too much about the i njustice of it all.
5 TH E P R O B L E M O F COM POS I T I O N
Endnotes 3 44
But the movement of squares was different because the 29 See Rust Bunnies
square occupations lasted for so long. For that reason, & Co., 'Under the
the occupiers were forced to take their own reproduc· Riot Gear' i n SIC 2,
tion as an object.29 The occupiers had to decide how to forthcom ing.
l ive together. Their abil ity to persist i n the squares - to
occupy for as long as it took to have an i mpact - was 30 G iorgio Agam ben, The
their only strength ; their leverage was that they refused Coming Community
to leave. They adopted forms of g overnance that they (Un iversity of M i n ne·
claimed were better than the ones on offer in this broke sota Press 1993), 85.
and broken society.
31 Ibid., 85.
It may be that the most relevant precursor to this feature
of the movements is to be found in a previous square 32 I bid., 86.
occupation, one that seems not to have been a d i rect
reference for the 2 0 1 1 protesters. That is Tiananmen 33 I bid., 85. The term
Square. Despite his simplifications, Italian philosopher is explained in the
G iorg io Agam ben captu red someth ing of the spi rit of book's opening
Tiananmen, in a way that is prescient of the 2 0 1 1 protest chapter.
movement. In The Coming Community, Agamben, speak·
ing of "a herald from Beij i n g ", characterises Tiananmen
as a movement whose generic demands for freedom
and democracy belie the fact that the real object of the
movement was to compose itself.30 The com m u n ity that
came together, in Tiananmen, was med iated "not by any
condition of belong i n g " nor " by the simple absence of
conditions", but rather, " by belonging itself".31 The goal
of the demonstrators was to "form a comm u n ity without
affirm ing an identity" where " h umans co-belong without
any representable condition of belonging".32
Endnotes 3 46
wasn't only that : individuals with all sorts of pre-existing 35The best accou nts of
affin ities tended to congregate in this or that corner of anti sexual harass-
the square. They set up their tents in circles, with the ment organ ising in
open flaps fac i n g i n wards. M o re i n s i d i o u s divisions Egypt can be fou n d in
emerged along gender lines. The participation of women the videos produced
i n the occupations took place under the threat of rape by the Mosireen col-
by some of the m e n ; women were forced to organise lective ( mosireen.org ) ,
for their self-defence.35 Such d ivisions were not d issolv- and the testi monies
able into a unity that consisted only of consensus-based translated on the
decision-making and collective cooking. facebook page of
OPANTISH (OPeration
Here's the t h i n g : the fact that the 2 0 1 1 movements ANTI-Sexual Harass-
p resented themselves as already u n ified, as al ready ment) .
beyond the determ i nations of a horrible society, meant
that t h e i r i nternal d ivisions were usually d isavowe d . 36 Because it went so
Because they were d isavowed, those d ivisions could m uch further than all
only appear as threats to the movement. That is not to the other movements,
say that i nternal d ivisions were simply suppressed : it Egypt was someth ing
was rather that d ivisions could only be resolved - within of an exception in
the confines of the squares - by forming another com this respect. After the
m ittee or promu lgating a new rule of action.36 massacres of Mo-
hamed Mahmoud St.,
The movement was forced to look i nward , i n this way, the division between
because it was barred from looking outward . Without the Brotherhood and
the capacity to move out of the squares and i nto soci everyone else was
ety - without beg i n n i n g to d ismantle society - there is clearly marked, with
no possibility of undoing the class relation on which the irreversible resu lts.
proletariat's i nternal divisions are based. The occupiers
were thus contained with i n the squares, as i n a pres
sure cooker. Class fractions that typically keep their
distance from each other were forced to recogn ise one
another and sometimes l ive together. I n the tensions
that resulted, the movement came u p against what we
call the problem of composition.
Endnotes 3 48
the composition problem from the opposite angle, to
begi n from the d ivisions with i n the proletariat, and on
that basis, to pose the q u estion of u n ity?
Endnotes 3 50
scour the globe in search of cheap labour. Once the
boom gave way to a long downturn, that i nteg ration
broke down.
6 C O N C L U S I O N : P O I NTS O F NO R ETU R N
Endnotes 3 52
mostly lost in false hopes of their own : they hope that
the state can be convinced to act rationally, to undertake
a more rad ical Keynesian stim u l us. The protesters hope
that capital ism can be forced to rid itself of cronies and
act in the interest of the nation. U n l i kely to abandon this
perspective - as long as it seems remotely plausible - anti
austerity struggles are themselves stuck in a holding
pattern. They confront the objectivity of the crisis only i n
t h e state's impassiveness in response t o their demands.
56
Wit h i n marxist fem inism we encounter several sets of In the broadest
b i nary terms to analyse g e n d e red forms of d o m i na strokes, marxist femi
tion under capital ism.' These include: prod uctive and nism is a perspective
reprod uctive, paid and u n paid, public and private, sex which situates gender
and gender. When considering the gender q uestion, oppression i n terms
we found these categories imprecise, theoretically defi of social reproduction,
cient and sometimes even m isleading. This article is an and specifically the
attempt to propose categories which will g ive us a better reprod uction of labour
g rasp of the transformation of the gender relation since power. Often it consid
the 70s and, more importantly, since the recent crisis. ers the treatment of
such topics i n Marx
The account that follows is strongly infl uenced by sys and in su bsequent
tematic d ialectics, a method that tries to understand marxist accou nts of
social forms as interconnected moments of a total ity.2 capital ism deficient,
We therefore move from the most abstract categories to and i n light of the
the most concrete, tracing the unfolding of gender as a 'unhap py marriage' and
" real abstraction". We are only concerned with the form 'dual systems' debates,
of gender specific to capital ism, and we assume from it general ly supports a
the outset that one can talk about gender without any 'single system' thesis.
reference to biology or prehistory. We beg in by defining It is also worth noti ng
gender as a separation between spheres. Then, having that this article is
done so, we specify the ind ividuals assigned to those meant to conti nue a
spheres. Importantly, we do not define spheres in spatial conversation from the
terms, but rather i n the same way Marx spoke of the 1970s, the 'domestic
two separated spheres of production and circu lation, labour debate,'
as concepts that take on a material ity. which turns on the
relationship between
The bi naries listed above appear to limit one's g rasp val ue and reproduction,
of the ways in w h ich t h ese spheres function at pre and which deploys
sent, as they lack h istorical specificity and promote a Marxist categories
transhistorical understand ing of gendered "domination", i n order to consider
which takes patriarchy as a feature of capitalism without whether 'domestic'
making it historically specific to capitalism. We hope and 'reprod uctive'
to delineate categories that are as specific to capital labour are prod uctive.
ism as "capital" itself. We arg u e that these b i naries
depend on category errors whose fau lts becom e clear 2 See 'Co m m u n isation
once we attempt to illuminate the transformations within and Val ue-Form
capital ist society s i n ce t h e 70s. Forms of d o m estic Theory', Endnotes 2
and so-called " reprod uctive" activities have become (April 2010).
1 PRO D U CTI O N / R E PR O D U C T I O N
Although Marx speaks of the specificities of the com- 4 Marx, Capital, vol. 1
mod ity labour-power,4 there are some aspects of this (MECW 35), chapter 6.
specification which req u i re more attention.
Endnotes 3 58
First, let us investigate the separation between labour
power and its bearer. The exchange of labour-power pre
supposes that this commodity is brought to the market by
its bearer. However, in this particular case, labou r-power
and its bearer are one and the same l iving person. Labour
power is the l iving, labouring capacity of this person, and
as such, it can not be detached from the bearer. Thus the
particularity of labour-power poses an ontological question.
Endnotes 3 60
t h e labou r-time req u isite for t h e prod uction of la- s Marx, Capital vol. 1
bour-power redu ces itself to that necessary for the (MECW 35), 18t
production of [its] means of subsistence.5
Endnotes 3 62
Because the existing concepts of production and re
p ro d u ct i o n are themselves l i mited, we need to fin d
more p recise terms t o designate these two spheres.
From now o n we w i l l use two very descriptive (and
therefore rather c l u n ky) terms to name them : (a) the
directly market-mediated sphere ( D M M) ; and (b) the
indirectly market-mediated sphere (I M M ) . Rather than
comi n g up with jargonistic neologisms, our aim is to
use these as placeholders and to concentrate on the
structural characteristics of these two spheres. I n the
cou rse of our p resentation (see Part 2) we will have to
add another set of descriptive terms (waged/unwaged)
to sufficiently elaborate the n uanced characteristics of
these spheres.
Endnotes 3 64
share domi nates the D M M sphere. Of course, mecha- 9 The gendered
nisation is also possible i n the I M M sphere, and there i nternalisation of this
have been many innovations of that sort. In this case, allocation of IMM
however, the aim is not to allow the production of more activities, what we will
use-val ues in a g iven amount of time, but to red u ce call 'naturalisation',
the time spent on a g iven activity, usually so that more obviously plays a
time can be dedicated to another I M M activity. When it large role in this. We
comes to the care of children, for example, even if some will look closer at this
activities can be performed more q u ickly, they have to mechan ism i n Part 4.
be looked after the whole day, and this amount of time
is not flexible (we will retu rn to this i n part 5) .
2 PAI D/ U N PAI D
Marxist fem i n ists have often added to the d isti nction 10 The fact that the
between production and reproduction another one: that wage itself does not
between paid and u n paid labo u r. Like many before us, come with a trai ning
we find these categories imprecise and we prefer to use manual is i nteresti ng.
the waged/u nwaged distinction. As we fu rther expl icate One may do with it 'as
the spheres of D M M and I M M in relation to that which one pleases' - particu
is waged or u nwaged, we elucidate the overlapping of larly those who are its
these spheres through the principle of social validation. d i rect reci pients - and
En route we will explore the ways in which the activities so it is not d istrib
in question can be called labo u r or not; that is, if they uted accord ing to the
qualify as labo u r or not in this mode of production. specificities of the
IMM sphere, i.e. the
The d ifference between paid/unpaid on the one side, size of one's fam ily,
and waged/unwaged on the other is b l u rred by the standard of living or
form of the wage, by what we m u st name the wage the responsible/
fetish. The wage itself is not the monetary equivalent to economical use of
the work performed by the worker who receives it, but a particular i ncome
rather the price for which a worker sells their labo u r stream. This point
power, equ ivalent to a sum of value that goes one way would req ui re more
or another into the process of their reproduction, as they attention, but for now
must reappear the next day ready and able to work. 1 0 it will suffice to say: it
H owever, it appears that those w h o work for a wage is just not the capital
have fu lfilled their social responsibility for the day once ist's responsibility.
the workday is over. What is not paid for by the wage
appears to be a world of non-work. Therefore, all "work"
appears to be paid tautologically as that which is work,
since one does not appear to get paid for that which
one does when not "at work". H owever, it is i m perative
to remember that Marx demonstrated that no actual
living labour is ever paid for i n the form of the wage.
Endnotes 3 66
O bviously, t h i s does not mean that the q u esti o n of 11 Clearly, all activities
whether an activity is waged or not is irrelevant. I ndeed, taki ng place in the
she who does not go to work does not get a wage. capital ist mode of
Wage-labour is the only way the worker can have access production are social,
to the means necessary for their own reproduction and but certai n reprod uc
that of their fam i ly. Moreover, val idation by the wage tive activities are
qual itatively affects the activity itself. When an activity rejected by its laws
that was previously u nwaged becomes waged, even as non-social, as they
when it is unproductive, it takes on some characteristics form an outside within
that resemble those of abstract labour. I ndeed, the fact the inside of the totality
that labou r-power is exchanged for a wage makes its of the capitalist mode
performance open to rational isations and comparisons. of production. This
In return, what is expected from this labour-power is at is why we use the
least the socially-average performance - including all its social/unsocial binary,
characteristics and intensity - regulated and correspond sometimes fou n d in
ing to the social average for this kind of labour ( clearly fem i n ist accou nts, with
the absence of value makes it impossible to compare it caution. A problem
with any other kind of labour) . An ind ividual who can not with the term is that it
del iver a proper performance i n the necessary amount can i m ply that 'repro
of time will not be able to sell their labou r-power in ductive labour' occurs
the future. Therefore, the wage val idates the fact that in a 'non-social sphere'
labo u r-power has been e m ployed adequately, whilst outside of the capital
u niversally recognising it as social labou r, whatever the ist mode of prod uction,
concrete activity itself m i g ht have been, or whether it in either a domestic
was "prod uctively" consumed. mode of prod uction
(see Christine Delphy,
Now we m ust consider this d istinction between the Close to Home: A
waged and u nwaged, i nsofar as it i ntersects with that Materialist Analysis of
between the I M M and D M M spheres. When we consider Women 's Oppression
those activities which are waged, we are referri ng to [H utch inson 1984]),
those w h i ch are social 1 1 ; those which are u nwaged or as a vestige of a
are the non-social of the social: they are not socially previous mode of
validated but are nonetheless part of the capitalist mode production. It can
of prod uction. I m portantly, however, these do not map even sometimes be
d i rectly onto the spheres of I M M and D M M . used to arg ue that it is
another mode of pro
We see that within t h e i nterplay o f these four terms there duction left unsocial
are some waged activities which overlap with those of because of its lack of
the I M M sphere : those organ ised by the state (the state rationalisation and that
Let us now turn things round one more time and look at 13 Marx provides a
what the wage buys ; that is, what is an element of the useful insight i nto the
wage, what constitutes the exchange-valu e of labo u r process of natu
power. The wage b uys t h e commod ities necessary ral isation: 'Increase of
for the reprod u ction of labou r- power, and it also b uys popu lation is a natu ral
services which participate in this reprod uction, whether power of labour for
d i rectly (by paying a private nanny, for example) or indi which noth ing is paid.
rectly (for example, by paying taxes for state-expenditure From the present
on education, which is part of the indirect wage) . These standpoi nt, we use
services, whether they are productive of val ue or not,1 2 the term natural
have a cost that is reflected in the exchange-value of power to refer to
labour-power: they imply, in one way or another, a deduc social power. All natu
tion from su rplus-val ue. ral powers of social
labour are themselves
What remains are the activities that are non-waged, historical prod ucts:
and that therefore do not increase the exchange-valu e Marx, Grundrisse
o f labou r-power. These are the non-social o f the social, (MECW 28), 327.
the non-labo u r of labo u r (see Addendu m 1 ). They are
cut off from social production ; they must not only appear
as, but also be non-labour, that is, they are naturalised. 1 3
They constitute a sphere w h o s e d issociation is nec
essary to make the production of valu e possible: the
gendered sphere.
Endnotes 3 68
In the next part we will finally turn to the ind ividuals who
have been assigned to this sphere. However, we should
first consider another binary: public/private.
Figure 1. A g raphical
representation of the
relation between the
DM M/I M M and waged/
unwaged spheres.
ADDE N D U M 1 : ON LABO U R
Many people use the category "public" to designate 14 For Marx, civil
the state sector. And marxist fem in ists often use the society - or what in
concept of the "private" sphere to designate everything most pol itical theory
with i n the sphere of the home. We find it necessary to is considered 'natu ral'
hold fast to the trad itional dichotomy of private/public society - stand s op
as that which separates the economic and the political, posed to the state.
civil society and the state, b o u rgeois i n d ividual and
citizen. 1 4 Prior to capital ism the term "private" referred
to the household, or oikos, and it was considered the
sphere of the economic. With the advent of the capital
ist era the private sphere moved outward beyond the
household itself.
Endnotes 3 70
j u ridical is the real abstraction of Right separated from ts See Marx, On the
the actual d ivisions and d ifferences constituting civil Jewish Question
society. For Marx, this abstraction or separation must (MECW 3).
exist in order to attain and preserve the formal equality
(accom panied, of course, by class i nequal ity) n eces-
sary for self-interested private owners to accumu late
capital in a manner u n i n h i b ited rather than controlled
or dictated by the state. This is what distinguishes the
modern state, which is adequate to capitalist property
relations, from other state systems corresponding to
other modes of production, whether monarch ical or
ancient democratic.
Th e Logic of Gender 71
they bear with i n t h e i r person as t h e i r own property,
or - if that exchange is med iated i n d i rectly - t h ro u g h
those with formal equal ity.
Endnotes 3 72
itself constituted were various forms of u nfreedom. For 16 See Chris Chen's
this reason we have citizen and other as mapping onto : 'The Limit Point of
male (white)/ non-(white) male. Capitalist Equal ity' i n
t h i s issue.
