The $8.25 man, Bloomberg News wrote in December, has worked at McDonald’s for twenty years. Still, he can’t get forty hours a week or anything more than minimum wage. He can’t make rent payments, can’t afford a computer, and has to go to the Apple store to update his Facebook. After picking cigarette butts out of a bathroom drain, he has to clean off before his next job—at another McDonald’s. The $8.25 man is cheap goods compared to the $8.75 million man. The $8.25 man would have to work roughly a million hours to make what McDonald’s’ CEO made in 2011. The $8.75 million man stands atop an industry that added jobs at double the U.S. average post-recession. Between 2008 and 2011, McDonald’s profits alone rose from $4.3 billion to $5.5 billion. If the $8.25 man became a $15 man, a report from the Economic Policy Institute suggests, the labor market wouldn’t lose any jobs. In downtown Chicago’s retail and food service sectors, raising the minimum wage to $15 would cost $103 million, small change compared to the $14.2 billion in revenue accrued by these sectors in 2011. Even if the aggregate raise were passed on directly to consumers, prices would go up only 2.6%.

But who is the $8.25 man?

In the popular imagination, the $8.25 man is, unfortunately, what you see on TV: younger and less child-dependent than the growing majority of his real-life counterparts. He is also, unlike the central figure of Bloomberg’s well-traveled, well-narrated piece, statistically unlikely to be a man. Nationally, women make up 66% of food preparers and servers, 70% of waiters and waitresses, and 74% of cashiers.

In the post-2007 progressive eye, low-wage workers are the face and hope of the 99%. If Michael Bloomberg is the figurehead of neoliberalism with a healthy diet, fast food workers are the sickle-wielding poster-people of the new American labor movement. As with Wal-Mart workers and domestic workers, their jobs are growing in number—and ripe for unionization. The public is, moreover, well-primed by social critiques like Super Size Me and Bloomberg’s anti-junk food soapboxing. In two cities, the organized struggle is heating up. In New York, food service workers are pushing for recognition of an independent union, the Fast Food Workers Committee, with support from community groups and established trade unions. In Chicago, food service and retail workers from the downtown “Magnificent Mile” have a similar drive, “Fight for 15,” under the aegis of the independent Workers Organizers Committee of Chicago.

The horizons of the $8.25 man, beyond a living wage, are less certain. In his famous 1972 essay in the New York Review of Books, Christopher Lasch took issue with the economism of Jack Newfield and Jeff Greenfield’s Populist Manifesto and Michael Harrington’s allegiance to the sabre-rattling, high-seated AFL-CIO. The challenge, he wrote, is to develop “a theory of class and an understanding of the way in which class interests, seldom presenting themselves directly in economic form, are mediated by culture, which in turn acquires a life independent of its social origin.” The question, carried on by decades of cultural historiography and half-lived Italian debates surrounding class composition, can be rehashed simply: Is the low-wage workers’ movement a “labor” movement? Or a movement for black and brown power? Or a twenty-first century “other women’s movement”? Or, when the workplace is no longer a factory but an urban commons dotted with chain stores, a movement to reclaim “the public”?

In New York and Chicago, workers struggle within and against a political economy of urban space: a dynamic reconstruction of big cities with upscale retail in the center, low-wage labor pushed to the periphery or walled into projects, and McDonald’s everywhere. As part of this architecture, workers are, like fast-food CEOs, political actors—agents of the system as much as its victims. In Andrew Herod’s formulation, “Workers are not dropped from the air into some preexisting economic landscape but are thoroughly connected to the production of space through their struggles to work out geographical solutions to the problems of ensuring their own self-reproduction.” At the highest stratum of labor geography, trade unions advocate different wage rates for different regions in order to maximize their overall leverage. Within locales, workers can, as in the Justice for Janitors campaign in the early 1990s, appropriate public space to unify struggle across spatially fragmented workplaces. As Sarah Jaffe writes about New York, “organizers have moved to find strategies that make sense to workers, that aren’t trapped in the same old formulations that worked in factories but don’t make sense in food service.”

Properly situated in place and space, the heterogeneity of low-wage labor asserts itself. Workers operate within a web of political economies—of race, gender, sexuality, migration—that re-cast the labor-capital antagonism along political lines that outlets like Bloomberg generally hold at arms length. “Fight for It,” an official Fight for 15 music video, riffs, “President don’t give a fuck/His foreign policy is gonna trigger World War III” and then, “Macy’s, aka modern day slavery.” Hip-hop polemic doesn’t lend itself to reportage. But, if workers are anything more than workers, it should.

The campaign in New York grew out of broadly focused community organizing. Naquasia LeGrand, who works at a Brooklyn KFC, recalls being confronted about housing issues. “I signed the petition for that and the next thing you know, a few months later, I got a call about fast food—about how I feel about fast food and better wages,” she says. “Me and my team went from there. It was underground… once we got enough people, we went public.”

On November 29 and April 4, workers from dozens of chain stores went on one-day strikes—in both cases, the first action that many took as part of the campaign. “My coworkers—they have a choice now,” LeGrand says. “They see what’s been going on…. It’s kind of easy now, because I’m confident to let them know that they have nothing to worry about.”

The Chicago campaign emerged from conversations among low-wage workers and community organizers on issues ranging from transit access to Illinois’s minimum wage.

“I was working one day and they came and asked me if I struggled every day and they asked if I’m working my butt off every day,” says Felix Mendez, a sandwich-maker at Subway. “It’s basically paying my bus pass just to get back and forth, and I got two kids, back and forth.”

After the initial interaction, he says, “I started snatching other people up, just taking it day by day.” Now, he attends weekly Wednesday meetings that include a growing number and diversity of workers: “It’s awesome. You hear different stories, and you can relate to a lot of people. You’re not struggling by yourself. Everybody is out there struggling in the way that you are.”

Rachael Teague, who works at both Navy Pier and Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., remembers a similar induction to the campaign. Organizers “were doing what we call ‘hub-hopping,’ going to service doors, talking to as many people as you can, exchanging information, following up with them, and just letting them know that this is something legit, and we’re not asking anything from you, we’re just giving something to you.”

For Teague, the geography of struggle extends beyond the Magnificent Mile. “The reason why I ‘Fight for 15’ is I am a single mom,” she says. “A lot of people think when you say drug dealer, you think of a guy standing on the corner. I know a mother of three who is in school who has that kind of income. That’s one of the most heartbreaking things as a mom to see other moms.”

Mendez says, about his partner of seven years, “I can’t support her like that for now. We got two kids. It’s a struggle every day. Right now I’m living with other people.” East Garfield, on Chicago’s West Side, is “not the greatest neighborhood that my kids see.”

LeGrand describes her grandmother’s immediate reaction to the first one-day strike: “She was like, what are you getting yourself into?” Then, “When she saw it on TV, she was like, oh ok, that’s when she said I hope they do make a change.” The second strike, which was twice as large as the first, elevated public consciousness of racism historically—and proximately—embedded in low-wage labor relations. Strikers carried pickets with variations on “I AM A MAN,” invoking the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968, which Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated exactly 45 years earlier supporting. (“YO SOY UN HOMBRE” represents another slice of the $8.25 man. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Latino workers, like black workers, fill a disproportionate share of low-wage service sector jobs.) April 4 also, as Jaffe reports in her podcast with Josh Eidelson, Belabored, united churches and community groups with workers from particular fast-food joints—which, having metastasized into poor neighborhoods, are as round-the-corner as mom-and-pop bodegas.

In Chicago, workers decided to end Christmas retail season with a visible show of civil disobedience. As Teague recounts, “First we met at St. James Cathedral. We talked and we prayed. We basically went from store to store singing and asking for higher wages, and we moved on and on to the next one. The last one we moved from was Starbucks. Then we walked down to the water tower, which is where we sang the last song. The water tower has signs up saying that nobody can gather or protest or you’ll get arrested. A few of my fellow union members sat down in the street and were singing peacefully and were asking for higher wages. It was so awesome. It was such a huge turnout.” On April 24, Chicago’s downtown fast-food and retail workers staged a one-day strike of their own. Upwards of 500 workers walked off the job at dozens of chains—in some cases, shutting them down.

Teague says, “All eyes are on us, and people are listening up. They have no choice but to hear us now. It’s actually become a thing where I walked into a store downtown, and I had on my union hat—a red hat with white writing—and one of the managers got to the security guard to keep an eye on me. It just lets me know that you see me.”

The image of workers’ struggle as a vertical opposition between ideal types—the pure and unitary 99% against the centralized and conniving 1%—has worked as a powerful catalyst of indignation against the hypocrisies of big-chain industry. But in representing low-wage workers’ struggle, these ideal types are limits to be overcome. Workers are tactical innovators pushing on different points of pressure rather than upward, in a unified hegemony, against the system. The emergence of mass struggle is a charge for those at the switchboard of popular attention to reconceive struggle itself, attending to the composition of agencies and spaces implicated in it—far more than what one can, as here, understand from a handful of phone conversations.

The visibility of critical geography has increased with the popularity of David Harvey’s books—which, themselves, offer a mixed bag of 21st century social movement theorizations. In Spaces of Hope, Harvey marshals world-systems theory to rethink movements around human rights, the environment, and the exploitation of women, all of which “bridge the micro-scale of the body and the personal on the one hand and the macro-scale of the global and the political-economic order on the other.” On Baltimore’s living wage struggle in the 1990s, he writes, “Its basis in the churches, the community, the unions, the universities, as well as among those social layers ‘not immediately concerned with the questions,’ starts to frame body politics in a rather special way, by-passing some of the more conventional binaries of capital/labor, white/black, male/female, and nature/culture.” He concludes with a description of the “insurgent architect,” who assembles alternatives by finding ways “to negotiate between the security conferred by fixed institutions and spatial forms on the one hand and the need to be open and flexible in relation to new socio-spatial possibilities on the other.”

Elsewhere, Harvey’s attention to the heterogeneous and shifting class composition of low-wage industry unravels. In The Enigma of Capital and his post-Occupy Rebel Cities, he posits a “Party of Indignation” and an anti-Party of Wall Street “People,” respectively—in both cases, one “yes” (for global justice) to counter the one “no” (global capital) that obscures the multitude of agencies that he collects over the course of the text. Harvey’s arguments against anarchist forms of political practice in Rebel Cities are targeted against the imperfections of an ideal type, rather than taking anarchism as one item in a material, if incoherent, assemblage of alternatives.

Harvey’s flat assertions can be read as provocations rather than sui generis proposals. Even so, for a politicized audience trying to grasp the horizons of struggle, they risk reproducing the “annihilation of space through time,” as Marx famously put it, characteristic of capital itself. They denote a struggle, an anti-systemic class, revolting from within a despatialized political economy. They respond to the 30,000-franchise spacelessness of McDonald’s with spaceless, textureless alternatives.

The obliqueness of Marx’s own labor geography highlights the challenge of teasing out variegated “spaces of hope” from the emergence, and startling newness, of mass struggle.

In their March 1850 Address, Marx and Engels called for the creation “of at least a provincial association of the workers’ clubs” to combat the consolidation of bourgeois power in response to the revolution. The Industrial Congress supported strikes “as a means of transition from our present state of affairs to one of association.” Mass insurgency could unite an otherwise “incoherent mass” of laborers “scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition.”

As a sometime journalist, Marx was a close observer of coordinated labor action. In one report in the New York Daily Tribune, he wrote of an 1853 British strike wave:

Each mail brings new reports of strikes; the turn-out grows epidemic. Every one of the larger strikes, like those at Stockport, Liverpool, etc., necessarily generates a whole series of minor strikes, through great numbers of people being unable to carry out their resistance to the masters, unless they appeal to the support of their fellow-workmen in the Kingdom, and the latter, in order to assist them, asking in their turn for higher wages. Besides it becomes alike a point of honor and of interest for each locality not to isolate the efforts of their fellow-workmen by submitting to worse terms, and thus strikes in one locality are echoed by strikes in the remotest other localities.

In the case of surprise one-day strikes at diffuse locations, the echo of “new reports” inheres in the action itself. With the addition of social media, space and time implode into a single, if lengthy, moment. This moment feeds on—but clouds—the constellation of political economies that delimit low-wage workers’ struggle. Swept up in the moment, the $8.25 man is an exploited man with a low wage. Simultaneously set free by it, low-wage labor reveals a complex landscape of political practice, with new agents of struggle to get to know.

James Cersonsky (@cersonsky) is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist. Read about his work on community-based pedagogy here.

Photo: Micah Uetricht

The news from Caracas has not been promising for some time. The leader of the Bolivarian Revolution had not been seen since early December, when he travelled to Cuba to undergo emergency surgery for a still undisclosed form of cancer. On Tuesday March 5, Vice President Nicolás Maduro announced that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died in a military hospital in Caracas. He was 58 years old.

Chávez was and will remain a polarizing character, as all revolutionaries should be.

Chávez had the temerity to defy the United States as it attempted to reconfigure the post Cold War world. He decried the “collateral damage” of bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, was an outspoken and substantive supporter of Palestine and a critic of Israeli war crimes, and worked towards delinking Latin America from the prerogatives of US power. In 2002 he survived an attempted coup d’état orchestrated by local elites and sanctioned by the Empire to the North. In 2003 he withstood a bosses’ strike in the petroleum sector that lasted two months and crippled the economy. In both cases, Chávez was saved not by virtue of his political acumen or his larger-than-life personality – attributes he held and practiced in abundance – but rather by mobilizations of Venezuela’s poor majority that surprised his government as much as anyone else.

It is this example that could be forgiven least by Empire, but it was also this reality that repeatedly thwarted attempts by domestic and international capital to oust Chávez. The real threat posed by the Bolivarian Revolution was not its redistribution of the country’s wealth, its drive to democratize consumption, its commitment to eradicating poverty at home and abroad, or its diplomatic project to forge a multipolar world system – though none of these should be discounted.¹ The real threat posed by the Bolivarian Revolution to world order was felt most in those moments when it “ruled by obeying.”²

In this way, Chávez’s divisiveness was much more significant than suggested by the sound bites already being repeated ad nauseum, long before his death, by a North Atlantic media that tended to operate more as the State Department’s megaphone than the “Fourth Estate.”³ The “Chávez Phenomenon” forcefully restaged the question of the state and of sovereignty for anti-capitalist struggle.

