“The way things are today, only when people are frightened will they take to the streets; and they will come out abruptly, all at once… Then, the KKE^[1] will be enlisted to stop them.”

This impressively precise prediction was made by an old Trotskyist in a chat over a coffee in 2007. In this text, we look into the overt emergence of the KKE as police^[2], this important event of 20^th October, its meaning for the development of the class struggle in Greece and how this relates to the development of the crisis.

We begin by attempting a critical reading of the core position that criticises the KKE for “betraying the working class”. Those holding this opinion are also dejected that “we are bickering among ourselves”. Their stance gives the impression that it overlooks the KKE’s role in the class struggle in Greece. This is not an oversight, however; it is not an omission caused by a lapse of attention. What this viewpoint fails to see is determined by the essence of what it does see, by the structure of its vision and by the very core of its content. Its vision is revolution as the triumph of the working class, as the transformation of capitalist society into a society of workers, that is, the revolution as the KKE also purports to see it (with itself in place of the bosses, of course). That is why this critique accuses the KKE of “betrayal” in the fight towards a common goal. It contends that the KKE betrays the common goal of the “free” workers’ society, because, through its practice and discourse, it upholds the political form of a workers’ state, as opposed to the self-management of production, and, on these grounds, this view objects to the KKE’s use of the slogan, “without you, not a single cog turns – worker, you can run things without the bosses”.

It may seem paradoxical at first, but it is this slogan that contains the essence of the events of 20^th October. The content of this slogan expresses the KKE’s side (not only the KKE’s though, and this is very important) in the conflict that is historically produced in the current period between the practices of class struggle.  A careful reading of this slogan reveals that the word worker is the key to the content of the revolution according to the KKE (and not only). This revolution does not abolish the worker as such, it does not abolish the proletariat, it does not abolish the “cogs”, that is the production of value. On the contrary, it calls on workers to fight (or to align as sheep behind the shepherds, in the KKE’s case) so as to carry on being workers, to carry on “turning the cogs”. The utopian phrase “without the bosses” means “by your own initiative”, namely with bosses who will also be workers, supposedly their own bosses, or with the “workers’ party” as the boss. Behind the opportunistic adoption of an “anarchists’ slogan” by the KKE, there is the essential point that labour continues to be a separate human activity after the revolution, and everything that entails.

The KKE’s defence of the parliament and the police, in this critical moment for capital and the state, from the attacks of a section of the proletariat is entirely compatible with this slogan, even more so because such attacks against the state and property can only become possible with the support of a very large chunk of the proletariat, as it became obvious on 19^th October. The defence of labour cannot take place in a historical vacuum – an ahistorical form of work (as is implied by slogans like “we want work, not unemployment”) does not exist – it is necessarily the defence of the specific form labour has taken in the historical present. Subsequently, the revolution, according to the KKE, will be the restructuring of labour on the basis of its historically determined condition (something already done by the Bolsheviks when they gained power in Russia, taking part in the proletarian revolution of 1917, as well as by the CNT trade unionists when they took control of the factories after the proletarian uprising in Spain in 1936). If we consider these conclusions alongside the KKE’s strategy to claim an ever more important role in working class reproduction, that is, to gain strength as a reproduction mechanism of the capital relation in parallel with the State, or as a “cog” of the State apparatus in some cases, then, in the context of the growing importance of policing for working class reproduction, it is evident why the KKE must play the role of the police.

So what of those who attacked the KKE? How is it explainable, in terms of the reasoning described above, that a section of those who attacked the red front of the police, which was blocking the way to the khaki front of the police, share a great deal with the KKE’s view of the revolution? Is there a point in blaming them for fighting against the KKE over the possession of Amalias Av. and effectively over the political leadership of the movement? There are grounds for this in part, although there is an error in the content of the question itself (the political leadership of the movement). The meaning of the 20^th October events is hidden below the surface of the political dispute. The question of why this conflict is produced, what its true content is and why this is now the central issue of class struggle[3] in many countries around the world, can only be answered if one goes beyond the apparent polarity between the left and the anarchists (a polarity of prior revolutions, as “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”). To go beyond this polarity one has to focus for a moment on the content of the “anarchist” camp, or the black bloc or whatever one wants to call it (although the difficulty in establishing a name hints something already). It is widely known that the subsection of “those involved in clashes” organically belonging to “militant anarchist” groupings is now very small and is becoming less and less significant as the crisis deepens. It is also known that, by now, even workers clash with the police – often without their actions being condemned by their unions (see POE-OTA) – as well as the unemployed and even the petit bourgeois (taxi owners) who are proletarianised abruptly. Those who have, one way or another, caused the recent period’s riots are NOT organized anarchists in their vast majority, while organised anarchists’ influence upon them is minimal and constantly declining. They are a mixed crowd of young (and as the crisis deepens, not only young) proletarians who are precarious or unemployed, or they can be school or university students. Their practices – typically riots without specific demands, occurring both separately and within demand struggles – express the current impasse of demands, the lack of future produced by this crisis, which is a crisis of the existence of the wage and therefore of proletarian reproduction. Those who clash with the police are NOT “revolutionaries” who do so because they have “class consciousness”; they are agents of the practices brought on by the exclusion of proletarians from labour, by the violent pushing downwards of the middle strata, by the frenetic course of the crisis of restructured capitalism and the attempt to address it with another round of capital’s attack, which challenges the very existence of the wage. These practices also lead to a dead end, seen from the viewpoint that seeks a strategy towards the victory of the working class and the realisation of a workers’ society. It is this impasse that prefigures these practices’ overcoming through the class struggle, an overcoming that will not result from their dominance over other practices but will be produced in the course of their conflictual co-existence with revindicative practices. This overcoming will only be possible at the stage when this conflict does not only reproduce the dynamic of riots without specified demands but also involves taking particular measures. This conflict is produced objectively – any individual choices are overdetermined by the sweeping onslaught of the crisis. This was not then a conflict between anarchists and the KKE in front of parliament – this is only what it is apparent. Such an understanding only serves the special interests of politically organised anarchists, those of the KKE and their fellow travelers. There will certainly be efforts to extract political value from this by both sides of the conflict and in the short term they might (both) appear to be successful. There will be quarrelling over who is most concerned about working class unity, with accusations against each other in almost the same terms. However, the development of the crisis accelerates, and the event of 20^th October will soon look like an innocent game involving rocks, a couple of petrol- bombs and hundreds of poles with hanging red cloths.

The conflict that, in the terms of political fetishism, appeared as a clash between anarchists and the KKE in front of parliament, has been produced as an internal conflict of proletarian practices within the entire cycle of struggles that began after the restructuring of the 80s (90s for Greece); it constitutes the essence of this cycle of struggles, generated and developed by contradictions that are now condensed in the current crisis. This conflict has been produced historically as the outcome of capital’s accumulation, of the class struggle, and it is not a result of “strategies”, ‘betrayals”, “class consciousness” and other ideologemes. The two camps rapidly created through the condensation of historical time are fluid; what seems to prefigure the revolution through the overcoming of its limits today, will appear divided tomorrow; its internal contradictions, that may not seem so important today, will explode. The deepening of the crisis will lead to practices beyond those of the current “phase of riots”. The rebels of tomorrow (and that may not be so far away) will be forced to take measures for continuing the struggle that will simultaneously be survival measures, communist measures that will affect the crux of surplus value production and will build new social relations. The contradictions of militarism and sexism, which necessarily come with the riots, will explode in the camp that will challenge the very existence of value. Internal conflicts are coming, new divisions are unavoidable.

We are living in the vortex; there is nothing that can rescue us anymore. Every attempt to understand the structure of current social relations, every attempt to break free from the political conception of the revolution, which, being a political one, belongs to the old world of previous revolutions, will certainly contribute to the critique of this world, which in any case trembles, is under threat, as an ensemble of social relations, of being abolished by the coming revolution.

 Agents of chaos

The ‘indignados’ in Greece

Real democracy and the rise of a new bureaucracy

No flags but the Greek flag

The general strikes

The contradictory dynamics of the movement

What was it all about?

(September 2011)

From the writing of the text “The transitional period of crisis: the era of riots” published in June 2011 in the 5^th issue of blaumachen journal to date (early September of 2011), two very important events have been produced through the development of class struggle. The first event was the emergence of the ‘indignant’ movements in Spain, Greece, and Israel. The second one was the burst of riots last August in England.

To be sure these two events are important on their own, but from the point of view of our theoretical practice it is the relation between the two, i.e. the rift between the practices of the participants in these movements, that is of utmost importance. The notion of ‘rift’ (écart) was first used by Théorie Communiste: “From struggles for demands to revolution there can only be a rupture, a qualitative leap, but this rupture is not a miracle, neither is it the simple realization on the part of the proletariat that there is nothing else to be done other than making the revolution given the failure of everything else. ‘One solution, revolution’ is nonsense symmetrical to that of the revolutionary dynamic of the struggle for demands. This rupture is produced positively by the unfolding of the cycle of struggles which precedes it and, we can say, is still part of it. This rupture is prefigured in the multiplication of rifts inside the class struggle between on the one hand the calling into question by the proletariat of its own existence as a class in its contradiction with capital and on the other the reproduction of capital which is implied by the very fact of being a class. This rift is the dynamic of this cycle of struggles which exists in an empirically verifiable manner” [The present moment, Théorie Communiste]… “In the concept of ‘écart’ there are three moments: the idea of distance, that of movement and that of interiority/internality [interiorité]. Distance, insofar as these are activities which can be differentiated and opposed to each other; movement, inasmuch as we are not dealing with independent things only coexisting in one and the same place, but rather with a critical reflexivity/self-reflexivity (a critical reflecting back on itself) [retour sur soi critique] of action as a class, which gives us the third nuance of the term: it’s a question of a movement and a distance internal to the activity of the proletariat as a class. It’s a question of two faces (having as horizon nothing other than capital / being in contradiction with its own reproduction as a class) of the same action as a class – l’écart is the duality become visible as constraint in capital of existence as a class” [Roland Simon].

The rift between different practices in working-class struggle can take many different forms: it can be a rift between practices that appear in different struggles within the same capitalist state (for example, December 2008 and the movement of ‘indignant’ in the summer of 2011 in Greece). The practices of one struggle can be produced by the limits of another, and then the two sets of practices may constitute a rift (not only in the direction of struggles without demands, something that is undoubtedly related to the composition of the participants, i.e. the conjuncture of the cycle of struggles). It can be a rift between different practices in one struggle: “In 2006, in Savar, 50km north of Dhaka, Bangladesh, two factories were torched and a hundred others ransacked after workers had not been paid for three months. At first they were demanding to continue working in these factories with a higher wage, but as they were confronted with the delegitimization of demanding, they started attacking their own existence as proletarians by burning or destroying the factories. The rift is not merely the burning of factories; it is the contradictory coexistence of both the demanding and destruction of means of production” [blaumachen, “The perspective of communisation” (in greek)].

The rift can also appear between practices of class struggles which take place in different states.  “These different aspects are moments of a totality that arises from the fact that the second phase of restructuring taking place now, produces a rapidly growing surplus population. Simultaneously it does not increase the proportion of variable capital in total social capital, i.e., it intensifies qualitatively and quantitatively the impasse of the crisis and does not produce an exit from it” [The transitional period of crisis: the era of riots, blaumachen]. Class struggle is undoubtely a tangible reality for the proletariat of each state: the proletariat is being exploited by capital in the state where it lives, thus the proletarians necessarily perceive reality as related to their bosses in their state. The case, however, is different in every state (the English police is not the Greek police, the specificity of class struggle in England requires another type of policing). From the point of view of communisation (for which revolution is the self abolition of proletariat and not the ‘emancipation’ of workers and the transcendence of capitalist society to a ‘workers’ society’), the rift between practices of struggles that take place in different states is of great importance. Although it is true that the crowning moment for the reproduction of capital, the production of value and surplus value occurs specifically and separately in each state, the very existence of each state is possible only because of its special relationship with the other capitalist states, i.e. its integration in a certain position in the global articulation of states, produced as such through the competition between capitals and the (special) competition between capitalist states. The proletariat has to confront its state and its bosses, but through the global articulation of the total social capitals of the states (which of course contains contradictions and conflicts), the capitalist class exploits the whole of the proletariat.  The revolution as the process of abolition of value and abolition of the state will attack in parallel against each state mechanism and it is necessarily going to destroy the articulations of the states (and will not create a worker’s state power or parallel forms of self-management of production), i.e. it will necessarily have a global character.

The rift between practices which appear in different struggles and between practices within a specific struggle produces, in our cycle of struggle, both class belonging as an external constraint and the overcoming of this cycle of struggles (from our point of view this is produced as an abolition of class belonging, as a communising revolution). We put the emphasis on the relation between struggle practices: “What is important is to identify the rift between practices and not just one practice as ‘revolutionary’ or ‘not revolutionary’. Such a distinction simply does not exist before the revolution and its invocation can only be the nessecarily ideological self reflection of the agents of different diverging practices” [blaumachen, “The perspective of communisation” (in greek)]. The demanding practices of the proletarians within revendicative struggles are not efficient any more and the historical production of this fact is their relation with the practices of struggles without demands: ‘riots’ burst all the more frequently. The historical course of the cycle of struggles is determined by the participation of ever more proletarian strata in the struggles, but this participation does not point to the direction of class unity: The particular rift between practices, the one that is produced between struggles which take place in parallel or within one struggle defines the stage of the historical production of the contradiction (the class of the capitalist mode of production and because of this class of the revolution). The evolution and transformation of the rifts between practices within the struggles is in itself the historical process that produces the overcoming of this cycle of struggles.

