PRIMA PORTA

“POWER TO THE SISTERS, AND THEREFORE THE CLASS”—NOTES ON SELMA JAMES

What follows are notes written on the occasion of Selma James’s recent visit to Occupy Philly, March 7-8, 2012. A longer piece on the theme of autonomy and social reproduction is forthcoming in the next n+1 Occupy Gazette.

It is Wednesday evening, and I am sitting with several dozen dissidents in the packed main room of the Lancaster Ave Autonomous Zone (LAVA), a West Philly meeting-place for local radicals. Tonight’s speaker is Selma James, a lifelong activist and author best known for having founded the Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, who has come over from London to address the Occupy movement face to face—and to promote a new book of mostly old writings, Sex, Race, and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).

James’s presentation begins on a self-effacing note: “I am not an author. An author is somebody who sets out to write, and I never set out to write. I set out to organize.” This might seem a strange preface for a book tour event, but resistance to authorship has long been a red thread in James’s career. Take, for example, the opening lines of her explosive letter to the National Conference of Women in Manchester, written in March, 1972: “It is impossible any longer to sit in the protection of a group and see the potential of the movement squandered. This was hastily written, though it represents many years’ consideration. It is not meant to be the final word, not even of its author.” These caveats are the signs of a writer repulsed by the egotism of writing, and by all egotism: what kills movements, James argues, is the vaunting of personal ambition over the collective interest. To make one’s voice an asset rather than a hindrance, it must be the urgency of the moment that spurs the pen, as in: This, I couldn’t not write, the stakes were too high.

The stakes certainly seemed high Wednesday evening. The winter months had taken their toll on the Occupy movement, drawing out divisions to the point of outright conflict—between reformists and revolutionaries, socialists and anarchists, all the familiar shades of internecine dispute. James’s visit was intended to energize a different sort of debate, one centered on women, their enemies and allies; to that end, she would preside over a special women-led general assembly the following night in celebration of International Women’s Day. Whereas the session at LAVA stuck mostly to matters of theory, Thursday’s GA would address the role of women in Occupy and in the radical milieu more broadly, a topic on which James has long been an authority. Her 1972 pamphlet, co-authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, argues that feminism and anti-capitalism cannot be considered as separate struggles; to destroy capitalism means overcoming the economic domination of women in all spheres, even in the trade unions and other enclaves of working-class power. (Not incidentally, The Power of Women was read collectively by a group of occupiers in the first weeks of the Philly encampment.)

The argument sketched out by James and Dalla Costa begins by exposing a blind spot in Marx’s analysis of capitalism: the domestic sphere and the unpaid work of housewives. Supporting the above-ground system of production and waged labor is, they suggest, a sub-level of social reproduction, wherein care-taking, cooking, cleaning, and sexual service are combined to produce and maintain the worker as a creature fit to work. After all, it is only in the mists of fantasy (implicitly quite popular, nonetheless) that the workingman arrives self-constituted at the factory gates; in reality, he had always been dependent on the labor of women, whether mothers or wives. This dependence holds in the workplace as well: When women stay at home, their toil is free—it isn’t even acknowledged as labor; but when they seek an escape-route from domestic servitude in the workplace, the fact of their being paid less than men is frequently used as a bargaining chip to keep men’s salaries artificially low. One way or the other, James and Dalla Costa argue, capitalism divides the working class against itself, separating women from men and the reproduction of society from the production and exchange of commodities.

This critique wasn’t itself unusual: two years earlier Shulamith Firestone had proposed a notion of “sex class” that was tied to reproductive labor. But controversy arose when The Power of Women led to the Wages for Housework campaign, which James launched in 1972 alongside a cadre of militant feminists. Its demands were enumerated in no uncertain terms:

WE DEMAND A GUARANTEED INCOME FOR WOMEN AND FOR MEN WORKING OR NOT WORKING, MARRIED OR NOT. If we raise kids, we have a right to a living wage. The ruling class has glorified motherhood only when there is a pay packet to support it. We work for the capitalist class. Let them pay us, or else we can go to the factories and offices and put our children in their father’s laps. Let’s see if they can make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time. WE DEMAND WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK. All housekeepers are entitled to wages (men too).

