Differences

en:the-feral-underclass-hits-the-streets [2013/02/02 17:04] eaustreum		en:the-feral-underclass-hits-the-streets [2013/02/02 17:07] (current) eaustreum
Line 86:		Line 86:
	What seems to be absent from the invasion of the riot into the movement, as it appears in the current conjuncture in the first zone of capitalist accumulation, is the struggle in the workplace. In the movement over pensions in France, where a large number of workers participated, there was no major wave of strikes. The movement’s connection with the workplace was mainly expressed in the form of the blockade (blockades of refineries). Similar was the case in the US, when the occupy movement saw the step forward in blocking ports in the West coast, while during a week of workplace occupations in the public sector in Greece last autumn, occupiers were very careful not to be strikers (nobody was really prepared to lose their wages). The posing of the contradiction between classes in this cycle of struggles at the level of their mutual reproduction is in the present moment unable to cross the barrier of production, namely enter the field which is at the core of this mutual reproduction, as, in the face of the precarisation (lumpenisation) of the wage relation, being a proletarian today is not identified with being a worker and even those who are actually workers do not identify in any positive way with the condition of being a worker. This has in a way been expressed in scattered factory occupations over redundancies and compensations in Europe during the last few years, which as such are a flight from the workplace, from the worker’s condition (itself a moment of the production of class belonging as an external constraint). In the absence of struggles or actions that will put the production of value at stake and their relating to them, those who find themselves reproduced in the modality of inclusive exclusion will be unable to question the dependence of their survival on activities of exchange, as became evident in the August unrest. However, in the practices of blockading, in the invasion of ‘outsiders’ into workplaces, two important issues arise: a) putting value production at stake will not necessarily take the form of the strike (which does not mean that strikes will not happen, but that the crucial significance of productive labour is not posed anymore as the centrality of the figure of the productive worker); b) the practices of blockading anticipate the practical questioning of self-organisation in the conflictual encounter between workers and ‘outsiders’, to the extent that this invasion will tend to question the privileged relation of certain workers with the specific means of production they work with.		What seems to be absent from the invasion of the riot into the movement, as it appears in the current conjuncture in the first zone of capitalist accumulation, is the struggle in the workplace. In the movement over pensions in France, where a large number of workers participated, there was no major wave of strikes. The movement’s connection with the workplace was mainly expressed in the form of the blockade (blockades of refineries). Similar was the case in the US, when the occupy movement saw the step forward in blocking ports in the West coast, while during a week of workplace occupations in the public sector in Greece last autumn, occupiers were very careful not to be strikers (nobody was really prepared to lose their wages). The posing of the contradiction between classes in this cycle of struggles at the level of their mutual reproduction is in the present moment unable to cross the barrier of production, namely enter the field which is at the core of this mutual reproduction, as, in the face of the precarisation (lumpenisation) of the wage relation, being a proletarian today is not identified with being a worker and even those who are actually workers do not identify in any positive way with the condition of being a worker. This has in a way been expressed in scattered factory occupations over redundancies and compensations in Europe during the last few years, which as such are a flight from the workplace, from the worker’s condition (itself a moment of the production of class belonging as an external constraint). In the absence of struggles or actions that will put the production of value at stake and their relating to them, those who find themselves reproduced in the modality of inclusive exclusion will be unable to question the dependence of their survival on activities of exchange, as became evident in the August unrest. However, in the practices of blockading, in the invasion of ‘outsiders’ into workplaces, two important issues arise: a) putting value production at stake will not necessarily take the form of the strike (which does not mean that strikes will not happen, but that the crucial significance of productive labour is not posed anymore as the centrality of the figure of the productive worker); b) the practices of blockading anticipate the practical questioning of self-organisation in the conflictual encounter between workers and ‘outsiders’, to the extent that this invasion will tend to question the privileged relation of certain workers with the specific means of production they work with.
-
-	The capitalist crisis is a flight forward, an acceleration of all the dynamics of the restructuring. It is a radical affirmation of the illegitimacy of the wage demand amidst the unraveling of guarantees for survival, the proletarianisation of middle and petit-bourgeois strata and the accentuation of the production of surplus populations. The attack against the price of labour power is crystallized as austerity measures (similar to the structural adjustment programmes of the 80s) that are now implemented.