As this cycle of struggle evolves, the proletariat struggles, in the context of the rift between practices within struggles of particular fractions of proletarians, for its reproduction as a class and at the same time is confronted with its own reproduction (the class belonging) externalized as a constraint in capital, i.e. it struggles at the same time for and against its own reproduction (this is the rift as an internal relation between practices within the same struggle and between practices of different struggles). The crystallization of this contradiction/identity in particular practices and activities becomes increasingly apparent and it seems that it is going to produce violent conflicts inside the struggles.

In this text we analyse the current conjuncture (up to the burst of the movement in Spain in May 2011). By introducing the term ‘era of riots’ we define the transitional period of the crisis and the crisis of this transitional period: “Recent struggles reflect the two basic aspects of the process that produces the revolution of the current period: first, the delegitimization of demands, i.e. demanding is converted into a component of the reproduction of classes, which tends to be marginalized and suppressed, and second, the internal distance produced between proletarian practices in the evolution of class struggle. These two aspects of class struggle are produced in every zone of capital despite all their differences, and is imposed by the objectivity of capital, the economy. We may risk the prediction that we are entering into an era of riots, which will be transitional and extremely violent.  It will define the reproduction crisis of the proletariat, and thus of capitalism, as an important structural element of the following period. By ‘riots’ we mean struggles for demands or struggles without demands that will take violent forms and will transform the urban environments into areas of unrest; the riots are not revolution, even the insurgency is not revolution, although it may be the beginning of a revolution. The internal distance between proletarian practices aggravates all social contradictions and creates a self-reinforcing process of growing conflicts that includes more and more categories of the working class and the intensification of State repression. The particularity of this ‘era’ is that the dynamics of the struggle cannot produce stable results. In any case, the struggles of the proletarians will inevitably reproduce the opponent class and their own class existence as a class of proletarians. The limit of these struggles, now, is the fact that they are class struggles. The only guarantee to overcome this limit is a practical attack against capital, which is identical with the attack on the very existence of the proletarian class”.

The riots in England confirm the analysis regarding the ‘era of riots’ and they signify a historical milestone for the overcoming of the current cycle of struggles. It is very difficult to ignore the sequence November 2005 (France) – December 2008 (Greece) – August 2011 (England) even if until now one tried not to notice. Specific practices that appear in this historical sequence (looting, arsons of companies’ buildings, arsons of police stations) construct the subject of the excluded, of the structurally produced surplus population within the current cycle of accumulation. These practices confirm the ‘end of activism’, see “The present moment”), as a particular form of the current class-struggle limits. In France, the urban ghettoization of the excluded proletarians (engineered by the state) left no room for the coexistence of the ‘autonomous (in relation to capital)’ activists and the insurgents. In Greece the encounter of the activists with immigrants and high school students produced a particular coexistence: those days some activists overcame through their own practices their activism and alternativism. In England urban planning was not an obstacle to such an encounter but the particular alternativism of the milieu was absolutely irrelevant with the practices of the looters (the activist’s critique regarding looting practices was so intense that in some cases it became a practice in its own respect, and even some of them participated in the riot cleanups).

The ‘indignant’ movements confirm the ‘end of radical democratism’ (see “The present moment”), they are simply put an explosion of the contradictions of the latter. The crisis of 2008, as a crisis of globalization, made it possible for radical democratism to recover after a long absence (from 2003) and to be destroyed through its own triumph. These movements are very broad in terms of composition (ranging from young proletarians ready – only in theory – to join the labor market to rapidly proletarianised petty bourgeois and business executives) and in terms of demands (ranging from a new regulation of capitalism to an alternative management of capitalism, which is described with the word democracy and some adjectives before this word).    The triumph of radical democratism is that this broad composition is expressed in its massiveness and in the fact that the words used by the activist avant-garde fractions of the past now dominate.  What seemed to be ‘radical’ in the end of the 1990s – beginning of 2000s (self organization, working-class control of state structures, full depreciation of political parties, ‘direct’ democracy) is now the very banality of these movements (as a result these words have no longer the old ‘radical’ content). But both sides of this triumph are in fact the destruction, or more precisely termed, the internal subversion, the collapse of radical democratism. The massiveness, as expected, failed to make the movement visible to the state, let alone to ‘legitimize’ its demands. The ‘radical’ words were not able to hide that they were void of content: nobody thinks that these words can mean something by themselves anymore, nobody believes in ‘another world which is possible’ (that is without a destruction of this world). Within the second phase of restructuring (see the text “The transitional period of crisis: the era of riots”) the response of the State to this impressive invasion of the movements of ‘indignant’ in the public sphere is not a ‘new’ regulation of the capital relationship; it is somehow straight and tactless: the police.

What is most important about the future developments of the crisis and class struggle is the evolution of the relation between the practices in England and the practices of the ‘indignant’. This relationship becomes of prime importance because of the liquidity between these two produced subjects (unemployment and precarity are at the heart of the wage relation). The form of the new limit (the police, class belonging as an external constraint) produces, as a transitional stage, a particular form of struggles that we try to approach with the use of the term ‘riot’. ‘Riots’ surround the movements of ‘indignant’ and eventually they penetrate them and produce rifts (écarts) between the practices of these movements. The rift dialectics work feverishly…

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The transitional phase of the crisis: The era of riots

The capital relation cannot overcome its reproduction crisis. This crisis, now, is not merely a financial one. It is increasingly taking the form of a generalised social crisis. Capital would have a chance to overcome the crisis, only if the destructive process produced by the crisis was to function in a full scale. A new cycle of accumulation could only start through a devaluation or an immediate destruction of productive capital of significant value (more importantly, through the devaluation / renewal of fixed capital), followed by a restructuring of the mode of production.

A massive devaluation of capital today has as a precondition the massive devaluation of financial quasi-capital (fqc, i.e., potential capital  locked into the financial system and under the constant threat of a massive devaluation during the current crisis). This step is necessary because of the current structure of social capital and of the special importance of its financial form for the reproduction of capital. The importance of financial capital has marked the current historical period of restructured capitalism. The restructuring, which followed the crisis of the 1970s, resulted in the financialisation of capitalism as a whole, it did not just strengthen the financial system as a component of capital. The role of financial capital in the process of raising and allocating profit in the period between 1982 and the outbreak of the crisis in 2008 was decisive for the evolution of the profit rate. Financial capital was the ‘architect’ of the equalization mechanism of the rate of profit in the process of globalization. In the expansion phase of the cycle, financial globalization has encouraged investment by increasing the population available for exploitation and by the enforcement of competition among the labor powers worldwide (competition for the lowest price of  labor power has led to the so-called descending spiral of the labor power value globally). At the same time, the mobility of capital and the success of financial capital in organizing the increase of profitability were so effective that they led to the reversal of the relationship between interest and business profit. The gradual rise of financial quasi-capital during this phase of the cycle was  absolutely necessary for the expansion of production, and simultaneously the expansion of production brought about the rise of fqc as its consequence. This increase of the financial quasi-capital established the low (compared to the previous cycle) rate of accumulation that characterized the entire period. The low accumulation rate is connected to the fact that part of the profits should be ‘recycled’ in the financial system, so that the latter might  continue to monitor and ‘engineer’ the rise of profitability. Thus, the growth in the rate of profit was based on a relatively low rate of accumulation. As the cycle went on, financialisation contributed to the reduction of  variable relative to fixed capital and finally to the maturation of capital overproduction crisis. Financial globalization has been the par excellence mechanism for restructuring and then for operating restructured capitalism, on the basis of low accumulation in the productive sectors. Financialisation (and the globalization connected with it) is a mechanism that produced both the expansion and the crisis of this cycle of accumulation.

This very close relationship between financial capital and the production process in the context of restructured capitalism, on the one hand, renders the devaluation of financial quasi-capital necessary for the initiation of a chain reaction of devaluation / renewal of fixed capital. But, on the other hand, it also causes it to be a very dangerous process as – given the absolute freedom of capital circulation – this process would be a huge shock to the banking systems and consequently to the economies of every capitalist country. This is a significant difference between our period of restructured capitalism and the period of Keynesianism/Fordism. The internationalization of capitalism in the period of Keynsianism/Fordism was based on a national delimitation for the reproduction of capitalist social relations and on  control by financial capital; it was possible to stop (or at least to control effectively) the circulation of capital amidst crisis.

The precondition for the commencement of a new accumulation cycle is that the devaluation of fixed capital during the crisis has to be larger and faster than the variable capital devaluation. It is this phase of the crisis mechanism which allows the rate of profit to recover and the process of the expansion of production for each accumulation cycle to begin. The capitalist class has made until now anxious efforts to delay the inevitable unfolding of a destructive phase of the crisis. These efforts conceal their fear for the possible revolts of the proletariat in some countries, but also exacerbate inter-capitalist contradictions and conflicts.

The second phase of restructuring

The new measures are imposed by capital almost on a global level and they constitute the second phase of restructuring (see appendix). These measures are an attempt to maintain the current structure of accumulation. This effort consists in two processes, which are linked to one another:

The first process is the partial valorisation of financial quasi-capital in those sectors and industries that are mainly linked to the reproduction of  labor power and the distribution of the  surplus-value produced (‘efficient privatization’ or ‘selling off’of state-owned assets, restructuring of social-security systems, etc.). This process actually evolves throughout the accumulation cycle, and it is directed from the periphery to the centers of accumulation. It is also a significant component of all regional wars from 1980 onwards. But today this process is on the rise, especially regarding privatization of fixed capital assets which until now belong to the state or whose  major stockholder is the State. The attempt to valorise fqc includes the passage of several productive capitals under the absolute control of the financial circuit; this is the current form of the centralization of capital.

The second process is the effort to further devalue labor power through police constraint. This attempted devaluation is a result and precondition of the attempted partial valorisation of fqc (Greece is a typical example in this respect). These two processes define the second phase of restructuring (we are still in the accumulation cycle which began after the crisis of Keynesianism / Fordism) and aim to increase the rate of surplus value, partly through the extraction of absolute surplus value. The devaluation of labor power, which was initially responsible for the expansion of production in the current accumulation cycle, is now used again as a means to overcome (or bypass) the crisis, and is resulting in a deepening of the crisis.

Two points are important here: the first is that the attempted valorisation of a part of fqc is only possible by creating new fqc (in the U.S. after QE1 came the QE2, the Eurozone constantly discusses the refinancing of loans contracted by member states in exchange of tougher measures, etc.). This parameter tends to transform the financial crisis that is currently underway to an acute monetary crisis and next to a crisis of value. The second point is that the privatization of state assets – which is the result (but also a cause) of state insolvencies that happen all over the world – means that the financial policies of each state become absolutely controlled by the international circuit of financial capital. This development has resulted in the deepening of the existential crisis of the capitalist (nation-) state as a politically autonomous entity and has led to the crisis of the very globalization of capital (at least as we know it today).

This seemingly paradoxical reality has been produced by the contradictory relationship between capitalist states and freely moving capital, especially from 1990 onwards. The obedience of each state (of the second and the third zone of capital) to the dictates of an international and rapidly circulating capital was very important for the reproduction of capitalist social relations in the current  period. In many cases a war was required in order to discipline the proletariat and/or fractions of the national capital of each state. On the one hand, the subjection to the imperatives of the Capitalist International enabled these states to be incorporated in the international circuit of accumulation during the expansion period of the accumulation cycle (often through the participation in some type of regional union). On the other hand, it gradually undermined the ability of the states to manage their internal social issues and made them increasingly vulnerable to the emerging crisis. The controversial relationship between the accelerating globalization and the administrative role of the nation state in the imposition of this process reached its limits at the beginning of the crisis back in 2008. The (financial at first) crisis imposed a (temporary) ‘rescue of the financial system’, i.e. an effort to maintain the current structure of accumulation. This ‘rescue’ was achieved by means of  new liquidity which either came  from  ‘state property’ or  was created from scratch. Both methods quickly led to state bankruptcies. Most of the states were already heavily indebted, as in  recent decades they had substantially reduced taxation of capital and had thus voluntarily assisted to the undermining of their budget. These defaults make the privatization of social reproduction mechanisms (except from repression) compulsory and restrict the role of the state to the regulation of capitalist competition. Repression as the prime mechanism for labor power management is reconfigured and adapted to the modern needs (they are oriented towards riot control in  urban environments and the guarding of the borders).

The other side of fqc partial valorization is the expulsion of labor power value from the cycle of capital reproduction. The restructuring of (not only) state-owned companies and services does not involve a renewal in fixed capital that could lead to the creation of an overall new demand. Instead, it solely involves layoffs, cuts and downsizing. The ‘unemployed recovery’ (every economic index shows recovery except for employment) is simply an expression of the fact that the mechanism of  crisis has not worked to the extent required in order to overcome the overaccumulation crisis. The continuous expulsion of labor power value creates explosive social conditions in all capitalist states, regardless of the zone they belong to. One important result of capital’s (and proletariat’s) efforts to deal with the crisis is the explosive impasse of the migration issue.