For many organizers and activists, the demand of “wages for housework” seemed a bewildering step for a feminist to take, if not outright regressive. James seemed to be advocating housework and domesticity at exactly the moment when women were poised to reject patriarchal confinement. As Jenny Turner’s recent article on feminism in the London Review of Books recalls—and as a lengthy reply by Beatrix Campbell confirms—Wages for Housework provoked a rare sort of indignation within feminism, particularly in the UK, prompting accusations such as the one Campbell voices: that Wages for Housework failed to challenge “the patriarchal political economy, or the domestic division of labour, or men. Far from being an ‘intellectually ambitious attempt to synthesize Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism,’ its theory was crude and its practice toxic.” James’s new book gives a detailed account of the dispute, describing the backlash against her publication of the Manchester letter, which bore the title “Women, the Unions and Work, Or… What is Not to be Done”:

Almost every Left organization or party mobilized against it, and at the next national women’s conference in London some months later, there were large banners which said, “A reply to Selma James”—except one which said, “A reply to the reactionary Selma James.” Each had a publication with a major article devoted to attacking this terrible thing I had done: I had dared to be critical of the unions and, on top of that, demanded wages for housework which would discourage women from going out to work, so they could have as high a consciousness as men.

But these complaints did not resurface during the two days of James’s visit to Philadelphia. Why this is so, and why James’s work makes sense in the context of Occupy, is a question well worth pondering. One answer surely lies in the profound transformation the welfare state has undergone in the era of neoliberalism. For if there is any one thread that holds together the weave of Occupy’s DNA, it is that the decades-long strangulation of the public sector has made life less and less livable for more and more people. To fight under the banner  of Wages for Housework today is to struggle along a broad front, much broader than in the early 1970s when the movement was conceived. James and her comrades aimed to deepen the welfarist impulses of the state, to bring it to its absolute limits—if the state would not cross the boundary, then the implicit answer was a revolution that would. Now, with austerity as the watchword, “wages for housework” takes on a different cast: a defense of welfare as a defense of women. This was James’s most urgent message to the audience on Thursday: that the attack on welfare in the US, the UK, and around the world, has a direct impact on women, and on all who have chosen—for whatever reason—not to enter the workforce, or for whom there are no longer jobs available.

Those who recall James’s activism of the 1970s might be surprised to find the platform of Wages for Housework translated, and even transformed, into a relatively simple argument for social welfare. In one sense, this shift indicates how much ground has been lost in the intervening decades. James’s cohort launched its campaign during the final years of capitalism’s postwar golden age, when it was still possible to imagine guaranteed income as a realizable demand. The perspective of Wages for Housework was utopian, but it appropriated this vision from the welfare state as it really existed. After the 1973 oil crisis, though, everything changed: the capitalist system entered a period of increasingly frequent booms and busts, one effect of which was to precipitate a political backlash against the welfare system. It is against the backdrop of economic crisis that Wages for Housework must be understood. Strangely, the movement’s demand was reviled exactly when it might have been realized. Now, however, the political atmosphere has degraded to the point where even moderate social-democratic reforms seem beyond contemplation.

When a participant at Thursday’s GA asked what the present-day struggle for welfare ought to be called, James paused for a moment, then said, “They’ll probably call it Wages for Housework.” …Maybe not, I thought to myself. Attitudes in the radical milieu have changed in the past few years—changed, that is, in direct relation to the decline of the welfare system. If “workfare” has been the neoliberal solution to the problem of social reproduction (i.e. “He who does not work shall not eat”), one response to neoliberalism has been to advocate autonomy from the failing apparatus of the state. Cut budgets and we will protest, but we will also lay plans to do for ourselves what the state will no longer provide. This attitude reveals a critical ambivalence: Does Occupy stand for the defense of welfare, or does it prefigure, and even initiate, techniques of social reproduction that presume the elimination of entitlement programs?

This was a question that beset autonomist movements from the outset: by focusing on self-organization as a counter-model to the revolutionary party (and its implicit horizon, the “dictatorship of the proletariat”), one could be accused of ignoring the state altogether. In the case of Occupy, however, this accusation could be expanded to include the realm of labor—a point upon which many occupiers diverge from previous autonomist movements, Wages for Housework among them. It was in the context of Autonomia, the Italian Marxist current associated with Antonio Negri and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, that Dalla Costa and others of James’s collaborators (among them Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati) developed their call for work stoppages in the sphere of unwaged, domestic labor; this program mirrored Autonomia’s politics of refusing work, and more specifically, its rejection of trade-union mediation in the struggle of workers with capital. Along these lines, James’s 1973 essay, “The Perspective of Winning,” advocates feminist autonomy, defined here as a total refusal of capitalism in all arenas of the life-world: “Our struggle against the factory is not only to get out but never to go in. Our struggle against the family is to get out, but not so we are free for the factory. This is our demand for autonomy, our autonomous class perspective, founded in this total rejection of the capitalist organization of our lives.”