For i nstance, under the conditions of slavery in North
America, the classification of wh ite was necessary to 17 Marx, Capital, vol.1,
maintain the property of masters over slaves. Women (MECW 3 5 ) , 179.
were also classified as other, but for d ifferent reasons,
as we shall see. One factor worth mentio n i n g h e re
is that with i n this relation of w h ite/person of colour/
woman, t h e preservation of t h e p u rity of t h e "wh ite
master", as opposed to the "black slave" is of the utmost
i mportance - as well as the strict preservation of the
domi nant master signifier of equality ( "white blood" and
therefore "wh ite mothers" ) across future generations of
the bourgeoisie. Therefore the d ivision between wh ite
and non-white women was also closely reg u l ated i n
order t o preserve such a taxonomy, with i n t h e m ixed
context of both plantation-based commodity prod uction
i n the N ew World and the rise of industrial capital ism . 1 6
Endnotes 3 74
and "pol itical" actions, within the state. This would
amount to the abolition of the private through the public
sphere -a revolution through reform which is structur
ally impossible.
Endnotes 3 76
lower price tag , fixed to those who look l i ke the kind of 21 See Paola Tabet,
people who "have children", is not determined by the sorts 'Natu ral Fertil ity,
of skills that are formed in the I M M sphere. Even though Forced Reprod uction'.
the sphere a woman is relegated to is full of activities in Diana Leonard and
which req u i re l ifelong train i n g , this does not increase Lisa Ad kins, eds, Sex
the price of her labou r-power, because no employer has in Question: French
to pay for their acq uisition. As a resu lt, capital can use Materialist Feminism
women's labour-power in short spurts at cheap prices. (Taylor and Francis
1996).
In fact, the general tendency towards "femin isation" is not
the gendering of the sex-blind market, but rather the move
ment by capital towards the utilisation of cheap short-term
flexibil ised labour-power under post-Ford ist, globalised
conditions of acc u m u lation, increasingly deskilled and
"just-in-time". We must take this definition of feminisation
as primary, before we attend to the rise of the service
sector and the increasing importance of care and affective
labour, which is part and parcel of the "femin isation tu rn".
This turn comes about through the dynam ic unfolding
of capital ist social relations historically, a process that
we will see in the last two parts of the text. But first we
must summarise what we have learned about gender
until now, and attempt a defi nition. This req u ires analysis
and criticism of another common binary: sex and gender.
ADDEN D U M 2 : O N WO M E N , B I O LOGY A N D C H I LD R E N
4 SEX/G E N D E R
Endnotes 3 78
Sex is the fl ip side of gender. Fol lowing J u d ith Butler, 22 See her critique of
we criticise the gender/sex b inary as found in fem i n ist Simone de Beauvoi r's
l iteratu re before the 1 9 9 0s. Butler demonstrates, cor 'uncritical reproduc
rectly, that both sex and gender are socially constituted tion of the Cartesian
and fu rthermore, that it is the "socializing" or pairing distinction between
of "gender" with culture, that has relegated sex to the freedom and the body:
"natural" pole of the b i nary natu re/culture. We arg ue J u d ith Butler, Gender
s i m i larly that they are binary social categories which Trouble ( Routledge
simu ltaneously de-naturalise gender while natu ralising 1990), chapter 1 : 'Sub
sex. For us, sex is the natu ralisation of gender's d ual jects of Sex/Gender/
projection upon bodies, agg regating biolog ical differ Des i re:
ences i nto d iscrete natu ral ised semblances.
T h e d e n a t u ra l i sation of g e n d e r
Endnotes 3 80
to "female" bodies - or the counter-pole to sex - becomes
i ncreasingly i m perative to capital acc u m u lation as the
tendency toward fem i n isation. Hence, the reproduction
of gender is of utmost i m portance, as labou r-power with
a lower cost, while a reserve army of p roletarians as
surplus popu lation is increasingly redu ndant.
D u ring the era of prim itive accumu lation, a major prob- 23 See M i chael Perel-
lem facing the capital ist class was how to perfectly man, The Invention of
cali b rate the relationshi p between the I M M and D M M Capitalism: Classical
spheres such that workers would, on the one hand, be Political Economy and
forced to survive only by sel ling their labour-power, and the Secret History of
on the other, be allotted only enough personal property Primitive Accumula-
to continue self-provisioning without bri n g i n g up the tion (Duke U n iversity
cost of labou r-power.23 Indeed, at the moment when Press 2000).
the I M M was constituted, it had to take on as m u ch as
possible of the reproduction of labou r-power, to be as
big as possible, but just enough so that the proportion
of self-provisioning allowed nevertheless requ i red the
habitual re-emergence of labour-power on the market.
Therefore, the sphere of I M M supplementing the wage
was subordinated to the market as a necessary presup-
position of wage-relations and capital ist exploitation,
and as its immediate result.
Endnotes 3 82
I ndeed, at the beg i n n i n g of i n d ustrial isation, women
represented one third of the workforce. Like children,
they did not decide if or where they would take employ
ment, or which job they would perform ; they were more
or less s u bcontracted by t h e i r h usbands or fathers.
(Marx even com pared it with some forms of the slave
trad e : the male head of the fam ily bargained the price
of the labou r-power of his wife and children and chose
to accept or decl ine. And let us not forget that i n some
countries, such as France and Germany, women only
got the right to work without the authorisation of their
husbands i n the 1 9 60s or 70s) . Far from being a sign
of the emancipation of women, or of the modern views
of the h usband, women worki ng outside the home was
a blatant ind icator of poverty. Even if married women
were generally expected to stay at home when the family
could afford it (where they often did home-based pro
duction, especially for the textile industry) , many women
never married - for it was an expensive business - and
some were not supposed to become preg nant, forming
their own fam i ly. You nger daughters were often sent to
become servants or helpers in other fami l ies, remaining
"officially" single. Therefore, even if those responsible
for the I M M sphere were always women, and those
responsible for the wage were always men (one could
say, by defi n ition) , the two genders and the two spheres
did not map one to one in that period.
Endnotes 3 84
been possible without the i ntrod uction of household
appliances turning the most extreme physical tasks into
chores that could be carried out alone. The wash ing
mach ine, the i ndoor water-tap, the water heater - these
helped to d ramatically reduce the time spent on some
I M M activities. But every m i n ute gained was far from
i ncreas i n g the housewife's leisure time. Every spare
m o m e nt had to be used to i nc rease the standards
of reprod ucti o n : clothes were was h e d m o re often ,
meals became ever more varied and healthy, and most
importantly, childcare became an all-consuming I M M
activity from i nfant care t o the facil itation of children's
leisure activities.
With the cu rrent crisis, all signs indicate that the state
w i l l be i ncreas i n g ly u nw i l l i n g to organise I M M activi
ties, si nce they are a mere cost. Expenses i n childcare,
elderly-care and healthcare are the fi rst to be cut, not to
mention education and after-school programs. These will
Endnotes 3 86
become D M M for those who can afford it (privatisation) , 26 See the previous
or lapse into the sphere of u nwaged indirect market article in this issue,
mediation - therefore i ncreasing the abject. 'The Holding Pattern'.
The extent of this remains to be seen, but the trend 27 Francesca Bettio,
i n countries affected by the crisis is already clear. In 'Crisis and recovery
the US, and i n most cou ntries of the Eurozone (with in Europe: the labour
the notable exception of Germany) , governments are market i m pact on men
cutt i n g t h e i r s pe n d i n g to red uce t h e i r d e bt-to-G DP and women; 2011 .
ratios.26 Countries l i ke G reece, Portugal and Spain, but
also the U K, are drastically scaling down their expenses 28 Fem i n ist Fig htback
in healthcare and childcare. In G reece and Portugal Collective, 'Cuts are
public kindergartens are closing down. I nfringements a Fem i n ist Issue'.
o n the rights of pregnant women to m aternity l eave Soundings 49 (Wi nter
and benefits, or to resume their jobs after matern ity, 2011).
have been reported in G reece, Portugal, Italy, and the
Czech Republic.27 I n the U K, where state-ru n n u rseries 29 Speech by David
are closing one by one, the situation is described by Cameron on 'the Big
an anti-capital ist femin ist group involved in the Hackney Society', Liverpool, 1 9
n u rseries cam paign, Fem i nist Fight Back: J u ly 2010.
Endnotes 3 88
many fem i n ists would view this possibil ity as "a fate 32 Silvia Federici, Revolu-
worse than death :' [ . . . ] But, quoting Dolores Hayden, tion at Point Zero,
the reorganisation of reproductive work, and there- Housework, Repro-
fore the reorgan isation of the structu re of housing duct/on, a n d Feminist
and public space is not a question of identity; it is Struggle ( Common
a labo u r q u estion and, we can add , a power and Notions 201 2) , 147.
safety question .32
33Th is is obviously not to
Silvia Federici is right - we do consider this possibil ity say that we don't val ue
worse than death. And her answer to t h i s o bjection, the whole of Federic1's
w h i c h q u otes Dolores H ayden rat h e r freely, m i sses contribution to the
the point: the labour question is an identity question .33 marxist fem i n i st de-
Even if we m ig ht, in the crisis, have no choice but to bate. Along with Dalla
self-organise these reprod uctive activities - and even Costa and James's,
though, most l i kely, abject reprod uction will i n the end The Power of Women
mainly be foisted upon women - we must fight against and the Subversion
this process which rei nforces gender. We m u st treat of the Community,
it as it is: a self-organ isation of the abject, of what no Silvia Federici's texts
one else is willing to do. are s u rely the most
interesting pieces
It is i mportant here to state that, even if u nwaged I M M from the 'domestic
activities and the abject might refer to the same concrete labour debate' of the
activities, these two concepts must be d ifferentiated. 1970s. What we want
Indeed, the category of the abject refers specifically to criticise here is a
to activities that became waged at some point b u t position that is cur
are i n the process o f returning i n t o the u nwaged I M M rently influential within
sphere because they've become too costly for the state the 'commons' debate,
or capital. Whi l e I M M is a p u rely structu ral category, and that we consider
i ndependent of any dynam ic, the concept of the abject h i g h ly problematic.
g rasps the specificities of these activities and the pro
cess of their assignment in our cu rrent period. I ndeed,
we can say that, if many of our mothers and g rand
mothers were caught i n the sphere of IMM activities,
the problem we face today is d ifferent. It is not that we
will have to "go back to the kitchen", if only because
we cannot afford it. Our fate, rather, is ha ving to deal
with the abject. Contrary to the I M M activities of the
past, this abject has al ready been to a large extent
denatu ral ised. It does not appear to those perform ing
Endnotes 3 90
A RISING TID E LI FTS ALL BOATS
92
M O N DAY, 8 AUG UST 2 0 1 1 1 For Siiri and Finn,
whose entry i nto
Wandering north u p Mare Street towards central Hack this world fired the
ney helicopters throbbed in the air ahead, tightening starti ng pistol, and
an atm o s p he re al ready tense with A u g u st h u m i d ity for their parents to
and tales of riot. 1 The road was pecul iarly desolate for whom we owed a gift.
evening rush hour, barren of the usual steady flow of
traffic that trudges n o rth-south along t h i s i n ner-city Thanks to Larne, C h ris,
artery. Remnants of some episode were visible: bins Richard and Sean
dismantled, tu rned over; rubbish sprawled, broken glass for useful feedback.
g l ittering on the open road ; probably a confrontation
with the cops. A fai r few loitered, curious, oddly lacking
intent - h ipster riot tou rists and other locals. A group
of kids, mostly black, gathered nonchalantly about a
pawn shop where a shutter and window were bro ken
in, making a hole j ust big enough for a child or someone
small to weasel through. A "gang" perhaps, or just some
opportunists : were those casual fig u res playing lookout,
while one or two went about steal ing what they could?
A few shopkeepers too, concerned for their property,
m i l led about the street ; a l ittle fu rther up, a smattering
of police in fluorescent jackets.
Endnotes 3 94
embodied in residents' organisations, and a sometimes
vocal presence in the local med ia. On summer days
l i ke this strains of dancehall and reggae sometimes
drift from the row of small shops that line one side of
Clarence Road .
Endnotes 3 96
to by passers-by, including some black-clad types, pre
sumably from Pogo, who brought water, trying to keep
the atmosphere around her calm. Along the street were
one smouldering car wreck after another, some on side
streets. A motorbi ke had also been b u rned out, and
more bins. Incongruously, amongst the wisps of smoke
two priests in full robes were engaged in conversation
with some locals; saintly nodd ing, downcast eyes; an
older black man speaking of a need for black youth to
stick up for themselves, final ly. Others describing m iser
able conditions, the impossibility of finding jobs, feeling
discrim i nated against by the "feds". Some red g raffiti
chorused : "fuck da feds" ; further up, "fuck Cameron".
The name Mark Duggan, and the police m u rder of a
black man were on some lips, but not all ; still, that event
was clearly a sym bol. The priests just l istened. Debris
indicated a pitched battle had taken place. A row of
teenagers, some wearing the archetypal hoodies, on the
front steps of a terraced house, consu m i n g beer and
crisps, probably looted from the convenience store ; a
foam ing beer can lobbed at a friend.
Endnotes 3 98
way. We drifted along with the flow as it crossed the
boundary of the estate to enter the Narrowway, with its
g reater supply of shopfronts.
Endnotes 3 1 00
WHY R I OT
Endnotes 3 1 02
or two's hindsight, many of them wou ld come to affirm
the experience as somethi n g they'd happily do again .
MARG I N S
Endnotes 3 1 04
popu lation was actually in decl ine for most of the 20th 6 Probably i n part
Century, after the peak of the Victorian sl u m ; a tenden- reflecting these
cy that only turned around i n the 1 9 9 0s. spatial d ifferences,
accord ing to census
The inner-urban and "white flight" connections here invite data i ntermarriage
com parison with the American ghetto, but the latter is a rates are sign ificantly
much more pronounced structu ral aspect of a society higher i n England; a
forged d i rectly i n plantation slavery - as opposed to mixing that seems to
profiting off the latter from a distance before moralising find a cu ltu ral coun
about it when it suited. " Black" as a declared eth n icity is, terpart i n the history
of course, m u ltiples higher as a percentage of the popu of British pop m usic.
lation i n the U n ited States, and the American g h etto is
an expansive u rban area, much larger than the marginal
blocks and estates of British cities, and more a world
u nto itself.6 I n Britain, while these places do, of course,
condense unemployment and other social "dysfunctions"
relative to other zones in the urban geography, residents
typically continue their existences as workers, consum
ers or students elsewhere, beyond the bounds of these
merely residential areas. Nor does the state hold back
from penetrating such spaces with its own i nstitutions:
youth services ; social workers ; one or another remedial
neighbourhood scheme. If the state posits such places
as its own i nternal l i m its, it is thus i m portant not to take
it too l iteral ly at its word, for while these developments
reinforce real long-term deprivation, the most salient
d imension on which this exclusion occurs is a social
logic of abjection experienced first and foremost i n the
encou nter with the repressive arm of the state. Every
thing else follows : med iatised victimisation of residents,
u nending chain of aspirant cabinet mem bers fei g n i n g
deep concern , think-tan k concept creation, crypto-racist
scandals about a feckless, parasitic underclass.
ANTI - C O P
Endnotes 3 1 06
police station . . . these people enter the canon of martyrs racists probably
for a minor genre of long-term sing le-issue com m u n ity explains the greater
cam paign that has left l ittle lasting impression on the scope for success
country at large.8 Such campaigns run up against a wal l withi n the British
o f si lence, obstruction a n d intim idation, a n d a media state. The Lawrence
landscape that has typically been tilted against them cam paig n has even
from the very fi rst police press statements - rushed out become a national
after the i ncident to provide a conven ient frame for the cause celebre with
subsequent discourses : the deceased was a gangster/ Lawrence's mother
a drug dealer/ i nsane, or had assaulted a police officer. gai n i n g an OBE,
Deleg itimised in advance, they then tend to be pushed a l ife peerage,
towards an apologetic position, where the victim must be and a spot i n the
painted an "angel", a " peacemaker" etc, while the police Olym pic cer-
just go about their business. The only sort of "justice" emony as em blem
possible i n such circumstances is obviously a retribu of a harmonious
tive one, and with a complete shut-out from the state's m u lticu ltural Britai n
legitimacy-generating organs, the logical place for the (though the Tory
playing out of such retribution is in a public confrontation far right 'Trad itional
with the cops i n wh ich a crowd presence can generate a Britai n G roup' con
momentum not available to individual, orderly campaigners. tinue to arg ue for her
Donald Douglas, whose brother B rian was beaten to 're patriation'). Similar
death by two police when on a n i g ht out, reg retted his campaigns where
efforts to defuse a riot situation when tensions mounted the pol ice are the
between a c rowd of m o u rners and atte n d i n g cops: d i rect object typically
run u p against a wal l
I n h i ndsight, because you haven't reached a kind of of state obstruction;
conclusion that you want to, you think "well I won the anti-police
der, if I wasn't so disciplined and organised and just riot then presents
al l owed people to go and tear u p the situation . . . " itself as an obvious
p robably in h indsight that's the best that could've tactic for making
been achieved, and at l east it would've been a day them listen. The
to remember, if nothing else. And some property or Lawrence cam paig n
whatever would've been destroyed and that would've is an exception that
represented the death of Brian . . . 9 helpfully obscu res
a repressive rule.
