67 It implies sharing tools of organizing and tactics of struggle, taking measure of the rumors and whispers, and engaging in small struggles in ways that can help them transform fear and mistrust into courage and solidarity. 35 This distinction recurs in Operaismo’s notion of class composition, which has both a passive and an active form: the composition of the class as workers, and the active effort of composing the elements of the class, autonomously. Our task cannot be to search for the equation that will give us the result we want, but to explore the maximal possibilities of abolitions of separations here and now, between us and between us and our means of reproduction – be it through riots and affinity groups, mutual aid and autonomous zones or through taking municipal or state power. This class lives as an excluded insider to “the silent compulsion of economic relations,” faced not with exploitation but with the “direct extra-economic force which is still… used, but only in exceptional cases.” 32 Marx had first introduced the lumpenproletariat in a discussion of Max Stirner’s romantic vision of non-productive and work-refusing ragamuffins and lazzaroni. It can be identified with regional human populations, but is generally discussed as an issue of world population. From a spectatorial distance, this approach points out the limitations of existing struggles from the point of view of the capitalist totality, which provides it with a theory of what form such a revolution must necessarily take to be adequate. 27. Now, Marx writes (in what was certainly also a strategic intervention in a process of class composition), the interests of the peasants are close to those of the urban proletariat, in which they will find a “natural ally and leader” – while many young lumpen peasants will be lost to the army. The Brumaire is often read as a text in which the problem of class divisions – between proletarians and between the proletariat and its allies – is one of enlightening proletarians about their objective common interest and organizing them, of establishing alliances with the organizations of other classes, and of finding ways to politically represent the unorganized and “unenlightened” residues of the proletariat and other subaltern classes. The problem of proletarian separation can only be tackled in those nodal points where common solutions can be produced, and forms of competition – racialized, gendered, nationalistic, etc., can be undermined. Marx distinguished between the forms that subsume classes (the value-form, money-form, capital-form, state-form, etc. Unless there is the development of common tactics and strategies of dealing with concrete problems, the different mutually competing strategies for dealing with it will prevail. I'm on Twitter: @artcarden. the protestant work ethic) and the negative impact of crime on the everyday lives of working people. First, the production and accentuation of differences within the proletariat along gendered and racialized lines, which leads to competition between and within national workforces; and secondly, the production of surplus populations. 38, Marx makes this argument, which is clearly orientated by the practice of the English workers, against Proudhon’s theoreticist rejection of workers’ combinations. "Useless eaters" is a term often bandied about by conspiracy theorists. Proletarians will be stuck less and less in the mode of life they had developed to deal with a problem of their separation, by abolishing this separation and thus their existence as proletarians. Thus the question of strategy and force becomes reduced to the question of recomposing the political forces with a view to establishing new class alliances. 17 More problematically, Marx’s prioritization of the thesis that revolution would come about through the globalization and exhaustion of capitalist development, lead him to briefly lend colonialism support as a driver of the process that would make the proletariat a global reality, and thus communism a global possibility. Marx’s scepticism with regards to the lumpenproletariat is a result of his awareness of how the political allegiances of a class are shaped by the ways in which this class reproduces itself. A surplus occurs when there is some sort of disconnect between supply and demand for a product, or when some people are willing to pay more for a product than others. Before this becomes a matter of revolutionary struggle it is a matter of everyday solutions and resistances to the problem of proletarian reproduction. Scrooge’s most blameworthy attribute is, unfortunately, shared by many self-styled humanitarians. In recent decades such surplus populations have mostly been produced by automation manufactured in the Global North, whereas the surplus populations of the Global South overwhelmingly remain victims of the combined push of population growth and industrial agriculture in rural areas (subdivision of land, capitalist competition and expropriation). 