Much of the autonomist program would appear to have been revived by the Occupy movement, from the creation of self-managed kitchens, medical units, and power generators to the political process of mass assembly and consensus. Self-organization was always a constitutive feature of Autonomia Operaia (which translates as “worker autonomy”); squatted social centers and pirate radio stations were everyday fare in 1970s Italy. But beyond this point, the resemblance ends. Occupy puts an emphasis on public space and communal living that is wholly absent in autonomist Marxism, which remained focused on class struggle in the factories and in society at large. The same can be said with regard to Wages for Housework: whereas James and her comrades focused on the sphere of reproduction, for Occupy, the site of struggle is exterior to production and reproduction alike. Instead, occupiers have laid claim to the no-man’s-land of empty plazas and “privately-owned public spaces,” refusing to be defined according to clear-cut distinctions of sex, race, and class. In New York, OWS claims the status of an amorphous assembly of 99%ers, while in Oakland, occupiers have proclaimed themselves a self-sustaining, self-defending commune, reviving the memory of Paris, 1871 (without, again, the emphasis on a specifically workers’ commune). The result has been a movement with an unusual potential for openness, a space for categories to be sloughed-off and reassumed at will. 

For the same reasons, however, Occupy finds itself faced with a new set of obstacles—or rather, with old obstacles confronted anew. Thursday evening’s GA concluded with a speak-out session for women occupiers, many of whom took issue with the sexual division of labor within Occupy. Two organizers, both heavy lifters in Occupy Philly, pointed out that despite the movement’s rhetoric of fairness and equality, the burden of reproductive work—the tasks of caring, cleaning, keeping on schedule, mending bruises, resolving disputes, and so on—has consistently devolved to women; and because it is not acknowledged as work, it goes without thanks. In this way, they argued, Occupy attacks capitalism and the state in word only, busying itself with protest while ignoring the work of care. Along these lines, one of the most wrenching testimonials at Thursday’s GA came from a woman who spoke of sacrificing her job, her education, and her boyfriend in order to care for her dying mother. For the many women who end up making the same decision, it is often because there is no other option: no one else is willing to do the labor of caring. That the same can be said of Occupy—not always, but often enough—is no compliment to the movement.

There is a lesson in this for Occupy in its moment of springtime awakening. If we cannot organize ourselves in ways that elevate care above a narrow conception of work, recognizing the work of reproduction as what it is—as labor—then we might as well quit now. Care, James tells us, is the mark of civilization; to be deprived of the experience of caring is to be deprived of one’s humanity. That the Occupy movement has made care a priority—and more than a priority, a rallying point and an ethic—is evidence of its basic goodness, if we can be permitted that term; for if it is not good to provide eye wash to strangers during a tear gas attack, or food to the hungry, or calming words in the midst of crisis, then nothing is good. But if these tasks remain the de facto burden of women, then there will not be enough goodness yet to warrant celebration. Or to say it differently, Occupy will not be what we need it to be unless it is a movement of and for women, and of and for of all of us whom care has civilized. This might require us to fight for welfare as James is advocating, but it might also provoke a more radical refusal of capitalism and its governmental protectorates: resistance with care, not chaos, as its objective. Thankfully, some women in Occupy (and their male allies) have begun to make space for this conversation—an arena that will no doubt widen as James’s speaking tour continues. Now that warm weather has returned, perhaps we will hear her slogan echoing on the human microphone: Power to the sisters, and therefore the class.

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION REVISITED—“A BETTER FORM OF EDUCATION”

In preparing for a writing assignment—soon to be posted here and elsewhere—on Selma James’ recent visit to Occupy Philly, I had the occasion to revisit a piece written in November by a comrade at Berkeley, titled a few unexpected subjects of struggle. It’s a great text, and more so because the author is a great and passionate fighter, one of the handful of student organizers currently under attack by the Alameda County DA. So far, 8 students have received stay-away orders denying them access to the campus except on “lawful business.” Nothing about these proceedings is short of vile. Read more here. 

The following excerpt from a few unexpected subjects (reposted from reclaimuc) deals specifically with the question of social reproduction:

Our insistence that occupations remain open to all and that everybody should have the capacity to reproduce their lives, free of financial exchange, within and beyond the bounds of our campuses, is not capricious; rather, this insistence is aligned with the politics of recent university struggles, insofar as these struggles have challenged prevailing, privatized regimes of social reproduction. It’s worth remembering, for instance, that one of the demands advanced by the Wheeler occupiers in November 2009 was that the university renew its essentially rent-free lease with the Rochdale student housing cooperative. Or that a recent makeshift tent on the lawn in front of Sproul Hall bore a sign that read: “affordable student housing.” Ours is a struggle for autonomous social reproduction, and as such, it shares much with revolutionary feminist movements. 