When a similar i ncident a few months later - the death
of Wayne Douglas (no relation) - did erupt in the Brixton 9 From Ken Fero and
riots of 1 9 95, Donald thought t h i s probably a m o re Tariq Mehmood's
fitting outcom e : f i l m , Injustice, 2002.
Endnotes 3 1 08
urban neighbourhoods, are posited as the limit concepts
of affirmable social class - just as the traditional l u m pen
was the necessary negative corollary to a positive work
ing class identity. A result and constitutive moment of
this logic is the riot as rebel lion against the police.
RESTRUCTU R I N G R I OT
Endnotes 3 110
proffering a neo·Nazi message which exchanged the East 14 A key moment here
London Jews of the 1 930s for the Afro-Caribbeans and was the 1 977 ' Battle
Asians of the 1 970s. The resulting conflicts with anti· of Lewisham'. i n
fascists - emerging from the punk, student, and Trotskyist which t h e National
scenes of the moment - and black and Asian communities, Front clashed with a
when the NF would march through their neighbou rhoods, newly consolidated
provided further pretext for heavy police intervention i nto anti-fascist movement,
neighbourhoods wh ich were sinking i nto deeper abjec· and the pol ice
ti on as the social crisis of the late 1 970s escalated. 1 4 used riot shields
for the first time on
1 979's Winter o f D iscontent, and t h e i n ab i l ity o f Cal· main land Britain.
laghan ' s Labour g overnment to begin in earnest the While the h istories
capitalist restructuring that had been set at its place, of the two forms are
brought a Tory N ew Right to power with a programme closely entwined,
of i nflation-busting monetary restraint. U nemployment, such encou nters with
rising through the 1 970s, now rocketed, underm i n i n g the far right should
the bargain i n g power of an already-embattled labour be d istingu ished
movement and further rei nforcing the margi nal status from the com m u n ity
of some u rban commu n ities. The 1 9 8 0 riot i n St Paul's, anti-pol ice riot that is
Bristol demonstrated to the authorities that it was not only a focus of this article.
the more enduringly troublesome black com m u n ities of
London that could constitute a threat, and - anticipating 1s G i l roy, Ain 't No Black,
historian David Starkey's racist comments three decades 1 26. Starkey, casting
later - that even wh ites could evidently prove similarly around on national
disruptive when exposed to the morally corrosive example television for an ex·
of their black neighbours, for they had constituted at least planation for the 2011
50 percent of the crowd . 1 5 Exposi n g the constellations riot·wave, claimed
of a superstitious copper's cosmology, i n which u rban that 'the wh ites have
u n rest was paired up not only with blackness but also become black'. See
l iteral istically with 1 970s leftist m i l itancy, some police BBC Newsnight,
apparently read the appearance of Tariq Ali i n B ristol 1 2 August 2011 .
shortly before the riot as evidence that they must have
been the work of that eternal agent of social disturbance :
the outside agitator.
Endnotes 3 1 12
stop-and-search - wh i c h really crystallised a new ap
proach to policing. The friend ly, bicycling com m u n ity
bobbies of yesteryear came to be replaced by something
resembling a medieval army : hel meted, sh ielded foot
soldiers equipped with hand-held cudgels for cracki ng
proletarian sku lls, plus a caval ry of m o u nted officers
capable of moving at speed and striking from above,
and the ever-present threat of CS gas, water cannon, or
plastic bul lets, should this not prove to be enough. This
repressive configuration - pioneered by an occupying
army in Northern Ireland - was now imported into mainland
Britain to deal with the enemies with in. And it would see
its first fu ll deployments here with the breaking of the last
holdouts of the workers' movement: the m i ners at the
Battle of Orgreave in 1 984, and the printers in Wapping
in 1 9 8 6-87. At the same time, the sus law - now widely
perceived to be a contributory factor in the generation of
riots - was scrapped, barely a month after the end of the
riot wave, while the Scarman Report, commissioned in
response to the riots, found some fau lt in the policing of
black neighbourhoods, and contributed to a bureaucratic
reconfiguration of policing in which the preservation of
an image of race neutral ity would be a priority. Wh ile
mainstream m e d i a cont i n ued to d e p l oy an a n i malis
ing discourse about these neigh bou rhoods as social
sinkholes brimming with rampant, asocial cri m i nal ity - a
sort of " heart of darkness" i n the midst of the city - they
remained home to m u ltifarious cultures of m i l itancy, m ix
ing black nationalism, rastafarian ism and varied leftisms
i nto a campaigning culture of neighbourhood defence.
Endnotes 3 1 14
the bourgeois subject. And, while the specific cultural
em bod iments of the pol itics of race which persisted in
the Britain of the early 1 980s have indeed faded, the
same demands have persisted, for the cops have not
ceased harassing black people i n the street, beating
them to death i n cells, and attempting to smear their
names when conflicts get out of control. Campaigns over
deaths in police custody persist, now with a generational
cross-section that leaves rastas and a certain residual
rhetoric about "Africa" in the older brackets, alongside fully
"natural ised" younger generations expressing similar de
mands in a language inflected more with grime or hip-hop ;
people u n ified thus i n at least one negative sense - the
conviction that pol ice behaviour is not fair. And i n this
m ix, the odd th read about pol ice treatment of "worki ng
class" com m u n ities persists as a minor element, from
those stil l attempting to conjure some broader solidarity.
I NSECU RE
Meanwh ile, w i t h the complete defeat of the workers' 18 While extreme waves
movement and a breathtaking pace of deindustrialisation of deindustrialisation
that outstri pped anyth ing seen elsewhere, the traditional also occu rred el se
worki ng class that had been a central p rotagon ist of where, such as the
B ritish society since the industrial revolution, with its American m id-west,
own pecul iar corporatist culture and conservatism, found the national-level
itself staring into the abyss. 1 8 I n gestu res of neol i beral scuttling and sinking
populism, appealing to its industrious, l iberal val ues, this of industry i n general
class was i nvited to remake itself as a sort of pseudo was a pecu liarly Brit
petit bourgeoisie : everyone a l ittle entrepreneur, with ish phenomenon.
their l ittle stock of capital , their l ittle stake i n some ideal
future catallaxy. N ot only the famous flogg i n g cheap of
cou ncil housing stock, but also the inducement to take
out shares in the privatising ex-state utilities, the "Big
Bang" opening of the City to barrow-boy geezers, who
wou ld make a q u ick wad on some reckless speculation
Endnotes 3 1 16
and end u p a parvenu " l oadsam o n ey", flas h i n g cash
i n sprouting cocktail bars by the end of the 1 9 80s . . .
Those who were not i n a position to make the necessary
leap - especially those in the more emphatically indus
trial areas further north - got long-term unemployment,
often masked as "incapacity". And they stayed there: U K
unemployment d id n 't even get back t o t h e level o f the
end of the turbulent, crisis-ridden 1 970s until around the
millennium, and it has only increased from there. If workers
were lucky, they got absorbed into the burgeon ing state
sector that has remained by far the biggest employer i n
Britain t o the present, or eventually made t h e i r way i nto
one or another precarious service sector job. But either
way, from here on, being "working class" was either an
increasingly vague, nostalgic identity construct, tethered
to Grim Up N o rth/ Stuck-up South binaries and rosy
Coronation Street images of a dead world, or something
to be d isavowed i n favou r of glib assertions that "we're
all middle class now". Even appeals to a generic post
i n d u strial wage-labo u r became i ncreasingly tenu o u s
evidence f o r a positive class identity, g iven the u b i q u ity
of the wage-form in rem unerating everyone from CEO
to streetsweeper. Wh ile class, of course, persisted as
a deep, structuring logic - and wealth polarised to an
ever-g reater extent - the British working class had been
thoroughly decomposed, and this brute fact of polarisation
translated less and less clearly i nto any straightforward
sociological, political-economic, or even cultural schema.
Endnotes 3 1 18
work, but must simply hope for the best from one week 19 Out of the 270 sample
to the n ext. I n t h ese senses, comparisons of actual rioters i nterviewed
e m p l oyment levels with those of the 1 970s can be in the Reading the
deceptive, since the meaning of the work/unemployment Riots study, half
d istinction has changed so significantly over the period. were students and
If unemployment fig u res remain h i g h compared to the about a quarter were
years of the post-war settlement, employment itself is unem ployed. Never
q ualitatively less distingu ishable from unemployment. theless, many rioters
retrospectively cited a
For these reasons it is important not to read the ten lack of job prospects,
dential precarisation of the wage as leading necessari ly unem ployment or the
to the constitution of any neatly delimitable "surplus fear of unem ployment
population", identified simpl istically by a lack of formal as a reason for their
employment or residency in some marginal zone : it was rioting. Reading
never d i rectly "the surplus popu lation" that took u p the Riots (G uard ian
residency i n Britain's poor u rban estates, n o r was i t i n and LSE 201 1), 4.
any immediate sociological sense a "surplus population"
of unemployed that developed a propensity to riot over
this period. I ndeed, a majority of rioters in 2 0 1 1 seem to
have been either in full-time education or employed, and
though unemployment remains of cou rse higher in the
marginal areas in which riots tend to generate - and was
spiking significantly in the period leading up to the riots,
making it legible, perhaps, as a sign ificant contributing
factor - it has remained markedly low in hyper-flexibilised
Britain, compared to other European countries. 1 9 While
the general law of capitalist accumu lation is to produce
a surplus population, and this is a central dynamic of
this epoch, we should also be wary of identifying these
developments with a clearly specified "precariat" class,
for the erosion of the stabi lity of the wage is something
socially general, not neatly confinable to a specific part
of the population : insecurity is everywhere, only with
varying types and degrees of i ntensity. The production
of a surplus population is a matter of the deep inner
logic of the capital relation ; its forms of appearance are
mediated with too much complexity to be easily mapped
"at the su rface of society", equated simplistically with
unemployment or marg i nality.
Endnotes 3 1 20
they wou ld trickle i nto d issolute pools of i rreg ular em- 21 Beatrice Webb, My
ployment in the East London slums of the time.21 That Apprenticeship
world is, of course, long-gone. The precarious and the (1926), 166. Cited
irregu lar are no longer pecu l iar to some residuum left by in Stedman Jones,
a growing industrial working class ; as that class dwindles, Outcast London, 1 2.
these tendentially become u n iversal . The cu rrent logic
of abjection - the new outcasting force - is incompre- 22 The term 'chav' reput-
hensible in abstraction from this broader restructuring edly has etymological
of the capital relation since the 1 970s. associations with
Romani gypsies - an
The m arg i nal u rban n e i g h b o u rhood of t h i s period is other perm utation of
the exemplary sym bolic location for the playing out of the abject. It came
this outcasting force, and the black i m m i g rant its first i nto general use as
exemplary subject - what we above cal led the "primary a sort of pseudo
abject" of restructu red capital ist society. But this logic racial ising term of
does not l i m it itself simply to distinctions of " race". Over class hatred in Britain
the last three and a half decades the u rban abject has i n the early 2000s.
mutated to encompass a broader range of figures, while
retaining an umbil ical l i n k to the immigrant commun ities
of the 1 970s. Thus the "chav", pecu l iar rendering of the
new "residuum" : the poor remainder of the white working
class after its Thatcherite liqu idation, as if this class had
become a race. 22 The riotous inner-urban subjects of the
late 1 970s and early 1 980s were never really any single
mono-ethnic g ro u p ; even then, the m ean ing of " race"
was g iven less by any notional biological attribute than
by the urban environment itself as a place of danger and
cri m i nal ity, calling for tougher law and order. And there
were plenty of wh ites who wanted to riot in N otting H i l l ,
S t Paul's, Brixton. B u t over t i m e t h e significations o f the
u rban abject have sh ifted : the b lack m i l itant is gone as
a figu re of fear, but the fatherless petty criminal remains,
alongside the scandalously fertile mother. To the set
has been added the Eden Lake i mage of the hood ied
teenage chav, slouch ing along behind an agg ressive
l ittle dog, and the m u lti-generational dole-scrounging
fam i ly. By the social logic of abjection, those who fal l
fou l of the reg i m e of generalised i nsecu rity tend to be
constructed as one or another of these stigmatising
Endnotes 3 1 22
Of course, the social logic at play is never merely one soldier Lee Rigby
sided. The state does not merely decide to punish the in Woolwich: Police
poor, but rather evolves its tactics i n organ ic relation apparently descri bed
to the practices of the com m u n ities in q uestion, as well the attackers as 'of
as broader social dynam ics. No doubt certain modes of Muslim appearance'.
crim i nal ity and black market activity do become more
pronou nced in these areas as prospects for an orderly,
stable incorporation into the labou r market and broader
society d i m i n ish. But the relation is a d istinctly asym
metrical one, in which what are at play for the police
are not only the direct law-and-order issues of particular
neighbourhoods, but also their own legitimacy for capital,
state, and a society at large whipped into ever g reater
levels of b i g oted frenzy by a media that well knows
how to sell stories. Indeed, l ike the Vietnam body-cou nt,
stop-and-search has been propelled over recent years
by b u reaucratically-driven q u otas, in which i n d ividual
officers are expected to conduct a specified n u m ber in
a specified time, but must at the same time su pposedly
demonstrate that they are not doing this on the basis of
any racial profi l i n g - which is of course irrelevant if the
area i n q u estion is predom inantly black.
All this vanished with the 2008 crisis. Saved from outright
bu rst by one or another state endeavour, the housing
bubble hovered , frozen i n air, no longer presenting itself
as a proxy pension fund, yet still freezing out most re
maining aspirants. When the all-out crash did not come,
it was o n ly to be a long, slow d eflation i nstead . The
g rade inflation-wage deflation couplet came q u i ckly to
show itself for what it was, with fees escalating and job
prospects contin u i n g to van ish. And, with the almost
overnight doubling of unemployment and a rash of auster
ity measu res which wou ld d i rectly im pact standards of
l iving, the " u rban outcast" was left with l ittle prospect
but further p u n ishment for their own pred icament as
the police tried to keep the lid on a society riven with
rising tensions. The general horizon of immiseration and
d i m i nishing fut u re where all this has taken place is one
of fractal d ifferentiations i n which broader solidarities
h ave been generally lacki n g - each reach i n g for their
Endnotes 3 1 24
own l ittle l ife-raft, kicki ng the others away. Distinct but
downwardly-convergent trajectories, capable sometimes
of un ifying negatively into a fleeting movement of rage at
this descent, only to d isperse agai n, each to their own
particularity. Despite this negativity, this decomposition,
these were years i n wh ich a long-reced ing tide turned.
TURN
Endnotes 3 1 26
and very l i mited, but occurrin g with the onset of major 2s l n itial demands of
crisis, and against a sterile h i storical backd rop, they the S ussex Stop the
appeared as the first m u rm u rings of an approaching Cuts campaign after
period of contestation. Yet they were to prove atypical their first meeting
in relation to the c o m i n g wave, in w h i c h i m med iate i n October 2009.
workers' struggles were margi nal at most : i n B ritain's
peculiarly post-industrial economy even the problem
of struggles breachi n g a "glass floor" i nto production
seldom puts itself on the agenda.
T E ETH
Endnotes 3 1 28
left-lean ing philosophy department - one of a handful in
the U K - was threatened with closure. These occu pa
tions motivated greater movement between campuses,
but with occupations also came property damage and
g reater levels of repressi o n . Whe n fifty S u ssex stu
dents occupied t h e u n iversity's adm i n istrative building,
six were suspended for trespassing and "holding staff
hostage" in a protest that ended with riot police fight
ing students on u n iversity soil, while a tweeded Vice
Chancellor su rveyed the action from the h i l lside above.