The flow of migrant workers from the third zone of the capital to the first two reaches a critical threshold and gets blocked. Here we find the paradox of a simultaneous crisis of globalization and of the nation-state. The downward spiral of the depreciation of labor, upon which the accumulation of the current period (until the outbreak of the crisis in 2008) was based, was so succesful that its own continuation is now questioned. The walls that are raised on the border lines and the continuous flow of immigrants, the immigration police set up at national and supranational level, the reception-detention centers or labor camps and the riots that burst there, the cries about the end of multiculturalism in Britain (!), the leftist discourse about a possible return to some ‘national development’, these are all signs of the first phase (or one side) of the crisis of globalization. But when the labor power flow starts to get blocked, sooner or later the free circulation of capital will be also questioned. In any case, the first signs of the crisis of globalization are the ‘currency war’, the ‘beggar thy neighbor’ strategies of the states, and some major mergers and acquisitions, which show that the so-called foreign direct investments begin to gather closer to their initial center of accumulation  (states of first zone). This does not mean that there will be a new round of investments in the second and third zone, something that would require an increase of accumulation in these areas. For nearly two decades, the net balance of capital flows is strongly positive in favour of the first zone.

A return to the previous model of capitalist organization, in which the nation state had a central role, is practically impossible. This structure of capitalist relations belongs to the past. Intercapitalist conflicts and the intensification of class struggle will probably produce a regionalization of accumulation. This product of the crisis, which includes a lot of conflicts, does not appear currently to be able to lead a new cycle of accumulation even if it implies a de facto devaluation of financial quasi-capital. The relations between the regions of the new regionalisation of capital will of course be hostile. These regions originate from the historical evolution of the previous cycles of capital accumulation. Some areas, especially in the third zone, which do not belong to any of the regions of accumulation, but also some areas of the second zone for which it is difficult to remain included in the model currently applied by financial capital are already, or will be, the first fields of intensified class struggle and intercapitalist conflict. Centers of accumulation of the first zone intend to plunder resources and manage the reproduction of the proletariat that lives in these regions. This does not mean that the bourgeoisie of these states is going to ‘resist’ this onslaught. Instead, the most powerful factions are facing this crisis as an opportunity to be placed higher in the internal hierarchy and devour the weaker factions. The weaker factions of capital and the petty bourgeoisie strata get compressed, and in times of crisis they will lean towards the nationalist tendencies in order to get protected. The social contradictions in these areas are exploding, as it becomes more and more clear to the proletarians who live there that the continuation of capitalism does not include (a large part of) them as labor power. On the other hand, it should not be considered certain at all that the objective trend toward regionalization of accumulation will be implemented. Serious frictions are created between key players of the Eurozone around the immigration issue. New forces appear in the wider Middle East and the Persian Gulf, such as Iran, Turkey and even the group of states constituting the ‘Gulf Cooperation Council’, and they are trying to become as much autonomous accumulation regions as they can be. The reproduction crisis of the proletariat, on the one hand, is pushing for regionalization and, on the other hand,  tends to completely dissolve the global system.

The imperialist attack against Libya takes place in the context of the globalization crisis. Τhis reflects the frantic efforts of the Capitalist International to take advantage of the chaos created by African and Arab uprisings. Additionally, it is a warning for the proletariat (and the middle strata) in the other countries of this area about what will happen if they continue the uprising. Arab and African uprisings, which are a catalyst in the development of the crisis, also belong to this context. While the political form of dictatorship is questioned by the proletariat (and not only), rebellion has an ‘anti-state’ (but not anti-national) character and this is the way in which it expresses the crisis of globalization. This dimension of the insurgency is essentially an attempt to rescue capitalism itself, by saving the status of ‘free’ worker  from the standpoint both of the proletariat and of fractions of capital which were suffocating under this political form and demanded ‘free’ competition. On top of that, this questioning is happening precisely at the moment that the political form of capital (a New Totalitarianism) tends to be applied to Greece and possibly to other countries of the second zone of  capital. This creates a contradictory double movement. On the one hand, the Greek state is faced with the difficulty to impose the new measures as it fears unrest and, on the other hand, it is possible that the Arab and African revolts, as they contribute to the deepening crisis of restructured capitalism (which also results in increased migration flows), will make more immediate the need to accelerate the second phase of restructuring in Greece and Europe in general.

The other pole of the contradiction, the proletariat, tends to appear more and more on the other side of the barricades of the  conflict  produced. Undervalued as  labor power, fragmented, highly redundant and without worker’s identity and pride, the proletariat in most countries of the world is in turmoil. In the text ‘The historical production of the revolution of the current period’ we dealt with some important aspects of this activity: bosses’ kidnappings in order to claim redundancy payments in Europe, wild strikes in the centers of accumulation of East Asia, continuous localized riots in China, riots that rocked Greece and France but did not reach production sites and the ‘rebellion with demands’ of the Caribbean in 2009. We may summarize the highlights of the last year as follows: in October 2010, the ‘stable’ part of the proletariat in France made an unsuccessful attempt to delay the imposition of the second phase of restructuring (in the form intended for the countries of the first zone). In autumn the students rebelled against cuts in Britain and Italy. Public workers rebelled in their own way in Wisconsin (prefiguring a conflict similar to which has not happened during the last decades in the U.S.). In Mozambique, in a foretaste of what would follow in early 2011, food riots burst in September 2010. Wild strikes continued in East Asia, unrest against the repressive form of social reproduction across the African continent intensified. In December 2010-January 2011 the Arab-African revolt burst, and it turns out that it is going to be the historical catalyst for entering  the ‘era of riots’, the transitional stage of this crisis. The activity of the proletariat in the current crisis produces (through its various manifestations) class belonging as an external constraint. This reality is expressed as a lack of class vision, as a lack of class organization, as a lack of a vision for the transformation of the capitalist society to a ‘worker’s society’, to a society that is supposed to consist of a single class. The production of class belonging as an external constraint is emerging in different ways in each zone of global capital, but also in every state of each zone of capital. These different aspects are moments of a totality that arises from the fact that the second phase of restructuring taking place now, produces a rapidly growing surplus population. Simultaneously it does not increase the proportion of variable capital in  total social capital, i.e., it intensifies qualitatively and quantitatively the impasse of the crisis and does not produce an exit from it.

France: Radical or not, it is still trade-unionism

If however the limit of present-day class struggles is not any more this “other world that was possible”, what is the new form and content defining class struggle? Maybe better than anywhere else, the seriousness of the present situation was made apparent in France with the revindicative movement of past autumn. The State suddenly lodged a bill to increase the age of retirement, posing an implacable dilemma to the proletariat: either we will slow down the increase of debt at your own expense or the country’s creditworthiness is going to suffer, as Sarkozy said pointing threateningly his finger at Greece. This plan was connected to the crisis of the Eurozone and the need for the French State to accelerate the restructuring. But the result was the breakout of a movement which, from the very start, was clearly confronted with the objectivity of capital : the economy.

An important element this time was the coexistence, within the French movement, of young and older proletarians (who were developing parallel activities). Most of the older participants in the movement belonged to the salaried middle strata, while most of the younger ones were not University but high-school students. The relation between these two segments of the movement was particularly complex. There was undoubtedly a common starting point: pensions. But this was a common preoccupation, not a common perspective. The older participants belonged to the pool giving rise to the imaginary figure of the average consumer: they could almost appear as a faded advertisement dating from the Fordist period. Undermining their chance to survive their working life was just another step in the breach of the social contract of Fordism. The younger participants are not only confronted to the additional two years of the retirement age, but they should work for forty years in order to qualify for retirement, whereas they know that they are unemployed persons in waiting. The trap of a life containing solely precarious work or unemployment and death was becoming common to all.

The placards stressing that immediate practical interests of the youth living in France are under attack, as the raised retirement age makes their entry in the labour market  even more difficult, constituted one aspect of practices that marked this coexistence. The other aspect was their total absence of demands as well as their stance towards repression. The young demanded nothing; the State was immediately sending police against them from the moment they were in the streets, although they blocked just their devalued schools, not production. Both these elements show that neither of the sides admitted the other as an interlocutor for arranging the future. The youth saw the State as a tyrant, and the State saw the youth as the surplus workforce of the future which it should repress at any cost. The police intervention in schools was clearly aiming at teaching discipline, the only useful lesson for the youth. As objective situation and as activity, the youth embodies in condensed form the absence of future.

The movement in France largely took, however, the form of a trade-unionism in a process of radicalisation. It was a purely defensive revindicative movement, with its strategy and its tactics,  and also with the unavoidable confrontational coexistence of self-organisation and official trade-unionism. The weakening of official trade-unionism is so clear that it has practically been transformed from a mechanism for negotiating the price of labour power to a mechanism for the management and allocation of individuals, mostly of the middle strata of the working class, at various hierarchical levels – a mechanism that is undoubtedly fully identified with capital, but also one for which there is no substitute. Just like parties, trade unions are institutions without members, the remains of the defunct worker’s identity. It is in this vacuum that activism emerges. Activism, a tendency characterised by intense mobility, aims at becoming a catalyst of developments through the objective consequences of this mobility on the economy. The attempts at internal policing of the movement by the trade-unionists of CGT and their inability to propose a solution, a decent end for the movement, combine with the pressure of militants on trade-unionists for the continuation of the struggle. The inevitable cooperation with them, this sort of permanent osmosis, reminds us that trade-unionism is not just a form, but it is also content.

The content of radical trade-unionism, or activism, or “movementism” as it has been called in France, was expressed more markedly in blockages. Its most dynamic manifestation was the blockage of oil refineries – its strength and also its limit. Blockages were the result of a contradiction: the pressure of the rank and file for action on the one hand, the inability to strike and lose revenue on the other hand. But they constituted a more appropriate substitute for strikes as compared to demonstrations, and they reached the menacing limit of their becoming real blockages. The fact that demonstrators have persisted in demonstrating for so long was connected to blockages. The strategy of the trade-unions, namely weakening the movement through duration, failed, and it led to an overcoming of the practice of demonstrating. Blockages were considered by militants as a means for blocking the economy. This objective shows, on the one hand, the importance of distribution as an integral part of the cycle of capital. On the other hand, however, it expresses an ideology declaring that the question does not lie in production of value but in its circulation. Whatever the case, in the end the economy was not blocked. But the sheer fact that, from the beginning of the movement, blocking the economy was an acceptable objective, or at least wishes, shows an overcoming relatively to the anti-CPE movement. The practice of blockages aggravated contradictions and confrontations within the revindicative movement. The question was posed whether, and to what extent, blockages should be symbolic or real, and trade unions had a hard time controlling the people who flocked to Grandpuits. The priority set by trade unions was the protection of the refineries’ installations, and in this way it became even more obvious that the protection of labour is above all the protection of capital. As an activity, blockages did not put demands into question, but they constituted the limit of the activity produced by the deligitimation of demands.

What is more generally the product of an unstable and circumstantial trade-unionism? In France the State waited for the strikers of the refineries to get tired and stop the blockings. It treated them as a bothersome but inevitable stage in the evolution of the situation. In fact, the militants blocking the refineries were begging the State to negotiate with them in search of a solution. But the State could only let them “dance around” for some days and then send in the police. The internal contradictory dynamics of the movement was however not so confrontational as to lead to a calling of its revindicative character into question to a significant extent. The limit of the French movement expresses the limit of today’s class struggle. It is a dipole corresponding directly to the concrete reality of two opposing classes. On one side, the class character of the proletariat’s action, expressed in all its demands which could be condensed to the demand of a perpetuation of its class existence, and thus also of capital. On the other side, “the police”, that is the enemy class ready for battle.

The conclusion that can be drawn from the French movement is that the delegitimation of demands is so advanced as not to permit any stable establishment of radical trade-unionism in the place of the anti-globalisation movement’s alternativism. The absence of a political program should not however entail a mechanistic perception of reality. “Programmatism”  is an inherent element of class struggle and will continue to manifest itself, at least during the first stages of most struggles. As long as the proletariat remains the proletariat, it will produce the same thing as every living organism: the demand for a perpetuation of its existence. Through the contradictory development of this demand, the proletariat’s activity against capital, exploitation as a contradiction between classes, historically produces revolution. The fact that the demand of a perpetuation of its existence, and revolution as its self-abolition, are embodied in the same class is not only apparently but also really tautological: it defines the “necessary and impossible tautology”, it defines the capitalist relation as a “moving contradiction”.

In what follows we cite comments by some comrades on the French movement. These comments were found in the website dndf.org:

This movement never believed that it could win. The point was not there. The point was to express that enough is enough. [...] If there is no more the possibility of a confirmation, there is no  implication guaranteed by capital either (this is why there are no more any real negotiations with trade-unions). [...] Radical democratism is dead for good. No counter-proposal to the government’s plan was heard. The Socialist Party tried to mutter something, but very soon shut its mouth. [...] When the unavoidable demanding is illegitimate (when it is not systemically integrated in capital’s self-presupposition which has to reproduce the class opposite to capital), there is this empty self-confirmation, this hatred that wears down its own brakes. […] In the illegitimacy of demand, trade-unionism becomes impossible, and it can lead to the emergence of a rank-and-file trade-unionism with various unstable or outright informal organisational forms, since every class organisation before the revolution can only be trade-unionist. [...] There is a tendency for a hatred of the economy as a mode of life to take root, without a demand for ‘another economy’. Thisis precisely the specificity of the October movement.