In The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James call for strikes in the sphere of social reproduction, rolling refusals of unwaged domestic labor that bear certain resonances with recent university strikes and occupations:

“We must get out of the house; we must reject the home, because we want to unite with other women, to struggle against all situations which presume that women will stay at home, to link ourselves to the struggles of all those who are in ghettos, whether that ghetto is a nursery, a school, a hospital, an old-age home, or a slum. To abandon the home is already a form of struggle, since the social services we perform there would then cease to be carried out in those conditions, and so all those who work out of the home would then demand that the burden carried by us until now be thrown squarely where it belongs – onto the shoulders of capital…. The working class family is the more difficult point to break because it is the support of the worker, but as worker, and for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the support of the class, the survival of the class – but at the woman’s expense against the class itself…. Like the trade union, the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he or she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family is crucial.” (41)

What Dalla Costa and James indicate in this passage is that strikes in the sphere of social reproduction, while similar to ‘conventional’ labor strikes insofar as they directly counter exploitative forms of work discipline, appear different from such strikes in two crucial, and seemingly contradictory, respects – first, that they seem to directly undermine the survival of working class subjects, and second, that they carry with them the promise of liberating the working class from the requirement to labor in order to survive. If we translate this analysis into the university context (something that Dalla Costa and James also do, at times, in their essays), we can see certain resonances with recent student strikes. On the one hand, such strikes appear self-defeating, as evidenced by the ubiquitous refrain that a walkout in support of public education is a self-contradictory gesture. How, we are asked, can one defend public education by refusing to teach class or to attend lecture? On the other hand, such strikes appear to promise the liberation of the student from her social and economic role: such liberation would entail the abolition of student debt; the decomposition of hierarchical relations between students, professors, and university workers (which we saw hints of during the November 15 open university); and ultimately the realization of her capacity to live free of the requirement to work for wages. 

What we saw with the open university at Berkeley on November 15, and what we will likely see in coming days at Davis, was a form of learning that emerged out of our collective refusal to participate in official university schedules. Our strike gave us time to meet together and to discuss, without the usual formalities or hierarchies, theoretical questions of direct relevance to our lives. This experience confirmed for us the falsity of the notion that a strike in support of public education is self-contradictory – now we know from experience that a better form of education is possible, that it lingers in the shadows of our universities, and that only through concerted strike actions will it reemerge. 

INSURRECTION, COMMUNIZATION, AND THE PERMANENT STRIKE

[Excerpted from an ongoing conversation about communization and the #M1 general strike. Both texts are written by the same author, but the second presents a somewhat different argument than the first—slightly more hard-line.]

Point

I haven’t been following this thread until now, but I did want to respond to the question of subtraction and its relationship to communization—and also insurrection, which I think has to be distinguished very clearly from communization. 

When we pose the question of resisting capitalism as an either/or—either I subtract myself completely from capitalism OR I participate completely in it—we should be aware that we’re shifting the problem of our relationship to capital from the level of the personal to the level of the totality: i.e., from questions concerning what we do with the money we get in exchange for our labor to the question of the systemic badness of the capitalist system. This represents a shift from present to future tense: from the problem of making do in the here-and-now to the prospect of a totally different system yet to come. And it’s also a shift in agency: from what I can do in relation to my own employer (or lack thereof), my own money (or debt), my own friends (or loneliness), etc., to what “workers” in general can do in relation to “capitalism” in general. Once we pose the question this way, it’s inevitable that we’ll recoil from the impossibility of subtracting ourselves from the world we live in—that is, subtracting 
ourselves from our work, our means of support and social reproduction (from the recipes we’ve memorized for making cheap food to the knowledge we’ve acquired to help us compete on the labor market, etc.)—since the problem of our personal misery has become a moral imperative: a directive from the Totality to the Individual, “Thou shalt depart from capitalism! Thou shalt sacrifice thyself in the wilderness!” 

It’s a problem when we put off-limits our personal misery under capitalism, whether as workers who hate their jobs or who hate the idea of selling ourselves on the market, as debtors who will never be able to pay off our loans, as bodies that don’t receive the care (medical, social, emotional) they require, etc. Aren’t we all miserable under this system? I know I am! Rather than confront our relationship with capitalism as a moral issue, and as an either/or dilemma, let’s try to confront our particular relationships within the wage and property system, since our misery has everything to do with our dispossession in the world of work and our atomization in the sphere of everyday life (i.e. social reproduction). Personal misery can’t be solved personally (that’s the logic of the market); it can only be solved when we come together and start to plan how to live—how to survive—as a collective. That’s the truest meaning of the word ”commune”: a commune is simply a group of people who work for the collective rather than for themselves. 