Endnotes 3 1 30
M I LLBA N K
A week earl ier, David Wi lletts, Minister o f State for U n i - 27 Territorial Support
versities and Science, had accepted the Browne Review, G roup: launched in
but decided to cap tuition fees at £9,000, essentially 1987 as a reincarna
tripling them overn ight. I n response, the University Col tion of the notorious
lege Union (UCU) and the National U n ion of Students Special Patrol G roup,
(N US) - now com ing round to a recog n ition of the spon whom we encoun
taneous student struggles, and at least lending them tered earl ier. One of
a national frame - had cal led the demonstration, which the major aspects of
attracted around 50,000 university, A-level and Further the retooling of the
Education students, as well as lecturers, teachers and British police force
other staff. It was not simply to be about tuition fees, after the 1981 riots.
however; at stake were also the EMA g rant, unemploy
ment, generalised precario usness. The N U S and its
then president Aaron Porter - soon to become a £ 1 25/
hour education consu ltant - cooperated closely with
the police i n the build-up to the march, helping design
the route, then acting as g uard dogs on the day, guar
anteeing protesters wou ldn't stray from the rig hteous
path. The march was to pass through Whitehall and
Westminster and end at Tate Britain where Porter would
g ive a speech. Thousands of people didn't get that far.
Endnotes 3 1 32
pol ite tactics would proliferate - destruction of property, ao Patrick Sm ith, 'Stu-
fig hting cops, occupying b u i l d i ngs - and the swe l l i n g dent protest: the N U S
groups o f masked-up schoolkids a t the heart o f m u c h lobby wasn't enough
of this activity looked l e s s and l e s s l i ke a m i nority o f for us'. Guardian, 10
" p rofessional anarchists". I n these demonstrations we Novem ber 2010.
repeatedly witnessed arg uments between people in the
street over this spreading fractiousness, uncomfortable at
the giving-way of conventional distinctions. Oxford Street ;
a wealthy-looking woman, bags of shopping ; screaming
at a group of masked-up and very young-looking teens:
"Why must you cover your face? ! Don't you realise that
we are not you r enemy? We do suppo rt you but don't
cover your face ! " The fear of a loss of order was palpable.
A Guardian jou rnal ist registered su rprise after talking
to M i l l bank occu piers : "Those d ressed i n black were
children too, and several fresh-faced excited students
said this was their fi rst demonstration:'30 Standard nar
ratives of "outside agitators" and " m i l itants" were now
being forcibly displaced by one of "students radical ised
by the cuts". Instead, a new d isti nction now came i nto
play with the emergence of g roups such as UK Uncut
and Arts Against Cuts providing the fig u re of the "good"
rad icalised student, able to more eloquently articulate
their radical ity and transform acts of property damage
and occupation into something more palatable, window
dressed with poetry read ings and performance art.
M I D D LE· CLASS
Endnotes 3 1 34
at the frontier of the job market. But youth, of cou rse,
is not a class : it cannot be assu med that the you nger
participants and "EMA kids" who came i nto the move
ment from M i l l bank onwards, represented in any clear
sense a class d istinct from those already i nvolved in
the movement. While EMA m i g ht be needed to support
post- 1 6 vocational - rather than academic - training, it
was at the same time not a fundamentally separate issue
from university fees: both EMA cuts and fee-increases
could potentially affect the same person , who might
need financial support to continue education post- 1 6,
in order to then go to u niversity. And the same person
could s i m u ltaneously be affected by youth c l u b clo
s u res - and even stop-and-search. But what can be
said with certai nty here is that the d i m i n ishing futu res
of that moment h it not only the poorer, but also the
younger, harder: while those already at u n iversity might
scrape through with moderate fees for their last year
or two, those a couple of years below them would get
the fu ll £9000/year for their whole u niversity ed ucation,
if they made it that far, lose the state support for their
pre-un iversity studies, enter a tougher job market when
they got there, and so on. And of course, the young tend
to be less cowed in their relations with the cops, having
not yet been fully schooled i n such things . . .
OCC U PAT I O N
Endnotes 3 1 36
in a Disabil ity Rig hts protest outside Parliament, before 33 0nly 5 percent of
being fine-tuned in the 1 9 9 9 WTO protests, and employed 'suspected cri m i n als'
again at the 200 1 May Day protests. But the bending typically appear in
of the j u d icial syste m towards the rapid and severe the Crown Court.
p u nish ment of activists - sending them to the Crown
Cou rts, where penalties are much harsher - had no such
precursor.33 This seems to have set a precedent for the
punishment of rioters the following August. That Edward
Wool lard , the student who threw a fire ext i n g u isher off
the roof of M i l / bank, was arrested for attempted m u rder
and later sentenced to two and a half years i n jail for
violent d isorder, resulted i n bays of approval from a
large section of the publ ic. Taking no chances, a Ch ief
Su perintendent for domestic extremism - appoi nted a
week earl ier - began an intelligence operation to monitor
the dangerous incitement of "fringe elements", while on
24 November, the Met swamped central London with an
extra thousand G reater London cops, both riot-geared
and mounted. Blocking protesters from Parliament Square,
their typical site of enforced contai nment, huge games
of cat and mouse came to characterise these protests,
with students ru n n i n g down back al leys, dod g i n g and
trying to outwit the cops, until eventually getting kettled.
Initial atmospheres were festive, with du bstep and grime
sound systems, lots of dancing and coloured flares being
set off, but as h o u rs passed the crowd became frus
trated and started vandal ising and setting fire to things.
After several hours of dancing, interspersed with violent
confrontations, they fi nally released everyone. Around
the city, those not trapped i n kettles were i nvolved i n
a mass array o f fleeting actions, a n d u n iversities and
schools nationwide were either i n protest or occupation.
STI CK
Endnotes 3 1 38
in a tight kettle on Westminster Bridge without food, 35 '0ur Story So Far',
water or toilet facilities for hours in the freezing cold, Save Hari ngey Youth
some needing treatment for respi ratory problems, chest Service webs ite.
pains or bru ised ribs after severe crush ing.
36 It is woth noti ng that
I n January, as eyes tu rned to another wave of struggle at least some cuts
now picki ng u p i n the Arab world, parliament inevitably d riven restructuring of
voted to cut the EMA g rant. Wh i l e the presence of youth services had an
younger and more t u rb u lent kids had lent dynamism overtly pun itive focus,
and kick before the December tuition fee vote to an prioritising the jobs of
otherwise more l i m ited student movement, there was those special ising in
a relative lack of reciprocal participation from u niversity youth crime. See Alex
students on the day of the EMA. In the same month the Newman, 'Hackney
press informed Haringey residents that the council had Council Youth
officially agreed to cut youth services by 75%. A coun Services Job C uts
cillor had erroneously claimed that the com m u n ity had Slammed', Hackney
al ready been consu lted and al l was fine, as there were Citizen, 4 Apri l 2011.
a plethora of voluntary organ isations ready and willing
to step i n to pick u p the extra work. The council then
warned that if the com m u n ity did not cooperate over
the cuts, it would be at the expense of "disabled and
abused" children,35 but it would happily compromise and
offer a consultation over the remaining 25%. Youth work
ers across London soon noticed the mounting tension
around these issues, and some began predicting riots.36
With the tuition fee and EMA votes both lost and nothing
comparably concrete on the horizon, the subsequent
protests became chaotic, theatrical, fun and frustrated.
The T U C (Trades U n io n Cong ress ) " M arch for t h e
Alternative" i n March 2 0 1 1 was the second biggest
demonstration ever on British soil, bringing out onto
London streets much of the remnant workers' movement,
and providing another organ isational skeleton for the
heterogeneous and more chaotic elements that had
emerged through the student movement. The point of
destination for all u nion-led marches is Hyde Park, once
the site of the 1 855 S u nday Trad ing B i l l riots ( consid
ered by Marx at the time to herald the coming Engl ish
Endnotes 3 1 40
d istinction into d ivergent forms of action seemed ind ic
ative of a red uced concentration and widened scope,
in comparison to the kettled concentrations of preced
ing demonstrations. UK U ncut had occupied Fortnum
and Mason - the Queen's favourite grocery shop - and
some occupiers were on the balcony, glugging bottles
of cham pag ne swiped on the way through. The atmos
phere outside g rew tense as riot pol ice were p u m ped
i nto t h e area and began l i n i n g every s i d e street. It
seemed a conscious tactic that day to avoid the need
to kettle by simply ind icating it as a threat. Following
those violent long hours of containment i n December,
the fear of kettling was explosive, and any signal sent
huge booing crowds lau nching towards the cops un
til they backed off. A group of protesters momentarily
su rrou nded the police, chanting " kettle the cops ! " ; a
woman posed for a photo, holding a kettle and with
a sign saying " Cameron, don't put the bloody kettle
on"; a severely i nj u red man stu m bled aro u n d , blood
gushing down his face, reeling in shock and p u m ped
with adrenal i n : "they're crazy ! " Concerned for his l ife,
we pleaded with cops for paramedics or an a m b u
lance : " n o , that ain't my job love". T h e bleed ing man
ran off into the crowd , to haunt the rest of the day. As
a kettle began , the crowd went mad , frantically trying
to break through police l i nes, and violent fig hts broke
out, distracted eventually by an attem pted break-in of
a bank. The streets were bri m m i n g until late, and as
we wandered the city that evening to get a sense of
the damage, almost every bank we came across had
been smashed i n . Forensic teams on their hands and
knees dusted for fingerprints. And as that day d rew to
a close some activists made an abstract fi rst stab at
establishing a resonance with the Arab Spri n g : Trafal
gar was to become Tahrir. The cops had l ittl e d ifficulty
moving them on, and it was not to be until after Brit
ai n ' s own wave had crashed in A u g ust that a m o re
self-consciously international squares movement would
sprout in the alluvium . . .
Endnotes 3 1 42
The student movement had rapidly come u p against its 39 Fou r people were
limits and frothed over into a fissiparous, disorderly state, arrested in Starbucks
with no real positive horizon but a bit of fun at the expense for being dressed
of the cops. Where there had been vague semblances of as zombies. As Amy
a positive programme at moments in this movement, this Cutler explained: 'we
had always seemed dubious, half-hearted, tinted with the were just dressing u p
baseline cynicism of a certain "capitalist realism". All that a s zombies. It's nice to
was available as a framework for u n ity was a bland set dress up as zombies'.
of negative, umbrella demands: stop the cuts. And even
this seemed - and u ltimately proved - impossible. What 40 Steph Pike of U K
else to do then but raise some hell? At least it would U ncut was arrested
mean that there had been a fight. And what response on this charge at
could this i nvite but a further ramping-up of policing? a tax avoidance
That, ultimately, was the "mean ing" of M i l l bank. J ust as demonstration.
the sinister g ri n of the Cheshi re Cat i ntensifies as its
more seemingly contingent parts dissolve, through the
development of these protests the police had increasingly
appeared as the visceral presence of the state in the
face of its supposed retreat or rollback. Yet somehow the
consol idation of an abstract enemy i nto a single tangible
one meant that the city - wh ich h ides itself behind the
police - felt, for fleeting moments at least, more open
and vulnerable, more reachable and breakable.
SWAR M I N G
Endnotes 3 1 44
i ndeed it was probably obvious at the time to anyone 42 These events are sti l l
present who had the slightest acquai ntance w i t h t h e playing through the
recent history of u rban u n rest : cops had not only killed British legal system
a you ng black man, but also a resident of the Broad to this day, with
water Farm estate, with its long and d ramatic history a new arrest - 28
of antagon istic relations with the police; and now they years late r - timed
were again fail i n g to su pply any i nformation to fam ily conveniently to
or com m u n ity. After years of building tension on an es correspond to the
tate al ready considered a serious problem area by the second ann iversary of
early 1 970s, Cynthia Jarrett's death at police hands Mark Duggan's death
i n October 1 9 8 5 had precipitated an extraord i narily and the beg i n n i n g
violent riot i n wh ich pol ice came under armed attack, o f a n inquest i nto
culminating in the killing of PC Keith Blakelock.42 In the its ci rcu mstances.
2000s, with regeneration projects and decl i n i ng crime
statistics for the neighbourhood, those events might
have seemed consigned to the past. But police sti l l
considered Tottenham i n general a hotspot f o r (black)
g u n crime, d r u g - d eal i n g and gang-related violence,
and pun itive policing had been stepped u p over recent
years around "The Farm", as it had in other such neigh
bourhoods. At least a day before rioting actually broke
out, John Blake, who had g rown up here with Duggan,
saw it com ing :
CONTAG I O N
Endnotes 3 1 46
which the emergent logic of crowd action kicked i n , and
comm u n ity demonstration ti pped over into riot. Even for
a crowd that knows full well in advance what may be
com ing there is a first-mover problem which prevents
the riot itself from being a straig htforwardly i ntentional
act ; no individual or group can simply decide u n i l ater
al ly to riot, u nless the riot is already i n process. Th is is
why the immed iate trigger very often appears as some
relatively m i nor act of the police which u n ites a crowd
in indignation against them ; but such tipping-points do
not come out of the blue - rather, they are themselves
produced from some escalating dynam ic, i n wh ich a
crowd can certainly play an active role. By 8 : 20pm the
crowd was attacking nearby police cars, setting them on
fire, and pushing one out i nto Tottenham H i g h Road as
a sort of burning barricade. It then broke through pol ice
lines to attack the pol ice station, throwing bricks, bottles,
eggs. Unrest was now spreading throughout the area. At
around 1 0 . 1 5pm, Tottenham post office was set alight
and wit h i n half an hour, more police cars and a double
decker bus. The Aldi supermarket and the now famous
Carpetright store too were soon burnt down - and with
the latter went a number of people's homes. More police
were drafted i n , including specialists from the Territorial
S u pport G roup, armed and with dogs and horses, with
reinforcements from City of London Pol ice. These arrived
to jeering and chants : "we want answers"/ " n o jus
tice, no peace"/ " rest i n peace Mark D uggan"/ "whose
streets, our streets". They attem pted to seal off t h e
side streets to prevent the riot from spread i n g , w h i l e
the u s u a l helicopters throbbed overhead. But they had
already defin itively lost control of events.
Endnotes 3 1 48
enabled the word to spread that pol ice were on the
back foot, opening up snowballing opportun ities to take
advantage of this, for straightforward ly i nstrumental rea
sons or with some other aim - such as revenge against
shops that had rejected job appl ications, as one looter
would retrospectively claim. Thus the famous Blackberry
messenger com m u n iq u e that circu lated widely as the
disorder spread into Sunday 7 August, exhorting poten
tial rioters to abandon the more destructive actions and
enjoy the commod ity free-for-al l :
Endnotes 3 1 50
stores such as Vodafone, H&M, Footlocker, WH Sm ith,
Currys and JD Sports were looted ; KFC and Mc Donalds
had their windows smashed ; Footlocker and Nando's
were set on fire after a till was stolen. But, i n another
show of crowd d iscernment, the h i g h ly central Ritzy
cinema - with its many windows - was left u ntouched.
M E D I AT I O N
Endnotes 3 1 52
Around 9pm events spread to the town centre, where 44 Th is choice term
several large and very severe fires were started, in seems to have
c l u d i n g the Reeves Furniture shop - now famous as skulked in the annals
photogenic emblem of the most destructive aspects of of cri m i n al justice
the riots. One man was shot ; a wh ite m iddle-class g uy policy for some years
was chased, tri pped and beaten ; another man p u l led before emergi ng as a
off his scooter and also beaten. synonym for 'chav' i n
t h e late 2000s, and
S i m ultaneously, in Eal ing, crowds who again seemed finally gai n i n g general
to have been organised through social media moved cu rrency as an ab
to attack rich areas - cars, cafes, boutiques and com jectifying keyword i n
mercial properties - apparently without interest in looting. t h e midst o f t h e riots,
Bystanders were assaulted. A 68-year-old man was being bandied around
attacked when trying to put out a fire in a dustbin, and by government fig u res
later died. In Birmingham around 200 rioters set fi re to l i ke Ken Clarke.
an u nmanned police station in an i n ner city area, and
tried to attack the city centre. Police fended them off
with extra officers, but later in the n i g ht kids retu rned
to l oot many shops. In B attersea bystanders i d e nti
fied rioters as "blues, yellows and reds"- members of
local gangs who had apparently called a truce for the
eve n i n g . I n Camden some shops were attacked and
confrontations with riot cops drifted u p to Kentish Town
and Chalk Farm . In Peckham a h u n d red-strong group
cheered as a shop was set on fire, shouting "the West
End is going down next". Cycl ists and motorcycl ists
were violently dismounted with rocks, their bikes taken.