[…] I consider it more promising to see in these events the crisis of demanding. Its generalised delegitimation. A further step has been taken. Between the CPE and the pensions, we passed from a movement that ‘obtained’ the withdrawal of the bill (something that is not a positive demand as such) to the absolute revindicative failure of the present movement. [...] In the obsolescence of programmatism and the collapse of radical democratism – democracy is no more, from either side, but a reference of principle, devoid of alternative content, and some followers of radical democratism lose in this way their ideological marks – the programmatic Marx tends to be inverted: every anti-union struggle cannot but be anti-political. Class struggle will find its terrain. [...] The most important point is to understand that these [unionist] limits are acquiring today a different character through the illegitimacy of demands; that these limits emerge within a permanent restructuring of the class contradiction at a worldwide level. The most important point is to see that this produces an anti-economic struggle, and thus by necessity, in a given conflict, confrontations with trade-unionism, which is by definition enclosed in this terrain. [...] The dynamic content of anti-unionism is the anti-economic one. Trade-unionism comes to a conflict with itself when demanding becomes illegitimate.

[…] Every revindicative struggle follows a course, and the initial aims, triggers, motives and causes evolve in the process in order to tackle the totality of the problem as posed now, not yesterday or tomorrow. Those struggling can change change their attitude and position. It is wrong to state that the aim of this conflict was the ‘sharing of wealth’. On account of that, we frequently acted for principle, in order to be ‘within’, in order not to sit idly by, although most of us doubted about the possibility of a positive issue. This situation leads to a generalisation of desperate struggle. At a given moment we might hope and think that, in a situation of crisis (when capital can no more reproduce the proletariat, which is a precondition of its own existence), the  proletariat, for the most part, will not be willing to return to the proletarian condition.

Middle East and Maghreb: Repression and exploitation, the two matches that lit the fire of the ‘popular uprising’

While in France the situation is getting serious with the consolidation of a total delegitimization of wage demands that is currently underway (and which may appear even more intensely in the US in the near future), in the Arab and African countries it is clearer than ever that the marginalization of the vast majority of the youth taking part in rebellions is the very definition of a new phase of the crisis. No doubt the situation is not identical in every state. Each state has its own class structure and may differ from others in important respects, like the influence of religion, the gender issue, and the position in the global hierarchy of capitalist states. Yet we cannot overlook certain common aspects that stem from the objective situation, and from the activity of the proletariat and of the local middle strata (the petty bourgeoisie and the upper layers of waged workers) that are being rapidly proletarianized. On a first level, it is important to look at those elements that are common between these states and not at their differences. Besides the structural common aspects of these states (language, and to a large extent religions and the subjection to Western centers of accumulation guaranteed by the authoritarian regimes) there are also important common elements relating to the conjuncture. The economic situation in Tunisia and Egypt right before the uprising was similar, mutatis mutandis. Growth rates were about 5% and structural unemployment and precariousness were very high, especially for the young generation, whose social significance is huge because of the particular demographic structure. In Egypt, the great majority of the proletariat is very poor, with an ‘average per capita income’ of approximately $2,000 per year, as over one fifth of the population’s ‘average income’ is $2 per day. The impoverishment of the middle classes has been intensified in recent years, especially since 2008, thanks to the increase in food prices.

The evolution of each state from Nasserism to neoliberalism, although different in intensity and speed, also has certain common elements: the overwhelming and ever-evolving repression promoted and protected the ‘breach of the social contract’ until the burst of the revolt, but also gave the uprising its anti-repression characteristics. Repression in these states was devastating even for the middle class. A typical example was the assassination of Khaled Said in the summer of 2010 in Alexandria. His assassination caused protests that prefigured the current revolts. His murder was important enough to mobilize the youth of the middle class. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back! The devaluation, the absolute dependence on the state and the lack of future ceased to be tolerated by the young generation. The importance of the demographic issue is illustrated by the fact that in all political factions (from the left to the Islamists) there is a horizontal division between the older and the younger generation. Repression as social reproduction, as devaluation of labor power, was simultaneously the motive force for the economic development in these states and the limit of this form of political rule: on December 17, 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi lit the match which, together with the fire that killed him, also lit the fire of revolt. His self-immolation was the negative side of the current impasse of capitalism. The expulsion of labor-power value from the reproduction cycle of capital, the continuous devaluation, and the destruction of variable capital that dominates the crisis so far, defined the context of the suicide of a young Tunisian with no future. At the same time, the effectiveness that this suicide had on class struggle confirmed that we are now in a transitional period of this crisis – in the era of riots.

Apart from the dependence of the middle and petty bourgeois strata on the state, the repressive neoliberal management of social relations had as its main objective the devaluation of labor power. The attack against the working class did not remain unanswered; we could say that there was symmetry between the intensity of this attack and the reinforcement of strikes in recent years. The most important strikes took place in Egypt in 2006, and in Tunisia in 2008 at Mahalla and Gafsa respectively. At least 2 million workers participated in the strikes in Egypt over the last decade. These strikes involved wage demands. The important characteristic was that they occurred locally, as the workers  only trusted their interpersonal relationships. This was due to the former Stalinist left being integrated by Mubarak and unions becoming instruments of the state mafia. The link between the exploitation of the working class and the absence of future for the new generation of the middle class was materialized in the youth ‘movement of April 6’, that would later play a role in the events of the Tahrir Square.

State and/or religious repression and over-exploitation resonate in the issue of gender. The temporary installation of an Islamist prime minister (Ganoutsi) in Tunisia and the jeering of women from male bystanders in Tahrir Square on March 8 were facts that justified an ominous expression of concern from an old militant of the feminist movement: “History has taught us how popular revolutions are aborted by remnants of the ousted regime, and the first thing to be abandoned is the rights of women”, (Al-Ahram Weekly, 26 February 2011). In Tunisia, several women marched on January 29, in order to make clear that they would not accept any devaluation of women neither by the Islamists nor by ‘anyone else’. Sana Ben Achour said that they did not overthrow a dictatorship only to enter into a new one ‘of another type’. Women are the most oppressed subjects in these (more or less) Islamist and at the same time neo-liberal authoritarian regimes. Their activity is clearly a qualitative indicator of social unrest, whether it is the women of the April 6 movement in Tahrir Square, or the women in Benghazi whose relationships grew deeper during the protest movement against the slaughter at the Abou Salim prison.

All these said, the conclusion is that the rebels appear to be aware of the fact that this region is intended for predatory exploitation and repressive management of the overabundant proletariat. This situation produces a whole range of practices and ideologies among rebels according to class origins, sex, age, the State they live in, and the complicated dynamics of the interactions between these factors.

Bread, water and oust Ben-Ali

For sure the participation in the rebellion is itself a dissolving process. The previously important social ties and institutions that define the capitalist social relations are questioned in the process of revolt. Revolt entails the self-transformation of each person into a struggling proletarian, it entails a sudden and violent proletarianization of every social category, since the everyday life of rebellion is merely action, solidarity, direct relations (even personal conflicts tend to be unmediated) and confrontations with the forces of repression. If this observation is important for answering once and for all the state propaganda that speaks of a purely “political movement”, at the level of analysis it is important to see the differences between the practices of the rebels. It is important to reconstitute dialectically the fragmented reality of these revolts to understand what is both its power and its limit, that is, how they define and how they are defined by this transitional phase of the crisis.

The most important differentiation within the practices of the rebels was the one between the riots, the pillages, sabotage, attacks on prisons and police stations on the one hand, and on the other hand the rhetoric of democracy, civil liberties, elections, and so on. The second pole of this contradiction represents the schizophrenia of the rapidly proletarianized petty bourgeois and of the middle strata. This contradiction also stems from the violent elimination of the future for nearly the whole of the new generation (official unemployment rate of the youth is near 60%). Personal accounts of the insurgents in Egypt express this schizophrenia to the utmost. One can see that the educated unemployed, or the almost starving underpaid young public workers, do not realize that their situation is a picture of the future of their  European and American counterparts. While they understand capital as something totally alien to them (they constantly refer to corruption and cleptocracy), they don’t understand (at least not yet) that this period of capitalism, and its crisis, produces them as ‘estranged’. The thirst of the middle strata for democracy is in fact a thirst for justice, i.e. meritocracy. They require to be used for what they were educated to do, that is for the continuation of capitalism and its effective management. They require from the capital, that produced them as such, to find a way to incorporate them in the production process, they require the period of prosperity that neoliberalism reserved for Europeans and Americans of the same class. This section will not be happy with anything less than that. This is illustrated by the fact that part of them is rapidly radicalized, but also by the fact that the questioning of neoliberalism is expressed with a discourse on the nation (and not on religion), i.e. the discourse over the practical questioning of globalization, the challenge of the international circuit of capital whose functionaries are not considered credible interlocutors any more. But this part of the insurgents is caught in a double trap: on the one hand, the capitalist class pushes them all the more violently in the hell of surplus population and, on the other hand, part of this surplus population, instead of asking for democracy and justice, just riots, pillages, destroys, meaning that it does not demand anything, or it doesn’t participate at all in the revolt. The petty bourgeoisie and the middle strata participating in the riots are disintegrating into the proletariat, but this does not mean that their ideology is vanishing. Instead, this dissolution produces even more intensively the democratization of the movement (which is inherent in a class movement): a communique distributed by the steel-industry workers included among other demands the ‘immediate resignation of the President and all the symbols of the regime, the dissolution of the union federation that was ‘Mubarak’s minion’ and the immediate creation through general assemblies of their own independent union, without any permission or agreement of a regime that has fallen and has lost all legitimacy, the confiscation of all state companies that were privatized and their re-nationalization, the creation of a new management of these companies which will consist of workers and technicians and will be accountable only to the people, the creation of workers’ committees for production management, pricing and wages, the creation of a general assembly of all political trends of “the people” that would realise the constitutional convention and would elect truly popular committees regardless of what the regime wants.’

Fortunately, this menacing human mass (the proletariat from ashwa’iyyat) was entirely absent from the revolt…
(ashwa’iyyat is the Egyptian word for the slums in the outskirts of Cairo)

Excerpt from the interview of a left sociologist in the New Left Review journal

The fragmented and precarious or unemployed proletariat had its own distinct presence (as in December 2008 in Greece) expressed by the complete absence of demands and the unmediated organization of the rebels (except for Libya: it is still too soon to talk about the events there). Ultimately, however, their practices were synthesized with the demand-formulating democratic practices that dominated the movement. This synthesis was based on the proletarian, class, ‘programmatic’ reality and ideology of the proletariat. The dialectic between the fractions of the movement did not lead to a rupture; it did not result in the overcoming of this dipole. Instead, it resulted in a provisional and precarious foundation, namely the coexistence of these practices, which marks a transitional phase of this crisis.

As long as the proletariat is struggling as a proletariat it will always be faced with the issue of the continuation of its reproduction, i.e. the continuation of proletarian existence. The most controversial and important turn of events in Egypt was the appearance of the working class as a unified subject, through the trade unions. Οnly when the working class turned to a supposedly neutral State, the one represented by the army, only then did the scales tip in favor of Mubarak’s fall. Only then did the revolt meet its demands, and simultaneously its counter-revolution came to triumph. In Egypt and in Tunisia ‘democracy’ triumphed right before the great massacre. No surprise that democracy took the form of military dictatorship in Egypt, and of a new government with members of the old Ben Ali government in Tunisia.

The massiveness and therefore the multi-class composition defined the uprisings that swamped all these states. The coexistence of different classes should not be perceived as ‘the struggling working class’ with the external addition of the middle strata. In contrast, the participation of these social categories and their dismantling into the movement has been crucial for its evolution. This development opens up an important theoretical question about the dialectic generated between the surplus population and the rest of the proletariat and the petty bourgeois strata that are rapidly proletarianized. The coexistence of different social classes has not been so much confrontational because no question about communist measures could be posed, since that would practically challenge any vision of the middle strata for the continuation of capitalism. The multi-class composition of the movement was simultaneously its power and its limit. Due to this composition the movement managed to complete a titanic task, to challenge harsh dictatorships which were in power for decades. But the practices produced from the dynamics of this composition also gave the State the right to raise itself above its concrete form, even to denounce it, to change camp, to go with the insurgents and to implement the counter-revolution entailed by the revolt itself. The State must be preserved outside class struggle in order to continue to be the State of the capitalist class. The activity of the rebels made it possible for the State to play this role. The necessary internal distance between the practices of the rebels which would undermine the ability of the State to play a mediating role was not created.