Throughout the 1990s a consensus emerged between the Left and Right – if for incommensurable reasons – that the state-form was always and only a road best left untraveled. While the election of Chávez in 1998 did not settle the matter, it placed the relation between constituent and constituted power at the center of its discourse and debates. One could find heavily subsidized translations of John Holloway’s anti-state Marxist manifesto Change the World Without Taking Power (2002) in the same government-funded subway kiosks that sold the constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and books extolling the political and historical significance of el Comandante. Televised debates took place on the theses of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. The roadmap for the revolution advertised throughout 2007 and 2008 – the “five motors of Bolivarian Socialism” – openly supported the radical reconfiguration and decentering of the national “geometry of power” and governance through the “explosion of communal power.” The sense of openness, experimentation, and possibility is palpable in Venezuela, even if rhetoric and action have not always matched each other’s pace.

To suggest the Bolivarian process has been completed, or that it has been unilaterally successful in these endeavors, is as facile as comparisons of Chávez to Stalin. As Roland Denis – a comradely critic of the Chávez effort who served as the minister of Planning and Development in the early stages of the Revolution, and a long-standing participant in Venezuelan social movements since the 1970s – puts it:

“the process” is… a collective and open construction that is not marked by final objectives, nor is it driven by the inexorable course of historical development… everything in “the process” is in tension. Nothing or no one can overcome its transitory logic; we are making a new reality that we don’t yet know very well.⁴

The Bolivarian Revolution is ongoing and contingent. In my own work I have often described the Chávez government as the “‘institutional” phase of the political sequence that began with the uprisings against neoliberal structural adjustment of the 1980s and 1990s.⁵ The next, “post-Chávez,” phase will continue to be defined by this irresolvable tension over its direction, method, and substance – the clash between radical and “right-wing” chavismo has already been raging for a decade, and has been more significant than conflicts with the opposition in determining the trajectory of the Revolution to date.⁶

Or at least, this has been the chief contradiction until the present. Chávez performed a dual role during his decade and a half in the presidency. In the first, he embodied the gap and tension that defined struggle in Venezuela, stitching together social democratic and revolutionary factions of the “Left.” In the second – perhaps counterintuitively – he prevented social antagonism in Venezuela from boiling over into open and armed civil war. He was fond of reminding supporters and opposition alike that the Bolivarian Revolution was “peaceful, but armed.” While the new composition of the Venezuelan government leaves much room for debate as to whether the internal “Right” or “Left” of chavismo will carry el Comandante’s torch (and this may indeed be by design), the ongoing civil war in Venezuela shows little sign of subsiding. If anything, social and political conflict in Venezuela is likely to increase in scope and intensity, and this is a deeply ambivalent development from the perspective of social revolution.

‘The kind of change we want can’t be won through elections alone.’

I lived and worked in Venezuela in 2007 and 2008. One of my jobs was with the government’s misión Ribas (a high-school equivalency program organized by residents of informal settlements and funded by the national government) in the Western Caracas Parish of La Vega. The people I worked with there were among the most marginalized by the country’s chaotic urbanization without industrialization that had defined the second half of the twentieth century. They were as zealous in their support of and confidence in President Chávez as they were critical of the “bureaucrats and scorpions” that surrounded him, and they were militantly opposed to the “rancid bourgeoisie.” “The kind of change we want can’t be won through elections alone” was their mantra. “We have to build our power, as a community. No one will give it to us.”

A few years later, after I returned to the United States, the sentiment I encountered every day I worked with radical bolivarians was captured perfectly in an interview with a member of the HipHop Revolución movement: “we respect Chávez, because he understands our struggle, but we are always looking to be self-critical to keep our revolution moving in the right direction…I’m a revolutionary from my heart. Chávez fucks around and flips on us, we’re gonna flip on him. And I think that’s what he expects from us.”⁷

George Ciccariello-Maher (2007) has described this dynamic by reformulating Lenin’s concept of revolutionary dual power. Of particular interest for Ciccariello-Maher is the institutionalization of popular power in bodies like the consejos comunales (communal councils) and the now defunct círuclos bolivarianos (Bolivarian Circles). He contends that in

the construction of an autonomous, alternative power capable of challenging the existing state structure… we can see that the establishment of communal councils in Venezuela is clearly a positive step toward the development of fuller and deeper democracy, which is encouraging in and of itself. But the councils’ significance goes beyond that. The consolidation of communal power says much about the role of the state in the Venezuelan Revolution. Specifically, what is unique about the Venezuelan situation is the fact that sectors of the state are working actively to dismantle and dissolve the old state apparatus by devolving power to local organs capable of constituting a dual power. Transcending the simplistic debate between taking or opposing state power, a focus on dual power allows us to concentrate on what really matters in Venezuela and elsewhere: the revolutionary transformation of existing repressive [state] structures.⁸

In Venezuela the state-form itself is being transmogrified into a self-revolutionizing apparatus. Rather than a head-on collision with the institutions of the ancien régime – notably the bureaucracy, the private news media and the public education system – the Chávez government more often than not has opted to fund the creation of parallel institutions. The misiones bolivarianas, the decentralization of legislative and budgetary power to the communal councils, the degree to which everything gets called to a vote – all of these quotidian realities suggest a revolutionary strategy of exodus and production. Build a new world so that the old can wither and die.

The “post-Chávez era” will in other words be determined by the continued expression and development of popular power, not by representatives or institutions. It would, however, be misguided to underestimate the importance these (often temporary) institutionalizations of power have been, especially in terms of providing platforms for future action and mobilization against the still-present old guard.

It has often been suggested that the Chávez government ought to be supported because it facilitated the actions of social movements to organize and advance. This position, while correct in the final instance, is nonetheless based on the faulty assumption that Chávez was the cause rather than the effect of social upheaval and transformation in Venezuela. Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution have always been the beneficiaries of the social revolution to which it is allied, not its source.

The Bolivarian Revolution moved into the spaces opened by insurrections it did not and could not control: the caracazo anti-neoliberal uprisings of February 1989 that left thousands dead during a weekend of street battles over structural adjustment, and shattered the exclusionary “democracy” of the puntofijo pact.⁹ A decade later Chávez won his first election – after the then Lieutenant Colonel took responsibility for a failed coup in 1992 – on the explicit promise of a definitive break with the ancien régime. In April 2002 a spontaneous uprising of the capital city’s poorest overturned a two-day coup led by the military high command, private telecommunications companies, the national chamber of commerce, and the directorate of the state oil company. In 2003 retired workers and volunteers ended a lockout of the oil industry that crippled the national economy.

With the events of 2002 and 2003, the internationally-linked opposition over-extended itself and was defeated by the multitude. It couldn’t have been any other way. The Chávez government has been meticulous in its commitment to legal, institutional, reforms; it has always sought to legislate change. The cycle of “counterrevolution and reform” could only advance after defeat for the right, and these defeats were played out in the streets.¹⁰

“Compañeros, the greatest libertarian teacher of the Venezuelan people has died, and two days earlier another equal teacher… Chávez and Sabino show the way.” - Roland Denis

Chávez’s death came as many revolutionaries in Venezuela were trying to make sense of an earlier loss. On March 3, just two days before the announcement of Chávez’s death, Sabino Romero was assassinated while travelling to a polling place for a community election. Sabino was a leader of the Yukpa people in the Western Venezuelan state of Zulia and a tireless agitator for indigenous autonomy and rights, and the preservation of lands in the face of the Bolivarian government’s often developmentalist drive. In 2009 Sabino spent 18 months in prison on almost certainly fraudulent charges of arson and cattle rustling after he lead a campaign of nonviolent direct action and occupation of lands granted to the Yukpa, but being held illegally by large-scale land owners.

Sabino identified as a revolutionary, and though he often clashed with local (and usually right-wing) chavista officials, was widely considered by the radical base of the Bolivarian movement an example to be followed in “deepening” the Revolution. His death at the hands of paid gunmen will almost certainly be eclipsed by the public mourning and political reconfiguration following the death of the President. However, his fractious relationship with the Bolivarian Revolution characterizes the dynamics that have defined the last 15 years in Venezuela, and suggests possible directions for the future of the movement.

I have long wondered if Chávez, perhaps paradoxically, might have been the only thing preventing civil war in Venezuela. Of course, Venezuela is notoriously no stranger to everyday violence and crime. However, the assassination of Sabino suggests a disturbing and increased degree of ungovernability and boldness on the part of elites, and an intensification of the war that predates the Chávez government and has pushed for a deepening of the revolution. It remains to be seen whether these forces can continue to be contained without Chávez at the helm of the Revolution.

“Those who die for life can’t be called dead.” – Alí Primera

When Nicolás Maduro announced the death of Chávez, he insisted the Bolivarian Revolution was bigger than its ostensible leader. He quoted Alí Primera, the Venezuelan folk singer and communist militant of the 1970s and 1980s, “Los que mueren por la vida no pueden llamarse muertos” – those who die for life can’t be called dead. The chorus has been repeated countless times since.

Primera quotes and songs are regular features of the social and political life of chavismo. The persistence of Primera’s music highlights the continuity of struggles against capitalism, poverty, inequality, and deprivation in Venezuela. In this way, they are a particularly striking summary of the sequence of struggles that will inevitably, if misleadingly, be referred to as “the Chávez era.” Chávez was the product of a sequence of struggles that did not end when he assumed office, nor will it end with his death. He should be remembered as he saw himself: a comrade in the struggle against exploitation and against capitalism.

We honor our dead by continuing the fight we shared with them.

Donald V. Kingsbury is a lecturer in the Department of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, and will soon be relocating to the University of Toronto. His current book project, To Rule by Obeying?: State and Power after Neoliberalism in Bolivarian Venezuela, tracks the revolutionary dialectic of constituent and constituted power in Venezuela from the 1980s to the present. He never got to meet Hugo Chávez. They did shake hands once, but he doubts he made much an impression on el Comandante.

1. The advances of the Bolivarian project in terms human and social welfare are particularly striking in that Venezuela reduced absolute and relative inequality at the same time as the gap between rich and poor was growing in the “developed” North. Venezuela was declared an ‘illiteracy free’ country by the UN by 2005, and the government has prioritized providing the population with free health care and education as well as access to heavily subsidized basic foodstuffs and dignified housing. Against doomsayers on the Left and Right the country has weathered the post-2008 ‘great recession’ better than the United States and Eurozone and has continued to diversify its international diplomatic and trading ties both regionally and globally.

2. The phrase “mandar obediciendo” was first made famous by the Zapatista Rebels of Chiapas, Mexico for autonomy and against neoliberalism in 1994. As a political principle, to “rule by obeying” invokes horizontal, inclusive, and participatory democracy (referred to in Venezuela as “protagonism”) and is explicitly opposed to the norms of liberal, representative and marketized democracies of the North Atlantic.

3. The New York Times, for example, immediately endorsed the failed 2002 coup against Chávez. The obscene obverse of the rush of US and European media outlets to raise concerns with Chávez’s “divisiveness” and a-liberal take on democratic governance can be seen in the Left’s equally misguided attempts to lay out Chávez’s “legacy.” Both approaches to the death of a public figure mistake what is at stake. While it is entirely appropriate to mourn Chávez as a fallen comrade in struggle, it is nonetheless equally important to avoid reinforcing the disempowering myth that he was somehow the Bolivarian Revolution’s only indispensible participant or leader or the “savior” of the Venezuelan people.

4. Roland Denis, Rebelión en Proceso: Dilemas del Movimiento Popular luego de la Rebelión del 13 de Abril, (Ediciones de Nuestra América, 2005).

5. Donald Kingsbury, “Between Multitude and Pueblo: Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and the Government of Ungovernability,” New Political Science 35.4 (December 2013).

6. The roundtable hosted by the journal Historical Materialism in 2001 offers important insight into this struggle. See Spronk, et al. “The Bolivarian Process in Venezuela: A Left Forum,” Historical Materialism, Volume 19, Number 1, 2011, pp. 233-270.

7. Pablo Navarrete and Jody McIntyre, “Venezuela’s Hip Hop Revolutionaries,” March 4, 2012.

8. George Ciccariello-Maher, “Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution,” Monthly Review, Volume 59, issue 4, 2007, pp. 42-56, at pg. 42.

9. See, for example, Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski “Dismembering and Remembering the Nation” in their edited volume States of Violence (University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 83-152 and George Ciccariello-Maher’s forthcoming We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Duke, 2013).

10. The expression “counter revolution and reform” has been used by Gregory Wilpert to characterize the early years of the Chávez government. See his Changing Venezuela by Taking Power (Verso, 2007).

On July 1st, 2012, the day of Mexico’s recent presidential election, I visited the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, hoping to encounter a painting by Remedios Varo. A surrealist painter fleeing the Spanish Civil War, Varo was among the many notable exiles to make their home in Mexico City during the mid-20th century. I hoped that through one of her Cimmerian dreamscapes I might learn something about the political situation she experienced in the aftermath of the massive Mexican revolutions of 1910 to 1929. It was during the prime of her career following the end of WWII that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), inheritors of the Mexican Revolution, strayed decidedly off-course to embrace a particular brand of oligarchic and authoritarian governance. Their 71 years of uninterrupted rule ended in 2000, but as I arrived at the museum that morning their return to power, in the context of an increasingly bloody “Drug War,” was already presumed. As it happened, Varo’s paintings were not on display and much of the museum was closed off, so I made my way into an open exhibit entitled Suspecho, which serendipitously enough was concerned with the convergence of drug cartel-related violence and the larger socio-cultural shifts taking place in Mexico. On display in this exhibit was the clear relationship between media technologies and the inability of the Mexican media to properly represent the 60,000 murders that dominate the country’s headlines – the fundamental issue at stake in the election – with any depth or causal understanding . The works selected all meditated on deeper issues relating to the propagation of information in the era of postmodernism, but they posed an immediate political question: how can the drug war be conceived as a logical piece in the whole picture of Mexico’s current political crisis, without immediately reifying it as a spectacle in the graphic dailies, or in a politician’s ready-made sound bite pledging to provide protection?

As a participant in public education struggles at the University of California, I coupled my summer efforts at improving my Spanish with an education from the nascent student movement that rose up to confront Mexico’s broken political process. The lessons: the 2008 crisis in the global capitalist system is playing out in distinct national contexts, owing in large part to the variegated historical experiences of the 20th century. Mandates for capitalist restructuring made by elites across the globe (“austerity measures”) are located within particular social compositions and distinct political mechanisms, whether in Egypt, Iran, or China. The Mexican events demonstrate that though such “local obstacles” have to be wrestled with and passed through, this process is part of a more universal struggle against the global conditions of capitalism. As Arab Springs and Occupy movements inevitably continue to appear, they may be expected to remain tactically and politically distinct uprisings against capitalism (some more explicitly) with the potential elements to constitute a post-capitalist society.