With this l itany of chaotic and often dark events com
ing to form a carousel of l u m pen depravity, rotated on
barely changing loops to ever-more plaintive, moralis
ing tones, the authorised version of the riots began to
consolidate : this cou ldn't all be "about" Mark Duggan ;
no, it was the work of a deranged, feral underclass44,
out to get whatever t h ey c o u l d , at best because of
some misguided "consumerism", at worst because they
came from t h e work-shy u rban cesspits of " b roken
Britain ", lacking the authority of proper father fig u res
who would have soon set them right, with a good old
paternal clip round the ear. " I m moral ity" or "cri m i nality"
SCU M
Endnotes 3 1 54
commun ity: j ust a big hole in society into which the bad
ones fal l. Pol iticians, of course, took care to be photo
g raphed amidst this smug convu lsio n ; " Boris ! Bori s !
Bori s ! " cried t h e broom-brigade, a s t h e tousle-haired
Tory buffoon turned u p to ensconce h imself i n the col
lective anti-chav backslap.
Endnotes 3 1 56
hurried through the congregation, visibly on guard. A mob
of Tu rkish men started fol lowin g them down the street,
turning and whistling for back-up, bristling for a fight, but
it came to noth ing. A little later a black couple showed
up further down the street and the crowd bristled once
more . . . but they were j ust there, l i ke us, to get food.
Endnotes 3 1 58
more opportu n ities elsewhere. However one explains
it, Tuesday n i g ht was the n i g ht on which the country
beyond London really burned : in Nottingham, at around
1 0.30pm, 30-40 men firebombed a pol ice station ; in
Liverpool a crowd of youths assembled at 1 1 :30pm,
t h rowi n g m issiles at police and attacking shops; at
Birm ingham's New Street station, police fought up to
200 l ooters who had attacked shops and set fi re to
cars - shots were fired at police, including at a helicopter,
and petrol bombs thrown; from 1 1 pm in Gloucester - a
small provincial market town , which had nonetheless
seen riot i n g before - riot i n g and loot i n g took place ;
i n Manchester, t h o u g h the t h i rd larg est force i n the
cou ntry, pol ice lost control of the city centre as loot
ing and arson kicked off in the shopping area. But the
most dramatic events were probably i n Salford , a city of
about 250,000 in the Manchester area, where another
anti-police riot ignited.
D I S G UST
Endnotes 3 1 60
i n the national media spectacle, Jahan's speech came 4& Jahan h i mself
to stand for the sane, moral voice of the nation at large, would later explicitly
against the madness of rioters in general. Disembedded distance h i mself from
from its local referent, it came to imply that those around the demon isation
the country who continued to riot were now complicit i n of rioters and the
violence w h i c h , among other things, had cost a father p u n itive escala-
his son. And as such, it seemed to work. tions against them,
acknowledging the
It would later emerge that the incident had been an acci problem of stop-and
dent, that some of those impl icated had actually known search. See Jahan
the victims, and that a cop involved in the case had l ied interviewed by Mehdi
under oat h ; all of the 8 accused of m u rder were acq u it Hasan, 'I don't see
ted, and an I PCC i nvestigation was lau nched i nto the a broken society',
conduct of the police. Many of those i nvolved also turned New Sta tesman, 24
out to be white. Associations of the incident with the riot August 2011.
ous behaviour or anti-Asian violence of local blacks thus
unravelled, leaving it an u nfortunate but highly contingent
event. I ndeed, the more terrifying social dynamics that
were at play in this case were less a matter of rioting i n
itself, than o f a potential inter-communal strife emerging
as racial l y and territorial ly-defi ned com m u n ities self
organised against the spread of the riots, and against
looting in particu lar. Tuesday had put this prospect on
the table, from broom-brigades to baseball-batted Turks,
from Birm i n g ham's Asian comm u nity to the EDL. But:
nowhere the blacks. Out of this ambivalent social logic
a distorted national consensus forged a bl itz-sp irited
smugness against the asocial ity of the rioter, as the gal
lery of riot horrors rotated endlessly on our screens: the
burning of a carpet warehouse and al l the flats above it;
the burning of a longstanding family fu rniture business;
the mugging of a bewi ldered Malaysian student; and
finally, poor, noble Tariq Jahan.46
Endnotes 3 1 62
but a rising tide of spontaneously u nfold i n g actions, explanation - seems
a perceptible mechanics of social u p heaval by which to have some
a fairly standard com m u n ity a n t i - p o l i ce d e m o n stra historical association
tion spills over i nto riot ; by wh ich this creates cop-free with the anti-semitic
space for the usual lootin g ; by wh ich this looting then fig u re of the Jew as
spreads at a startling rate, afforded fi rstly by the scale physical embodiment
of the i n itial conflag ration, and secondly by the u biq of crime itself.
u ity of lateral means of com m u n ication ; by which other
com m u n ities who recogn ise a common cause with the 49 It is surely this quality
rioters of Tottenham then come out to wage their own of the riot-wave as
anti-police riots, amidst the general ising d isorder; by emergent social event
which this g rowi ng contagion precipitates a broader that makes it such a
national crisis of law and order as the police struggle seductive, enigmatic
to respond ; i n which context there prol iferates a cha object for phi loso
otic mass of behaviours normally kept somewhat at bay phers and pundits,
in the "social peace", and in response to wh ich other who read ily queue
com m u n ities feel compelled to self-organise agai nst u p to scrutinise this
the breakdown of order; which self-organisation then charm ingly i nscruta
t h reaten s to eru pt i nto i nter-co m m u nal strife ; which ble thing, in whose
all compels the formation of a national consensus of depths, it is supposed,
disgust at the whole u nfolding thing, before it all dies there m ust be h idden
down, we a l l g o home, and t h e mass-i ncarceration some secret.
beg ins. The last embers of the fi re faded i n Liverpool
and Manchester that Wed nesday, with only the Eng
lish Defence League sti l l carrying the torch , i n Eltham,
of a riot-wave that had its clearest roots i n anti-racism.
PU N I S H M E N T
Endnotes 3 1 64
This perceived homogeneity would appear in the blanket 51 C h ief Constable
sentencing of vastly d ifferent acts accord i n g to norms Peter Fahy in
completely other than those which would apply in normal, Panorama, 'Inside
non-riot circumstances. I n its generalised exemplary the Riots', BBC One,
sentencing of rioters, the state seems to impl icitly rec- 22 Novem ber 2011.
ogn ise the riot's real character as an emergent social
event. U n l i ke individual crimes, as a socially generalis-
ing logic the riot impl icitly puts society itself at stake ;
rather than the riot being a sum of the particu lar acts
of rioters, these acts then become i n stances of this
general logic. Each can thus be judged as such - as
the putting at stake, u ltimately, of society as a whole.
The response of the Chief Constable of the G reater
Manchester Pol ice was clear:
Endnotes 3 1 66
custody rate, had been left to wait in cells below the s2 Nick Clegg, speaki ng
courtroom , often crammed to their m ax i m u m capac in Manchester
ity. The spectrum of candidates in the 2 0 1 2 London to businesses
mayoral election would propose the standardisation affected by the riots :
of this industrious spectacle for the city as a whole on Guardian News Blog,
their glossy campaign flyers. And if this display was not 13 Aug ust 2011.
enough to appease a nation h u n g ry for "justice", the
Prime M i n ister would soon advise local councils that
they should consider withholding the shrinking welfare
cheques of all those fam i l ies harbou r i n g a rioter, or
even, perhaps, evicting them - signal l i n g to a mass of
panicked parents that they should shop in their delin
quent kids, to save their homes. As N ick Clegg echoed :
Endnotes 3 1 68
In an Olympic opening ceremony a couple of miles from
the sites of Hackney's riots, while order is ensured with
param i l itary-style pol icing, a patriotic spectacle is sum
moned from Britai n's disorderly h istory, throwing wh ite
p u n ks and black grime kids from the nearby district of
Bow against top-hatted Industrial Revolution bourgeois;
an anarchic multicultural explosion about which we are to
feel proud, included. A year after Smiley Culture's death,
Dizzee Rascal decants the last of London's autonomous
black subcultures onto the stage. Doreen Lawrence
carries the torch through the South East London that
lit the fuse of 1 9 8 1 ; that m u rdered her son in 1 99 3 ;
where the EDL concluded t h e riot-wave i n 2 0 1 1 . J ust
outside, a Critical Mass demonstration - ord inarily toler
ated by the cops - is stamped on hard. Young black men
continue to be stopped and searched m u ltiples of times
more than any other g roup, while a m uted recog nition
that there may be problems with this approach slowly
seeps t h ro u g h the post-riot pol itical landscape, j u st
as it did in the early 1 9 8 0s. And in this sense at least,
these riots may be said to have "worked''. Persecution of
the supposed feckless agai n ramps up, with the state
managed class-cleansing of London estates. Thatcher's
long-awaited death lets loose a national outburst of
schadenfreude as the su rvivors of the 1 980s pour into
central London to drunkenly celebrate something that
feels vaguely l i ke a victory : at least we outlived her.
Endnotes 3 1 70
we are now. Stuck in modes of struggle that rebound
upon us. Residue of positive class belonging only at
someone else's expense. And for them: class branded
onto their very being as mere objects of d isg ust. Class
declared by rule of law, enforced by police patrol. Thus
class, at least, put at stake.
Jasper Bernes
1 72
What is theory for? What good is it, in the fight against 1 Karl Marx, 'Letter
capital and state? For m u ch of the left, the Marxist left to Arnold Ruge'.
in particular, the answer is obvious: theory tells us what September 1843
to do, or what is to be done, in the strangely passive (M ECW 3), 144.
formula often used here. Theory is the pedagogue of
p ractice. Thus, the essential l i n k between Comrade
Len in and his putative enemy, the Renegade Kautsky, the
master thinkers of the Th i rd and Second I nternationals:
despite their storied d isagreements, both believed that
without the special, scientific knowledge d ispensed by
intellectuals and dedicated revolutionaries, the work
ing class was doomed to a degraded consciousness,
incapable of making revolution or, at any rate, making it
successful ly. The task of theory, therefore, is to weap
onise proletarian consciousness, to turn it toward right
action. This d idactic view of theory extends across the
entire range of M arxist i ntel lectual work i n the 20th
century, from the comparatively crude Bolshevist pro
g rammatics of Len i n and Trotsky to the sophisticated
variants offered by Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser.
Endnotes 3 1 74
contemplative (if not fatalist) orientation to the u nfold
ing of strugg les, offering d iag nosis at most but never
any strateg ic reflection, lest it comm it the card inal sin
of " intervention", playing the pedagogue to the masses.
The result is a perversely u n happy consciousness who
both knows better and yet, at the same time, feels that
such knowi ng is at best useless and at worst harmful .
T h i s g u i lty self-consciousness plagues even those i m
portant theories - b y G i l les Dauve and Theorie Com
m u n iste, for i n stance - wh ich emerge after 1 9 6 8 as
critiques of the historical u ltra-left.
TH E O RY F R O M THE G RO U N D
Endnotes 3 1 76
in solidarity with whatever they understood as the chief 4 For an exam ple, see
grievances of the Occupy movement. How, then, to char 'Blockading the Port
acterise the relationship between the blockaders, many Is Only the Fi rst of
of whom were unemployed or marg i nally employed, and Many Last Resorts'
the highly organised port workers? Who was affected ( bayofrage.com ) , a
by such a blockade? What is the relationsh i p between text that add resses
the blockade and the strike tactic? Once asked, these many of the questions
questions l i n ked the moment of the blockade to related outlined above, and
mobilisations: the piqueteros of the Argentine uprisings which was d istrib
of the late 1 990s and early 2000s, unemployed workers uted with i n Occu py
who, absent any other way of prosecuting their demands Oakland after the first
for government assistance, took to blockad ing roads in blockade and before
small, dispersed bands; the piquets volants of the 2 0 1 0 the second, m u lti-city
French strikes against proposed changes in pension law, blockade. In many
bands of dispersed picketers who supported blockades regards, the essay
by workers but also engaged in their own blockades, here is a formalisation
independent of strike activity ; the recent strikes by work and refi nement of a
ers in I KEA's and Wal-Mart's supply chains; and every process of d iscussion,
where, in the season of pol itical t u m u lt that fol lows on reflection and critique
the crisis of 2008, a prol iferation of the blockade and a i n itiated by that text.
waning of the strike as such (with the exception of the
industrial "BRIGS", where a renegade labour formation
has i n itiated a new strike wave ) .
Endnotes 3 1 78
In J IT systems, manufacturers must coordinate upstream demonstrating the
suppl iers with downstream buyers, so speed alone is dangerous frag i l ity
insufficient. Timing is crucial. Th rough precise coord i na of today's distributed
tion, firms can invert the trad itional buyer-seller relation production system,
ship i n which goods are first prod uced and then sold to where a 'breakdown
a consumer. By replenishing goods at the exact moment anywhere i ncreasingly
they are sold, with no build-up of stocks along the way, means a breakdown
J IT firms perform a weird sort of time-travel , making it everywhere, much
seem as if they only make prod ucts that have al ready i n the way that a
been sold to the end-consumer. As opposed to the older, small perturbation
"push prod uction" model, i n which factories generated i n the electricity grid
massive stockpi les of goods that retailers would clear i n Ohio tripped the
from the market with promotions and coupons, i n today's g reat North American
"pull" production system " retailers share POS [poi nt-of blackout of August
sale] i nformation with their vendors who can then rap 2003'. Barry C Lynn,
idly replenish the retailers' stock". 7 This has lead to the End of the Line: The
functional i nteg ration of suppl iers and retailers, under Rise and Coming Fall
terms i n wh ich the retailers often have the u pper hand. of the Global Cor-
Massive buyers l i ke Wal-Mart reduce their suppl iers to poration ( Doubleday
m ere vassals, d i rectly control ling product design and 2005), 3.
pricing while still retain i n g the flexibil ity to terminate a
contract if needed. They gain the benefits of vertical 7 Edna Bonacich
integration without the liabil ity that comes from formal and Jake B Wilson,
ownersh ip. Whereas in the early 1 9 80s some thought Getting the Goods:
that the emphasis on flexibility and dynamism would shift Ports, Labor, and the
the balance of power from big, inflexible multinationals to Logistics Revolution
small, agile firms, lean production has instead only meant ( Cornell U n iversity
a phase change rather than a weakening of the power Press 2008), 5.
of m u ltinational firms. The new arrangement features
what Bennett H arrison has called the "concentration a Bennett Harrison,
without central isation" of corporate authority.8 Lean and Mean: The
Changing Land
Lean manufacturing, flexibility, just-in-time inventory sys scape of Corporate
tems, " p u l l " production : each one of these innovations Power in the Age of
now forms a component part of the so-called "log istics Flexibility (G u ilford
revolution", and the corresponding "logistics industry", Press 1 997), 8-12.
which consists of in-house and third-party specialists in
supply-chain design and management. Enabled by the
technical transformations of the shipping and transport
Endnotes 3 1 80
liquid of forms capital takes : money. This is i m possible, 10 G i l les Deleuze and
of cou rse, since the valorisation process req u i res fixed Felix G u attari, Anti
capital outlays at some point along the circu its of repro Oedipus: Capitalism
duction, and therefore someone somewhere will have to and Schizophrenia
shoulder the risk that comes with i nvesting in immobile ( U n iversity of Min
plant and mach inery. But log istics is about m itigating nesota Press 1983),
this risk, it is about transform ing a mode of prod uction 227-228.
into a mode of circu lation, in which the frequencies and
channel capacities of the circu its of capital are what 11 Braudel, notably,
matters. In this the log istics revolution conforms to the treats capital ism as
hydrau lic conception of capital ism outlined by Deleuze the i ntervention onto
and Guattari in the 1 970s, in which surplus value resu lts a pre-existing plane
not so m u c h from t h e i rreve rs i b l e transformation of of market transac
worked matter but from the conj u nction of one flow tions by powerful
(money) with another (labour) . 1 0 In this accou nt, infl u actors who are able
enced by Fernand Braudel's description of the origins to suspend the rules
of capitalism, and its revision by world-systems theory, of fai r play for their
capital is noth ing so m u ch as the commander of flows, own benefit. Capital
breaki n g and conj o i n i n g various cu rrents in order to is, fundamental ly, a
create a vast i rrigation and d rainage of social power. manipu lation of circu
Logistics turns solids i nto liquids - or at its extreme, into lation and the flows
electrical fields - taking the movement of discrete ele of a market economy.
ments and treating them as if they were oil in a pipeline, Fernand Braudel, The
flowing continuously at precisely adjustable pressures. 1 1 Wheels of Commerce,
( U n iversity of Califor
TH E U S E -VAL U E O F LOGISTICS nia Press 1992), 22.