Democratic dictatorships and referenda do nothing other than to underline that we are in a transitional phase. Reuters points out aptly: ‘Egypt presents a new dynamic. It could become a magnet for investors as the labor power and land are cheap’. In other words, although the political maneuver was necessary for the restoration of order, what really matters for capital is the continued devaluation of labor power. But the class struggle has the specificity to function as a chain reaction, therefore is itself a cause for its own reproduction. The energy emitted by the riots and protests against these regimes was so strong that it let all hell loose. We should not underestimate the fact that the call for democracy is above all a claim to the right to strike. In less than two months, the network of independent unions was strengthened in Egypt. These unions are now active and cause blockages in the production process. Also, violent incidents in everyday life reveal that social relations have undergone significant disruption, social roles have been challenged. On March 23, 2011 the new (blessed by the rebellion) Egyptian junta passed a law that criminalizes strikes, demonstrations, and rallies, and on April 9, on the two-month anniversary of the fall of Mubarak, they applied this law: they killed 6 protesters and injured hundreds more on Tahrir Square. The Ministry of Justice of the junta issued a statement with which it reassured the proletariat that it has every right to complain but it should be careful ‘not to impede the production process and not to cause chaos.’ The counter-revolution carried within the revolt in the Arab and African countries has not been promoted only by the State. We read in an article by K. Anderson about developments in Tunisia: ‘Youth from all over the country have continued to gather from time to time in Kasbah Square in Tunis to pressure the interim government. In early March, they succeeded – after a new round of confrontations with the police – in getting more old guard politicians to resign. As part of these efforts, a High Commission to Safeguard the Revolution has been created, which includes among its members trade unionists and Marxists.’ In the article by P. Anderson in the New Left Review we find the condensation of this counterrevolution expressed in a language more familiar to the proletariat than the harsh language of state repression:  ‘The strategic priority for a re-emergent left in the Arab world must be to close the rift in the revolts by fighting for the forms of political freedom that will allow these social pressures to find optimal collective expression. That means, on one side: calling for the complete abolition of all emergency laws; dissolution of the ruling party or dethronement of the ruling family; cleansing the state apparatus of the vultures of the old regime; and bringing to justice  its leaders. On the other side, it means careful, creative attention to the detail of the constitutions to be written once the remnants of the previous system are swept away. Here the key requirements are: unrestricted civic and trade-union liberties of expression and organization; undistorted—that is, proportional, not first-past-the-post—electoral systems; avoidance of plenipotentiary presidencies; blocking of monopolies – state or private – in the means of communication; and statutory rights of the least advantaged to public welfare. It is only in an open framework of this kind that the demands for social justice with which the revolt began can unfold in the collective freedom they need to find any realization.’

Taking into account the issue of regionalisation and the related intercapitalist conflicts, one can see that the “victory of the revolutions” in Egypt and Tunisia produces a new impasse. Libya and Syria – two States in the class structure of which racial and religious conflict plays a key role – could be only the beginning of the bloody future of class struggle and intercapitalist conflicts. Recent struggles reflect the two basic aspects of the process that produces the revolution of the current period: first, the delegitimization of demands, i.e. demanding is converted into a component of the reproduction of classes, which tends to be marginalized and suppressed, and second, the internal distance produced between proletarian practices in the evolution of class struggle. These two aspects of class struggle are produced in every zone of capital despite all their differences, and is imposed by the objectivity of capital, the economy. We may risk the prediction that we are entering into an era of riots, which will be transitional and extremely violent.  It will define the reproduction crisis of the proletariat, and thus of capitalism, as an important structural element of the following period. By ‘riots’ we mean struggles for demands or struggles without demands that will take violent forms and will transform the urban environments into areas of unrest; the riots are not revolution, even the insurgency is not revolution, although it may be the beginning of a revolution. The internal distance between proletarian practices aggravates all social contradictions and creates a self-reinforcing process of growing conflicts that includes more and more categories of the working class and the intensification of State repression. The particularity of this ‘era’ is that the dynamics of the struggle cannot produce stable results. In any case, the struggles of the proletarians will inevitably reproduce the opponent class and their own class existence as a class of proletarians. The limit of these struggles, now, is the fact that they are class struggles. The only guarantee to overcome this limit is a practical attack against capital, which is identical with the attack on the very existence of the proletarian class.

Even if the crisis will not soon occur as globally as it appeared in 2008, the intense regional crises like the ones emerging in the States of rebellion, in Japan or in the debt ridden Eurozone, will define in a different way the universality of the crisis as a composition of chaotic local situations . Whether we are refering to France or to the insurgent Middle East and Africa, to the U.S. or China, we see that the inherent tendencies of this phase of restructured capitalism are developing rapidly and with tremendous momentum. All these tendencies converge towards the devaluation of labor power as a common component and the conversion of an ever larger part of the workforce into a structurally surplus population. The possible success of this phase of restructuring, i.e. the partial restoration of the rate of profit, whatever form it takes, will not lead to a new cycle of accumulation. This will only happen insofar as the structure of class relations is changed. The representatives of fqc, who enjoy the benefits of a delay of its devaluation (through repression). or those who appear as opponents of the fqc fraction –in some cases they really are – and who defend another Keynesian form of capital, will ultimately be in the same camp even if the conflict between them intensifies today during this transitional phase.

Capital is in every sense a moving contradiction: while in the second phase of restructuring it completely fragments the proletariat, at the same time it creates a strong unity on the basis of its objectivity. It pushes each proletarian category from its own perspective to a common ascertainment: that such a profound lack of future entails a relentless gnawing of the present. This awareness creates the ideology of our time, the one of a struggling subject that does not use the old ideological signs of class unity; it has no existence outside capital and also has no future inside capital. The development of this contradiction in the form of the internal distance between practices in the class struggle, which will inevitably become confrontational, will show whether and how this lack of future will be produced, not as an objective movement of capital, but as an activity of the proletariat against capital, i.e. against itself as proletariat, i.e. as a continuous self-transformation through the communist measures that will be taken as the revolution will eventually abolish the proletariat.

ANNEX

On the “second phase of restructuring”

The notion of a “second phase of restructuring” is based on three fundamental ideas. First, capital’s counter-offensive after the end of the Fordist cycle of struggles was the restructuring that transformed capitalism from Keynesianism/ Fordism to globalised and financialised neoliberalism. Second, this restructuring marked the beginning of a new phase of the real subsumption of labour under capital. The dissolution of workers’ identity and the continuous undermining of the reproduction of the working class, as a class relying on direct and indirect salary for its reproduction, are decisive characteristics of this phase. Third, a basic characteristic of this restructuring, which has established a dynamic that continuously undermines any internal coherence of the working class, consists in its being a process that continuously renews its own dynamic. The restructuring has been realised; a new model of accumulation has been established; nonetheless, and however paradoxical that might seem, the restructuring is maintained as a dynamic and is being intensified through the internal crises of this period.

On the basis of the above, it is obvious that we have a difficulty in attempting to establish an internal periodisation of restructured capitalism, although the present crisis forces us to try.  This difficulty is related to a historical novelty of restructured capitalism. This novelty is the “tendency to a double disconnection” (of the accumulation of capital from the reproduction of the working class and disconnection of income and consumption from wages, according to the terminology used by Théorie Communiste). To put it in a nutshell, it is the fact that, for the first time in history, we witness the following paradox: whereas every restructuring, as a counter-revolution, contains necessarily an attack on the value of labour power, the restructuring effected from the mid 70s to the mid 80s has incorporated this attack as a permanent, necessary, structural characteristic of restructured capitalism. In the present crisis we are faced with the fact that this attack was already structurally incorporated in the situation prevalent before the crisis.

Besides the present crisis itself, the attempt to counter it brings automatically into question the reproduction of the capitalist relation and, specifically, of the proletariat. Why specifically of the proletariat? Because capitalism is really globalised and every national or regional proletariat is treated in an abstract way as a part of the global proletariat, perfectly interchangeable with any other part. This leads to a vicious circle. On the one hand, we witness a deepening of hierarchy due to an aggravated devaluation of the proletariat in countries occupying the down-most posts in capitalist hierarchy. On the other hand, we witness a devaluation of the proletariat in countries of, mostly, the second but also the first zone, in the framework of a global competition that in neoliberalism translates, to a large degree, in competition for the lowest price of labour power.

Capital’s attempted response, from the breakout of the crisis up to now, looks like blindly forging ahead. It is a restructuring internal to the cycle of accumulation, or, more aptly formulated, it is the second phase of restructuring itself, which by its nature must always be renewed based on its fundamental orientations. Logically, this second phase of restructuring will also acquire some geopolitical characteristics. The more we approach the production of the revolution of this cycle of struggles, more “internal restructurings” of this type will be needed: the time distance between them will be shortened as historical time condenses and the historically productive process accelerates.

Today’s measures, although pointing in the same direction, do not have the same historical importance as those implemented in the period when the arrangements of the previous accumulation model and of the reproduction of the working class were swept away. The “first phase of the restructuring” (which can be called like that only today, in the crisis and with the new measures) represented a change of the model of accumulation; the second phase of the restructuring is an attempt at continuation, an attempt to tackle a crisis internal to the cycle of accumulation, a crisis so serious as to produce the present situation. Continuing the attack on the value of labour power and undermining the reproduction of the working class are already contained in capitalism’s modus operandi. Whence the concept of a “second phase”, which is not a new restructuring but expresses the fact that the “first phase” of restructuring represented the beginning of a historical period whose production will be revolution as communisation. This problematic opens the road for an issue that is still more difficult and more important, that of the concept of conjuncture, which we intend to discuss in the near future.

The transitional phase of the crisis: From restructuring to rebellion

Day by day, the wind of revolt sweeping regions of Africa and the Middle East is increasingly felt. One country after another appears in the headlines of international press; the issue always the same: conflicts between protesters and the police or para-state thugs of every local, usually totalitarian, regime. Despite all the efforts by global spectacle to conceal the proletarian nature of the uprisings and over-emphasize their internal contradictions, presenting the events just as a political “movement for democracy” or as political confrontations between the supporters of such and such politicians in the region, the obvious truth cannot actually be concealed: class is against class. The proletarians use stones, Molotov cocktails and sticks, the cops are fully armed and so scared that they shoot and kill indiscriminately. The proletarians occupy buildings, block roads and burn cars, they burn down prisons, releasing the inmates, and they sabotage infrastructure. Capital gets prepared to impose even harsher dictatorship. It will not be easy for the transitional regimes to stabilise themselves, as they will not be able to meet any of the major standard-of-living demands of the insurgents. Egypt and Libya are, so far, the most serious manifestations of this insurrectionary phase of the crisis. Egypt is important because of its economic and geopolitical significance within the global inter-capitalist competition and Libya, not only because of its significance as an oil-producing country, but also because the state rapidly lost control of the situation, which has caused panic worldwide.

The current accumulation regime is the result of the first restructuring which took place in the ’70s and ’80s; its crisis is the flip-side of the success of this restructuring. It is the deepening of neoliberalism itself which produced this historical crisis, because capitalism is a contradictory system of social relations. No matter how stable each mode of accumulation appears externally, it carries the development of its internal contradictory dynamics within, which eventually leads to the outbreak of the crisis. The achievement of the restructured capitalism, namely the triumph of the subsumption of the entire life of the proletariat under capital has made the reproduction of the proletariat (and of capitalism altogether) desperately dependent on the ups and downs of the economy, i.e. more vulnerable to the crisis than in any previous historical period. In the present historical moment we are in a transitional phase of the global capitalist crisis that erupted in 2008 and is still developing. In this transitional phase, global financial capital is trying to skip its direct devaluation through the imposition of the draconian second phase of the restructuring across the planet. The consequences of this effort are visible everywhere, but they differ in terms of the intensity and the quality of the attack against the proletariat, which depend on: a) the position of each state within the global capitalist hierarchy, b) the already achieved progress of the first phase of the imposed restructuring and mainly c) the history of class struggle in each region. Across the world (excluding China) the restructuring means the reduction of the direct and indirect wage (pensions, benefits and public services); it means the becoming illegitimate of the wage demand; it also means the increase in the prices of essential goods, which is due both to the objective mechanism of the crisis and the fact that certain factions of capital clearly speculate with food prices. A result of this gambling is that the most undervalued part of the proletariat has literally no longer anything to eat: “Prices have risen so much that if I buy a few lemons for my sore throat, I will be bankrupt for the whole month” said a worker in the Ministry of Transport in Egypt.

Amidst the storm of the economic crisis, the state subsidies for the survival of the surplus workforce disappear and the result is the proliferation of informal labour and poverty. Proletarians have no other option but to work (mostly informally) in order to survive and at the same time, as a result of the crisis, they find it impossible to find a job or have an income that would cover the cost of the reproduction of their labor power. Proletarians demand their survival, so they demand the lowering of food prices, wage increases and jobs. Their demands desperately request from capitalists to save capitalism itself. When demanding stable employment and “decent” wages, proletarians in fact say to capitalists: “you need us, without us there is no extraction of surplus value, there is no capital”. Capital on the other hand responds that it cannot afford the survival of the proletariat, and makes it clear that a (significant) part of the latter is useless (in terms of value) and, most important, that the desired recovery does not include any re-integration of this over-abundant part of the proletariat; it follows that these proletarians structurally form a surplus population. Historically, then, the wage demand is produced as both necessary and (structurally, not cyclically) a dead-end. The uprising of this surplus, and thus without future, proletariat is confronted with the clearest, the most cruel form of capitalist domination, the police. It is precisely the fact that the exit from the crisis, from the capitalist point of view, does not include this surplus proletarian population which makes the police the general form of current capitalism.