0 0. It does not find the collectivity in which these problems could be articulated as common interests, where the everyday struggles of each peasant family or village could become a common struggle. But because the processes of capitalist accumulation entails both the increasing competition and atomization of workers, Endnotes can only conceive of struggle as the spontaneous coming together of the separated, principally in riots and insurrections. Many employed workers struggle against the inclusion in the labor market of new groups of (women, lumpen, migrants, blacks) in order to maintain their position. They were the millions of black domestics and porters, nurses’ aides and maintenance men, laundresses and cooks, sharecroppers, unpropertied ghetto dwellers, welfare mothers, and street hustlers. We must understand with Federici how one effect of this war on women, whose most violent episode was the witch-hunts, was that the proletariat was split. They cannot represent [vertreten] themselves, they must be represented [vertreten]. We discover this ambivalence in the writings of the communizationist journal and writing collective Endnotes. Abstract: A biopolitics of the population, when it succeeds in securing life and wellbeing, is surely worth having. … It is equally a tendency of capital to make human labor (relatively) superfluous, so as to drive it, as human labor, towards infinity. This gives us “the general law of capitalist accumulation”: The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army. Once we recognize this constitutive heterogeneity of the exploited and expropriated populations of the world, we recognize that any general theory of “the proletariat” as a revolutionary agent will have to start from the self-organization and composition of differences and particularly of different strategies of life and survival. Thus, while Bonaparte would like to appear as the “patriarchal benefactor of all classes … he cannot give to one class without taking from another,” severely constricting his capacity to unite different classes under his representation. All Rights Reserved, This is a BETA experience. Thus, if we read together Marx’s chapters on primitive accumulation with his analysis of the general tendencies of capitalist accumulation, we must conclude that struggles over reproduction are becoming an increasingly important issue, not merely in the form of struggles over the wage and working day, but as defenses of welfare (the social wage), and struggles to appropriate the means of reproduction or against their expropriation. Check out the pronunciation, synonyms and grammar. 28 Instead, the wage became a form through which the unpaid reproductive work of women, but also of children and other dependents, was mediated through the mostly male wage, producing what Mariarosa Dalla Costa calls the patriarchy of the wage. Instead, Marx’s own strong arguments for the impossibility of full employment have been re-actualized through a re-reading of Marx’s theory of “generalized law of capitalist accumulation” and the capitalist tendency to produce surplus-populations. Even if the concept of communization, unlike Kant’s God, is founded on a systematic materialist and dialectical understanding of the laws of movement of capital, such a theory does not, as we have seen, provide us with a strategic, practical orientation of class formation and strategies of reproduction, nor with a concept of state violence. We can’t. However, the isolation also points to the fact that a movement which develops the technical means and organizational forms through which peasants can communicate and link up is one that will abolish the need for a representative and enable the peasantry to represent itself. How population issues have been addressed since 1949 have been important components of China's economic, social, and political development during the last half of this century. 43. the monetary part of the reproduction of the working population. Consequently, there is a decline in the exportable surplus. It would thus seem that our reading brings us to the very traditional interpretation that Marx – according to the iron logic of his own argument – could only be champion of the industrial proletariat. I understand why so many people with available transportation are going out anyway. 57 The problem of the lumpenproletariat might not be that they are the paradoxical product of bourgeois society standing in the way of the world-historical revolution, but that their untimely up-rootedness is so contemporary in times where “everything solid melts into air,” that its organization in the revolution requires a wholly different mode of political composition. 39. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. But is important that this communist horizon is not construed as a matter of overcoming and negating particular individual strategies of reproduction, in the sense of raising yourself to the level of universality of the class in the uniformity of its antagonism with capital. But in this duality of objective tendency and subjective irruption, it is easily overlooked that riots are conditioned by everyday resistances that work against the naturalization of oppression and explore the limitations of other less antagonistic forms of redress. Thus, as Silvia Federici shows, primitive accumulation … was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. Poverty and starvation remain, but not because of inherent resource limitations or because of overpopulation. All this depends on situated assessments of the possibilities of composition, the state of the enemies and the relations of forces. Scrooge the critic of the “surplus population” was mistaken. well surplus means more then enough supplies there for a surplus population is one that has lots of food and products on the market. 20 As a theory of communist revolution, communization is a theory of the insufficiency of all real practices, yet curiously a theory of hope. However, Marx is not hostile to peasants per se, nor does he, as we have seen, present the peasants as necessarily counter-revolutionary. 50, Curiously, the proletarian leadership of the peasantry advocated by Marx seems to install it in position of representation of the isolated peasantry, similar to that of the modern Prince Bonaparte, on the one hand, or a certain automatism of them joining the proletariat in the city – instead of the lumpen. 'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
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