Endnotes 3 1 82
complementary technical innovations, streamlining and C i rculation, then, refers
su percharging d ifferent segments of the total circuit of to two different pro
reproduction. The ever-faster rotations of credit and cesses that are con
commodities around the globe are m utually enabling ceptually distinct but in
relays. H owever, i nvestment i n these areas is not j ust practice almost always
about brute velocity ; it also aims at reducing the asso intertwined. Fi rst, there
ciated costs of circu lation and thereby increasing the is a metamorpho-
total load of the transport systems. Alongside the obvi sis in the form of the
ous economies of scale and mechanisation afforded by commod ity, as com
container technology, i nteg rated i nformation systems modities change into
vastly reduce the adm i n istrative costs associated with money and vice versa.
c i rc u lation, freeing up more m oney for d i rect i nvest This is 'circu lation' not
ment in production. 1 2 in actual space but in
the ideal phase-space
But these developments cannot b e understood in terms of the commodity-form.
of q uantitative increase and decrease alone : increase As Marx notes, 'mov
in speed and volume of commod ital flows, decrease in able commod ity values,
overhead . There is an important q ual itative goal here such as cotton or pig
as well, described by log istics as "ag i lity"- that is, the i ron, can remain in
power to change, as q u ickly as possible, the speed, the same warehouse
location, origi n and destination of products, as well as while they u n dergo
product type, in order to meet volatile market conditions. dozens of circu lation
Corporations aim for " responsive supply chains", as the processes, and are
chapter title of one popular log istics handbook has it, bought and resold by
"such that [they] can respond i n shorter time-frames specu lators'. We need
both i n terms of volume change and variety changes". 1 3 to distinguish this type
I n t h e i r interventive role, log istics experts m i g ht seek of properly u n produc
to identify and remedy bottlenecks in order to maintain tive circulation - 'where
ag i l ity. But as a matter of preventive design, specialists it is the property title
w i l l strive to syn c h ro n ise and d i stribute i nformation to the thing and not
across the entire supply chain so that suppl iers can the thing itself' that
take appropriate action before i ntervention becomes moves - from the phys
necessary. Th is d istributed i nformation is referred to as ical circu lation of the
a "virtual su pply chain", a chain of transm itted sym bolic object in space, which
representations that flows o p posite to t h e p hysical might be thought of
movement of commodities. Entirely separate firms might as an extension of the
use d i stributed data of t h i s sort to coord i n ate t h e i r val ue-generating activ
activities. T h e result, a s Bonacich a n d Wilson note, is ities of the prod uctive
that "competition . . . sh ift [s] from the firm level to the sph ere ( ibid., 1 53).
Endnotes 3 1 84
between corporate log istics and m i l itary log istics is 11 Wal mart CEO Bill
so strong that the many of Wal-Mart's managers and Simon, a former Navy
executives - who set the standard for the industry as a officer, i n itiated pro
whole - come from the m i litary. 1 7 g rams which recru it
managers and execu
Log istics, w e might say, is war by other means, war by tives from the m i l itary.
means of trade. A war of supply chains that conquers Michael Bergdahl,
new territories by suffusing them with capillarial d istribu What I Learned From
tions, ensuring that commodities flow with ease to the Sam Walton (John
farthest extremities. From this martial perspective, we Wiley 2004), 155. He
might useful ly distinguish, however, between an offensive has also established
and a defensive logistics. The offensive forms we have 'leadership' prog rams
already described above : logistics seeks to satu rate modeled on m i l itary
markets, red uce costs and outproduce com petitors, academ ies.
maintain maxim u m throughput and maxim u m p rodu ct
variety. In this offensive aspect, logistics emphasises 18 Ch ristopher, Logistics
flexi bil ity, plasticity, permutab i lity, dynamism, and mor- and Supply Chain
phogenesis. But it finds its complement in a series of Management, 1 89-210.
protocols which are fundamental ly defensive, m itigating
supply chain risk from blockades and earthquakes, strikes
and supplier shortages. If "ag i lity" is the watchword of
offensive logistics, defensive logistics aims for "resilience"
and emphasises the values of elasticity, homeostasis,
stabi lity, and longevity. But resilience is only ostensibly a
conservative principle; it finds stabi lity not in i nflexibil ity
but in constant, self-stabi l ising adaptivity.1 8 In this sense,
the defensive and the offensive forms of logistics are
really impossible to d isentangle, since one firm's agi lity
is another's volatil ity, and the more flexible and dynam ic
a firm becomes the more it " exports" uncertainty to the
system as a whole, requiring other firms to become more
resi lient. In any case, we can expect that, in the context
of the economic crisis and the loom ing environmental
col lapse, log istics will become more and more the sci
ence of risk management and crisis m itigation.
Endnotes 3 1 86
i ncreasingly taken the sphere of circu lation as the object
of its own i nterventions. In this regard, theory provides
us not only with the why of capital's restructuring but
the why of a n ew cycle of struggles.
VIS I B I LITY A N D P R A X I S
Endnotes 3 1 88
of the mach ines is fundamentally opaque to them. The 20 Richard Sennett, The
d ifference between enteri ng val ues i nto a spreadsheet Corrosion of Char
and baki ng bread is neg l i g i ble to them. Concrete labour acter: The Personal
has become fundamentally abstract, scrambling at the Consequences of
same time d istinctions between material and immaterial, Work in the New Capi
manual and mental labour: talism (W. W. Norton &
Co. 2000), 68.
Computerized baki ng has p rofo u n d ly changed the
balletic physical activities of the shop floor. N ow the
bakers make no physical contact with the materials or
the loaves of bread , monitori ng the entire process via
on-screen icons which depict, for instance, images of
bread color derived from data about the temperatu re
and baking time of the ovens; few bakers actually see
the loaves of bread they make. Their worki ng screens
are organized i n the fami liar Windows way; i n one,
icons for many more d ifferent kinds of bread appear
than had been prepared i n the past - Russian, Italian,
French loaves all possible by touch i n g the screen .
Bread had become a screen representation.
Endnotes 3 1 90
vivre. This is part of a long h i story of what Stiegler cal ls 22 Bernard Stiegler, For
"grammatization", in which knowledge and memory is a New Critique of Po
d iscretised i nto reprod ucible and combinatorial bodily litical Economy, (Polity,
gestures - phonemes, graphemes, keystrokes, bits - and 2010 ), 40-44,
then exteriorised t h ro u g h i nscription in matter.22 The
d i g ital and teleco m m u n ication technology of contem
porary grammatisation is the final stage of this process,
such that our memories and cog n itive facu lties now
exist in the data cloud, as it were, part of a d istributed
technological prosthesis without which we are effectively
incapable of orienting ourselves or functioning. In this
largely persuasive account, which thankfully cuts against
the optim istic read ings of i nformation tech nology as a
progressive socialisation of "general i ntellect", we are
d ispossessed not just of the means of production but
the means of thought and feeling as we ll.
T H E RECO N F I G U RAT I O N T H E S I S
Endnotes 3 1 92
system, in this regard , emerges from its intractabil ity, 24 Alberto Toscano,
and not the other way around. In an insig htfu l article 'Logistics and Op-
on the log istics industry and contem porary struggle, position', Mute 3, no. 2
Alberto Toscano (who has lately devoted considerable (metam ute.org).
effort to critiq u i n g theorists of com m u n isation) fau lts
the "space-time of much of today's anticapitalism" for
its rel iance on "su btraction and i nterru ption, not attack
and expansion ".24 Toscano proposes, as an alterna
tive, an anticapitalist logistics which treats the various
productive sites and infrastructu res of late capitalism
as "potentially reconfigurable" rather than the o bject of
"mere negation or sabotage". No doubt, any struggle
which wants to overcome capital ism will need to con
sider "what use can be d rawn from the dead labours
which crowd the earth's crust", but there is no reason
to assume from the start, as Toscano does, that all exist
ing means of prod uction m u st have some use beyond
capital, and that all technological i nnovation m u st have,
almost categorically, a prog ressive d imension which is
recu perable through a process of "determinate nega
tion". As we saw above, the use-value which the logistics
industry produ ces is a set of protocols and tech niques
that enable firms to seek out the l owest wages any
where i n the world, and to evade the inconven ience of
class struggle when it arises. In this sense, u n l i ke other
capitalist tech nologies, logistics is only partly about
exploiting the efficiencies of mach ines i n order to get
products to market faster and more cheaply, since the
main purpose of the faster and cheaper tech nologies
is to offset the otherwise pro h i bitive cost of exploiting
labour forces halfway around the world. The tech nologi
cal ensemble which logistics superintends is therefore
fundamentally d ifferent than other ensembles such as
the Ford ist factory; it saves on labour costs by decreas
ing the wage, rather than i ncreasing the productivity of
labour. To put it in Marxist terms, it is absol ute surplus
value masquerad ing as relative surplus val ue. The use
value of log istics, for capital , is exploitation i n its rawest
form, and thus it is truly doubtful that logistics might form,
Endnotes 3 1 94
variety, of wage d ifferentials and trade i m balances? a heterodox Marxist
How m uch would become useless once one eliminated perspective on tech nol
the commodity-form, once one eliminated the necessity ogy, whose exemplars
of buying and sel l i n g ? Furthermore, the contemporary are writers such as Ra
logistics system is designed for a particular international n iero Panzieri and Da
balance of trade, with certain cou ntries as prod ucers vid Noble, and whose
and others as consumers. This is a fact fu ndamentally clearest sources lie in
entangled with the wage imbalances mentioned earl ier, the chapter i n Capital
which means that the i nequal ity of the global system i n on 'Mach inery and
part has t o do with t h e u nequal d istribution o f produc Large-Scale Industry,'
tive means and the infrastructu res of circulation - the and in particular, the
concentration of port capacity on the West Coast of the section on the factory.
US rather than the East Coast, for instance, because of There, Marx suggests
the location of manufacturing in Asia. Rebalancing the that, in the modern fac
amount of goods produced locally or at a distance - if tory system, capital's
such a thing were to be a part of a break with capital ist domination of labour
prod uction - wou ld mean an entirely d ifferent arrange 'acqu i res a tech n ical
ment of infrastructures and probably d ifferent types of and palpable real-
infrastructu re as wel l ( smaller ships, for i nstance ) . ity'. In the factory 'the
gigantic natu ral forces,
We m ig ht also q u esti o n t h e reconfi g u rati o n t h e s i s and the mass of social
from the perspective o f scale. Because o f the uneven labour embodied i n the
d istribution of productive means and capitals - not to system of mach inery . . .
mention the tendency for geograph ical specialisation, constitutes the power
the c o n c entrat i o n of c e rt a i n l i n e s i n c e rt a i n areas of the master' (Marx,
(textiles i n Bang ladesh, for i nstance ) - the system is Capital vol.1 [MECW
not scalable i n any way b u t up. It does not permit 35], 420-430 [Fowkes
partitioning by continent, hemisphere, zone or nation. trans.]). But if mach in
It must be managed as a total ity or not at all. Therefore, ery is a material isation
n early a l l proponents of t h e reconfi g u rati o n thesis of capital ist domi na
ass u m e h i g h - vo l u m e a n d hyper- g lobal d i stri b u t i o n tion - an objectification
i n t h e i r socialist o r c o m m u n ist syst e m , e v e n if t h e of the 'master' - then
usefu lness o f s u c h distributions beyond prod uction for we have every reason
profit remain u n clear. Another problem, though, is that to doubt that we can
adm i n istration at such a scale intro d u ces a s u b l i m e undo such domi nation
d imension to t h e concept o f "plan n i ng " ; these scales without negati ng the
and mag n itudes are rad ically beyond h uman cogn itive 'techn ical and palpable
capacities. The level of an impersonal "admin istration of aspect of mach inery. If
things" and the level of a "free association of prod ucers" workers were to seize
Endnotes 3 1 96
i nternational d ivision of labo u r - the concentration of
manufacturing in a few cou ntries, the concentration of
productive capacity for certain essential l ines of capital
in a handful of factories, as mentioned above - any
attempt to seize the means of production would requ i re
a n immedia tely global s e i z u re . We w o u l d n e e d a
revol utionary p rocess so q u ickly successful and exten
sive that all long-d istance supply chains ran between
n o n-capitalist producers with i n a m atter of months,
as opposed to the m uch m o re l i kely scenario that a
break with capital will be geographically concentrated
at first and need to spread from there. In most cases,
therefore, maintenance of these d istributed production
p rocesses and s u pply- c h a i n s w i l l mean t rade w i t h
capital ist partners, an enchai n ment to p roduction for
p rofit (necessary for s u rvival, we w i l l be told by the
pragmatists) the results of which will be nothi n g less
than d isastrous, as a study of the Russian and Spanish
examples will show. In both cases, the need to maintain
an export economy in order to buy crucial goods on the
international markets - arms i n particular - meant that
revolutionary cadres and m i l itants had to use d i rect
and indirect force i n order to induce workers to meet
prod uction targets. Raising p rodu ctivity and increas
ing produ ctive capacity now became the transitional
step on the way to achieving comm u n ism then, and in
anarchist Spain, as much as Bolshevist Russia, cadres
set to work m i micking the dynamic g rowth of capital ist
accumulation through direct political mechanisms, rather
than the i n d i rect force of the wage , t h o u g h in both
cases economic incentive structures (piece rates, bonus
pay) were eventually i ntroduced as matter of necessity.
It is hard to see how anything but a new insu rrectionary
process - one mitigated against by the establishment of
new d isciplines and repressive structures - could have
restored these systems even to the labour-note based
" l ower phase of comm u n ism" that Marx advocates i n
" Crit i q u e o f the Gotha Pro g ram", l e t alone a society
based upon free access and non-compelled labour.
Endnotes 3 1 98
H O R IZ O N S A N D PROSPECTS
Endnotes 3 200
try to g raph the flows and l i n kages around us in ways
that comprehend their brittleness as well as the most
effective ways they m i g h t be b locked as part of the
conduct of particu lar strugg les. These would be sem i
local maps - maps that operate from the perspective of
a certain zone or area. From this kind of knowledge, one
m ight also develop a functional understanding of the
i nfrastructure of capital, such that one then knew which
technologies and productive means would be orphaned
by a partial or total delinking from planetary flows, wh ich
ones m ight alternately be conserved or converted, and
what the major practical and techn ical questions facing
a revolutionary situation m i g ht look l i ke. How to ensure
that there is water and that the sewers function? How
to avoid meltdown of nuclear reactors? What does local
food production look l i ke? What types of man ufactu re
happen nearby, and what kinds of things can be done
with its production machinery? This would be a process
of inventory, taki n g stock of t h i n g s we encou nter i n
our i mmed iate envi rons, that does not imag i n e mastery
from the standpoint of the global totality, but rather a
process of bricolage from the stand point of partisan
fractions who know they will have to fight from particular,
embattled locations, and win their battles successively
rather than all at once. None of this means setting u p
a blueprint for t h e conduct o f strugg les, a transitional
program . Rather, it means prod ucing the knowledge
wh ich the experience of past struggles has already de
manded and which future struggles will likely find helpful.
C h ris Chen
202
Without an account of the relationsh i p between "race" 1 See 'The Logic of
and the systematic reproduction of the class relation, the Gender' i n this issue.
question of revolution as the overcoming of entrenched
social d ivisions can o n ly be posed in a distorted and
incomplete form. And without an u nderstanding of the
dynamics of racialisation - from capital ism's h istorical
orig i n s in " p r i m itive acc u m u l at i o n " to the US state' s
restructuring i n the post-World War I I era - continuing
struggles against evolving forms of racial rule can only
be m isrecog n ised as peripheral to an ultimately race-
neutral confl ict between capital and labour. Rather than
wan ing with the decl ine of what is sometimes construed
as a vestig ial system of fol k beliefs, resistance to racial
su bordination i n the US has continued. " Race" has not
withered away: rather, it has been reconfigured i n the
face of austerity measures and an augmented "post-racial"
secu rity state which has come i nto being to manage the
ostensible racial threats to the nation posed by black wage-
less l ife, Latino immigrant labour, and "Islamic terrorism".