	The capitalist crisis is a flight forward, an acceleration of all the dynamics of the restructuring. It is a radical affirmation of the illegitimacy of the wage demand amidst the unraveling of guarantees for survival, the proletarianisation of middle and petit-bourgeois strata and the accentuation of the production of surplus populations. The attack against the price of labour power is crystallized as austerity measures (similar to the structural adjustment programmes of the 80s) that are now implemented everywhere in the first zone of capitalisteverywhere in the first zone of capitalist accumulation (the supervisors of this process are Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s). As this process develops amidst a severe sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the implementation of austerity in the South is of utmost priority not only for the PIIGS (austerity is the mechanism of the restructuring which mystifies itself in the coercive language of access to international financial markets), but for the core states as well, in order to prevent the acute devaluation of their own financial assets, which would rapidly send them deeper into recession, making contradictions in the internal front even more explosive (somebody called that uneven de-development at a discussion in London). Amidst the whirlwind of intensified intra-capitalist competition, the multiplication of proletarian struggles and riots, the police is everywhere affirmed as a central moment in the reproduction of the contradiction between classes, as exemplified in the banning of protests in the US and Spain, with new laws voted following the ‘occupy’ movement and the appearance of riots in Barcelona, in the recent emergency law in Canada, brought into action when riots invaded the student movement, or in the army taking to the streets in Italy and the new detention camps for illegal migrants in Greece. In Britain, the August unrest was followed by around 5,000 arrests and legal modification that led to hugely increased sentences for riot participants. Apart from the publication of various studies on the events and the shortcomings of the state’s response which explored ways of preventing similar unrests in the future, a number of committees and bodies announced that widespread riots are quite likely to erupt again and have been working hard to supply the state’s arsenal with more effective ways of dealing with similar unrests.((Police should consider using live ammunition to halt attacks on buildings when the lives of those inside might be at risk. The use of ‘protected’ vehicles advancing against rioters, rubber bullets, water cannons and military backup were also suggested. On the occasion of the Olympics, the technological repressive arsenal of the state is being reinforced as well, with new face recognition cameras and other gadgets, while the condition of the army patrolling in the streets is being normalized.)) The form of the ghetto, of intensified spatial segregation secured by innovated surveillance methods, police special forces or even the army, is anticipated as the dominant modality of reproduction for rapidly increasing proletarian populations, a trend that has been more advanced in the US. The recently voted for housing benefit cap and the massive ‘regeneration’ of the traditionally poor districts in East London on the occasion of the Olympics, which cause a renewed social cleansing, point to this direction in Britain. In these trends as well as in the cases of technocrats being directly appointed as heads of the state to temporarily relieve serious political crises, as has recently been the case in Greece and Italy, a tendency towards totalitarianism is evident, which, not being though in any case an incorporation of the working class into the state across national lines, is not a repetition of the historical totalitarianisms of fascism and Nazism (historical repetitions are without meaning anyway).		The capitalist crisis is a flight forward, an acceleration of all the dynamics of the restructuring. It is a radical affirmation of the illegitimacy of the wage demand amidst the unraveling of guarantees for survival, the proletarianisation of middle and petit-bourgeois strata and the accentuation of the production of surplus populations. The attack against the price of labour power is crystallized as austerity measures (similar to the structural adjustment programmes of the 80s) that are now implemented everywhere in the first zone of capitalisteverywhere in the first zone of capitalist accumulation (the supervisors of this process are Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s). As this process develops amidst a severe sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the implementation of austerity in the South is of utmost priority not only for the PIIGS (austerity is the mechanism of the restructuring which mystifies itself in the coercive language of access to international financial markets), but for the core states as well, in order to prevent the acute devaluation of their own financial assets, which would rapidly send them deeper into recession, making contradictions in the internal front even more explosive (somebody called that uneven de-development at a discussion in London). Amidst the whirlwind of intensified intra-capitalist competition, the multiplication of proletarian struggles and riots, the police is everywhere affirmed as a central moment in the reproduction of the contradiction between classes, as exemplified in the banning of protests in the US and Spain, with new laws voted following the ‘occupy’ movement and the appearance of riots in Barcelona, in the recent emergency law in Canada, brought into action when riots invaded the student movement, or in the army taking to the streets in Italy and the new detention camps for illegal migrants in Greece. In Britain, the August unrest was followed by around 5,000 arrests and legal modification that led to hugely increased sentences for riot participants. Apart from the publication of various studies on the events and the shortcomings of the state’s response which explored ways of preventing similar unrests in the future, a number of committees and bodies announced that widespread riots are quite likely to erupt again and have been working hard to supply the state’s arsenal with more effective ways of dealing with similar unrests.((Police should consider using live ammunition to halt attacks on buildings when the lives of those inside might be at risk. The use of ‘protected’ vehicles advancing against rioters, rubber bullets, water cannons and military backup were also suggested. On the occasion of the Olympics, the technological repressive arsenal of the state is being reinforced as well, with new face recognition cameras and other gadgets, while the condition of the army patrolling in the streets is being normalized.)) The form of the ghetto, of intensified spatial segregation secured by innovated surveillance methods, police special forces or even the army, is anticipated as the dominant modality of reproduction for rapidly increasing proletarian populations, a trend that has been more advanced in the US. The recently voted for housing benefit cap and the massive ‘regeneration’ of the traditionally poor districts in East London on the occasion of the Olympics, which cause a renewed social cleansing, point to this direction in Britain. In these trends as well as in the cases of technocrats being directly appointed as heads of the state to temporarily relieve serious political crises, as has recently been the case in Greece and Italy, a tendency towards totalitarianism is evident, which, not being though in any case an incorporation of the working class into the state across national lines, is not a repetition of the historical totalitarianisms of fascism and Nazism (historical repetitions are without meaning anyway).