Communization is often discussed as if it were simply a matter of stripping-down the public sphere in its moment of decay. This seems like nonsense to me; we can’t communize anything if we don’t start with what we ourselves own and earn; we can’t fight capitalism if we don’t first break the barriers of the property system in our own quarters. As much as I love the banners and slogans of the “Oakland Commune,” I don’t think it means anything to call an occupation a commune if the people in it haven’t anted up their property—income as well as debts—and kick-started the process of redistributing it among the collective. Maybe that’s happened in Oakland, maybe not. Are we really “doing communization” if we let our friends suffer privately under the weight of their debt? Or if we relegate our political energies to planning occupations and general strikes while still worrying about how we’ll survive as workers on the job market, or as artists on the art market? I’m not saying I’ve made this leap; I haven’t. But it’s a leap that has to be made—not as a withdrawal from capitalism, but as a shift in our relations to one another. I’ve said this before, but just to reiterate: communization is simply the process of making things common; it doesn’t matter whether these things are obtained from capitalism or from somewhere else. There’s no contradiction, for instance, between being a communard and earning a wage or any other form of income. Communization isn’t a shift from one system to another, it’s a shift in what we do with the money we make (or owe) that matters. A communard who holds down a steady job is working so that other people in the commune don’t have to. I wish I could say that when I apply for jobs or fellowships, I’m doing it for the collective rather than for myself only. It would make what I do a good deal less odious. [Someone], YOU don’t have to become a small-scale farmer, but maybe one of your friends really wants to do that. Or maybe there’s already a community farm nearby that’s running at half capacity for want of volunteer labor, or that throws away half of what it produces because it can’t sell it. Whatever: the point is that we’re in no position to organize our means of social reproduction differently until we make social reproduction a social rather than a personal problem. And though Occupy has come close to that—especially in the camps—it’s still a leap that most of us haven’t taken (myself included). 

As [someone] points out, people make do without a steady source of income all the time by falling back on the support of friends and family. The only reason we don’t tend to think of this sort of mutual aid as having anything to do with class struggle or “subtraction” from the wage system is because these acts of support aren’t usually intended as a replacement for personal income, they’re only meant as a supplement or safety net. We need to get past this; why not organize our incomes and rents so that one or two of us can devote themselves to politics full-time without having to worry about the job/art market? Or something along those lines. Instead of meeting about W.A.G.E. or artists unions (the horizons of which are always far in the future: things will be better when there’s a better system), why not take our own problems into our own hands? We don’t need capitalism to survive, but we sure as hell need each other. 

I get the sense that my arguments are falling flat in part because the project I’m advocating doesn’t follow the logic of the strike or the blockade, where we either stop capital from flowing, withdraw our labor, or stop consuming stuff. Please understand that I’m simply trying to sketch out the conditions of mutual aid that would make any of these things possible at a scale that would be seriously damaging to capitalism. I’m also trying to get past the barriers that prevent people from being able or willing to do those things, and which tend to make insurrection less a matter of communization than of mere squatting and looting (or worse: spectacle). If the state were the primary barrier to communization, wouldn’t property destruction be met with universal celebration? People don’t rise up against capitalism because their existence depends entirely on privately earned income and privately held property. Or rather, that’s the reason most people haven’t even considered “rising up against capitalism.” Try talking to unionized workers about indefinite general strikes and communes and the like. I just don’t see why we should expect anyone who’s not already indoctrinated (in the best sense of the term) via reading groups like ours to spontaneously throw away their only means of subsistence to join an insurrectionary movement in New York City or  anywhere else. I don’t see it happening. I can see why unemployed people, college students, artists, and the rest would participate in a limited-duration “insurrection” consisting of blockades and consumer boycotts and that sort of thing. But I don’t even see something along those lines leading to a durable win against capitalism; wasn’t that the hope and failure of May ‘68? So if we’re serious about blocking capital from flowing, isn’t it on us to figure out how to organize our lives without depending on a wage? If so, then I don’t understand why one would need to insist on the identity of that process—figuring out how to live without wages—with insurrection. 

Maybe this is a moot point: I don’t personally care if people start communizing things by seizing farms, seizing buildings, or whatever. All of that would be great. But I don’t think people will do any of those things if they haven’t first made the problem of subsistence a communal problem. And frankly, I don’t see that happening outside of 
the camps; and even in the camps, it’s mostly been people who really need subsistence who’ve gone there to live. I take [someone’s] point that the state won’t allow property to be expropriated willy nilly, but I see that more as an argument against insurrection than against communization. As for the problem of recuperation: if you’re arguing that the formation of communes alone wouldn’t bring capitalism to a halt, then I agree. But the formation of communes—and the broad dissemination of this model—would be a weapon against capitalism in a profound way, since capitalists absolutely need people who need to work. And I don’t think you can seriously ponder bringing capitalism to a halt without addressing the problem of social reproduction (the problem that we don’t control the means of our reproduction) *before* calling everyone into the streets for the moment of insurrection. 