Endnotes 3 204
as a set of ascriptive processes which i mpose fictive 2 See Nancy Fraser
identities and subord inate racialised populations. To dis and Linda Alcoff, who
tingu ish racial ascription from voluntary acts of cultural stake out n uanced,
identification - and from a range of responses to racial though largely op
rule from flight to armed revolt - requ i res a shift in focus posed, theoretical po
from " race" to racism. But focusing on the phenomenon sitions on the political
of racism tends to narrow the terrain upon wh ich " race" possibilities and l i m its
is structu rally enforced to personal attitudes or racial of 'identity politics'. As
ideologies rather than institutional processes which may this article goes on
generate profound racial disparities without requ i ri n g to arg ue, both posi
i n d ividual racist beliefs or i ntentions. tions are fundamen-
tally i nformed by the
As a result, " race" gets theorised i n d ivergent cultural h i storical promise of
or economic terms as evidence of the need to either a social-democratic
affirm denigrated group identities or i nteg rate i n d ividu coal itional subject,
als more thoroughly i nto capitalist markets momentar u n iting labour, femi
ily distorted by individ ual prejudice. On the one hand , nist, and anti-racist
" race" is a form of cultural stigmatisation and m isrepre pol itical cam paigns.
sentation req u i ring personal, institutional, and/or state See Alcoff, Visible
recogn ition. On the other, " race" is a system of wage identities: Race, Gen
d ifferentials, wealth stratification, and occupational and der, and the Self (Ox
spatial seg regation. Whether defended or derided by ford U n iversity Press
critics across the pol itical spectru m , the concept of 2006); and Fraser,
racial or cultural identity has become a kind of proxy 'Reth inking Recog ni
for d iscussi n g " race" m atters in general. Conversely, tion', New Left Review
dism issals of " identity politics" g rounded in functional 3 (May-J u n e 2000).
ist or epiphenomenalist accou nts of " race" propose an
alternative social ist and social democratic "politics of
class" based upon essentially the same political logic of
affirming subjects - i.e. workers - withi n and sometimes
against capitalism. Th is division between economic and
cultural forms of " race" naturalises racial economic i n
equal ity a n d transforms the problem o f racial oppres
sion and exploitation into either an epiphenomenon of
class or the m isrecogn ition of identity.2
Endnotes 3 206
pol itical stru g g l es as wel l . The legacy of racial and 4 Ch ristopher Kyri
gender exclusions which have structured the US labour akides and Rodolfo
movement has been steadi ly eroded at the same time Torres, Race Defaced:
that the relative size and strength of organised labour Paradigms of Pes
has dwindled. Because the public sector, with its robust simism, Politics of
anti-discrim i nation mandates, represents the last bas Possibility (Stan
tion of US organised labou r, hostility to the US labour ford U n iversity
movement is frequently couched i n racist rhetoric. As Press 2012), 119.
Kyriakides and Torres argue, 1 960s-era visions of a Third
World, non-al igned, or anti-colonial coal itional subject 5 Barbara J. Fields,
i n the US have, i n an age of decl i n i n g growth, fractu red 'Wh iteness, racism,
i nto m u ltiple "ethnically determi ned subjects of identity and identity', Inter
in competition not only for a shred of an ever-shrinking national Labor and
economic settlement but for recog n ition of their suffer Working Class History
ing conferred by a nation-state in which the Right won 60 (Fal l 2001), 48-56.
the pol itical battle and the Left won the culture war." 4
ADDENDU M : O N T E R M I N O LO GY
Endnotes 3 208
The cu rsory treatment of racial violence in the h istorical
narration of "prim itive accumu lation" remains a funda
mental blind spot in Marxist analyses of the relationsh ip
between " race" and capitalism. I n the era of the con
quista and in the transition to capital ism, " race" came
into being through plu nder, enslavement, and colonial
violence. At the very same time, primitive accumulation in
England prod uced a d ispossessed and superfluous ex
peasantry, for the factory system that might absorb them
had not yet been created. Many of these ex-peasants
were eventually sent to the colonies, or inducted into
imperial enterprises - the navy, merchant marines, etc.
I n the 1 8th and 1 9th centuries, more of these surplus
popu lations were i ntegrated i nto the developing capi
talist economy, whether as chattel slaves or as wage
labou rers, accord ing to an increasingly i ntricate typol
ogy of " race". Finally, after decades of compou nding
increases i n labour productivity, capital began to expel
m o re labour from the p rod uction process than was
absorbed . That, in turn, produced yet another kind of
superfluous population in the form of a disproportion
ately non-white industrial reserve army of labour. At the
periphery of the g lobal capital ist system, capital now
renews " race" by creating vast superfluous u rban popu
lations from the close to one billion slum-dwelling and
desperately impoverished descendants of the enslaved
and colonised.
Wh ile Marx and Engels generally insisted on the need 7 Marx's pronou nce
for workers to oppose racism i n its more blatant 1 9th ment that 'labour i n
century manifestations, they did not attempt to articulate t h e wh ite s k i n can
the relation of " race" and class at a categorical leve l . 7 never free itself as
A s Derek Sayer observes, " Marx was a m a n o f h i s time long as labour in the
and place" : black skin is branded'
([M ECW 35] , 305) is
Like most other Victorians, Marx thought both " race" often quoted by his
and family natural categories (even if subject to some defenders, as are h i s
"historical mod ification"), and had l ittle trouble in d is denunciations of anti
tinguishing between "civilisation" (wh ich for h i m was I rish racism. Less often
w h ite, western and modern) and " barbaris m �' H i s mentioned are Marx
views on t h e beneficial resu lts o f European colonial and Engels's opinions
ism would embarrass many twentieth-century Marxists, about 'lazy Mexicans'
notwithstanding his denu nciations of the violence of and the cause of the
its means . . . 8 political i m m atu rity of
Lafarg ue, Marx's son
The theoretical relation between " race" and class has in-law, being 'the stig
su bsequently become the subject of a long debate i n ma of his Negro herit
t h e varieties o f academic Marxism that emerged a s a age' and 'Creole blood'.
" N ew Left" generation inspired by the strugg les of the See Frederick Engels,
sixties e ntered the u n iversity. I n an early and i nfluential 'Democratic Pan-Slav
contribution to this conversation, Stuart Hall asserted ism', Neue Rheinsiche
that "race" was "the modality in which class is ' lived', the Zeitung 231 (M ECW 8),
Endnotes 3 21 0
med i u m through wh ich class relations are experienced, 362; Babacar Camara,
the form in which it is appropriated and 'fought through'�'9 Marxist Theory, Black/
Hall and other cultural theorists su pplemented Marxist A frican Specificities,
categories of "base" and "su perstructure" with the ideas and Racism (Lex
of Western Marxist fig u res such as Lou i s Alt h u sser i ngton 2008), 71-2.
and Anton i o G ramsci. G ramsci i n particular, and his
development of the concept of "hegemony"- with its 8 Derek Sayer, 'I ntro
room for more n uanced theories of culture, ideology, d uction' to Readings
and pol itics - has been a central reference i n aca from Karl Marx (Rout
d e m i c att e m pts to reart i c u l ate the relation of " race" ledge 1989), ixx-xx.
and class. I n this vei n , anti-racist struggle is viewed as
a contest for "democratic hegemony", which followed 9 Stuart Hall, 'Race,
from the m id-twentieth cent u ry d iscrediting of wh ite Articulation, and So
supremacy as expl icit state policy. 1 0 U ntil recently, the cieties Structured i n
G ramscian analytic of hegemony, which has informed Dominance', Black
both Marxist cultural theory and many h i g h ly i nfluential British Cultural Stud
critical accounts of " race" and slavery, has largely gone ies (Un iversity of Chi
unq uestioned . 1 1 cago Press 1gg6), 55.
Endnotes 3 212
The "form-determi nation" theory of the state may also 17 See Evelyn Nakano
help overcome some of the l i m its of a G ramscian view G lenn, 'From Servi-
of the state as an object over which contending social tude to Service Work:
forces struggle to gain control. From the "state-deriva H istorical Conti n u ities
tion debate" of the 1 970s there emerged an alternative in the Racial Division
view of the state as a particular man ifestation of the of Paid Reprod uctive
capital relation - constituted by the separation of the labour', Signs 18: 1
indirect, i mpersonal relations of production from d i rect (1992), 1-43.
political power. Thus the state, with its expanded penal
or carceral capacities, can i m pose d i rect relations of 1a As P. Valentine has
racial domi nation while for instance i nvolvin g itself i n observed, 'rigorous
the disciplinary regu lation and expulsion of i m m i g rant efforts to engage
labour. I n those relations mediated by "free" exchange, with and integrate
where wage labour as a commodity is traded, the state analyses of race
is obliged to ensure the terms of exchange and contract, that do not mesh
while u nwaged relations put one or both parties in the seamlessly with
relation potentially outside o r beyond the law. The in Marxist categories'
creasingly pun itive cri m inal isation of the purchase, sale, will inevitably require
and transportation of i l licit drugs provides perhaps one both reth inking some
of the most i nfamous examples of a racialised and ra of those categories
cial ising i nformal economy fundamentally structured by and challenging
state violence. Women's former legal status as chattel some entrenched
vis-a-vis marriage offers another, in which women did not orthodoxies of
trad itionally have protection from their husbands wit h i n anti-racist thoug ht: P.
t h e law, b u t only protection from men w h o were n o t their Valentine, 'The Gender
h usbands. The l i m ited protection of this legal status as Distinction i n Com
chattel was revoked in the case of black domestic labour m u n isation Theory',
ers in order to rationalise widespread rape and sexual Lies 1 (2012), 206. This
exploitation by white male employers . 1 7 In either case, the article is in part an
racial division of both productive and reproductive labour attem pt to respond
consistently maintains racial hierarchies within gender cat to this i nvitation.
egories, and gender hierarchies within racial categories. 1 8
Endnotes 3 214
While non-racially determined varieties of slave labour 20 M i ke Davis, Planet of
predated the European colonial "Age of D iscovery", capi- Slums (Verso 2006), 19.
talism bears the unique distinction of forging a systematic
racist doctrine from the 1 6th to 1 9th centuries - culminat-
ing in 1 9th century anthropological theories of scientific
racism - to justify racial domination, colonial plunder, and
an array of racially delineated varieties of unfree labour
and u nequal citizenship. The history of capitalism isn't
simply the h istory of the proletarianisation of an inde-
pendent peasantry but of the violent racial domination
of populations whose valorisation as wage labour, to re-
verse a common formu lation, has been merely h istorically
contingent: "socially dead" African slaves, the revocable
sovereignty and terra nu/lius of indigenous peoples, and
the nerveless, supernumerary body of the coolie labourer.
What H oward Winant and M i chael Omi have called 21 Recent studies of
the racial "break" or "great transformation"- d riven by the history of armed
a world-historical anti-racist upsurge of decolon isation, self-defense i n the
civil rights, and anti-apartheid social movements in the Civil Rights Movement,
mid-twentieth century - has discredited white supremacy for example by g roups
as explicit state policy across the g lobe. For Omi and l i ke the Deacons for
Winant, racial domination has g iven way to the struggle Defense and Justice,
over racial hegemony, and coercion has g iven way to have emphasised
consent. But fifty years after the racial " break", racial the complexity of
d o m ination has also evolved. Many ostensi bly " post the com m itment of
colonial" states have resorted to racial violence and movement activists
ethn i c cleansing in the name of nati o n - b u i l d i n g and to G handian strategic
economic development. After the " racial break", capital nonviolence. See
and race intertwine both inside and outside the wage Akinyele O mowale
relation. I nsofar as labour markets organise the ratio of Umoja, We Will Shoot
paid to u n paid labour, " race" as a marker of economic Back: A rmed Resist
subord i nation is g rounded both i n a permanently super ance in the Mississippi
fl uous population and entrenched wage d ifferentials. Freedom Movement
After the repeal of most Jim Crow laws and racialised (NYU Press 2013);
national immigration restrictions, two anti-racist political Simon Wendt, The
orientations emerged. In the case of US black-freedom Spirit and the Shotgun:
struggles after World War II, persistent racialised wage A rmed Resistance
d ifferentials - and racial d iscri m ination in housing, edu and the Struggle for
cation, and credit markets - became the target of a late Civil Rights ( U n iversity
civil-rights-movement politics of equitable inclusion and Press of Florida 2007).
electoral representation. At the same time, racial exclu
sion from the wage, de facto seg regation i n g hettos
and exposure to systemic police violence, made state
i nstitutions - l i ke welfare, prisons, and policing - the
target of a black fem i n ist welfare-reform m ovement,
waves of ghetto and prison riots, and a more m i l itant
politics of self-defense and self-assertion.21
Endnotes 3 216
S i nce the attacks of September 1 1 , 200 1 , popular US 22To be clear, these
stereotypes of the relative economic productivity of racial popu lations are not
subgroups have j ustified the exposure of such groups to outside but firmly
state surveillance, policing or incarceration - from border with in capitalism-with
patrol shootings of "illegals" to black mass-incarceration. labour regulation
At the same time, the " post-racial" civi l i s i n g m ission enforced by an array
of the US, and its prosecution of a m ulti-trillion dollar of pun itive state appa
m i litary campaign across the Islamic world, has been ratuses-so that while
vouchsafed by a national mythology of the p rogressive the wage no longer
overcoming of the legacy of slavery and legal segregation. d i rectly mediates col
lective access to basic
The chan g i n g relationship between the U S state and n eeds l i ke food and
su perfluous domestic populations h i g h l ights the global, shelter, a vast informal
fou ndational role of state violence as a racialisation pro economy has arisen
cess. The role of the state itself as an ostensibly neutral for secu ring the basic
agent of racial reform, rather than the principal agent of means of survival. In
racial violence, provides the missing third term in theoris the exam ple of the
ing the relationsh i p between race and capital . Contem partial proletarianisa
porary US racial pol itics is fundamentally structured by tion of the C h i nese
the decline of US global economic hegemony and by peasantry and the
the hyper- m i litarisation of a "post-racial" security state creation of a massive,
in response to three racialised "civil isational" threats: 160-million-person
the cri m inal threat of black surplus populations, the rural migrant labour
demographic threat of Latino immigrant labour, and the force, ag ricu ltu ral
unlimited national security threat posed by an elastically workers, or small
conceived Islamic terrorist menace whose adherents are peasants, have often
subject to collective punishment, torture, and preemptive become unwaged,
eradication. All th ree are d i rectly targeted and racial self-employed infor
ised by the state's penal, citizenship-conferring, and mal sector workers.
domestic security institutions. The rise of the anti-black The historical workers'
US carceral state from the 1 970s onward exe m pl ifies movement's dream
rituals of state and civilian violence wh ich enforce the ( a d ream which also
racialisation of wageless l ife, and the racial ascription of sustained the U S civil
wagelessness. From the point of view of capital , " race" rights movement and
is renewed not only through persistent racial ised wage an array of anti-colo
differentials, or the kind of occupational segregation pos n ial national l i beration
ited by earlier "spl it labour market" theories of race, but movements) , of pro
through the racialisation of unwaged surplus or superflu g ressive i n corporation
ous populations from Khartoum to the slums of Cairo.22 into the wage, has run
The colonial and racial g e n ealogy of E u ropean capi up against the real ity
talism has been encoded d i rectly i nto the econo m i c of persistent struc
" base" through an o n g o i n g h i story of racial violence tural unem ployment
which structu res both u nfree and i nformal labou r, and and su perfl u ity.
which binds surplus populations to capitalist markets.
If superfl u ity, stratification, and wage d ifferentials are
deracialised and the racial content of such categories
rendered conti ngent, then " race" can only appear as
epiphenomena!, and possess a de facto "specificity",
which severs any causal l i n k between capital ism and
racialisation. The racial typologies wh ich emerged from
and enabled the spatial expansion of European capi
talism as a mode of production, have been renewed
over the course of centu ries by an i mmanent tendency
wit h i n capital ism to prod uce surplus popu lations i n
ghettos, slu ms, a n d favelas throughout t h e world. After
the mid-twentieth century racial " break", formal decolo
nisation - i n places l i ke Brazil, su b-Saharan Africa and
South Asia - left i n its wake developmental ist states
which absorbed ideologies of ind ustrialisation and, so
also, racialised i n d igenous populations, eth n i c g ro u ps,
and stigmatised castes as peripheral to the wage rela
tion. Such popu lations will never be fu l ly integrated into
capital ist accumu lation processes except as bodies to
be policed, warehoused, or exterminated.