What Was the PRI?

Many of the glaring problems in Mexican society today, from government corruption to staggering inequality, are rooted in the country’s transition from social democracy to neoliberalism, symbolically completed on January 1st, 1994 with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).¹ The populist policies with which the PRI had initially solidified its base were subsequently rolled back and attacked by the very same party, in the years before and after NAFTA’s implementation. However, the one trait that provides a common link through the PRI’s seven decades in power was its ability to contain the forces of the revolutionary left, from which it formally took power in 1929. The alliances of distinct classes and social blocs that had powered several insurrectionary volleys in the years after 1910 were henceforth pitted against each other by the PRI’s wily political machine. Patrimonial networks and social spending were used to recuperate portions of the disillusioned base and geographically removed regions otherwise vulnerable to the politics of autonomy. It was in fact under the leftist regime of Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s that the centralization of power was first solidified through the use of political favors and economic rewards, on one hand, and direct suppression of political opponents, on the other. In the new global configuration that followed the end of World War Two, the trends were accentuated.²

In 1968, on the heels of an economic downturn and the outbreak of revolutionary movements across the Third World, a student movement arose with an as-yet unsurpassed level of coordination and popular support, challenging the government’s increasing authoritarianism and reformism. The youth of the ‘68 generation identified with an internationalist, rather than state-protectionist, socialist culture, and their ability to pull off massive strikes threatened to undo the PRI’s strategic isolation and immobilization of the labor movement. Two bloodbaths successfully truncated the student movement, in 1968 and then in 1971; they have been officially denied or underreported by each administration in office to this day. In the immediate aftermath some survivors formed armed guerrilla groups, though these were neutralized by 1975. In the long term, the crackdowns validated popular militancy, which has persisted on the fringe in some states, and memory of the massacres is deeply embedded in the cultural psyche. Indeed, the recent student protests revived memory of the potential of 1968, as well as attention to the government’s history of violent repression.

The major figure to complete the PRI’s embrace of Washington’s neoliberal mandate was Carlos Salinas, president from 1988 to 1994. His electoral victory in 1988 over Cárdenas’s son, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who ran on reforming the PRI, was a blatant fraud. The circumstances of his election alone leave Salinas as one of the most reviled figures in Mexico today, though he is close to the 2012 election winner Enrique Peña Nieto, and still wields considerable power within the PRI party structure. Under his administration, foreign capital was granted widened access to Mexico’s supply of loosely regulated labor, coinciding with an increase in the maquiladoras churning out cheap commodities just across from the US border. His policies also spawned Mexico’s massive media monopolies including the likes of Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man, and Televisa, which now owns 75% of the country’s television access. Wealth disparity subsequently grew rapidly, exacerbating the country’s class formations. A group of 100 mega-elites now own approximately 85% of the nation’s wealth, while somewhere near half of the population lives beneath the poverty line. At the same time, the post-NAFTA access to a bevy of international products and “luxury” items has shaped middle-class consumer habits and cultural identifications to resemble those of First World markets. This has led some investors and analysts to praise Mexico’s rising economy, the Financial Times even now hailing the country as the preferable destination for international manufacturing as it leaves China. Yet such analyses ignore both the rampant inequality that these economic shifts have increased, as well as the chaotic political situation which has come to be a necessity for continuing down this path.

Such inequality has of course created a more hostile political environment, and following the debacle of 1988 Cárdenas went on to form the left-splinter PRD, subsequently shifting the country’s party demographics. Meanwhile the economic reforms installed under Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo, his successor, have been continued, but by a new party more conducive to the ecumenical image desired by international investors. Elected in 2000, the National Action Party (PAN) promised that their cozy relationship to Washington would result in a widening of prosperity, while simultaneously retaining a traditional Catholic base with rhetoric of cultural conservatism. PAN left behind the PRI’s faint gestures towards labor and agriculture, instead substituting appeals to stability, democracy, and, of course, free trade. Twelve years later, the purported benefits of a US-economic partnership have yielded a minimal increase in the spending capacities that sustain belief in a middle-class. However, the moral appeal of a president who would kiss the Pope’s hand is now vastly trumped by pledges of security.

“DF” Center Stage

The country’s shifting demographics following 1988 can be seen in the ascendance and autonomy of Mexico City. Cárdenas became the capital’s first elected mayor in 1997, and the PRD have increased their margin of victory with each successive election. Spending projects have improved the city’s notoriously bad transportation and pollution, while socially progressive legislation such as the legalization of abortion and gay civil unions speak to the contrast forming between the city and rest of the country. Despite the capital’s greater portions of social spending, distinct class divisions are visible within the city, reflecting the identity of the Distrito Federal (DF) as a financial landing strip on the map of the global economy. In the country’s financial center several colonias are marked by cosmopolitan boutiques, gated communities, and expensive nightclubs. Alternatively, many industrial barrios and sprawling shantytowns on the city’s outskirts lack basic services; one in three city inhabitants lack regular access to water. The federal government has in turn focused its spending on rural areas, so that the capital increasingly relies on local rather than federal funding.

Walking up the sidewalk on Avenida Insurgentes, the city’s main North/South thoroughfare, one is confronted by a variegated stream of human traffic, evoking the “20 million stories” of the DF’s inhabitants, and echoes of the famous extranjeros who walked these blocks in the last century. Jack Kerouac fell in love with a prostitute; Varo’s English-born surrealist collaborator, Leanora Carrington, flamboyantly dressed at age 90 feeding stray dogs around Colonia Roma; MN Roy, founder of both the Indian and Mexican Communist Parties, whose one-time home in Roma is now an exclusive nightspot called “Roy”; Burroughs, Trotsky, Breton, Castro, Durruti, Bolaño, Pynchon, B. Traven, John Reed – each tale fascinating and unrepeatable. Loitering in the Zócalo, the city square, during the large protests that preceded the election, I was impressed by the pragmatism and savvy of the muchachos/as (many no older than 14) who formed a large part of the protests. Their grasp of Mexico’s political history was nuanced, while disillusioned: they held hopes for social revolution, and saw the entire electoral system as part of the problem. Nonetheless, most unhesitatingly advocated voting for the Left party, to contribute pressure to the system’s restructuring.

About 10 million “stories” – human lives – in the DF are lived in slums. Indeed, Mexico City boasts the world’s third largest slum population after Mumbai and Dhaka.³ The indignity many now experience in the United States of having to beg for a job is multiplied exponentially in the lives of many Mexicans who sell wares such as CDs, chewing gum, or one of an innumerable array of trinkets, an unbroken stream of begging for a few pesos at a time. I made a friend who lost her parents at eight years old and survived the street on her own by selling orange juice, until she turned 18 and found better work. Stepping in to organize this pauperized mode of survival for some time has been the drug cartels, who are thus the Mexican mafia. Cases like the city’s fleet of independent bus services have revealed that the cartels play a large coordinating role in providing small businesses with protection, and, additionally, extortion. Vivid accounts of slum-life by Mike Davis and Jan Breman are able to “enter” the slum in a way that many foreigners, or for that matter Mexicans with money, cannot. What’s more, the conclusion of Davis’s Planet of Slums – that militaries are being re-organized for purposes of “urban engagement” – now appears partially confirmed by the Mexican military’s build-up and escalation of the cartel war.

Whatever interaction exists between the lower and upper classes in Mexico City, then, is mediated jointly by the military, in a broad sense, and by financial exchanges. Beyond the buying of commodities from the street and the sparing of change, wealthy Mexicans navigate the city so as to avoid areas where they are likely to be robbed. Indeed, rather than gentrification, for which no real word exists in Spanish, the movement of wealth through the city’s zones is based on the mapping of status: here, a secure neighborhood with high prices; here, a place to go for bargains; there, a place never to be entered by the wrong people. Despite this strategy, the city’s robberies occur mainly in a small cluster of areas such as Tepito, “el barrio bravo,” into which tourists often mistakenly wander from the nearby city center.

“Hot Spots” of the Drug War and Regional Distinctions

Mexico’s divisions between “town and country,” and broadly between regions, stem originally from the process of Spanish colonialism during the 16th and 17th centuries. Spain’s conquest of the great valley to the capital’s north was swift, decimating these more spread out and nomadic tribes, and Nueva España’s religious and educational development was here subsequently concentrated. In the south, the densely populated remnants of empires like the Maya and Zapotec were more resistant to integration, though Catholicism, Jesuit liberalism, and enlightenment rationalism would all be influential here in particular ways. Meanwhile, the central plane that includes the capital relatively obtains to the region’s mezcla traditions. The capital of Nueva España that became Mexico City was originally built upon the existing city of Tenochtitlan, an area that had for centuries been the cultural and political center of Mesoamerica. However complicated the integration of the two cultures, the revolutions of 1810 and 1910 both drew on the capital’s mezcla character in promoting notions of national identity. To this day, Mexico remains a country with deep racial biases directed against the indigenous, darker-skinned population. All of these divisions extend to politics: the poorer states of the South traditionally received the least amount of federal support and economic development from the PRI, who focused on favoring their base in the northern industrial states. Recent years have seen a new push in the South for capital integration, investment in natural resources, and expanded mining activity – projects that have been resisted by local communities opposed to further denigration of their quality of life.⁴ The broad peasant-worker alliances under Zapata and Pancho Villa that powered the Mexican Revolution remain the last time that major portions of the North and South united to advance a political cause.

Another aspect of the developing town-and-country dynamic has been Mexico City’s relative immunity from the violence of the cartel war. Crime in the capital has dramatically decreased, while during the same period the political process in the North has been subsumed by the war over lucrative trafficking lines into the US. A slew of assassinations of journalists, activists, politicians, and security figures points to the overwhelming influence the cartels hold over these states. In the coastal tourist destinations as well, the high volumes of money and traffic moving through ensure that the regions remain battlegrounds for cartel influence.

Despite the uneven distribution of violence from the cartel war, the staggering number of murders over the last six years have touched most people in the country personally and become a focus of cultural discourse. The Suspecho exhibit at the Museo de Arte Moderno offers a unique perspective on the war through the prism of art in the postmodern world. The exhibit’s stated themes: new technologies, communications/media, and un/representability. Many of the pieces featured meditate on the explosion of access to information with the rise of the internet and the mass reproduction of images. However, some intimation of violence is present in each piece, problematizing how violence can even be properly represented, and at the same time suggesting that a certain bloodletting is implicated in these technologies themselves. A large wall, covered in a series of magazines with strips of pages successively ripped a few lengths apart; one cannot hope to read or discern any of the images, but the medium of tearing consistently regurgitates three themes: illegible ink, sexualized images, and gore. Bodies of victims are often displayed here on newspaper covers alongside women in exploitative photos, but the causes of the violence resist representation. While violence is easily absorbed by the spectacle, representation of the system itself is impossible. The artists in this series turn the in/visibility of violence into a search for the system that brings these elements together.

The work of Teresa Margolles approaches this question from a different vantage point, that of the necropolitica (death itself as a medium of political engagement). One of Mexico’s most famous contemporary artists, Margolles has often included in her work belongings from a cartel victim’s time of death, bringing the murders to an uncomfortable closeness. One such presentation was a steam tunnel that viewers would walk through, and upon exiting learn that they had been breathing steam from the clothes worn by anonymous victims.

A popular 2010 work by one of Mexico’s most important journalists, Anabel Hernández, does not balk in delivering a systemic, if conspiratorial, portrait of the drug war. Hernández and her colleagues’ efforts stand out all the more importantly for maintaining a critical voice in the context of increasingly brazen attacks against the media. In a tirelessly researched expose, Los Senores del Narcos presents a picture not dissimilar from the one found in Steven Soderbergh’s film Traffic a decade earlier: namely, that the government is not fighting a war against the cartels, but rather as a partisan for the particular benefit of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel. If these allegations are correct, the cartels would be just one more billion-dollar business that the government has partnered with, in this case offering the service of its military. As the publisher of the Reforma newspaper group said recently, “the nation faces a whole series of ‘cartels,’ of which the drug-trafficking ones are only a minority.”

A similar conspiratorial take animates a film released in the months before the election. Colosio is a JFK-style thriller that tracks the investigation and cover-up of a PRI reformer who was a shoe-in for president in 1994, until his assassination in Tijuana a few months before the election. A watershed year in Mexican politics, 1994 saw the launching of NAFTA, the beginning of the Zapatistas rebellion, and ensuing repression against the Mayans of Chiapas. The film most blatantly connects that era to the present with an ensemble of ruthless killings of those who get in the way of the Colosio cover-up. The murders are committed with a style of impunity reminiscent of drug-related deaths that today can be seen daily in country’s headlines. In a moment of true irony, the previews before the film featured a PRI/Green Party campaign ad that depicted the “magical” transformation of toxic liquid flows into streams of pure water. The image was mirrored in Colosio’s final shot, a long pan through a stream bloodied with the final victim of the government’s cover-up. The scene’s intention is clear: from 1994 on, blood has continued to flow, and will keep coming until the truth can no longer be killed off. The irony of the PRI/Green campaign ads is that the PRI’s social agenda is so regressive that it has sought out an “environmental” image; admitting, in short, that it’s focus is on something entirely external to the “merely social.” However, the last scene of the feature implies that the greatest environmental impurity has become the blood of the Mexican people itself. This is the corrective to a wide array of Green politics – the only meaningful environmentalism today is synonymous with the advancement of social justice.

Contrasts to South America

Mexico is more than twice the size and population of the rest of both Central America and the Caribbean. Its border with the US is the dominant entry point for migrants from Belize to Panama. Migration through Mexico plays a crucial role in the flows of money, commodities, and labor; an estimated 20-30% of El Salvador’s economy is composed of remittances from citizens in the US. Because of its size and border, the attention Mexico receives from both the media and global elites often dwarfs that of the rest of the region. Economically unique as well, it astoundingly “exports more manufactured products than the rest of Latin America combined,” according to the Financial Times.