Proletarians, all over the world, experience their precarious situation as suffocating, its context defined by poverty and ghettoization. The most striking examples are Frontex (the EU border police), the respective military and police that has been deployed in the U.S. border with Mexico, the wall in Palestine, the guarded by the army camps of workers in China, the gated communities in Latin America and their equivalent, the favelas, vast slums, and of course the Greek version of this situation, the 12.5 km fence in the borders with Turkey. The entire planet is slowly but definitely becoming an apartheid ruled space; modern bantustans are constructed for the working class. This urban repression makes proletarians suffocate and negates a basic capitalist condition, that of the free sale of labor power. In Cairo, this type of urban planning was implemented at a rapid pace over the past decade. The dictatorship of value and economy as a whole, in all regions of Africa and the Middle East that now see the proletarian uprising, has the political form of a dictatorial democracy. The reason that these riots have alarmed capitalists around the world is that democratic dictatorship, totalitarianism, is now the fantasy of the bourgeoisie in the more developed countries as well, since this seems to be the only way to enforce the second phase of the restructuring.

The demonstrations and riots started in all these countries from the field of reproduction and the question is whether the turmoil will encompass the field of production of value, the epicenter of capitalism, as well. The strikes that followed the fall of the socialist dictator Mubarak seem to point towards this direction and capitalists eagerly look at that corner of the world having their finger on the trigger, since “El Dorados” suddenly became traps for capital in volatile regions whose future is highly uncertain. The “huge competitive advantage” became, almost overnight, “an unmanageable risk”. Subcontracting, tourism, construction, the textile industry but above all oil and trade routes (Suez and the Gulf) are now met with the fire of proletarian uprising. After Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, where the insurgency is still ongoing, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Iraq and Algeria kill proletarians in their attempt to forestall the uprising.

The regime in Greece is also trying to operate proactively, against the upcoming revolt: on the one hand it prepares for the formal imposition of some form of dictatorship (perhaps through elections) and on the other it seeks to direct reactions towards a populist-nationalist right-wing or left-wing (as a second scenario) road. The functionaries of the global financial capital, who temporarily hold the Greek state power, now try to quickly sell off state property, following their success in reducing the wages. This sell-off is nothing but an attempt to valorize capital which is trapped in (mainly) the Greek and European financial system and is in an immediate danger of massive devaluation. On the other hand, proletarians oppose this sell-off because they understand that it means even greater reduction in the indirect wage and the deteriorating of living conditions in general; they refuse to pay tickets and tolls, they occupy buildings, they try to reduce the effects of crisis by making as much noise as they can, but so far only in the sphere of circulation and reproduction. The strikes in sectors affected by the restructuring do not correspond to the intensity of the attack; they are nothing other than the spending of the last mediation capacities of the unions.

Both the probable strategies of the Greek bourgeoisie cut both ways. The imposition of a dictatorship in Greece will possibly cause the virus of rebellion to cross the Mediterranean, with all the implications something like that would have for other European countries. On the other hand, the deceleration of the restructuring is likely to question the participation of the Greek state in the politically unified Europe, something that will relegate it to the third zone of capital. This development would seriously jeopardize the interests of a major faction of the Greek bourgeoisie

For the proletarians who live in Greece, there is only one road, whichever scenario is implemented: the increasingly radicalised class struggles. Probably, the unions will not call soon for a 24-hour general strike, like today, but the class struggle fronts will multiply as time passes; and the eruption of insurgency cannot be postponed much longer. The demand-oriented struggles of the proletariat, focusing on the existence of wage and being against the general deterioration of living standards, through their development and their objective failure, will be led to a rupture with their revendicative content. This rupture is already announced in cases like that of Keratea and will appear as a distinct event in any localized conflict. The content of ruptures makes political unification of the struggling proletarians and thus effective mediation of conflicts impossible. For example, the repression which the “we will not pay for the crisis” social movement will probably be faced with could bring the conflict to the point of putting in danger the very existence of present means of transport. The development of the dynamics of ruptures cannot be completed and stabilized in “working class gains”; it can only be the beginning of the historical revolutionary process.

Agents of Chaos

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On the text by “Woland pour Blaumachen.”

Blaumachen #3, editorial

This is a very interesting text that provides a detailed account of the December “riots” in Greece and attempts to draw lessons from it that go beyond the specifically Greek context. There is a great deal in it with which we in IP agree: a call for the abolition of the value form and wage labor; the rejection of the unions and of self-management; the need for class unity (involving different strata of the collective worker (our term), full time, part-time, students, immigrants, illegals, etc., across racial or ethnic lines; most important a rejection of the fetish of legality or respect for capitalist property, public or private; a need to spread the struggle beyond sectoral or national frontiers; a clear sense that within the framework of the value form, there is only one direction that society can take: a course towards growing barbarism.

But we also have disagreements on two important issues.

First, on Blaumachen’s view of destruction as capable of creating the conditions for the necessity of communism, because “generalized destruction would make it impossible to go back”. There is a focus on destruction of “buildings, means of production, networks of distribution,” as vital to the class struggle. Woland is not talking about the destruction that capital brings in its wake and imposes on the collective worker, but about the destruction wrought by the proletariat in struggle, which involves “the destruction of the urban space. “The abolition of value necessarily begins with the destruction of things”, Woland writes. Not the destruction of the value form, or the state apparatus, but the destruction — not the expropriation/appropriation/seizure — of the productive apparatus by the collective worker. Isn’t that appropriation the step that becomes revolutionary, as opposed to burning or looting stores? And that quite apart from how capital can and does use the images of destruction to win popular support for its own violence. It is true that pillage can transform commodities into use-values (the text on Chile in the last IP is an illustration of that, and it should not need an earthquake to provoke such action), but pillage can also be either an orgy of destruction or the looting of goods for re-sale and individual profit, which Woland does not criticize (contrary to the text on Chile). One can understand rage, more so in the case of the précaires or sans papiers than the student perhaps, but is this in itself the way forward, tactically or strategically? The idea that the class that is responsible for the production of life in all its facets can and should seize the apparatus within which it is compelled by capital to labor, not burn it down, seems entirely absent here.

The value-form is a social relation, not “things”. Destroying things is not necessarily a blow to the value-form. And while we agree that the practical destruction of the value-form does not begin after the revolution but through it, we disagree with the view that this takes the form of a mere destruction of things. Especially not since capital, at this time of massive overaccumulation, is itself bent on a course of increasing destruction of things (of superfluous value).

The other issue is the rejection of demand struggles, which, in Woland’s view, are condemned to be unionist struggles, even when unions are absent. Still, he states, “we participate in demand struggles that concern us” because “by their failure”, they create the conditions to go beyond unionism.

Our view of demand struggles is in part similar: we too see them as necessary learning experiences in which the workers begin to understand the impossibility to prevent the worsening of their conditions under capitalism. We certainly don’t see it as the role of pro-revolutionaries to tell the workers what demands they should raise nor to encourage illusions about what demands capitalism can accommodate. But there is more. We have always emphasized the dynamic relation between the objectives and means in the struggles of the working class. As the means change, become more powerful because of the growing extension and self-organization of the struggle, the objectives can change too. Through the praxis of self-organization and of overcoming divisions within itself, the class begins to see what seemed once impossible, as possible. The objectives radically change. What other possible road is there to revolution? That struggles begin as resistance against wage-cuts, etc, is to be expected and does not condemn them to remain “unionist” in content forever.

Blaumachen argues that extension and self-organization do not guarantee this transformation of the content of the struggle (which is true) and that real advances are measured by manifestations of the understanding that there is nothing to defend in capitalism, that it has no future for us, which take the form of struggles without specific demands, that are necessarily violent confrontations, riots, etc. In its view, expecting defensive struggles to become automatically revolutionary because of increasing class antagonism and extension of the scale of the struggle, would reflect a teleological view of the class struggle, with the working class realizing its revolutionary “essence”, as prescribed by “history.” We agree that there is no automatism and that this teleological view is indeed implicit in the different strands of productivist Marxism. But that does not mean that this link between goals and means is non-existent. The history of the working class struggle shows both that it is real and not automatic. The complexity of the question defies simplistic schemes.

There is something healthy in Blaumachen’s insistence that the content of the struggle does not automatically change, that it is foolish to equate revolution with the working class becoming a “class for itself,” since revolution would mean the destruction of itself as a class. But its critique throws out the baby with the bathwater. How they see revolution as a practical possibility if the experience of self-organization and extension in struggles for demands would not stimulate class consciousness and thereby change the content of the struggle, is unclear to us.

Sander and MacIntosh

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On the text by “Woland pour Blaumachen”: A reply

“If the postwar period saw the subsumption of workers not only as labor power but as purchasing power, “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle), something else begins to happen during the crisis of the 1970s. The producer-consumer submits to new (and newly repressive) disciplines in the advanced capitalist countries: fragmented, decentralized, colonized by rhetorics of self-management and participation, flexibilized, rendered part-time and pushed into industries devoted to the sale, distribution, management and circulation of commodities (including labor-power). This reordering of the working class as in-itself – the reordering of what Italian operaismo might call its technical composition – renders its conversion into the proletariat, as revolutionary self-consciousness, nearly impossible. The restructuring dislocates the working-class from its own self-realization and self-abolition by way of the revolutionary seizure of the means of production”.

Jasper Bernes, The double barricade and the glass floor, an account of the 2009 struggles in the University of California.

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Sander and MacIntosh’s (S&M) critique of the text ‘December 2008, Greece: an attempt to detect the power and the limits of our struggle’ published in Blaumachen (BM) #3, though brief, brings to the fore in a concrete manner the most important issue of grasping/theorising the relation between everyday proletarian struggles and the potential revolutionary overcoming of capital. It provides thus a welcome stimulation for us to clarify and productively develop the theorisation attempted in that text.

In overall, S&M’s critique is characterised by a perspective of the proletariat being constituted (united) as a class, where seems to be our main point of divergence. The self-evident obviousness of this perspective for them is probably the reason for whatever misunderstanding of certain points of BM’s text[1]. This viewpoint of theirs is clearly summarised in the last sentence of their text: “How they see revolution as a practical possibility if the experience of self-organization and extension in struggles for demands would not stimulate class consciousness and thereby change the content of the struggle, is unclear to us”.

How can one expect this “growing extension” of the struggle today? What we have been experiencing during the last few years (especially after the burst of the global capitalist crisis) is a multiplication of scattered struggles of different fragments of the proletariat and an increase in their vigor, without on the other hand being able to see a rising unity or (if one prefers a workerist terminology) a recomposition of the working class, as a class for itself. The capitalist restructuring that followed the high peak of struggles around 1968 was a counter-revolution which crashed the proletarian offensive and gradually dismantled the previously existing working class power[2]. But it was at the same time the all embracing transformation of the class relation in all its aspects. This means that one can no more face class conflicts having in mind the historical patterns of class struggle either of the late 19^th/early 20^th century or the Keynesian era. One cannot in 2010 expect the victorious repetition of the German revolution nor even a more self-organised, radically anti-unionist Hot Autumn.

The restructuring was a process of “liquidation of the working class” (and the restructured capitalism still advances this process). Its trends was to transform the latter from a collective subject confronting bourgeoisie into a sum of proletarians, everyone of whom is individually related to capital, without the mediation of the practical experience of a common class identity and workers’ organisations that would make of the class a recognised ‘social partner’, accepted to participate at the table of collective bargaining. This was achieved through the unceasing transformation of the technical composition of capital and the labour process and the highly accelerated internationalisation of capital, with the disintegration of the rigidities in the global circulation of capital and labour power and the subsequent ‘zoning’ in the global division of labour and the modalities of reproduction of the working class. This transformation while homogenising the essential conditions of the reproduction of the vast majority of the global population into the ‘proletarian condition’ -i.e. selling one’s labour power as the only means to survive- (contradictorily restricting at the same time access to the formal labour market for a huge percentage of it, producing a structurally overabundant proletariat and a vast ‘unofficial economy’), destroyed workers’ identity and the actuality of ‘common interests’ and fragmented the global proletariat to an unprecedented extent.

No call for class unity can re-establish a revolutionary community grounded on the affirmation of the proletarian class belonging. One cannot face the way capital brings proletarians together, i.e. the fragmented existence of the proletariat as labour power -which is its only existence- as superficial and inessential, as something to be superseded once proletarians begin to ‘understand’ that they have essentially common interests, thus demystifying social relations. In the cycle of struggles which had its peak during the years 1917-23, a unifying class consciousness was incorporated in the reproduction and the specific development of the relation of exploitation anticipating the communist revolution as the affirmation of the working class as the really productive force of society while appropriating the capitalist means of production. Class consciousness was not an apocalypse, but part of a specific historical existence of the class relation. Class consciousness persisted as the manifestation of the powerful workers’ identity of the post-war mass worker, though contradictorily so, since the ‘negation of work’ emerged as the practical critique against the impossibility of revolution as the affirmation of the proletariat, a critique produced nonetheless as inseparable part of this same content of revolution (see for example the contradictory co-existence of ‘ne travaillez jamais’ with the ideology of workers’ councils in the work of one of the most radical political groupings of the proletariat during that period, namely IS)[3]. A unifying class consciousness (revolutionary self-consciousness of the proletariat) is out of the question today, not because the proletariat is on the defensive but because the current content of the relation of exploitation doesn’t affirm working class as a social entity seeking to prevail against the opponent class.