Endnotes 3 218
govern ment of social i nsecu rity" founded on a pun itive 23 Lol'c Wacquant,
upsurge in survei l lance, pol icing, and i ncarceration i n Punishing the Poor:
response t o the d isappearance o f secure wage work.23 The Neoliberal
Government of Social
" Race" is t h u s rooted in two overlapping p rocesses Insecurity ( Duke Uni
of al location and control. Past and present racial dis versity Press 2009).
c ri m i n at i o n i s c u m u lative and d istr i butes p recarity, See 'A Rising Tide
u n e m ployment, and i nformal ity u n evenly across the Lifts All Boats', i n this
economy along " race" and gender l ines. But " race" is issue, for a discussion
also operationalised in various state and civil ian politi of how such a model
cal projects of social control which classify and coerce was developed i n the
"deserving" and "undeserving" fractions of various racial case of Britai n.
g roups while determ i n i n g their fitness for citizenship.
Erod ing the institutional separation between policing,
border securitisation, and global warfare, a massively
expanded secu rity state now sends 1 i n 3 black men
to prison in their l ifetime, deports nearly half a m i l l ion
undocumented immigrants annually, has extermi nated
anywhere from 1 00,000 to over a million civilians in I raq
alone, and is now gearing up for a $ 4 6 billion dollar
" border surge" which includes d rone surveillance and
biometric exit scann i n g . 2 1 st century " race" emerges
from this matrix of securitisation.
Endnotes 3 220
Sweeping critiques of "identity politics", or of l i beral 24 See Wood, Democra-
m u lt i c u lturalism as neoliberal mystificat i o n , conceal cy against Capitalism:
a deeper elision of the identitarian logic at work in a Renewing Historical
social ist and social democratic " pol itics of class". The Materialism. (Aakar
classical workers' movement, with its concept of "class Books 2007), 258;
consciousness", was prem ised upon a d ream that the and 'Marxism Without
widespread affirmation of a working-class identity could Class Strugg le?'
serve as the basis for workers' hegemony - within nation- Socialist Register 20
ally constituted zones of capital accumu lation - and so (Merlin 1983), 242.
also for a workers' revolution. Like m uch contemporary
anti-racist scholarsh ip, the Marxist critique of identity
pol itics typically remakes capitalism as a problem of
identity, specifically of class identity, and reduces struc-
tural exploitation to distributive inequalities i n wealth .
Labou r a n d identity-based struggles, assumed to b e
qual itatively d ifferent in s u c h accou nts, are i n fact struc-
tured by the same representational logic of affi rmi n g
identities within capitalism. "The 'difference' that consti-
tutes class as an ' identity';' Ellen Meiksins Wood writes,
" is, by defi n ition, a relationshi p of inequality and power,
in a way that sexual or cultural 'd ifference' need not be":
Endnotes 3 222
an era of declining membership i n mass-based labour 25 Kyriakides and Torres,
and civil rights organisations, the prospects are d i m for Race Defaced: Para
both a "politics of race" and a "pol itics of class". S hift digms of Pessimism,
i n g the analytic focus from d ifference to d o m in ation Politics of Possibil-
d i rects our attention to the entanglement of race and ity, 36.
superfluity, as well as the racialising i mpact of violence,
imprisonment, and warfare. Rejecting an understanding
of capitalism as an increasingly inclusive engine of racial
uplift, and the state as an ultimate guarantor of civic
equality, an abolition ist anti-racism would categorically
reject the contin u i n g affirmatio n of the fundam e ntal
respectability, productivity or patriotism of racial i sed
g roups as a way to determ ine their relative fitness for
racial d o m in ation. B eg i n n i n g from radically d ifferent
histories of racialisation, abolitionist anti-racist struggles
would aim to d ismantle the machinery of " race" at the
heart of a fantasy of formal freedom, where the " l im it
point of capitalist equal ity is laid bare as the central
protagonist of racial ordering:'25
224
We do not know whether the [contrasting] destinies 1 Sergio Bologna,
of Luxemburg . . . and Lenin were to be tied to the fact 'Class composition
that Lenin and his group armed the workers, while and the theory of the
the Spartacists continued to view the organisation as party at the orig ins of
coordination . . . and the refusal to work as the only the workers' council
adequate workers ' weapon. The essence of Lenin movement' (1972).
ism shifts from the relationship between spontaneity
and the party to the relationship between the party
and insurrection. 1
Endnotes 3 226
revital ising the Germany Social Democratic Party. As 4 G i l les Dauve and
Dauve poi nts out: " if [Luxembu rg] was the author of Denis Auth ier, The
the form u la, 'After August 4, 1 9 1 4, social democracy Communist Left in
is nothing but a nauseating corpse,' she proved to be Germany, 1918-192 1
q u ite the necrophil iac:'4 (1976), Chapter 4.
The history of the mass strike is a su bterranean h istory ; 5 See Philippe Bour
it is largely u nwritten. But it can be outlined a s follows.5 rinet, 'The workers'
councils i n the theory
I n 1 90 2 , roving strikes occu rred i n Belgium and Swe of the Dutch-German
den, as a means of pressing for u niversal male suffrage. com m u nist l eft:
The tactic then spread to the N etherlands and Russia
before arriving i n Italy, in 1 904, as a protest against the 6 Carl Schorske,
violent repression of workers' uprisings. In Italy, workers' German Social
councils were formed for the first time. Th is first wave Democracy, 1905-1917
reached its h i g h point in the enormous Russian mass ( Harvard U niversity
strikes of 1 905, which culminated in an insurrection - the Press 1955), 39.
first Russian Revolution - in December of that year. With
the Russian example serving as the model, the mass
strike tactic circu lated rapidly through Eu ropean cities.
Endnotes 3 228
for decades. It is only with i n such a context - that is, a
context of an unfo l d i n g sequence of strug g l es - that
revolution becomes possible, not just theoretically, but
actually. It is thus also only i n the course of i ntensifying
struggles that the strategic q u estions of an era can be
asked and answered, i n a concrete way.
Endnotes 3 230
2) Lab o u r-de p e n d e n cy not o n l y issues i n com p etition 8 Not all who are
between workers, repelling them from one another. Inso labour-dependent
far as individuals are able to secu re work, the wage also have ach ieved the
frees proletarians from having to deal with one another. autonomy that comes
No longer dependent on an i n heritance, wage-earners with it. For exam ple,
are not beholden to their parents or anyone else (except proletarian women
their bosses !).8 They can escape from the cou ntryside have always worked,
to the cities, from the cities to the suburbs, or from the at least for part of
suburbs back to the cities. As long as they find work, their l ives. But for
proletarians are free to m ove about as t h ey p l ease. another part of their
They can flee the admonishing eyes of ancestral and l ives (especially
religious authorities, as well as former friends and lovers, before 1970), they
in order to partner with whomever they want, to pray to were relegated to
whatever gods, and to decorate their homes any wh ich a domestic sphere,
way. Proletarians do not have to see anyone they do where they earned no
not l i ke, except at work. Thus, the com m u n ity d issolves wages of their own.
not only by force; its d issolution is also actively willed. Even when women
The result is an h i storically unique social structure, i n did earn wages,
which people don't really have t o depend on each other, their wages were
directly, for much of anything. Yet, proletarians' individual sometimes handed
autonomy is won at the expense of a col lective power over d i rectly to their
lessness. When revolt ends, proletarians tend to revert husbands. I n this way,
to atomisation. They dissolve back i nto the cash nexus. the development of
the capital ist mode of
Because proletarians begi n from a situation of nearly production prevented
u n iversal ato m isat i o n , t h ey face a u n i q u e coordina women from w i n n i n g
tion problem. Proletarians have to find ways to band t h e autonomy from
together, but i n order to do so, they have to overcome fathers and husbands
the real opposition of their i nterests. I nsofar as they that young men
have not yet overcome these barriers, they find that were able to achieve,
they are powerless in their struggle with both capital early on. That women,
and the state. Thus, the problem proletarians face - in today, do earn and
non-revo l utionary t i m es - is not the lack of a proper retain their own
strategy (which could be d ivined by clever intellectuals) , wages has g iven
but rather, the presence of real power asymmetries, them an increased
attendant on their atomisation. N oth ing i n the individ ual autonomy, even
workers' arsenal can match the power of capital ists though they are sti l l
to h i re and fi re at will, or the procl ivity of policemen to sadd led with most o f
shoot, beat or jail. t h e domestic work.
1 S P O N TA N E ITY
Endnotes 3 232
constraint. We participate in capitalist social relations 11 I nd ividuals act
everyday : by going to work, by making pu rchases, etc. spontaneously, in this
But we are free to decide not to do that, whatever the sense, all the time.
consequences may be (in fact, the consequences are Sometimes they have
sometimes severe, because our participation in capital· a plan and sometimes
ism is not a choice, but rather, a compulsion) . ' ' they do not. We are
i nterested, however,
Four points follow, from this re-interpretation of the term : not in such i nd ividual
acts of freedom, but
1 ) Spontaneity - precisely because it is freely willed - is in her· rather, in collective
ently unpredictable. For this reason, there can be no fixed acts of spontaneity.
theory of struggle. There can only be a phenomenology That is to say, we are
of the experience of revolt. Of course, revolt does bear interested, here, o n ly
a relation to crisis, economic or otherwise, si nce crises in mass activity.
make proletarians' existing ways of l ife u ntenable. But
the relation between crisis and revolt is never mechanical. 12 To point that out is not
Revolt remains fundamentally un· or overdeterm i ned : it to denig rate m i l itants :
never happens just when it is supposed to, and when it it is to rem i nd us that
does happen, it often arises from the unlikeliest of corners. while m i l itants are an
Discontent may simmer, but then a police murder or a rise active agent in any
in bread prices suddenly "triggers" revolt. However, no one wave of struggle, they
knows beforehand what will be the trigger event, in any do not hold the key
g iven case. This is not to say that revolt is unplanned - or to it. They solve the
that militants do not play a role in sparking revolts. In fact, coordination problem
m i litants try to spark revolt all the time. The point is that much as computers
their success lies in someth ing outside of themselves solve math problems:
(that someth ing reveals itself i n key moments, when the by trying every possi·
human material on which m i litants work suddenly stops ble solution, until one
responding to their micro-management - a struggle either of them fits.
leaps out in an unexpected d i rection, or else, it wilts) . 1 2
Who can predict when showing up at a park will lead t o just
another protest, and when it will explode i nto a civil war?
Endnotes 3 234
If there are local/national histories of struggle, that is 13 Hegel, The
partly because m i l itants establish conti nu ities of expe Encyclopedia Logic
rience. Strong m i l itant formations can become agents (Hackett 1991)
of i ntensification in the present; however, in trying to § 133, p. 202.
apply lessons learned in the past to an ever changing
present, m i l itants run the risk of trivial i s i n g the new,
i n the moment of its emergence. This is a dangerous
position, i nsofar as it remains axiomatic, for us, that we
have to put our trust in the new as the only way out of
capitalist social relations.
2 M E D I AT I O N
Endnotes 3 236
It should be clear that the immediacy of the revol ution is 14 See 'Logistics, Coun-
not simply a matter of lacking organisation (although any terlogistics and the
revolution will be chaotic) . On the contrary, d isruptive Com m u n ist Prospect'
activities must be highly coord inated and extensive - in a in this issue.
word , organ ised - so much so as to precipitate a deser-
tion from the armed forces (which is the sine qua non
of a revol utionary moment) . Nor is this point clarified by
saying that the revolution will take place without an inter-
vening, or transitional period. Because in fact, there will
inevitably be a transition, even if there will be no "transi-
tional economy" or "transitional state" in the sense these
terms had in the twentieth century. The comm u nisation
of social relations among seven billion people will take
time. It will involve sudden surges as well as devastating
setbacks, zones of freedom emerg i n g alongside zones
of unfreedom, etc. Even if communisers were to rout the
counter-revolution, there would inevitably follow a period
of de- and reconstruction. Relations among i n d ividuals,
no longer mediated by markets and states, would have
to realise themselves, in the world, as a thoroughgoing
transformation of material i nfrastructu res . 1 4
Endnotes 3 238
3 R U PT U R E
Endnotes 3 240
people trying to fi nd ways to reprod uce themselves, i n a matter of fig u ring
non-capitalist ways. O f these billions, even a n active out what to do with it.
m i nority wou ld have to n u m ber in the h u n d reds of mil I nstead, the revol ution
lions (that is to say, if individuals are able to determine will be the project of
the course of events, that in itself suggests that we are a fraction of society,
sti ll far from a revolutionary moment) . The revolution will i.e. the party, which
requ i re that b i l l ions of i n d ividuals d raw diverse aspects solves the coordina
of their l ives into an open struggle, which ends in those tion problem in the
individuals calling the total ity of their l ives into question. o n ly possible way - by
The rupture calls l ife itself i nto q uestion, but i n a way abol ishing class
that allows us to carry on living. society.
solution to their coord ination problem ("an injury to one this world. In that way,
is an i nj u ry to all" is not u n iversally true) . struggles themselves
construct the u n iversal,
not as an abstract
Endnotes 3 242
Facing u p to the pressu res of com petitive labour mar object of an idealised
kets, workers did construct their common i nterest, in revolution, but as the
the course of the twentieth century, by building workers' concrete object of an
organ i s at i o n s , w h i c h were l i n ked together t h r o u g h actual revolution.
the workers' movement. That movement forged - from
among a multitude of specific workers' experiences - an 19 Amadeo Bord iga,
actually general interest. But the actuality of this general 'Seize Power or Seize
i nterest was predicated on two t h i ngs. First, it was the Factory?' (1920).
pred icated on winning real gains, both with i n capitalist
societies and agai nst an old regime, which sought to 20 Certai n com m u nists
exclude workers from the pol ity. Second, it was pred i have taken a d ifferent
cated on a l ived experience of many proletarians: they tack. They take it as
identified with their work, as the defining trait of who their primary task to
they were (and they imag ined that, with the extension identify and i nfi ltrate
of the factory system to the entire world, this identity what they perceive to
would become a common h uman condition) . Workers be the 'key' economic
felt that they shared a common destiny as the vital force sector(s), the part that
of modern society, which was g rowing all the time. represents the whole.
M i litants withi n that
All that is now i n the past. A massive accumu lation of sector will su pposedly
capital has made the p roductive process ever more be able, at the right
efficient, rendering workers ever more superfl uous to moment, to i ntervene
it. Under these conditions, capital ist economies have decisively, to prod uce
g rown slowly, due to chro n i c overprod uction ; at the the revolution, or else
same time, most workers find it hard to win any real gains, to prevent the betrayal
i n a context of h i g h levels of unemployment. Moreover, of the revolution (which
this superflu ity of workers has found its correlate in a was su pposed to come
changed experience of work itself. I nsofar as they are from elsewhere). See,
employed , most proletarians do not identify with their for exam ple, Monsieur
work as the defin i n g trait of who they are. Either they Du pont's Nihilist
are peripheral to a more or less automated production Communism, on the
process - and thus, cannot see themselves as the vital question of the 'essen
force of modern society - or else they are excluded from tial proletariat' (Ardent
production altogether, and toil away in dead-end ser Press 2002). These are
vice sector jobs. This is not to say that there aren't still false solutions to real
proletarians who d ream of doing similar jobs in a better problems, but again,
world, where they could organise their work democrati for that reason, they
cally. It is just that this minority can no longer claim to will find their actual
represent the future of the class as a whole - especially solutions in time.
Endnotes 3 244
If there are such breakthroughs, anywhere in the world,
it is possible to imagine that, as a feature of partisanship,
commu nist parties will form (or will align themselves with
the new tactics) . They may not call themselves parties,
and they may not refer to their tactics as com m u n ising
tactics. N evertheless, there will be a separation out of
those who, with i n struggle, advocate and apply revolu
tionary tactics, whatever they may be. There is no need
to decide in advance what the party will look l i ke, what
should be its form of organisation, if it should be for
malised at all, or whether it is j ust an orientation shared
among many individuals. Comm u n ism is not an idea or a
slogan. It is the real movement of h istory, the movement
which - i n the ruptu re - g ropes its way out of h istory.
CO N C L U S I O N S
Endnotes 3 246
d ifference i nto a fundamental sameness - th i s tension
towards u nity is frustrated. There is no way to solve the
coord ination problem on the basis of what we are. To be
a partisan of the rupture is to recogn ise that there is no
collective worker - no revolutionary subject - wh i ch is
somehow h idden but already present i n every struggle.
Endnotes 3 248