South American countries, with the exception of Colombia, have overwhelmingly elected left and populist candidates over the last two decades, taking an alternative economic path to the Washington and IMF-led model. The political process in Central America and the Caribbean, on the other hand, appears stunted in the position of a “transition to democracy” following the brutal civil conflicts, coup d’états, and CIA proxy wars that spanned the 1980s. For activists in the US, these conflicts marked the great failure of the anti-Vietnam War movement to reconstitute itself as a popular resistance to a continuation and reconstitution of US military imperialism. The much diminished numbers that built the anti-nuclear movement and groups like CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) were forced to concentrate on forms of direct action and raising awareness, in lieu of large numbers to bring to the street. This activism was at the same time effective and tragically inadequate. Some gains could be noted by the end of the 1990s: protection of journalists, human rights tribunals, reporting of attacks on trade unionists, and the re-entry of left political parties in elections. Yet in the last few years many of these trends have been significantly reversed. Rates of poverty have jumped, most pointedly in the Caribbean, but on the continent as well. Influence of the drug cartels is spreading consistently, and with it violence for communities in their way. The US has continued its anti-democratic influence, including direct or tacit support for coup d’états in Haiti, Honduras, and Paraguay. Finally, protection for journalists and human rights workers has decreased while impunity for war criminals has gained, such as in Guatemala where a general implicated in war crimes against indigenous Mayans during the civil war is now president. As a result, migration to the US is strongly on the rise, accompanied by the usual xenophobia and reactionary ideas about the ills of immigration.

Why these different trajectories for Central and South America? It is undeniable that a dependent region south of the border is the preferred geopolitical arrangement of US elites and their international partners. The drug trade has become an essential component of Mexico and Central America’s economy, and undoing it would necessarily involve a renegotiation of the countries’ subservient relationships with the US.

Looking Ahead

While the politics of the PRD cannot be classified as revolutionary or opposed to the perpetuation of capitalist relations in Mexico, its politicians diverging considerably from groups like the EZLN, the party does at the same time symbolically stand as an opposition to the long tradition of impunity and anti-democratic, US-backed administrations. In 2006, as a full-scale rebellion against the government was underway in Oaxaca, the television duopoly of Televisa and TV Azteca launched a smear campaign against the PRD presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). In the aftermath of 2006’s contested election, and for the six years prior to last month’s election, documents confirm that they continued to illegally undermine public support for AMLO and disseminate propaganda for Enrique Peña Nieto’s campaign.

Another film released in the months before the recent election depicts how popular rock bands had been censored by the PRI because of their music’s political content. Gimme the Power presents a cultural history of the PRI’s last decades in power, narrating the conflict between the government and the era’s rock bands whose concerts and music were banned. Focusing on “Molotov,” a group with a huge contemporary following, the film serves as a briefing on recent culture wars that have influenced the outlook of today’s youth.

As the 2012 election approached, young people faced increased unemployment and the devaluation of their education, a situation which the election’s predicted winner was expected to worsen. The PRI campaign, in real terms, was reducible to a regional containment of the drug war through strategic compromises and the dismantling of the few remaining public unions and state institutions built during their first tenure. Given the likelihood of protests against these policies, many emphasized the past use of repression by the PRI, and by Nieto himself while governor of Mexico State. At a time when innovative solutions and progressive change seemed necessary to combat worsening social conditions, young people found that the political system was defaulting into a regressive mode of corruption and non-transparency. Opposition rallied against the political system’s most blatant features: a closed media system, “extra-democratic” measures chronically taken by parties, impunity for those implicated in corruption, and the lack of access to the political process for workers, the disenfranchised, and the left more generally. For these reasons, the student movement that appeared in May drew upon these basic demands: rejection of the PRI’s re-imposition, dismantling of the television duopoly, and legal/democratic improvements to the electoral process.

The movement emerged following a Nieto speech at Iberoamericana, one of the capital’s prestigious Jesuit universities, where students protested and heckled the “television candidate.” The PRI attempted to save face by blaming the protest on outsiders and paid provocateurs. Using social media, 131 students posted videos showing their ID cards, which in turn spawned thousands of solidarity statements by others denouncing the PRI machine (carrying the hashtags #yosoy132 & másde131). Although led by students, indignation at the PRI’s tactics ran across different segments of society. The rebellions that have moved from Egypt to Europe to the US helped motivate the belief that it would take massive numbers in the streets to dislodge the current political structure. The fundamental error of media outlets such as NPR who report that the PRI is a center-left party is that the PRI’s major attribute is its suppression of the Left. This is why massive numbers in the streets revolted in the context of an electoral process. While protests have continued well after the election, students are no longer the leading demographic, but instead one group among many who feel indignity at the political system. While many of the country’s very poor stayed clear of the #yosoy132 protests, their numbers were present at a massive AMLO rally in June as well as more recent marches piqued by alleged electoral fraud.

As the Mexican student movement stands at a crossroads – planning for protests against Nieto’s inauguration in December, but more generally deliberating on its future and the possibility of traversing class, cultural, and regional divides – global attention has moved on to outbreaks of resistance in other parts of the world. However, we would do well to consider the complex of forces that may determine future conflicts south of the border. Capital is placing greater hopes on the productivity of Mexico, and US imperialism seems bent on securing these investments. If we pay attention to the plight of Latino immigrants in the US, the chance of better-paid work is revealed to come attached with serious drawbacks: businesses take advantage of the status of undocumented workers, and structural racism pervades the education and prison systems. The United States employs a massive second-class labor force, only occasionally dispensing the honor of citizenry. These conditions can only breed further resentment against the distribution of resources and privileges, and offer a truly barbaric vision of the havoc the global economy wreaks daily, from one country to the next.

Pat Cabell is a graduate student at UC Davis. He has written for Lana Turner Journal.

We’re passing through a low phase in Northern California – a lull that partially parallels those facing organizers from Madison to New York. The rebellious energies so evident recently seem scattered these days, dormant. The universities are quiet. And the forces that had gathered in city parks and squares, most massively at Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, are largely absent. The encampments are broken up, the assemblies dissolved.

It’s hard to know whether this is simply a period of incubation, from which another, similar wave of class struggle will soon emerge, or if this moment of relative inactivity is allowing for the recomposition of our forces, our alliances, the ways we take action together. If the terrain of struggle we now encounter has been remade by the past year of action – by our effective acts of opposition, by new forms of state repression and co-optation, and by our own missteps – how can we most effectively intervene in the shifting political force fields we’re coming to inhabit?

As we offer ourselves a bit of relief from the intensities of the past year – as we heal, maintain ties, and work through it all – it’s worth collaboratively thinking through these questions. Struggles against austerity in California, which I’ve participated in and tried to think critically about, can provide a concrete context for this kind of reflection.

While many of us have been taking a rest, politicians have been active as ever. The recently passed California state budget is, as in previous years, crushing. It shortens the amount of time people can remain in the workfare program, reduces the program’s work exemptions for people with young children, cuts payments for and limits access to childcare, reduces funding for in-home supportive services, and guts public health care programs. In combination, these cuts constitute a severe attack on working-class women, and therefore on the class as a whole. The undoing of welfare, childcare, and in-home service programs further privatizes and devalues caring labor, and thus imposes increasingly impossible burdens of domestic and waged work on all those, particularly women of color, who have been denied financial reserves.

Austerity is still the order of the day. For all the class struggle that’s been staged in the streets, plazas, and universities this past year, and despite what we’ve accomplished, those who govern and manage capital are still effectively making it harder for working people to survive. And no partial, uncertain victories in the educational sector should allow us to lose sight of this stark reality.

There are a number of ways to make sense of the effects this year’s state budget will have on students and campus workers. The basic story is that, rather than simply cutting once again the budgets of schools and universities, the state has made these cuts contingent upon the potential failure of the compromise tax initiative this November. If the initiative passes, we’ll have a tuition freeze in the Universities of California, and a year without significant cuts in other sectors of public education.

That we may have another year without undergraduate fee hikes in the UCs, and without cuts to schools and colleges, should be understood as an effect of recent rounds of uncompromising student protest, including the cascading strikes and encampments that shook California’s universities last fall. These protests demonstrated to the state and to the UC Regents that further fee increases would come with a cost, and helped build support for the original Millionaires’ Tax, of which the current tax initiative – formed out of a compromise between the governor and the president of the California Federation of Teachers – is a pale copy.

While we might be inclined to consider the possibility of a year without cuts to public education as a victory, albeit an uncertain one, there are other political dynamics shaping the current situation that make for a murkier picture. Governor Jerry Brown, in tying the fate of students to his tax initiative, is working to co-opt and neutralize student movements – movements that otherwise could further delegitimate state institutions enacting and enforcing austerity, and even potentially set off, as in Quebec, a period of generalized social unrest. This fall, it will be incredibly difficult for those active on campuses to resist pressures to put our energies into campaigning for the tax initiative, despite the fact that relatively little of the revenue would go to education (much is slated to “pay down the deficit”); that the initiative includes a temporary, regressive sales tax; and that electoral campaigns force us to engage on a terrain and in a mode of struggle that work to our disadvantage, in comparison to campus-based direct action and mass organizing. As we recently saw in Wisconsin, social movements that allow themselves to be entirely diverted into electoral politics risk massive demoralization, defeat in both electoral and non-electoral domains, and the fraying of bonds forged through collective struggle.

Still, the pressure to participate in the initiative campaign will be intense, since the effects of a defeat would be so severe. In addition to the cuts that would be triggered, the initiative’s defeat would make educational privatization appear all the more inevitable, allowing those pushing fee hikes and pension reductions to invoke the “will of the voters” in support of their efforts. The UC Regents, for instance, are rumored to already be considering a 20% fee hike (approximately $2,500/year), which they’d try to implement in the event that the tax initiative failed. And the initiative very well could fail, especially if, for instance, the European debt crisis intensifies, and the economic depression in the States subsequently deepens.

While we have little control over broader economic dynamics, we can still prevent our movements from being co-opted and neutralized by the governor. We could, for instance, explicitly reject the electoral process as a primary terrain of struggle; along the lines of the movement of the Indignados in Spain, we could organize a series of walkouts and occupations in October tied together by the slogan: “There’s no vote against austerity.” Alternatively, we could prioritize local struggles whose outcomes will not directly be affected by the fate of the tax initiative. At UC Berkeley, for instance, the administration is attempting to move up to six hundred staff members to a building located miles away from campus – a move explicitly designed to spur workers to resign rather than endure degraded and isolating conditions of employment. In solidarity with workers organizing against their displacement, we could hold disruptive actions at the building to which they would be relocated. We could also link up with the movement to defend City College of San Francisco, which appears to be taking shape in response to the threat of dis-accreditation and closure levied by a recent audit – an audit performed by a body with ties to educational privatizers and for-profit colleges. Given how imbricated the various sectors of public education are in California, all students have a stake in the fight at CCSF, which has the potential to generalize struggles against tuition hikes and course reductions.

Even if student movements successfully avoid getting directly caught up in electoral campaigning, it’s conceivable that their more rebellious edges might be worn off by the specter of the November election. There’s a danger that students might be haunted by the imagined judgment of “the voting public,” that we might take on this phantom as a kind of superego, avoiding actions that could upset a projected voter or make them less sympathetic to the cause of public education. And there’s plenty of reason to think that voters in California are inclined to be unsympathetic: in recent decades, they’ve passed a number of reactionary propositions, including 13, 209, 8 and 36.  While Governor Brown may be confident that voters’ presumed classification of students as members of the “deserving” middle class will ensure passage of this year’s tax initiative, student activists ultimately have little to gain from attempting to fill the role of respectable defenders of existing educational institutions.

While higher education has historically been understood, with some validity, as a marker and reproducer of middle class status, college is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a stable, decent paying job. Increasingly, it offers to the degree-holder little more than decades of indebtedness and precarious employment. Our generation of students is facing a process of proletarianization; and rather than clinging to a fantastical “middle class” status, definitively refuted by economic transformations, we should act in solidarity with, and with an eye towards, the working class from which many of us hail and into which we’re headed. As we plan another round of protest, let’s concern ourselves with the perception of the broader class, those facing another devastating round of austerity, rather than with the sanctimonious vision of those who fear and resent the pleasures and possibilities of working class struggle and mutual aid – pleasures that many of us experienced last fall at the Occupy Oakland encampment, and during strikes on our campuses.

While things have been slow this summer, we’re still here; and if the recent past is any indication, another upsurge is likely imminent.  As we attempt to determine the shape coming struggles will take, the experience of the past year can give us confidence that direct actions, coupled with mass organizing, have the potential to generate widespread participation, open up new centers of gravity, and offer us lives less consumed with the anxieties of debt, work, and uncertain futures.

Amanda Armstrong is a graduate student at UC Berkeley and an editor at Reclamations Journal.  She has participated in recent anti-austerity movements in California, particularly those emerging from the universities.

It took a little while for the student struggle in Quebec to gain traction with activists outside of the province. The strike began in February, but it probably wasn’t until late March that activists in Ontario paid it much mind, and not until late April or May that large numbers of people began pouring across the borders into Quebec to demonstrate alongside the Quebecois, to talk to Quebec activists, and to learn from their organizing tactics and struggles so that we could push the movement beyond the confines of the Francophone province and into the rest of Canada.

The current strike in Quebec has been a long time coming. We can realistically say that activists there have been organizing for this strike not only since 2010, but since 1968, when the first student strike took place – demanding free tuition, the democratic administration of educational institutions and policies, and an expansion of the Francophone university system. Eight more student strikes were to follow, of varying degrees of success, and in each of these student activists consciously worked to learn from their experiences, from their successes and failures, and altered their organizing accordingly. Tuition fees in Quebec are directly related to this history of militant organizing and striking. There is absolutely no other explanation. Quebec students organized, Quebec students fought, and Quebec students won.

It was in 2001, with the formation of the Association for Student-Union Solidarity (ASSE), that a strategic perspective for effective mobilization developed. ASSE studied the history of the Quebec student movement and took on a radically democratic activist approach to student unionism, which has been carried forward by the Broad Coalition of the Association of Student-Union Solidarity (CLASSE) in the 2012 mobilization. This form of student unionism sees that students, like workers, have collective interests, and possess a collective power that must be harnessed and organized in order to defend these interests. It operates with direct democracy as its core, with general membership meetings and general assemblies as the site of decision-making for the union. Students gather together, debate, discuss, vote, and pass motions on the direction of their union. It is in this way that students themselves, not student leaders or representatives, decide the best direction for the student movement, the campaigns to adopt, and the strategies to enact in pursuit of these goals.