Counterpoint

To think for a moment about [someone’s] provocation: It seems right to raise the possibility of the long-term strike; for me, this is the horizon of the general strike today (as opposed to general strikes of yore), and it’s why I posted above that a strike in NYC or anywhere else would need to begin with an indefinite renunciation of work, official duties, and “business as usual.” And that would have to mean reproductive work as well (house work, affective work, etc.) As a number of you have pointed out, social reproduction (i.e. subsistence) would be a burning issue, and would need to be confronted not secondarily but as the primary question of the movement/revolution: how do we meet our needs without exchange? This is a question we can only address together, since our needs will differ depending on the composition of the group/collective/commune. It may turn out, for example, that the acquisition of meds takes precedence over the expropriation of food - who knows. In any event, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to flesh out a perfect alternative economy ahead of time; in fact, it’s imperative that we not think in terms of economies. At every moment, a permanent strike (it has a nice ring to it, no? better than the impenetrable “human strike”…) would be faced with falling back into relations of exchange, of the division of labor and reproductive work, etc., whether that means barter relations or time-chits or whatever. And by falling back, I mean falling into a trap. The point shouldn’t be to imagine a world for ourselves outside of which the laws of property, the wage, and exchange are allowed to remain in force; the point is to overturn those laws in the process (the activity) of satisfying our needs. But when we speak about para-economies, small-scale agriculture, neo-Luddism, etc., we’re admitting to ourselves that capital cannot be touched, that property cannot be expropriated and put to immediate use, and that our economy will have as its limits the boundaries imposed by capital and its agents (cops etc.). I think we can do better than that. For me, the problem isn’t to organize the economy that will replace capitalism (and I mean economy in a capacious way, including our relations with one another, with nature, etc.); the problem is to organize the renunciation of work so that we are all confronted with the problem of surviving together as an immediate priority. That sounds incredibly daunting, but there you have it.

Having said that, I feel compelled to take a less all-or-nothing position. I’ve said that the general strike would be a mass renunciation of work. But it seems more sane to say that the renunciation of work need not happen all at once, and probably shouldn’t happen at once, since many more resources are available to a collective that, having as its horizon the total renunciation of work, still retains several wage- or salary-earning members. This gets at a key difference (maybe a constitutive difference) between the permanent strike and the general strike: whereas the general strike has a firm starting date and implies an eventual end-date, the permanent strike is staggered and open-ended; it could begin on a different day for every one of its members, as not everyone will be immediately drawn into the strike. The question is: who wants to go first?

OAKLAND CALLING—“THE GENERAL STRIKE IS BACK”

 Reposting from occupyoakland.org:

Occupy Oakland Call for Participation in a May 1, 2012 Global General Strike

The general strike is back, retooled for an era of deep budget cuts, extreme anti-immigrant racism, and massive predatory financial speculation. In 2011, the number of unionized workers in the US stood at 11.8%, or approximately 14.8 million people.

What these figures leave out are the growing millions of people in this country who are unemployed and underemployed. The numbers leave out the undocumented, and domestic and manual workers drawn largely from immigrant communities. The numbers leave out workers whose workplace is the home and a whole invisible economy of unwaged reproductive labor. The numbers leave out students who have taken on nearly $1 trillion dollars in debt, and typically work multiple jobs, in order to afford skyrocketing college tuition.  The numbers leave out the huge percentage of black Americans that are locked up in prisons or locked out of stable or secure employment because of our racist society.

In December of 2011,Oakland’s official unemployment rate was a devastating 14.1%. As cities like Oakland are ground into the dust by austerity, every last public dollar will be fed to corrupt, militarized police departments in order to contain social unrest.  On November 2 of last year, Occupy Oakland carried out the first general strike in the US since the 1946 Oakland general strike,shutting down the center of the city and blockading the Port of Oakland. We must re-imagine a general strike for an age where most workers do not belong to labor unions, and where most of us are fighting for the privilege to work rather than for marginal improvements in working conditions. We must take the struggle into the streets, schools, and offices of corrupt local city governments.  A re-imagined general strike means finding immediate solutions for communities impacted by budget cuts and constant police harassment beyond changing government representatives.  Occupy Oakland calls for and will participate in a new direction for the Occupy movement based on the recognition that we must not only find new ways to provide for our needs beyond thestate we must also attack the institutions that lock us into an increasingly miserable life of exploitation, debt, and deepening poverty everywhere.

IF WE CAN’T LIVE, WE WON’T WORK.

May Day is an international holiday that commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Massacre, when Chicago police defending, as always, the interests of the 1% attacked and murdered workers participating in a general strike and demanding an 8-hour workday. In the 21st century, despite what politicians tell us, class war is alive and well against workers (rank-and-file and non-unionized), students, people of color, un- and underemployed, immigrants, homeless, women, queer/trans folks, prisoners. Instead of finding common ground with monsters, it’s time we fight them. And it’s time we make fighting back an everyday reality in the Bay Area and beyond.