Theory, as the self-critical character of daily struggles, is necessarily faced with the re-elaboration of the way revolution is produced in these struggles today, but -here is the crux of the question- not necessarily as their linear expansion or deepening. When S&M claim that we “participate in demand struggles that concern us because by their failure, they create the conditions to go beyond unionism”, they reconstruct our sayings in a way that reduces the theorisation of the contradictory course of class struggles to a question of political intervention. Our participation in class conflicts is not a ‘choice’; it stems ‘spontaneously’ and ‘objectively’ from our position in the class relation, our situation. We don’t attribute to theory the role of formulating a Revolutionary Practice out of concrete proletarian practices, being thus transformed into a revolutionary programme seeking to ‘radicalise’ actual struggles.

Moreover, in regard to the essential aspect of S&M’s argument, it is not ‘defeat’ in a strict sense that creates the potential for the ‘demanding’ content of daily struggles to be overcome, but the fact that everywhere, in all their struggles over immediate demands, even in the (rare) cases when such struggles are victorious for a small fraction of labour power[4], proletarians at the end of the day face only the present specificity of the relation of exploitation, which means the perpetuation of their being superfluous, expendable, precarious, depreciated and fragmented. There is no wage/productivity deal anymore. There is no socialist alternative either, or a radical alternative to the ‘really existing’ socialist one (e.g. self-organisation and self-management). In other words, the dynamics and limits of class struggle today converge exactly at the inability of the struggle to conclude its class dynamics (meeting of demands, renewed fighting position inside the reproduction of capital). This is as well manifested in the fact that one can see no stabilisation of new organisational forms of the working class that would question the official unions-in-crisis on the ground of an enstrengthened position of the class in the negotiating of labour power: the December revolt in Greece, the occupations of factories in Britain and France and the strikes and riots in China, India and Bangladesh ‘have left nothing behind’ in that respect[5].

Nonetheless, making claims, putting forward demands, is the normal course of proletarian struggles; it is not the expression of something like ‘a false consciousness’ (or “ideological rubbish”) dominating the working class movement. For the time being, we can see such practices that demand nothing from capital as the manifestation of ruptures emerging inside (and in a close/dialectical relation to) the day-to-day class struggles. But these ruptures and the generalisation of the struggle are not a matter of “understanding that there is nothing to defend in capitalism”. The fact is that in a sense there is much to defend in capitalism, since after the restructuring of the ‘70s and the subsequent highly accelerated internationalisation of capital, global proletariat’s reproduction has been fully -and without mediations- integrated in the production of surplus value. The contradictory feature is that now the bourgeoisie does not give a shit to guarantee this reproduction, which it faces as a mere cost. By breaking down the rigidities of the Keynesian period and really subsuming labour now at a global level, capital tends more and more to free itself from maintaining the level of reproduction of the proletariat[6]. Value’s utopia consists in emancipating itself from its dependence on living labour, in its uninterrupted parthenogenesis; needless to say that this is a self-destructive utopia which defines the present crisis as crisis of wage labour. We are confronted with a historically specific mode of accumulation where the wage, while at the heart of the crisis of reproduction of the capitalist relation (i.e. crisis of the reproduction of the proletariat, at the same time), has ceased to provide the core bargaining terrain for the face-off between THE working class and capital; demands have become ‘illegitimate’.

The potential of ruptures within the revindicative content of struggles grounds itself exactly in this presently a-systemic character of demanding. But then these ruptures are not a matter of forms of organisation either (against unions, let’s say) but a rupture with the content of the struggle, a rupture with being proletarian and necessarily fighting as such, which can only mean keep living all this shit. Ruptures are the failure of the class to conclude the course of its acting as a class. The generalisation of struggle then will be the result of a more or less simultaneous production of ruptures within revindicative struggles, i.e. the generalisation of practices that question proletarians’ existence as proletarians, which is not a matter of propaganda or finding effective ways to ‘bring out crowds’ or ‘call people to join’. This coming together of conflicts within struggles will immediately bring multiple aspects of the production of surplus value/reproduction of capital to a halt, putting thus at stake the reproduction of the working class itself, necessitating simultaneously the intensification and expansion of what will then be an open insurrection (or probably multiple insurrectionary fronts). Obviously, in this generalisation of struggle, the coming together of proletarian practices will not be a peaceful one; on the contrary a conflictive, contradictory and in many instances violent process is what we should expect[7]. The production of ruptures is the questioning of class belonging within the class struggle. This dynamics of class struggle today can never be victorious because it will keep finding class struggle itself as its limit up to the point that the multiplication of ruptures will become the overcoming of class belonging (and therefore of self-organisation of the class) as a revolution within the revolution, as communising measures which will either de-capitalise (communise) life further and further or be crashed.

Proceeding from this understanding of the dynamics and limits of present day class struggles, we can account of lootings as a proletarian practice emerging in a great deal of instances within them. One could criticize “looting of goods for re-sale and individual profit”; but in doing so the important issue is the clarification of the real/material framework of any proletarian practice in a specific historical moment and not the weighing of really existing struggles against a self-proclaimed revolutionary tactics or strategy. In order for ‘looting for re-sale’ to be overcome, the existence of exchange should be widely questioned in a generalised communising struggle. In so far as exchange is the only means of reproducing oneself, one can only expect individual consumption and re-sale to be the prominent aim of re-appropriation of goods. So, the character of looting is not a matter of good or bad will. A critical account of specific instances of looting in present proletarian struggles is much more complex than just condemning the ‘bad looting for re-sale’. Immigrants appropriating and re-selling cell phones and laptops in Athens is quite different a thing from proletarians organised in gangs looting stores in Haiti aiming at a much profitable control of the distribution of essential goods, averting at the same time looting carried out by other proletarian groups for the meeting of immediate needs. In the last example, one could imagine that the practical questioning of ‘looting for re-sale’ in the potential development of a struggle would take much more violent forms, being identified with the questioning of the existence of gangs as temporary formalisations of the perpetuation of the domination of capital.

Finally, as far as the dynamics of destruction is concerned, S&M are right to imply that revolution will not be an all-embracing burning down of what already exists. However, it will not be today the appropriation of the shit that capitalist society produces. The existence of a great deal of the means of production and means of subsistence will necessarily be incompatible with the continuation of the revolutionary struggle as the abolition of value and the capitalist division of labour. On the other hand, one shall justifiably imagine that insurrected proletarians will seize aspects of the productive machinery of capital in order to retain their survival. But this seizing will be a conflictive process which will have to do away with exchange and the division of labour, de-capitalising thus the means of production to mere tools that could be useful (or not) to the needs of struggling proletarians becoming social individuals. Of course, we agree that the abolition of the value form is not merely destroying things. “Destroying things is not necessarily a blow to the value-form”, but a blow to the value-form necessarily includes the destruction of things, which are aspects of the existence of capital relation themselves. The nucleus of our disagreement with S&M is that there is no class that is responsible in itself “for the production of life in all its facets”. Only capital is responsible for the production of life today and capital is a moving contradiction between two classes and not the ground for an opposition between two autonomous subjects. The proletariat is the productive class only in so far as it is subsumed by capital. In this sense, we do not perceive of the revolution produced by class struggles today as the radical socialisation of the means of production[8], but as the abolition of both classes and of the means of production as such. The ‘necessity of communism’ is not a theoretical postulate; it is something that can be produced by the destructive action of the proletariat. If one wants to be a realist and understand history as human practice, then they have no choice other than understanding the ‘necessity of communism’ as a proletarian practice which decomposes capital to the extent that any going back will be impossible.

Rocamadur

November 2010

[2] This obviously didn’t take place overnight, as for example the 1985 miners’ struggles in Britain indicate.

[3] This point undoubtedly needs further developing, but this cannot be done within the limited scope of this reply. The progress of this discussion will hopefully give us the opportunity to bring it up again in more depth.

[4] See, for example, some of the occupations over redundancies in France or the recent wave of strikes in China.

[5] In these conditions, the radical/autonomous/grassroots unions in countries like Greece or France are more militant proletarian groupings inclined in various kinds of activism against dismissals or compensations, rather than proper unions negotiating the labour power on an enterprise or sectoral level.

[6] No matter how much differentiated these processes are in the different parts of the globe (global zoning of the capitalist accumulation/reproduction).

[7] Different aspects of this conflictive process are already prefigured in instances like the recent dispute in FIAT and the relation between Polish and Italian workers therein, the Bangladeshi workers’ firebombing of factories with scabs working inside some months ago or the attacks by ‘banlieu kids’ against anti-CPE demonstrators in Paris 2006.

[8] In other words, as an abolition of private expropriation of surplus value in its radical socialisation, which historically has been proven to be impossible in its own terms.

a. The contradiction of the restructuring: A solution to the “1973 crisis” and the bearer of the current crisis.

b. Dynamics and limits of the current model of accumulation: the main dimensions of the restructuring.

c. Too big to fail is also too big to move on: The reproduction crisis of total social capital and its effort to impose the second phase of the restructuring

d. The crisis of the wage relation

e. Repression as social reproduction

II. Current struggles of the global proletariat

III. Communisation as the historical product of the capital-labour contradiction

Harold Pinter (He already said it on February 2003)

At the historical point we are now in, the contradiction of capital is increasingly clear worldwide. Proletarians around the world are in turmoil as the reproduction of their existence becomes more and more difficult. But while it is already difficult for proletarians to continue their lives, it is capital itself, as a relation of exploitation, which is in a crisis of reproduction: The current struggles of the proletariat are the expression of the current form of this relation of exploitation.

During the last year in China, where the economy is still growing very quickly, all kinds of contradictions were rising. Clashes of workers with the police are common for a number of reasons: the demand for the increase of the very low wages on which the steep economic growth is based; attempts to prevent land enclosures in villages; struggles to get compensation for dismissed workers, and against the inadequacy of a health system which results in a high mortality rate for children. In the U.S.A., where there is a historical low in workers’ struggles, thousands of homeless and unemployed people have occupied vacant houses which had been seized by banks. Students have occupied universities in California and New York writing on their banners: We have decided not to die. They are demanding what was until recently taken for granted, just their ability to continue being students. Proletarians in South Africa and Algeria, from their much more desperate position imposed by the hierarchy of capitalist states, have made the same demands, of water and electricity, against being forced to live in slums, as they clash with police. In India as well, workers fight because the price of bread has suddenly risen, and they are starving to death. Last year in Spain, workers in shipyards which were shut down burnt police cars. In South Korea, dismissed workers occupied factories and clashed with police for two and a half months. In Bangladesh, dismissed workers clashed with police and burnt factories. In France and Belgium, dismissed workers kidnapped their bosses, placed explosives in the factories and threatened to blow them up if they were not compensated for their dismissal. In India and China, they kill their bosses during the conflicts because of thousands of upcoming dismissals. In this historical phase, proletarian struggles are objectively struggles for the right of the reproduction of existence itself.

At the same time, the restructuring of labour relations has accelerated and precariousness is the predominant situation for everyone now. Precariousness is manifested in the worst conditions: there have been 43 employee suicides in France Telecom in two years; in the U.S. 1,000,000 unemployed are desperately waiting to see whether Obama will once again extend the unemployment benefit, which runs out in April, or if they will be left with nothing. Unemployment numbers in most countries have surged, hitting records higher than in any other historical period.

In this historical phase we are in, there are more than enough proletariats for capital as the latter cannot effectively exploit the former, cannot produce the amount of profit needed so as a part of it to be anew put into profitable investments. This is the essence of any capitalist crisis regardless of the form it takes. The present form of crisis objectively puts proletarians’ reproduction at the center of the contradiction. The crisis first appeared as debt crisis of proletarian households in the U.S.A. It has already been transformed into a generalized debt crisis, and it is possible it will be transformed into a monetary crisis; that is, a debt crisis of large countries with strong currencies or even whole blocs of capitalist states such as the European Union. The debt crisis forces capital to turn to its only choice at the moment, which is to continue the strategy that created this crisis. It must further reduce wages and benefits in every possible way. This is the only choice of capital, because the debt crisis is the result of globalization and the restructuring of capitalist relations from which there is no turning back.

From the proletariat’s standpoint: “[it is] caught in the stranglehold of competition that can only reduce prices by reducing wages, in the servitude of debt which has become just as indispensable as income in order to live. The waged have, to cap it all, the chance of being tyrannised at their own cost, since the savings [are] instrumentalised by stock-exchange finance, savings which demand to be repaid without end, are their own.” (Le Monde diplomatique, March 2008). From capital’s standpoint, it is a relentless pursuit of the lowest possible price of labour power across the planet, but which has a limit: the existence and reproduction of labour power as this is socially defined in every capitalist state.