These directly democratic organizing structures simply don’t exist outside of Quebec in any official or organized capacity in the student movement. Student unions and broad-based student associations exist, primarily the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), but the structure that these student unions and federations have taken has been far less directly democratic and grassroots-oriented than the trajectory of the student unions and organizations that eventually gave way to ASSE and CLASSE. Much of what could be called a student movement in the rest of Canada has been, since its founding in the 1980s, coordinated and directed by the CFS. The CFS has strong ties to provincial and federal political parties (primarily the social-democratic New Democratic Party), and uses the lobbying of parliamentary representatives as the best way to achieve aims of lower tuition and more accessible education – a path that has for 30 years seemed woefully inadequate and has proven to be a terrific failure. Tuition fees in Ontario are wildly out of step with those in Quebec, with students paying an average of $6640 annually, compared to the $2519 annual tuition rate in Quebec, despite years of CFS campaigns to “drop fees,” an annual Day of Action in February (seemingly more and more sparsely attended each year), repeated “occupations” of provincial and federal politicians’ offices (ending at 5pm!), and lobbying efforts by CFS representatives. Obviously none of these tactics have worked, and something, it is clear, must change.

Based on my own experience in Ontario, I can speculate on some of the reasons for this disjuncture, and the delayed response to the current strike. One is that there is a significant language barrier between Quebec and Canada’s other provinces. Although Canada is an officially bilingual country, what this means realistically is that eight of the ten provinces are primarily English speaking, Quebec is primarily French speaking, and only New Brunswick is officially bilingual. Students in Anglo-Canada study French throughout elementary school and high school, but that does not mean in any way that the majority of Canadian students are able to read, let alone speak and understand, French. Initially, there was little coverage in English media – even alternative media – about the strike organizing, strike votes, and strike preparations that were happening in Quebec. A few mentions would trickle out, of course, but Translating the Printemps érable, a website that translates important documents and new stories from Francophone media, was not yet in constant operation. Because of linguistic barriers that have prevented strong collaborations between Francophone and Anglophone activists over the years, the strike initially stayed below the radar for student radicals outside of Quebec. Of course, the eventual participation of Anglophone students and organizers in the strike movement has helped to accelerate the process of expanding the struggle across linguistic boundaries.

A second reason for the slow uptake in Ontario is that at the time the strike broke out, we were engaged in a series of labour and community battles of our own – mostly in Toronto, but also throughout the Southwestern Ontario region. In Toronto the municipal government was going up against labor in a significant way, targeting indoor and outdoor workers and working to pit the public against them. The municipal budget was also being voted on in Toronto, and that budget was seeking to make cuts to many important services across the city, affecting thousands if not millions of people. Caterpillar – the owner of a locomotive assembly plant in London, Ontario – had decided to offer workers a near 50% wage and benefit cut in their recent round of contract negotiations, and on New Years’ Eve unceremoniously locked out workers. Many activists, including student activists, were engaged in both of these struggles, and so our minds were elsewhere.

Finally, and this is pure speculation on my part, we have all witnessed the decline of the university over the years, and the continual defeat of student and even faculty resistance movements. There is almost a mini-industry in protracted internal critique lobbed at “the university” these days, from students and professors alike, not to mention food service, maintenance, and custodial workers. I think that many people in Ontario heard that there would be a strike in Quebec and, unfamiliar with the history of Quebec student militancy, presumed it would go much like the tuition increase protests in England in 2010. Massive crowds, lots of energy, rage in the streets, smashed windows, a recalcitrant government, and ultimately a crushing defeat.

All this being said, there was only, relatively speaking, a minor lag for Ontario students. By the 22nd of March, when the massive protest against tuition strikes hit Montreal’s streets, Ontario students were fully aware of what was happening, if not already in Montreal providing support.

Of course, the desire to expand the struggle is great, but the landscape of the student movement outside of Quebec is very different. First of all, the student movement outside of Quebec could hardly even be said to exist in recent years, prior to the 2012 uprising, and second, we do not possess the institutional structures for organizing and channelling dissent into a collective strike across campuses in the same way that Quebec does. Much of the student movement in Ontario has been centered around the CFS, and other major events in campus organizing have tended to circulate around labour union struggles.

For example, in 2008 there was a long and bitter strike at York University in Toronto – but this was a labour strike. The teaching assistant, graduate assistant, and contract faculty union, which has always been one of Canada’s strongest academic unions and certainly has one of the best contracts in the country, went out against the employer. Lasting 85 days, this strike was the longest faculty strike in Canadian university history. That said, a labour strike is fundamentally different in shape, form, and structure than a student strike. For one thing, as officially recognized workers, members of labour unions have to abide by the Labour Relations Act, and wait to be in a legal strike position. The institutional structures for labour unions and student unions are very different; while labour unions have (some) coordination between locals and larger provincial or national bodies, outside of the reformist CFS, Ontario students have nothing of the sort. This is exactly the kind of coordination, organization, and institutional structure that Quebec students have. Finally, as radical as York University’s union is (Canadian Union of Public Employees 3903), it does not operate on CLASSE’s principles of assemblies or direct democracy. So while the York militants and the York strike serve as an interesting example of campus organizing and pushback in Ontario, structurally this example is fundamentally different than the grassroots student organizing and striking happening in Quebec.

Processes are already underway to create some sort of new model of organizing in Ontario. Meetings have been held to launch the formation of the Ontario Students’ Mobilization Coalition, but this does not seem to extend beyond a Facebook page. The CFS has tried to hold solidarity demonstrations in Toronto, but they have been only marginally successful and low on attendance, primarily because they were organized by the CFS and not by students themselves, and they were not decided upon in a directly democratic manner by any recognized group of students and student activists. The first obstacle to overcome, then, in expanding the student struggle beyond the borders of Quebec, is to begin the difficult process of pulling ourselves away from the top-down, bureaucratic structures that will impede our progress and have proven ineffective in consolidating and acting upon our demands, whatever those may be. Overcoming an adherence to bureaucratic and authoritarian modes of organizing will be difficult, certainly, but steps are already being taken. Students and activists from all across Canada have converged upon Quebec in recent weeks, meeting with CLASSE and ASSE organizers, with student radicals in various universities, colleges, departments, and faculties. Conversations that have started in Quebec have been carried back to our home provinces, and the slow process of instituting truly democratic structures within our universities slowly begins.

Already there are plans for some activists, primarily from the Anglo universities in Montreal (McGill and Concordia) to host a weekend workshop in Ontario to train student activists in the art of pushing for general assemblies at the departmental level, and forming mobilization committees within faculties to obtain broad participation in these assemblies. And activists within departments are already planning to call general assemblies in September, inviting all students out to begin the discussion about what campus mobilizing in Ontario would look like, and whether or not we want to organize towards a strike. Networks are developing, slowly and quietly, outside of official channels, between Quebec students and those of other provinces.

But simultaneously there is a small power struggle underway between these more autonomous activists and the already constituted (and more bureaucratic) organizers of the CFS. Entryist activists in Toronto – namely Fightback – have set themselves the task of reforming the CFS, encouraging the Federation to “organize strikes.” Meanwhile, other activists struggle to set the stage for directly democratic organizing, which may or may not result in a strike. But it is only through the development of an assembly process within university departments and faculties that activists and students can decide how and when to deal with the CFS, and whether or not the Federation should be abandoned altogether. Those who, like me, are grounded in decentralized modes of organizing and struggle, see the method of directly democratic assemblies as a necessary element of this process. Striking the balance between these two constituencies and learning to work together, and occasionally around each other, will be of utmost importance in the coming year.

After all, in Ontario there is much to organize and struggle around. Each year, 5% tuition increases are quietly instituted at the majority of Ontario universities, and each year Ontario students have a harder and harder time finding paid work upon graduation. Displeasure rumbles beneath an otherwise placid surface. The most powerful form of solidarity that we can show to our comrades in Quebec is to learn from them and effectively mobilize our own struggles – to organize ourselves and spread the movement. With new modes of organizing being slowly introduced into Ontario student unions and student federations, the possibility persists that the 2012-2013 school year will see the burgeoning and bursting forth of student discontentment across the entirety of Canada.

We’re living in a revolutionary situation. We could reformulate the classical definition in the following terms: the ruling elites of global capital cannot live as in the past; the workers, the precarious, the students, the poor, the living knowledge refuse to live as in the past. In the global crisis, the transnational struggles – from the North Africa insurrections to the acampadas in Spain or Syntagma Square, from the Chilean university movement to Occupy and the Québec uprising – are composed by the convergence of a downgrading middle class and a proletariat whose poverty is directly proportional to its productivity.

In this context, the university is a key site. Not so much of knowledge production: on the contrary, the more that knowledge production spreads throughout the social factory, the less the university is a privileged site of its transmission – the Ivory Tower is definitely falling down. But the university is a key site of struggles, of the possibilities of territorialization and generalization.

The Edu-Factory Collective has defined this context as “double crisis” – that is, the crisis of the university and the global economic crisis. In fact, it’s impossible to grasp the transformations and struggles of the university without linking them to transformations and struggles of labor and production. So, in a stenographic way, let’s sketch five global trends of the political economy of the university, and its crisis. That is, five battlefields for the transnational struggles.

1. The crisis of the traditional idea of knowledge, which is also the crisis of the leftist mythology of knowledge as a neutral and natural common good to defend from the commodification. In contemporary capitalism, knowledge – a central source and means of production – is not only a commodity, it is a central commodity in capitalist accumulation. In fact, there is no neutrality or naturalness of knowledge: it is always a matter of production, and within capitalist social relations it is a source of exploitation too.

When we speak of living knowledge, we are trying to identify the new composition of living labor, and the socialization of knowledge production. This is an ambivalent process: knowledge is what is produced in common by living labor, and also what capital exploits; it is the possibility of the autonomy of social cooperation, and it is what capital captures and valorizes. In this ambivalent process, knowledge becomes a central battlefield: the common doesn’t exist in nature, but has to be produced.

2. The crisis of disciplines, that is, of the modern organization of knowledge. In the spring of 2009, answering a question posed by the Queen of England, a group of mainstream economists concluded that the discipline of economics had not only been unable to foresee the incipient crisis, but that it was also absolutely unable to understand anything about the economy, and could be held responsible for the crisis itself. The discourse within other disciplines has not been much different: they are increasingly unable to explain what is occurring. The disciplines, as well as the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, represent less and less a form of organization of knowledge, and more and more an artificial measure of the production of living knowledge – in other words, a tool of exploitation. In the current struggles what is at stake is a new and autonomous organization of the knowledge, based on its common production.

3. The crisis of the traditional figure of the student. Since they are producers of knowledge, students are no longer a workforce in apprenticeship, but are immediately workers, and precarious workers. In fact, there is a continuous overlapping between the education market and the labor market (think of “lifelong learning” or the accreditation system). It’s not by coincidence that the issues of labor (precariousness, devaluation of the workforce, impoverishment, crisis, etc.) have been central in student and university struggles in the past few years. And for this reason, the university struggles have a potentiality of political generalization across the whole class composition.

4. The crisis of the modern dialectic between public and private. Let’s consider the corporatization of the university. It doesn’t mean only the entrance of the private funds into public institutions. In the American and Anglo-Saxon models, the definition of corporate universities doesn’t depend so much on their juridical status: they are both public and private, and funded by both state and corporate money. “Corporate university” means that the university itself has to become a corporation – to work on the calculus of cost-benefits, budget rationality, and cuts in workforce costs, to compete in the global education market. It means a university beyond the dialectic between public and private, state and market. From the point of view of struggles, this means that we have nothing to defend: what is at stake is a constituent process of a new university. We call it the university of the common.

5. The crisis of the university as an elevator for the social mobility. Precariousness and indebtedness – as permanent life conditions – have demolished the idea that you go to the university to have a position higher than your background. All in all, this means an irreversible crash of capitalist progressive promises, even in their individualist competitive forms.

In the dismantling of welfare – exemplified by the crazy tuition increases in Québec – debt becomes a perverse way to access social needs (housing, education, healthcare, mobility, etc.). We can speak of a financialization of the university and of life. The system of debt works as a process of canalization of your choices, a disciplinary regime imposed not only on your present but first and foremost as a mortgage on your future. It is a moral regime of individualization: if you are in debt, you are in guilt. But exactly for these reasons, we have to oppose the moralist judgments from the Left about access to the credit system, because the use of credit also highlights the incompressibility of the social needs. The Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and its claim of a sort of collective right to bankruptcy for students, workers, poor, and precarious people, is strategic: on one hand, to re-appropriate the social wealth that we produce in common; on the other hand, to refuse the moral regime of financial capital and its apparatuses of individualization, and to create a collective process. In fact, we can say that the struggle over credit-debt in contemporary capitalism is the equivalent of the struggle over the wage in industrial capitalism.

On these bases, let’s conclude with a couple of the political questions raised by the transnational movements. On one hand, how can we build up a politics of common composition between the downgrading middle class and the proletarians with “no future,” these two elements which are put in common by impoverishment and capitalist expropriation, but are segmented by the apparatuses of financial capitalism (debt, individualization, salary stratification, identity politics, etc.)? This is a central node for the organization of the common.

On the other hand, nowadays the battlefield is not situated in the defense of the public (because it is a privatized public), but in a constituent process beyond the system of political representation. The occupation of the squares, the university, and metropolitan space is not a protest, there are no demands to address to the government. This practice indicates the immediate creation of a new space and time, an embryonic form of organization of the life in common. The question is: how can we build up a collective organization of our autonomous cooperation, and destroy the mechanism of capitalist capture? How can we transform the university into an institution of the common?

If we’re living in a revolutionary situation, we also know that it will not lead in a mechanical movement to the revolution itself, and the “1%” will not fall down if we do not throw them out. This is our task.

Gigi Roggero is a militant in the Edu-Factory collective and UniNomade network. He is also a precarious researcher at the University of Bologna, and the author of The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America (Temple University Press, 2011).

Though the basic course of events in Quebec over the past several months has been widely reported, I want to address two questions that might be of greater interest to those struggling in and around universities elsewhere.

First, I want to look at how the Quebec student strike articulates, on the one hand, the conflict and interplay between the socialist aspirations and corporatist realities of a public university system, and on the other, the pressures put on that system by the dreams of dollar bills floating through the heads of administrators and the “austerian” belt-tightening of governments. These are not simple realities; university administrators hoping to open the floodgates of tuition and donor dollars are contingently allied with government ministers convinced by fear that fiscal austerity is the only way forward. I believe that a Marxist analysis of the university’s place in the capitalist economy will clarify the stakes of the students’ struggle against this contingent alliance of hope and fear within the administrative apparatus.

Second, I want to ask, very briefly, whether this analysis has any traction outside of Quebec. What conditions have produced these 100 days of increasingly widespread and increasingly ambitious clamor? Can these conditions be replicated by others elsewhere?