On May Day 2012, Occupy Oakland will join with people from all walks of life in all parts of the world around the world in a global general strike to shut down the global circulation of capital that every day serves to enrich the ruling classes and impoverish the rest of us. There will be no victory but that which we make for ourselves, reclaiming the means of existence from which we have been and continue to be dispossessed every day.

REVOLT FOR A LIFE WORTH LIVING
STRIKE / BLOCKADE / OCCUPY

FRAGMENTS—ON THE 0% AND THE REAL MOVEMENT OF HISTORY

Fragments excerpted from the comments section here (I’m quoting Red WithoutWhy): 

The “99%”, the “1%” and the “0%” are all *in* the movement of history which traverses and determines their distinction. *This* is the movement which is radical, not that of the “0%” as a radical bloc–though it is a radical bloc within the occupation movement. That doesn’t mean it needs touting, and that the 99% needs denunciation.

[W]hat has been most radical about this movement is not at all fighting the cops or taking the streets without permits. What has been most radical has been the establishment of encampments. That’s what OWS did. And that’s why the category of radicalism doesn’t bear on the situation, and that’s why the fact that the so-called 0% are pushing for something Adbusters reformists aren’t doesn’t really matter.

 It’s not a “withdrawal” from the state form or the party or the people or “the movement” that’s at issue. A critique of organizational forms as displaced or rendered counter-revolutionary by historical transitions between pertinent or revolutionary forms of struggle is completely appropriate and necessary. I think much of what LGS’s piece says is true. It’s just that it’s often trivially true (Adbusters is reformist and opportunist) and in being so it misses the point of what is *not* trivially true: that these reformist opportunists also initiated (in the US) a tactic and an organizational form, the encampment, that carved a new and radical opening into a larger political sequence and thereby reinvigorated it in a way that was entirely unexpected and mostly laudable.

Yeah, I’m not interested in holding out the radical purity of “the 0%” against people who are stepping onto the street for the first time, or even against lame journalists who somehow managed to do something pretty fucking cool. And I think it’s ridiculous to protest too much about Oakland’s street cred within the occupation movement.

But I’m not going to veer from there into hollow calls for unity and especially not into even implicit efforts to undermine legitimate critique of the state form, of the party form, of worker identity, of democratic representation.

COMMUNIQUE FROM THE OCCUPIED CROSS-CULTURAL CENTER @ UC DAVIS

From UCDecolonized:

The spaces we live in are broken: occupation is our defense.

As capital spirals further into crisis, we are constantly confronted with the watchword of austerity. We are meant to imagine a vast, empty vault where our sad but inevitable futures lie. But we are not so naïve. Just as Wall Street functions on perpetually revolving credit markets where cash is merely a blip, so also does our state government. High tuition increases have been made necessary not by shrinking savings, but by a perpetually expanding bond market, organized by the UC Regents, enforced through increasing tuition and growing student loan debt. Growth has become a caricature of itself, as the future is sold on baseless expanding credit from capitalist to capitalist. Our future is broken. We are the crisis. Our occupations are the expressions of that crisis.

But on the university campuses, where militarization is increasing daily, we have more immediate needs. Our relationship with the administration and police is not one of trust and openness; the arrogance and nonchalance with which they regularly inflict violence against us is just as regularly followed by a thoroughly dissembling, inadequate, and cowardly condemnation of that violence. One hand attacks—one hand denies. Our universities and our public spaces are today ultra-militarized zones, where students and workers are monitored and subjugated under the pretense of “health and safety.” Officer Kemper from UC Irvine drew his gun at the Regents’ meeting at UCSF. Berkeley UCPD participated in violently clearing the Oakland Communards from Oscar Grant Plaza just weeks before they would come to UC Davis for the events of November 18th. On the day of the first Oakland General Strike, UCOP office in Oakland was lent out to OPD to “monitor” protests. Under the pretext of mutual aid, squads of armed and armored riot cops move from one campus, one public space, one city, to the next. The circulation of cops throughout the state shows that the mobile, militarized force of repression knows no boundaries: it will protect capital, government, and the status quo, wherever they are threatened. In a university whose motto is fiat lux, the administration crushes dissent and veils its intentions with lies. It has the same intentions as Mayor Quan or the Military in Egypt: to crush resistance, by any means necessary.

To continue our resistance, our immediate need is to create a safe space of togetherness, care, and freedom. When we occupied Mrak, the same officers who would later be involved in pepper spraying us watched over us as we slept. As we gathered to discuss, plan, and act to protect our right to education, the Orwellian “Freedom of Expression Team” and the “University Communications Team” loomed nearby, texting the pigs and administration on their stupid androids, smiling at us in their fake, overfed way, scooting near like unpopular highschool kids trying to overhear the weekends’ party plans. Later, these same concerned FOEs, would stand by on the quad and do nothing, grinning like idiots, as students pepper-sprayed at point blank range called for medics. It is clear to us that public space has become a euphemism for militarized, ordered, monitored space. Occupation opens a common space which is not the extension of private property to group property, but the active exclusion of all that reinforces private property. We must exclude the police and the administration, and their “Freedom of Expression Team” lackeys as well, in order to create the openness and togetherness which is impossible in their presence.