Capital is forced to try to resolve the crisis by destroying fixed capital (buildings, machinery, infrastructure) and variable capital (humans) in order to recreate the conditions of its reproduction, without being, at the moment, able to do it through its only directly effective manner, widespread global war. Thus, for the time being, the restructuring will inevitably deepen. The wage cuts are reaching the point where the lowest wage and the unemployment benefit tend to be equal, resulting in the explosive growth of debt for more and more proletarians. The privatization of “public” sectors (health, education, social insurance) is increasing dramatically. The unemployed have smaller and smaller benefits and are forced into slave-like working conditions with wages below the level of reproduction. The present historical period has reached its limit. That’s why the state places police guards outside schools in France or inside schools in the U.S.A. to arrest ‘undisciplined students.’ Capital’s only way out today is repression, but there is absolutely no way out of the crisis. This is obvious in cases of natural disasters such as in Haiti and Chile. In such cases, the capitalist system is directly put into question by proletarians, who, temporarily unable to be exploited as labour power, organize the expropriation of commodities and use them according to their needs in order to survive. Here, the only way to maintain capitalist property is by using military violence: Curfews during the night and straight assassinations are imposed in Haiti, while or imprisonment without trial takes place in Chile. Suddenly life looks like a prisoner’s life in concentration camps for the undocumented migrants who live in the thousands, imprisoned at the borders of each capitalist state.

The attack of capital against part of the working class in Greece is an aspect of this crisis of reproduction of capitalist relations. Greece today is in the eye of the storm of the debt crisis for many reasons. The most important is that the most precarious part of the proletariat rebelled in a way we all know in December 2008. Greece is an experimental lab for the new phase of the absolutely necessity of capital’s global restructuring. The bourgeoisie in Greece, as has happened many times in the past, has asked for help from more powerful bourgeois classes in order to impose a new form of exploitation. From the very beginning, the new government announced a higher national debt than the previous government in order to accelerate the introduction of the Stability Program). But the bourgeoisie itself is at the centre of the global crisis. The entire international economical press is waiting to see the reaction of the proletariat here in Greece and then to have an overview of the situation internationally. The biggest stores of loan sharks are competing with each other in order to lend and, thus, control the future of the Greek state, and thus the form and intensity of the local proletariat’s exploitation. The creation of the European Monetary Fund to IMF standards clearly shows that the contradiction of competition between capitals can now be solved temporarily, but it also shows that it does not matter who the boss of the proletariat is.

Any attempt to present the situation in a “better” way than it really is a meaningless effort. Any attempt to present the restructuring as Germany’s attack against Greece is suitable only for second rate TV-stations. SYRIZA (a leftist parliamentary party) has tried this approach, issuing nonsense about “sacred money” as compensation for a German Nazi occupation. An Orwell-type propaganda of the mass media has been mobilized, and restructuring is being presented as a natural disaster. At present, this propaganda has been partly successful. Some workers in the private sector have welcomed the reductions in the salaries of the employees in the public sector. The employees in public sector are divided on the basis of who is “truly privileged” and who is not. But all of them are in danger. If someone is wondering what being privileged means, they can ask the dismissed workers of Olympic Airways who occupied the State General Accounting Office. 15 days ago they accepted “the difficult and quite heavy program of the Ministry,” while the deputy-minister ignored them after they had begged him for a meeting. If someone is wondering about the impact on workers’ daily lives because of the attempted restructuring, one can ask the workers at the National Printing Office who after reading the text of the austerity plan’s law and realizing that 30% of their income was to be cut, decided to occupy the building they work at in order to prevent the printing of the Gazette! One can also ask them about the role of their trade union leaders who ended the occupation because they were orally “promised by the government” a circular amending the law!

There is nothing that can improve the situation. The ceremonial demonstrations called by leftists, as long as they remain as such, result in nothing but dead-ends. We are unmasking reality from the veils of politics. The stones that were thrown last Friday (March 5), and which covered the sky are not enough to make them listen to us. As more and more unemployed people occupy buildings and the police repress them; as more and more precarious workers and the unemployed clash with the forces of repression at any slightest opportunity; as the social chaos leads to organization on its own and takes the form of class revolt, then, the smiles of the showmen on the TV-news will freeze on their faces. The battles will be of similar levels to the violence accumulated over many years through the accumulation of capital and the expropriation of proletarian lives.

“What will happen in history, tomorrow, it can only be compared with the major geological disasters which change the face of Earth …”
- Victor Serge

agents of chaos

The interview in pdf

Download the full text in pdf.

Statement by prime minister K. Karamanlis, one of these days

“There is no question of ‘violence’; there is just a side being attacked during a war already in progress and thus the question of the means sufficient for victory”.

Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile, Paris, June 2006

“VIOLENCE means working for 40 years, getting miserable wages and wondering if you ever get retired…

VIOLENCE means state bonds, robbed pension funds and the stock-market fraud…

VIOLENCE means being forced to get housing loans which finally you pay back as if they were gold…

VIOLENCE means the management’s right to fire you any time they want…

VIOLENCE means unemployment, temporary employment, 400 Euros wage with or without social security…

VIOLENCE means work ‘accidents’, as bosses diminish their workers’ safety costs…

VIOLENCE means being driven sick because of hard work …

VIOLENCE means consuming psycho-drugs and vitamins in order to cope with exhausting working hours…

VIOLENCE means working for money to buy medicines in order to fix your labour power commodity…

VIOLENCE means dying on ready-made beds in horrible hospitals, when you can’t afford bribing.”

Proletarians from occupied GSEE, Athens, December 2008

1.

This December, the wind of insurrection blew once again over cities. The joyful and festive atmosphere was set on fire together with the Christmas tree on Syntagma sq. The assassination of the 15-year-old student Alexis Grigoropoulos by special police guard ignited the spark. Thousands of enraged proletarians got to the streets and set the cities of commodity on fire. The social explosion we still live cannot be explained only by means of rage against one more state assassination or against police. It’s much more. It’s the explosion of accumulated rage deriving from their constant attempt for years now to depreciate our lives, something which seems to be accelerated by a capitalism in crisis. At last, we had the opportunity to decisively and practically declare “That’s enough! Now it’s our turn!”. Despite our smaller or greater sporadic reactions, we have all these years been tolerating more and more work for increasingly tinier wages, we have tolerated our indirect wage being attacked by the benefits-pensions system reform, student life being intensified, the recent universities’ reform, more and more layoffs, growing precariousness, environment’s devastation and brutality against immigrants. We have been tolerating the multiplication of human-waste -those who don’t fit to their economy’s development diagrams- and bosses’ arrogance. And during all these years, we have been accumulating rage, while bosses hoped this social bomb wouldn’t explode and the naive wouldn’t believe it will explode. But history proves that explosion is inevitable and it always compels everyone to take sides. The old mole is not dead yet…

2.

Since we got to the streets, a grand mass of non-politicized teenagers showed us what we had to do in order to proceed. However, this revolt isn’t a student one. We met school kids, university students, young (mainly, but not only) workers, unemployed. Several of them (mainly in Athens) were immigrants who stood up against brutal exploitation, silently tolerated for two decades now. We heard about prisoners abstaining from food for 24 hours, manifesting their support to rebels in the cities. In the streets, dividing identities were practically negated. We merged in a crowd attacking police departments, banks and stores, fighting police, liberating public buildings (even provisionally) at the center of the cities and various suburbs, holding popular assemblies and demonstrations in the neighborhoods. This mixed crowd obtained homogeneity in the revolt against the everyday violence of commodity’s dominance, in the violent manifestation of its desire for real life. This insurgency is spontaneous and uncontrollable, while at the same time it explicitly implicates the rejection of politics, since no concrete demands or political proposals were put forth. We made clear that we don’t trust politicians of any kind, whose only goal is to maintain social peace; peace that veils the misery of our everyday life, our exploitation and alienation. Our rage is manifested in the wild simplicity of banners saying “Murderers!”. This insurgency constitutes an authentic proletarian moment of negating the conditions which we are forced to live in…

3.

From the very first moment after the assassination on December 6, state and media mechanisms were activated to confront the explosion of the proletarian rage. Initially, they attempted to put possible reactions under control exploiting the spectacular submission of the resignations by Pavlopoulos and Chinofotis (the Minister and ex-Deputy Minister of the Interior, correspondingly), the Prime Minister’s promise that anybody responsible for the death of the 15-year-old kid will be ‘exemplarily punished’, all oppositional parties’ and many journalists’ disapproval of the government and the ‘discreet stance’ of cops against demonstrators. However, very quickly, they unleashed every form of repression: threats of declaring the country in a state of emergency, mobilization of fascists and para-governmental organizations of ‘indignant citizens’, dozens of arrests and beating of demonstrators, more shootings by cops in Athens. All bosses’ parties in a body (with the Communist Party being the most vulgar amongst them) and the TV scamps attempted to spread fear. Similarly, the two major union confederations, GSEE and ADEDY, cancelled the routine strike demonstrations against new year’s state budget when they suspected the danger of those demos being transformed into riots. However, against union bureaucrats’ jabber about government’s failing to ensure social order and peace, demos did take place during the general strike day and were indeed wild. Thus, reality is different: bosses are those who are afraid. When the foreign minister of France stated from the very first days of the insurgency ‘I would like to express our concern, everyone’s concern about the progress of conflicts in Greece’, he would express bosses’ fear for the possibility of this social explosion to be circulated, since solidarity demos to insurgents in Greece are taking place in many cities all over the world. Particularly in France, the Ministry of Education withdrew the impeding reform in secondary schools, thus giving an end to an emerging movement of high school kids applauding the flames of insurgency in Greek cities and towns.

4.

On the news, we watch the police campaign of dividing demonstrators, either by presenting insurgency as an adventure of teenagers, whose inherent sensitivity due to their age gives them a right to rebel against their parents’ world (as if proletarian parents wouldn’t rightfully desire this world’s destruction) or by mobilizing racist reflexes using the fake separation ‘Greek demonstrators – immigrant looters’, but mainly by attempting to divide demonstrators between good-peaceful ones and bad-rioters. The right of demonstrating is affirmed by bosses and their lackeys only to suppress the need to revolt. Because they want to avoid any further socialization of violent behaviours in the streets, they seek by all means to present them as actions of ‘antiauthoritarians’ or ‘hooligans’ who intrude into demonstrations of otherwise peace-loving civilians. Well, not only (and not mainly) anarchists loot, smash and attack police. Anarchists participate up to a point. The significant depreciation of youngsters and immigrants for years now explains the harsh and standing conflict against the state and the generalized looting. Smashing as a proletarian action declares the everyday existence of police departments, banks or chain stores as moments of a silent war. It also manifests the rupture with the democratic management of social conflict, which tolerates demos against this or that matter, provided that they are deprived of any autonomous class action. Invoking the ultimate political rampart of capital’s dominance, that is democracy, the prime minister declared that ‘social struggles or the death of a teenager cannot be confused with actions against democracy’. Democracy of course approves devastating cities and the countryside, polluting atmosphere and contaminating water, bombing, selling weapons, creating dumps of human beings, forcing us to stop being humans in order to become objects-that-work (or look for work, since more and more people are or will be unemployed because of the crisis). He thus implicates that some people can destroy anything they want as long as new chances for profit are created and development is promoted. However, doing this against private property constitutes the ultimate scandal for a society which has established this essential right from its early birth. Burning and smashing constitute wounds to this society’s legitimacy. The ‘hooded rioters’ is an empty notion, intended for police use exclusively. Police monopolizes the shaping of the threat’s profile.

5.

For the image-producing machine, the very opposite of the ‘hooded rioter’ (that is, the image constructed to separate proletarians) is the ‘peaceful civilian whose property is destroyed’. Who is this celebrated ‘peaceful civilian’, enraged by smashing? In this occasion, ‘peaceful civilians’ are the small businessmen, the owners of ‘small’ stores, the petit bourgeoisie. The state has been fooling even them, since many of them are being destroyed by the capitalist crisis. During this December, turnover is half of that of December 2007, not only for stores at Ermou and Stournari streets (the first being the place with the more expensive stores in Athens and the second the main street in Exarchia district), but also for open-air markets; yet no such market was attacked during last days… Bosses claim that smashing stores has made many people lose their jobs, while at the same time one hundred thousand layoffs are to be announced soon in Greece because of the crisis. However, whatever smashes of ‘small’ stores were not carried out by hooded state servants are commented by workers in such stores in a leaflet written by the ‘Autonomous Initiative of Shop-assistants of Larisa’: ‘We denounce whoever attempts to terrorize and convince us that defending some properties stands above human life and dignity; besides, these properties have been created by precarious workers’ unpaid, black and surplus labour; no small properties have been damaged during symbolic attacks against banks and public buildings [indeed, this is true for Larissa and other provincial cities]. If they really care about shop-assistants, they should increase the miserable wages they give them, they should learn what social security is and they should create human working hours and conditions’. Let bourgeois (petit or grand ones) worry about their stores. We don’t stand at the same side in the class war; during periods of social polarization, as the one we live today, each one has to take sides.

6.

This is insurgency’s third week. Although mass media attempt to conceal this by all means, demonstrations, occupations, popular assemblies still continue to take place, mainly in Athens but in other cities as well. Insurgents demand the immediate release of everyone arrested. The only effective way to support arrested people is by developing the struggle, part of which they are as well. It’s true that this very moment it’s difficult for anyone to estimate whether and how this social unrest will continue. Regardless of what will happen, nothing will be the same not only for us who have been in the streets but for the whole working class as well. Lots of discussions and critical accounts have to be made regarding what happened during this December. But such a project concerns insurgents or whoever has interest in this world’s destruction and not the news or politicians. To conclude: this year, Christmas is canceled; there’s a revolt goin’ on!

Nothing is over yet, the struggle continues!

Immediate release of everybody arrested during the social revolt!

Some of those who have been in the streets of insurrected cities

December the 23^rd 2008