The analysis of the university must begin by acknowledging that students are not, as such, directly exploited wage-laborers. The students-as-workers analogy – suggested above all by the student strike itself – is, as of yet, only an analogy. However, this acknowledgment does not preclude us from recognizing that students can be usefully thought of as unwaged workers: (a) performing affective and intellectual labor within the university, and (b) producing their own labor-power.

No comprehensive treatment of the affective and intellectual labor performed by students yet exists. Dissecting this part of the question, it seems to me, would require a careful examination of the “imaginary subsumption” of education under the commodity form and capital; prices have been slapped on things that nonetheless have no real value, much as in Marx’s discussion of the “imaginary price” that can be set on honor or conscience.¹ It is noteworthy that, despite the rhetoric flying around about the capitalization and commodification of education, the university is not yet a formally subsumed capitalist enterprise, and does not yet produce standard commodities (goods or services that can be enjoyed upon purchase). Buying a degree or paying for research – the way you might buy a house or pay for a massage – would be an example of corruption, not a normal practice. Even the handful of for-profit universities in the US apparently operate solely by and for the capture of federally guaranteed student loan money, soaking up an indirect subsidy without which no one would be willing to “buy” their “product.” It seems that no one has figured out how to regularly and reliably produce educational services in a profitable manner and on an open market.

Nonetheless, much of what the university does is increasingly thought of by analogy to the capitalist production of commodities. And much of what the university does is also increasingly organized and carried out as if it were the production of commodities. This is a remarkable fact about the current world, that imaginary subsumption leads directly to real subsumption, even in the absence of formal subsumption. Capitalists don’t have to control a branch of human activity in order for those who do control it to try to rationalize production along what are thought to be capitalist lines. This seems to be the tendency in the university: managers are answerable to donors and legislators, not investors, but everyone still tries to import capitalist management techniques and organizational practices. The profit motive is not effective, but everyone is supposed to act as if it were. I think this goes some distance to explaining both the ubiquity of the critical mantra of neoliberalism and the occasionally heard counter-claim that what is hitting universities looks more like market socialism. A model of the market is being consciously applied by administrators, but in the absence of any actual exchange of commodities.

More immediate progress can be made on the second aspect of the question, the university as a site of the production and reproduction of labor-power. From the standpoint of the capitalist firm, higher education fulfills a training and a credentialing function. Universities train workers in the general skills that individual firms have no incentive to provide themselves, lest their carefully and expensively trained workforce be poached by their competitors. The degrees and credentials attested by transcripts and diplomas also sort the labor force into standardized segments, which reduces information asymmetries in hiring. What consequences does this functional operation have for the students?

From the standpoint of the student, insofar as that standpoint is dominated by economic incentives, a seat in a university classroom is an opportunity to access the higher wages that come with the training and credentialing, while expending as little effort as possible. Many proponents of raising tuition here in Quebec seem to take this standpoint at face value, and therefore think of spots in the university as commodities that are best allocated by a market free of price controls. But this elides the difference between the spot in the university and the outcome that is supposed to be a benefit to the student. Paying the fees and having a seat in the class doesn’t get you anything of economic value. Only by doing the work called for by instructors can a student actually obtain the training and credentials that might lead to higher wages. The economic costs borne by students would have to include not only the fees paid, but also the wages foregone by the choice to attend university and, most crucially, the time and effort necessary to do well enough in one’s courses to access the benefits of the credentials. This indicates the degree to which imaginary subsumption has been taking place in higher education. It seems as if tuition fees must be the price of some commodity. But just what this commodity is turns out to be quite hard to pin down, since the fees don’t actually finalize a transaction.²

Moreover, by asking students to pay up front for a benefit that they will only receive, if at all, in the form of future higher wages, the university turns students into speculators on their own labor-power. What will be the likely future returns on present investments in my labor-power? Is debt accrued now a good investment, or a foolish gamble? When tuition is thought of as an investment in human capital, this introduces incentives about which the student movement is extremely wary. As Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, one of the spokespeople for the student union CLASSE, put it: “We are going to inherit very big problems in the next decade, economic, political and environmental. We have to be able to learn freely without the pressure of being indebted. That’s the reason why we’re fighting.”

The red square that is the symbol of the anti-hike movement was adopted in 2005 because students feel that they are “squarely in the red.” While Quebec students shoulder less debt than their counterparts in the US, it seems to be spread around just as widely. In Quebec, as in the US, two-thirds of college seniors graduate with student debts, but in Quebec the average debt load is about $15,000, as compared to the US average of $25,000. Debt is certainly a means of disciplining labor, and, at the same time, a way of blunting social antagonisms. The slogan for ScotiaBank – one of the larger Canadian banks – is “You’re richer than you think,” and social peace seems to rest right now on convincing people that this slogan is actually true. The student strikers here remain unconvinced.

Hence, while the student strikers generally frame the issue in terms of the accessibility of education – as if it were only a quantitative issue of more or less accessible universities – I think it would be better to see the struggle as one over the terms and form of accessibility. Tuition hikes, if they were combined with a robust-enough program of offsets, grants, and loan guarantees, might actually increase accessibility, if this is measured by graduation rates.  But this would also cement the imaginary subsumption of higher education and encourage the model according to which tuition fees are an investment in future earning potential. Rejecting this model need not imply a romanticized depiction of education as “humanization” or the like. Let’s be frank: much of what happens in the university is not worthy of any romance. It is not the inherent dignity of education that is diminished by rising tuition fees and rising student debt. Rather, the high fees and high debt serve to obscure the university’s actual function within the capitalist economy, and to diminish the propensity for revolt amongst its students. The imaginary subsumption of education, supported by higher tuition and increased reliance upon student debt financing, just makes students think they’re actually supposed to be getting something for their money.

This being said, what are the prospects for the current unrest among Quebec’s students to spread? It is undeniable that the protests here are deeply rooted in the specificity of Quebec’s history. This aspect has been intelligently discussed by others, of diverse political persuasions. I will mention only that the interplay between the student movement and Quebec nationalism is undeniable. Especially since the massive march on March 22, Quebec patriotes and souverainistes have been a more visible part of the protests, and references to Quebec’s special system of social welfare protections, and its interest in sustaining a special culture, have been recurrent themes in commentary. This nationalism is an enabling constraint of the movement itself, in the sense that the belief that Quebec is different from the rest of Canada both fuels the protests and keeps them resolutely local in focus. A student movement unencumbered by this nationalism might not attain the breadth and energy of the present movement, either here or elsewhere. But the nationalist elements have an undeniably ugly edge, and they both limit the aspirations of the movement to the welfare of the in-group and reduce the potential for the movement to spread to other parts of Canada.

It is also worth mentioning that the student movement was inestimably buoyed by the stupidity and overreach of the Charest government, which, reacting to the darkest days of the struggle, when the violence was surging and the popularity of the movement plummeting, passed a “special law” – Bill 78 – clamping down on the right to protest and threatening massive fines to student organizations and individuals who encouraged further disruption. Bill 78 galvanized the movement, and gave it a breadth of appeal and a fresh energy that transformed the dynamic overnight. Of course, a movement cannot count upon the stupidity of its opponents.

Nonetheless, the central issues of the student struggle itself – debt and the disciplining of labor – are hardly unique to Quebec. The strength of the movement here has been based in the organizing work done at the ground level, and in the participatory activism of the student associations. One of the student organizers from McGill has written an important text, summarizing some of the lessons of the strike from an organizing perspective. Perhaps the most important reminder contained therein is this: “What’s important is that movements are both internally democratic, and committed to expanding to wider and wider sectors of society. This takes time and doesn’t happen automatically, and you will receive no help from the media or police. Don’t count on receiving it.”

William Clare Roberts teaches political theory at McGill University.

1. I take the notion of “imaginary subsumption” from Patrick Murray’s two-part essay on “Marx’s ‘Truly Social’ Labor Theory of Value,” in Historical Materialism, volumes 6 and 7 (2000). Marx’s discussion of imaginary prices is on p. 197 of the Fowkes translation of Capital (Ch. 3.1).

2. In this case, money seems to be a transaction cost on the side, not the medium of exchange; like the walk to the store, it doesn’t get you anything except the opportunity to do the real business that concerns you.

Spontaneity

Malcolm Harris begins by suggesting that a changed class composition requires a changed form of struggle. He writes:

The same traits that the “knowledge economy” valorizes (spontaneity, ambition, self-organization, quick always-on communication, working in teams) are what have enabled the occupations to take hold in the particular form that they have. “Idle chatter” between workers was a threat on the Fordist production line, now it’s a site of capture. We’re trained to do it. Of course the revolutionary workers went to look for Lenin at the crucial moment – but would we?

The conclusion is that it is precisely those specific traits valorized by a given regime of accumulation that can be strategically turned against that regime. Capital, in other words, provides us with the raw materials that we can then use to destroy it. But having potential weapons to work with and actually overthrowing the capitalist mode of production are two very different things. There is a gap between these moments, and a great leap must be made to turn this potentiality into an actuality. One does not organically grow into the other; something must actually be done to materially transform these traits into points of disruption.

It’s easy to simply perform a theoretical magic trick: to assume that the movement from a potential army created by capital to an actual antagonistic subject confronting capital will just happen on its own. The theoretical hole is thereby plugged by recourse to the conceptual stopgap known as spontaneity. There is no need for a program, for an organization – for anything, really. The masses, especially today, with our particular class composition, marked as they are by “spontaneity, ambition, self-organization, quick always-on communication, working in teams,” will naturally become that political subject since they are already implicitly that very subject.

It is at this point that Todd Chretien makes a decisive contribution to the debate. Looking back on the history of the Bolsheviks, he observes that in 1917, the process that Malcolm describes did not take place spontaneously at all:

As Alexander Rabinowitch demonstrates exhaustively, the Party cannot be reduced simply “leaders” and “masses.” Rather, hundreds, and thousands, of local leaders, workplace militants, soldier and sailor activists, intellectuals and a network of newspapers and shop and trench papers bound the central committee organically to the influx of new members.

In other words, the masses did not naturally come together as an army; nor were they blindly led by a leader. They turned themselves into such an army only by way of innumerable overlapping layers of organization. Some were quite visible, like the Central Committee, while others, like some of the affinity groups, went by entirely unnoticed.

Some of these organizational connections were forged after February, others during the great experiment of 1905, and still others stretched as far back as the 1890s. To use Sergio Bologna’s expression, we can say that “microsystems of struggle,” involving generations of politically mature militants, had already been formed through a series of accumulating cycles of struggles. While we may in retrospect see this whole process – the building of an army against capital – as spontaneous, this is only because the intricate levels of organization that worked to build that army have now been forgotten. This is why careful historical analysis should not be dismissed as pedantry. If we ignore these exacting historical details, we end up forgetting what actually happened, reaching for illusory concepts like spontaneity that misrepresent how a very complex historical process unfolded.

Articulation

Every cycle of struggle invents, or at least attempts to invent, a set of historically appropriate forms of proletarian self-activity. After a messy process of collective experimentation, one of these forms usually emerges as dominant, and thereby provides the framework within which the others develop. In 1917 this was the soviet – nested councils of organized workers, peasants, and soldiers pushing for the self-management of the means of production.

At the most elementary level, the soviet, as the dominant form of proletarian self-activity at that specific historical conjuncture, was essentially a gathering point. In providing a space where different sectors of the working class could come together, it ultimately allowed that class to develop its interests autonomously. The class could discuss, and act upon, its own unique needs, concerns, and desires, transforming the soviet into an alternative space, the prefiguration of a different way of living, and, consequently, the opening through which the proletariat could undertake its exodus from the capital relation itself.

But even all this was insufficient to make a revolution, since the simple appearance of the soviets did not in itself guarantee that the proletariat would confront capital in a directly antagonistic way. The soviets were spaces where the entirety of the working class, from its most advanced elements to its most backwards, could be brought into dialogue. This meant that all workers, regardless of their political positions, could express themselves democratically. This did not mean that they would therefore all be in favor of overthrowing the capitalist mode of production. Many months after February, in fact, most soviets remained opposed to directly taking power from the hands of the Provisional Government. They certainly possessed their fair share of radical elements, but they were also composed of moderates, and even conservatives. Their Executive Committees, really up until the October Revolution itself, were largely dominated by Mensheviks and SRs who represented great sectors of the working masses that were still adamantly opposed to making any kind of revolution against capital.

There is, in other words, a great difference between gathering the working class together and forging that heterogeneous mass into what Malcolm has called an army. Soviets can in fact coexist with capital for a time; they are not, in and of themselves, against capital. Eventually, if the soviets fail to overthrow it, capital will simply incorporate them into its own processes of reordering. This is, in part, what happened in Germany in 1918. Councils appeared all over the country, but despite their emphasis on proletarian autonomy, and the need for self-management of production, they never put the capital relation itself into question.  Failing to directly confront capital, they ended up just managing it better, and with it, their own exploitation.

“Workers’ struggles,” Mario Tronti has written, “determine the course of capitalist development; but capitalist development will use those struggles for its own ends if no organized revolutionary process opens up, capable of changing that balance of forces. It is easy to see this in the case of social struggles in which the entire systemic apparatus of domination repositions itself, reforms, democratizes and stabilizes itself anew.”  So some other element, beyond that of autonomous struggles, had to be present in order to build that army, turn this aggregate mass into a fully antagonistic subject, and directly assault the capitalist mode of production. Without this element, whatever it may be, these struggles would simply end up helping capital improve itself.

At the risk of being grossly misunderstood, I will call this element the party. I take the party to mean that historically appropriate form of communist organization which grows out of a corresponding form of proletarian self-activity in order to help this latter form directly confront the capitalist mode of production. In 1917 this was the Bolshevik Party. While the soviet was the form which allowed the raw material which capital had produced to become a potential army by building its autonomous power, the party was, at least in 1917, the element which allowed this potential army to become an actual, effective, fighting force directed against a clear enemy.

The party accomplished this through what I have called “articulation.” On the one hand, to articulate is to communicate, formulate, or express a given content by moving it to a different register. On the other hand, to articulate is to join separate elements together, and the articulator, in this sense, can be understood as the joint itself. This term describes the activity of the party in at least two ways: the party articulated a content and it articulated a bloc.

The party “articulated” in this first way by expressing, or giving voice to, the perspective of the Russian proletariat. The soviet, as we saw, was the form that the autonomous activity of the proletariat assumed at that specific historical conjuncture. But precisely because of this, because it was just a form, the soviet did not necessarily carry its own specific content. That content had to be developed, “worked up,” through the intervention of some other element. It was the party, as that other element, that developed the content of the revolutionary project in 1917.