The UC Chancellor, President, Regents—who prattle on endlessly about diversity while the university closes its doors to brown students, who hail marginal utility while “the economy” closes its fist around the poor, who dream up ways to boost the university’s standing on some imaginary scale of “excellence” while slurs, swastikas, nooses, and Klan masks appear endlessly on our campus, who meet protests with violence and truth with lies—they have already proven their incapacity to imagine a future different than the present. We occupy because we will not wait for the broken future they have planned for us, because we do not trust our “elected officials” or administrators to make decisions that address problems beyond their own narrow interests. This action is not the beginning of a discussion; this is the end of the discussion. We cannot negotiate for our needs, we will not negotiate for our needs, we will meet our needs.

ON ŽIŽEK AND EXTINCT FUNCTIONARIES

Slavoj Žižek’s recent article in the LRB, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie,” is a horrible piece of non-thinking, but still, I recommend reading it, if only as an exercise in holding one’s temper.

The problem with Zizek’s argument about the “proletarianization” of the salaried classes is that it gets both of its objects wrong, the salariat (as it’s known to the French) as well as the proletariat. I’m not sure why Zizek believes that the phenomenon of the salaried middle class is new—it’s as old as the 20th century—but it’s wrong to say that in the present moment the salariat is fighting to preserve its privileges; this fight has been ongoing for several decades, and has taken as its object the broad refashioning of office work according to the rhythms of the Taylorized factory. Anyone who has been even remotely interested in the conditions of salaried work since the 1970s knows that the field has been characterized by speed-ups (i.e. attempts to boost productivity) accompanied by heightened discipline/surveillance and by the erosion of social benefits. Add to this list the shift from wage increases to credit-based remuneration and you have a far less rosy picture of the salariat than Zizek’s vision of middle class stability. For Zizek, under the current regime of “new” capitalism (a qualification to be treated with suspicion whenever one sees it), “the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists.” While this isn’t a wrong statement, it does obscure the qualitative difference between administrators and functionaries, the former category including the top echelon of salary-earners, the latter, everyone else. While administrators have fared spectacularly well under neoliberlism, the same can’t be said for functionaries, who have been shat on again and again as the sphere of salaried work becomes ever more privatized.

Also missing from Zizek’s account is any sense of the geographical unevenness of the capitalist system, which puts its functionaries and administrators—its salariat—in one part of the world and its proletariat in another. For Zizek, the present danger to the salaried bourgeoisie is that it will slide into the ranks of the proletariat, becoming mere wage laborers rather than recipients of the cherished ”surplus wage.” As we’ve been saying all along, though, the problem isn’t that we—we functionaries—face a proletarian future, it’s that we face no future. No jobs, proletarian or otherwise, hence no means of social reproduction. Currently, the salariat is facing a fate worse than proletarianization: extinction. This is due by and large to two trends: 1) the geographic division of production and consumption; 2) the growth and expansion of the now-global labor market for functionaries and other ”immaterial” and/or “cognitive” workers. Both of these factors threaten make functionaries in the capitalist heartlands (USA and Western Europe) increasingly precarious. 

A more accurate account of the past year’s global unrest would identify wagelessness, not proletarianization, as the key source of anger. The Arab Spring was powered by a generation of over-educated young people faced with the prospect of terminal unemployment. Much the same can be said about the Occupy movement, whose partisans are the precarious, the underemployed, and—most importantly—the debtors. That’s why the movements of the past year have in various ways confronted the impossibility of merely surviving under the current regimes as their fundamental rallying-point. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, it wasn’t because his pension was being cut; it was because the wage system had made it impossible for him to live. This gets directly at the argument about the “self-abolition of the working class” put forward by Théorie Communiste, and taken up by Endnotes—i.e. the claim that in the present moment, the proletariat confronts its own self-reproduction as a class—as laborers—as a limit to be overcome in class struggle. Perhaps these theorists have missed, though, that the class most immediately confronted with the possibility of its abolition is not the proletariat but the salariat. The industrial working class still has everything to gain from what TC calls “programmatism” (a codeword for the politics of the proletarian dictatorship), only it has been confined to geographic regions and regimes inhospitable to unionization and workers’ association—places where the proletariat is easily divided and diverted and disciplined into daily submission. If the “salaried bourgeoisie” has been a site of revolution this past year, it’s because we functionaries have come face to face with the possibility of our social death.