The party “articulated” in a second way by joining the heterogeneous, and often hostile, elements that made up the broad working classes into a single antagonistic subject. The soviets might have brought these masses together, but there was no guarantee of this interaction becoming a fusion, and without a joining element these workers might have remained separate even in their unity. It is the party that bonded them together by articulating them into a bloc. In Russia, in 1917, this meant linking the proletariat to the other classes of Russian society – most importantly, the poor peasantry. Let’s not forget that the peasants and workers actually had their own separate soviets, their own interests, and their own needs. Their “coming-together” could never have been a spontaneous act. It was the crucial intervention of the party that allowed this alliance to come about by acting as a binding element. It was the Bolsheviks who tried to help the class overcome divisions within itself as well as between it and other potentially revolutionary laboring classes.

It should be apparent that these two aspects, articulation as formulation and articulation as joining, were actually closely related. Clarifying the content of the most militant layer of the working masses actually helped draw this mass together into a single subject; and drawing this mass together actually helped clarify the content of its most radical elements. The party, at least in Russia 1917, was that element indispensable to creating an antagonistic subject with a clear content directly opposed to capital.

Theory

One of the principal ways in which the party advanced a revolutionary content was through the theorization of programs. The party writes a program in order to clarify the content of the struggles of the working class; and it is this program that the party can use to unify the different segments of the working masses. There are at least two different kinds of program. There are those carefully detailed pieces of theoretical writing that few will ever see but which actually work to clarify matters within the party itself; and there are those broad slogans that work to amalgamate different social layers into a single revolutionary bloc. State and Revolution was a program of the first type; “Land, Bread, and Peace” was a program of the second. In between these two primary categories were moments of mediation. All were products of theory.

Indeed, among other things, the party, or at least a specific layer within it, did theory, of which there were at least two principal functions. The first function was to allow the party to articulate the communist content that could not, as I have already argued above, emerge spontaneously from the soviets. It is crucial to emphasize the actual source of this content. The party did not, as Lenin once seemed to suggest, impose its content onto the proletariat from without; it actually found the outlines of this content already present in the autonomous struggles of the proletariat itself, which were themselves already endowed with political knowledge. This content, then, was not discovered through sequestered scholarship but through a careful observation of the political behaviour of the class. It was the working class itself, and especially its most advanced elements, that produced the rudiments of some system of political content in its struggles. The task of the Bolshevik party was to access the viewpoint of that class in order to extract that implicit content. Theory worked to render this content explicit, to clarify it, deepen it, and then return it to the working class itself in a way that could advance its struggles. The working class, through its continued struggles, developed this content further, which was then rearticulated by the party, and once more returned to the class. Theory was therefore not a plan that somehow preceded the activity of the working class in order to make it better; it did not solve problems, it did not engineer answers, and it did not guide the working class to some predetermined telos.

The second function of theory was to help the Russian proletariat break with the capitalist state by combatting it at the level of ideology. The autonomous struggles of the proletariat may coexist with the capitalist state for a period of time, which happened in 1917 between the soviets the Provisional Government. This highly unstable situation, at one point called “dual power,” would have likely ended with the capitalist state successfully restructuring workers’ struggles, had those struggles not taken the initiative by violently breaking with the state. This break, as I have already tried to argue, was not a natural consequence of those struggles, since there was nothing ineluctably driving the soviet towards such a decisive rupture. It had to be made.

This rupture had to occur at several points because the capitalist state itself operated – and continues to operate – at the intersection of a number of levels. One of these, and often the most primary, was the ideological terrain, even in 1917. Since the capitalist state operated in large part within ideological apparatuses, the rupture with the state also had to be, at least in part, a consequence of a protracted struggle on the field of ideology. Theory was the form that class struggle assumed on this terrain. Its task was to assist the proletariat in breaking with the ideological apparatuses that worked to reproduce the capitalist state, which it did by elaborating clear “lines of demarcation,” separating the proletariat from capitalist ideology, and giving it an open space within which to develop. The ultimate aim, of course, was to take self-activity out of the world of “dual power,” the coexistence of state and soviet, and into antagonistic subjectivity.

These twin functions of theory – elaborating a content and fighting the state – should be seen as two aspects of the same process. That is, there can be no struggle against the capitalist state – and the ideological struggle is an element of this – except insofar as it is constituted by the autonomous struggles of the proletariat. So the articulation of these struggles is a struggle against the state: an autonomous struggle takes shape as a struggle against the state when it is articulated with the ideological struggle. If that autonomous struggle is not articulated with the ideological struggle, or does not bind with the elaboration of theory, then it will neither develop an explicitly communist content nor directly confront the state as an antagonistic subject. It will remain within the context of “dual power,” without ever pushing beyond it, eventually being consumed by the state. Theory must intervene to assist the proletariat in making this break.

Part of the importance of State and Revolution is that it serves as an example of this kind of intervention. Lenin’s piece was a product of theory in both senses. On the one hand, it tried to articulate the political content implicit in the proletarian struggles that culminated in the July Days in a way that deepened this content; on the other hand, it tried to struggle against the ideological apparatuses within which the Russian state operated by drawing a clear “dividing-line,” the phrase Lenin himself used to understand the object of theoretical work, within the broader terrain of ideology. This line could never have been drawn had it not first been informed by the political content thrown up by the autonomous struggles of the proletariat; and this implicit content would have remained merely rudimentary had it not been articulated with an ideological struggle capable of producing such a sharp break. The anti-state program set out in State and Revolution was itself a joining element.

Division of Labor

Pham Binh raises an important question when he reviews the history of the Russian Revolution:

The notion that Lenin articulated at the level of theory the “actuality of revolution” and made explicit what was implicit in the struggles of the day smacks of the division between mental and manual labor, between philosophy and action, between theory and practice, between intellectuals and workers, between thinking and doing.

In a certain sense, Binh is correct to note that this division is inherent to my understanding of Lenin’s role, and by implication, in my understanding of the Russian Revolutionary process itself. I must admit that I do believe there was some division of labor within the movement. But I think this was precisely because capital itself – the productive process and its accompanying system of social classification – necessarily generates such a division of labor. Capital always divides the working class into various layers, promotes different skills, and places unequal emphasis on different sectors of production. This is no less true today than during Lenin’s time.

If we follow Malcolm’s observation that we fight capital by using it against itself, but turning its attributes into weaknesses, then it must follow that our army will bear the marks of the enemy who bequeathed it to us in the first place. This means that the division of labor will still be with us. So although one of our principal aims will be to definitively abolish the division of labor, it is clear that our struggles against it will nonetheless have to take place through it, since our only option is to use this division of labor against capitalism. To simply wish it away all at once would be utterly utopian.

All this means is that workers will work differently, struggle differently, and participate in any kind of movement differently; they will play different roles in the totality of the revolutionary process. It is only natural that some, perhaps those employed more predominantly in the “knowledge economy” of which Malcolm speaks, will be more involved in the writing of theory, while others, employed in different sectors, will be involved in different kinds of equally important subversive activities. To turn all workers into theorists would not only be poor strategy, it would frankly be impossible. Each layer of the working class should autonomously develop strategies that will work to amplify their own particular strengths. In 1917, it was up to the Bolshevik party, which was quickly being supported by a number of different layers, to coordinate these struggles at different levels.

In 1917 the party was composed of multiple proletarian layers; it included both “intellectual workers,” or “intellectuals,” who principally wrote theory, as well as other “non-intellectual workers,” who principally engaged in other activities. But just because one group of workers happened to write theory, or attempted to articulate the general interests of their entire class, did not necessarily mean that this layer would have inevitably dominated all the others by elevating its own tasks to the summit of some formal hierarchy. On the contrary, while these different layers certainly pursued different tasks, the party, as the site of the encounter between different segments of working masses, was precisely that which provided the structure within which these different layers can pursue their specialized activities in a way that progressively destroys the very division of labor that undergirds them, thereby attacking the hierarchy at its roots. Even Lenin, who argued so forcefully for a specialization of tasks, saw as early as 1902 that one of the primary functions of the party was to serve as the place where “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals, not to speak of distinctions of trade and profession in both categories, must be effaced.” The party was to be a machine where intellectuals were to abolish themselves.

One of the ways the division of labor is subverted is the explicit transformation of theory into a process, rather than the privileged activity of some sequestered social group. Although it was certainly “knowledge workers,” or the former “intelligentsia” that actually wrote theory in 1917, the party made theory a collective process in which these intellectuals were submitted to the initiative of the working class. During the Revolution the party became something of a transmission belt, a kind of “hyphen” between those who wrote theory and those who did not: proletarian experiences would go to the militant theorists, militant theories based on those experiences would go back to the broader working class through the party, these newly enriched proletarian experiences would return once again to the militant theorists, and so on. Cornelius Castoriadis, who would later try to rethink such a process for his own time, put it this way: “a revolutionary puts before workers ideas that allow them to organize and clarify their experience – and, when these workers use these ideas to go further, to give rise to new, positive contents of the struggle, and eventually to ‘educate the educator.’”

So while it may appear that  theory originated with the intelligentsia, it was actually constituted by the workers themselves. Or better yet, it was really a set of practices collectively advanced by different layers of the party. The party, which was composed of both “intellectuals” and “workers,” was what allowed these various layers to encounter each other in the first place, and therefore stood as that circuit linking the different sectors of the militant working class together. It is only when that fluid circuit slowly eating away at the division of labor becomes ossified, or just breaks down altogether, that the communication within the class became unilateral rather than reciprocal. This took place after 1917; once this happens, the party either becomes a bureaucratized institution, as it did later in Russia, or these different workers, and especially “intellectual workers” and “non-intellectual workers,” just split off and go their own way. Intellectual workers would just pursue their own goals, producing isolated fragments of “knowledge” after lengthy rumination; and non-intellectual workers would be left without a theoretical language to articulate the political content of their struggle, thereby making it impossible for them to turn the traits of capital into weaknesses, and to abolish it altogether.

This division of labor, then, cannot be hurriedly tossed out just because we object to it at the level of moral principles. Nor can we just ignore it, since that would actually lead it to totally dominate our struggles, ultimately producing a very destructive kind of vanguardism. We can already observe this risk in Malcolm’s argument. By suggesting that the necessary form of political struggle today is based in the sensibilities of “knowledge work,” Malcolm ends up excluding other kinds of workers from politics. Knowledge workers like Malcolm are a very small percentage of the world’s population; and while processes of production across industries and countries are affected by new technologies, there are still many workers with dramatically different forms of life. The American working class, for instance, includes janitors from El Salvador and auto workers in Tennessee; and the toiling masses of the world include farmers and slum-dwellers. They have their own demands and they will put forth their own forms of struggle; just because we’re knowledge workers doesn’t mean we should know what they should do.

Lenin

Malcolm asks if we, like the revolutionary workers of the July Days, would go look for Lenin “at the crucial moment.” He implies that we would not. But we should first ask what the Russian workers were looking for when they went looking for Lenin. In the history I traced in my article, Lenin must be understood as a kind of metonym for the party – which is, as I have argued above, that binding element which simultaneously articulates a content and a bloc. Our task will be to invent our own historically appropriate Lenin; not as an individual, but as an articulating function, as an historically appropriate form of organization capable of building our technical class composition into a political one in direct confrontation with capital. So I agree with Malcolm that we do not have a party; but I disagree that we will not need one. The function that a party realizes is still needed today: we still need, despite all the differences between now and 1917, to find some form to bind the various layers of today’s proletariat into an antagonistic subject directly opposed to the capitalist mode of production.

While Todd also argues for the necessity of the party, I part ways with him on this question. If I understand Todd correctly, his analysis turns the binding element into something of an historical invariant. He seems to suggest that the binding element today must still be some kind of variation on the one first developed by Lenin in 1902. So there are two diametrically opposed positions in play. Malcolm thinks we have no need for a binding element, and that everything will come about organically because the present is totally disconnected from the past; hence the value of blissful ignorance regarding past works. Todd feels that we don’t need to reinvent a new binding element, and because our moment is still very similar to the past, we only need to modify a form of organization that has been handed down to us; as a direct consequence, there is great value in sticking as closely as possible to the works of the past.

This is precisely why he continues to insist that Lenin did not distort Marx and Engels. But Lenin, to be sure, distorted both facts and interpretations. On the one hand, he implies in the first chapter that Engels himself coined the crucial concept “special bodies of armed men.” But as Todd himself noted during his talk, there is no mention of this term in either Marx or Engels. I would characterize this as a distortion of facts. On the other hand, Lenin reads Engels’ famous passage on the “withering away of the state,” for example, as an affirmation of his own belief in the absolute necessity of violent revolution. He writes, “As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here of the proletariat revolution ‘abolishing’ the bourgeois state, while the words about the state withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian state after the socialist revolution. According to Engels, the bourgeois state does not ‘wither away’, but is ‘abolished’ by the proletariat in the course of the revolution. What withers away after this revolution is the proletarian state or semi-state.” This is clearly a distortion of interpretation. Engels may not have meant what the revisionists had thought, but he certainly did not mean what Lenin asserts here. As Rustam Singh has remarked, “A careful reading of Engels’ argument as quoted by Lenin reveals that even this is not an exactly correct interpretation of what Engels says.”

So on the one hand Lenin distorted Marx and Engels, and on the other he used this distortion to transform the theory in response to specific historical conditions. The first is a question for scholars; to show that Lenin was not simply repeating invariant doctrine, I underlined this in my article. The second is a question for revolutionaries; our understanding of Lenin’s relation to Marx and Engels directly informs how we in the present might engage with the past. I think it’s clear that far from undertaking an objective exegesis, Lenin was trying to extract out of Marx and Engels that which would be most relevant to making the revolution in his own present. This is why he reads Engel’s famous passage in a way that strongly advocates revolution. I have little problem with this kind of distortion. In fact, all of us are always distorting the theorists of the past in this way, Lenin included, because this is precisely what we must do in order to make them speak to the conditions of the present.

The danger in Todd’s position is that it risks freezing historical texts in a way that would actually cut them off from the present. To read them by the letter, which in any case is close to impossible since the mere fact that we are reading past texts from a new vantage point means that we will distort them, would be to reduce their usefulness today. Insisting on purity prevents us from thinking historically. We have to embrace Lenin’s distortions of Marx, just as we must embrace our distortions of every other thinker that came before us, since this is the only way to adapt them to our own needs.

Binh adds some clarity to the historical situation but great confusion to the contemporary one. On the one hand he compares Occupy to the “‘Leninist’ vision of a vanguard party.” On the other hand he writes that “the soviets were profoundly horizontal and far more democratic and inclusive than our General Assemblies.” In other words, if I understand Binh correctly, Occupy is simultaneously the party and the soviet; it is therefore both the form of proletarian self-activity appropriate for our own time as well as the form of communist organization necessary for overthrowing capitalism. If this is the case, a rather convoluted course of reasoning has caused time and space to unravel. Malcolm suggested that the rise of knowledge workers, marked as they are by spontaneity, ambition, and “quick always-on communication,” has actually fused the party and the soviet into the unitary form of Occupy. Binh now seems to suggest, by way of some unclear analogies, that this was always the case, even in 1917, thereby collapsing Malcolm’s historical argument about class composition into an invariant model – a model which impossibly assumes that the characteristics of knowledge work were hegemonic nearly a century ago. Now all we are left with is a vague model that hasn’t changed from the Russian Revolution to Occupy.

In my reading of the present situation, Occupy, broadly defined, is not at all a kind of party, vanguardist or otherwise, but autonomous proletarian activity in search of a more stable form. It has thus far experimented with the occupation of public spaces, then private ones, and is now considering other possible forms. It is, if anything, the embryo of some form of soviet power for our own time. But as for a party – defined broadly as an articulator – we have yet to invent one. Some, like Malcolm, seem to suggest that our historical conjuncture is so different that we no longer have a need for such a mediating moment, and therefore ignore this problem altogether; others, like Todd, suggest that organizational form is needed, and it should in many ways pattern itself on the one invented in a prior cycle of struggle; still others, like Binh, are very unclear about the whole question.

What form this mediating organization will take, I do not know, and in fact cannot know. It will only be discovered through collective experimentation, not through careful rumination. But looking at the past, and specifically at 1917, can help us understand what the party really was in a previous conjuncture, why it was called into being in the first place, and what it set out to do. It seems to me that there are a great many differences between our moment and Lenin’s – we are no longer dealing, for example, with a traditional intelligentsia, a newly emerging industrial working class, a large peasantry, or a Provisional Government – but many of the circumstances that forced those communists to make a party continue to persist. We still need some element to help bind the disparate layers of the working class together into a single bloc; anyone who has been to any major Occupy event knows how quickly our encounters fade away. We still need some element to help elaborate an explicit anti-capitalist content; anyone who has been around Occupy knows that it will never spontaneously do this on its own, since the movement is composed of everyone from liberals to libertarians, communists to conservatives. We don’t have to call it a party. In fact, once we have invented a new form for this articulating function, perhaps we can leave the whole debate on the party behind.

Salar Mohandesi is an editor of Viewpoint.

Illustration by Millen Belay.

“Young people will have to get used to the idea of not having a fixed job for life… what monotony! It is much nicer to change and accept new challenges.”
– Mario Monti, Italian Prime Minister

“The Future is already here; It’s just unevenly distributed.”
– William Gibson

I

After the defeat and seeming disappearance of the student movement in the UK, the developing counter-revolution in North Africa, and the continued absence of a mass movement with any political traction in Europe, the future is looking less inviting than it did a year ago. The articles and communiqués written then have already acquired a bittersweet air of nostalgia. Yet just as we struggle to come to terms with our political slippage, so to do the administrators of capital. Although austerity politics are clearly failing to impress the credit ratings agencies, let alone kick-start a new round of growth, the ideas of the host of analysts, commentators, and academics lining up to plug some kind of “Plan B” to the crisis sound equally hollow. A quiet terror appears to be slipping over a Europe of financial administrators and technocrats haunted by visions of  riot and stagnation. It is hard for anyone to believe that an economic recovery might entail even a return to the living standards we once knew, let alone beyond that. We may look back on the living standards of the global North in the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s – maintained, unevenly, via access to debt, into the 2000s – as an historic blip or anomaly, rather than a minimum standard to be surpassed. The decoupling, during the neoliberal era, of the accumulation of capital and the living standards of the majority of the society that produces this accumulation, appears to be accelerating, and increasingly feels irreversible. The view from the global North is a bleak one.

The future is over. This is the central, bold, and stark claim that Franco “Bifo” Berardi makes in his latest book After the Future. Time will continue onwards, but our collective and personal belief in a better future appears to have collapsed. This is a claim made all the more terrifying by its instinctual resonance. After several more years of austerity and crisis, the Invisible Committee’s rather grandiose claim that “everyone agrees that things can only get worse” appears to be meeting history and moving from the realm of polemical theory to common sense. The modernist dream of unending development has shattered. While the markets remain uncertain of future growth prospects and state administrators vacillate between austerity and neo-Keynesianism, the rest of society seems to be in a state of paralysis,  punctuated by outbursts of disorganized rage, such as the riots witnessed in various British cities last summer. Bifo claims we are experiencing the rapid decomposition of the European working class through the intensification of precarity, widespread unemployment, and widespread depression. Hyper-exploitation, hyper-tension and the receding hope of a modest pension are the only things left for those still working in the Prozac and caffeine-fuelled economy of the twenty-first century.

II

Bifo’s argument traces the mutating forms that the idea of the future has taken throughout the twentieth century. In order to outline the forms which collective visions of the future have taken one must interrogate the material conditions of the groups producing them. The rise of modernity, Berardi argues, represents a historic break, one where Christian conceptions of progress and time become inverted; rather than living in the ruins of Eve waiting for the rapture, modernity promised the possibility of perpetual improvement in the here and now. Communists, Social-Democrats and Fascists could all agree that heaven could, and would, be built on Earth with human hands. The politics of the future, Bifo is keen to argue, are a distinctly material phenomenon; political struggles, cultural currents and technological developments all influence our ideas of what a future society might look like. These visions reflect the hopes, fears and desires of those developing them. Bifo sets out to trace a path through the twentieth century idea of the future via an analysis of some of its key cultural movements.

For the Italian futurists, where Bifo’s analysis begins, this fusion of politics and technology saw its apex in mechanised “workshops beneath… violent electric moons”. The violence of modernity was glorified and the spread of new technologies such as the auto-mobile and machine tools was seen as the necessary harbinger of a better, more liberated world. This link between technologies and political imaginaries is echoed by what Bifo sees as the last utopian philosophy of the century, the “Wired ideology”. This ideology saw a potential emancipation of humanity via the new technologies and potentials of the internet. This philosophy argued that the horizontal, open and collaborative potential of the internet was destined to unlock the potential of humanity and usher in a new phase of wealth and prosperity. Although not an explicitly antagonistic philosophy, echoes of the Wired analysis of the internet can be seen in the work of Paul Mason and the politics of groups such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous as well as journalists, academics and activists infatuated with the power of Twitter and Facebook as catalyst for revolution.

However, Bifo is not an optimist when it comes to technology. The intertwined tale that is being told is that of the integration of these new technologies within the processes of discipline and production. Whilst the motor engine and the internet both promised a world of reduced work hours and increasing luxury the opposite has been the case. New technologies and organisational techniques have been used in turn to discipline people into the rhythm of the factory and then to fracture this collective body into the manageable fragments needed in today’s ‘flexible and innovative’ economy. The technologies discussed are revealed as intrinsically social, capable of being put to work by various different sections of society. Bifo’s analysis traces the links between artistic and cultural movements such as the proto-fascist futurists and the liberal dreamers of the internet that saw a brighter future ushered in through human ingenuity embodied in technological developments and the implementation of these technologies within the framework of capitalist development.

III

After tracing the history of the idea of the future, Bifo devotes another chapter to the present conjuncture, returning to a core concern within his work: the interplay between technology and subjectivity within capitalism. The role of information technology is central to the analysis put forward. Compared to the optimistic immanence of Hardt and Negri, or the liberatory affirmation of Paul Mason, Bifo’s analysis of the impact of IT systems on the social body is far less cheerful. Bifo sees these technologies as deeply invested within processes of capital accumulation and state discipline; a specific form of capitalism which Bifo labels “semio-capital” has emerged that puts our “neurophysical energies to work and submits them to the speed of electronic machinery.” IT technology has helped spread precarious work conditions, and mobilizes our thoughts, dreams and desires (Marx’s “general intellect”) for capital accumulation. Widespread depression is the response to this mismatch between cyberspace and cybertime, as the social body struggles to cope with the flows of information and emotional affects we encounter in our daily lives.

This fracturing of the social body has had an effect on our ability to organise politically. The potential for solidarity in the workplace and the rest of our lives has been radically reduced. Semiocapital produces subjects incapable of solidarity, or of composing into a class for itself. Outbursts of social rage such as the London riots or the student protests of winter 2010-2011 are more likely than long-term antagonistic movements. Indeed, we only need to look at the difficulty faced by those involved in the Occupy moment, as they attempt to cohere into a political movement capable of confronting the state and capital. These developments within contemporary capitalism, Bifo argues, are starting to foreclose the possibility of collective politics with traction in the world.

Bifo’s vision is bleak. Many economists are now willing to admit that austerity politics are failing, while Keynesianism or the continued belief in the promises of the information economy seem equally dysfunctional. Instead of the return of growth and steadily improving living conditions, Bifo foresees an economic recovery in which growth resumes with no concurrent social distribution. A future of increasingly predatory finance capital, repressed surplus populations, militarised green zones, universal precarity, and widespread depression is already here. “Recovery,” for most of us, means “a new round of social devastation.” The crisis of political legitimacy is also the universalizing of a bitter cynicism: only 42% of people in the UK say they are interested in politics. The political is dead, the post-political appears as permanent.

IV

What does the end of the future mean for radical politics? It is at this point that Bifo’s argument becomes problematic. In an argument that intersects with groups such as Tiqqun, Bifo argues that we must see “Communism as a necessity in the collapse of capital.” Distant from the voluntarism of previous forms of Communist politics, this “post-growth Communism” will be best understood as a necessary response to capital’s refusal of labour. Cut adrift from the “opportunity” to work, with welfare systems dismantled, Bifo argues that we will witness the proliferation of zones of autonomy responding to the needs of an increasingly precarious and superfluous social body. Communist politics will emerge from an exodus, both voluntary and compulsory, from a stagnating and increasingly predatory state-capital nexus. This exodus is both social, in the development of an alternative infrastructure, and personal, in the withdrawal from the hyper-stimulation of the semiotic economy. Bifo abandons hope in collective contestation at the level of the political.

Bifo’s politics could be described as a kind of “lifeboat communism.” As the crisis ripples, mutates, and deepens, Bifo sees the role of communism as the creation of spaces of solidarity to blunt the worst effects of the crisis of social reproduction. Gone is the demand for a better world for all, the liberation of our collective social wealth, or the unlocking of the social potentials of technology. Rather, Bifo’s politics are based around insulating a necessarily small portion of society from the dictates of capital. By withdrawing from the political sphere, we accept the likelihood of losing the final scraps of the welfare state and concede the terrain of the political to zombie politics and predatory capital. Rather than seeking new forms of organization to re-enter the political stage, Bifo seems to suggest that we seek shelter beneath it as best we can.

This shying away from the political stage is the weakness at the heart of the book. Recent eruptions of political struggle have captured the collectiveimagination because they demonstrate that political contestation is still possible today, in spite of the obstacles Bifo has described. The Occupy movement and the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have resonated with all those who still have hope in collective struggle. Although these movements have encountered varying problems, to which we must develop solutions, they dispel the idea of an unchangeable present. The current blockages to successful organising have been shown to be strategic and tactical, not terminal. Misdiagnosing the current inertia of post-political public life as a terminal condition leads the left towards an evacuation of the political, while we should instead reassert its primacy.  If we abandon any hope of fighting in, against, and beyond the existing architecture of the state and capital, and instead seek refuge in small communes, and go-slow practices, we abandon all real hope of a generalized, or generalizable, emancipatory politics. Although Bifo’s analysis of the difficulties of collective action resonates with all of us who have attempted to organize struggles in the past few decades, the proposal for a simple withdrawal from capitalism is a bleak politics indeed – which, at its most optimistic, calls for an orderly default by portions of the proletariat. The horizons of communist politics appear much narrower when capitalism is no longer seen as the repository of a vast store of social wealth awaiting collective redistribution, but rather redefined as an unassailable site of universal and permanent austerity combined with widening social redundancy.

It is hard to imagine a network of self-organized projects and systems supporting the majority of the population in the context of an increasingly predatory capitalism. Emerging from the and isolated leftist scenes, this lifeboat communism will by its very nature have a limited carrying capacity, as the anarchist experience in post-Katrina New Orleans attests. The lifeboats that Bifo calls for will undoubtedly be too small and makeshift to harbor us all.

The crisis is twofold. It is a crisis of capitalist profitability, and of an increasingly precarious and surplus global proletariat whose reproduction (as both labour and body) is under threat. It is unlikely that the proliferation of communes, squats, food co-ops, file sharers, urban gardeners, and voluntary health services will bring forth a new, better world. But while the current seemingly post-political situation throws up massive obstacles to organizing, there is still a potential for collective contestation. The capitalist state, racked by its own legitimacy crisis and weekly political scandals, is more vulnerable than it appears. We need only recall the period of unexpected hope built by students in Britain, occupiers in Oakland, and vast swathes of North Africa and the Middle East during the past two years. These movements were mobilised through the betrayal of a vision of the future – but alongside their rage, they put forth a hope which can guide our politics.

The task at hand is to unlearn old behaviour and to forge new tactical and organisational weapons for struggle. Bifo’s contribution is a timely and challenging one, but it ultimately leads us back towards a DIY culture and “outreach” politics. As our movements come to terms with these limits, we must also hold onto the belief that luxury for all is possible. The social potential of unfilled blocks of flats, emerging technologies like 3D-printing, and the desires of the millions of underemployed, should remind us of this. This will not be possible without a collective struggle against the state and the demands of capital, one which simultaneously defends what we have and attempts to move beyond it.

A retreat to lifeboat politics is both premature and a self-fulfilling prophecy. While Bifo correctly analyses the current conjuncture – clearly identifying the post-political state, the weakness of the Left, the crisis of profitability and new forms of labour, and their impact on the subject – his political prescriptions lead us in the wrong direction. Just as Bifo does, we place the struggle against work at the center; but we can also seek to liberate social wealth, rather than insulate a lucky few from the ravages of capital. Rather than “No Future,” we must raise a different banner: “The future’s here, it just needs reorganizing.”

Ben Lear is an underemployed researcher living in Manchester, UK. He is an editor of Shift Magazine, and has recently co-authored an article in Occupy Everything! Reflections on Why it’s Kicking off Everywhere. He is a member of Plan C.