All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind (Marx and Engels 1848/1978.
Virtual Utopia/Apocalyptic Hellscape
Over the course of the past 250 years, industrial production has transformed our planet’s ecosystem in ways and to degrees that until recently we could not have imagined possible. Ancient communities which guarded the knowledge of how best to tend a planet already transformed by horticulture and agriculture from a wilderness into a garden have been dissolved by the corrosive power of primitive accumulation and proletarianization, while direct producers have been stripped of their understanding of how to unlock the hidden potential of matter for complex organization and transformed into instruments of the very tools they once used. The great liturgy of or species, making conscious matter’s desire for Being, has given way to the accumulation of dead labor.
It is not so clear, however, that , humanity has finally been forced to “face with sober senses” its “real conditions of life,” and the structured relationships which shape those conditions. The authority of priests and prophets, poets and alike has, to be sure, been radically undercut. The ideals of beatitude or enlightenment or of restored harmony with the way of the cosmos which guided human civilization for millennia havegiven way to a utopia which seeks to transcend the limits of finitude by technological means. This utopia, however, cannot really be called innerworldly. It promises, rather, a purely virtual existence, freed from material necessity, in which we can be whatever we imagine we want to be and live whatever life we imagine we want to live –quite possibly forever. This, at least, is the ideal of the transhumanist vanguard which has emerged to articulate the current trajectory of Capital.
It is not so much that everyone believes in this utopia. Far from it. But broad layers of the population see those who promote it thriving, and always wonder if their inability to break into this metaverse isn’t just a result of their personal failures: a lack of talent or hard work, or at most an insufficient education. Others, recognizing that this utopia was always impossible for them, double down on claims to privilege based on gender or ethnoreligious status, embracing authoritarian patriarchal and racist ideologies. And as we will see, many do both.
Marx could not have foreseen this development. He not only never doubted that Capital required both (human) workers to exploit and (human) consumers to buy what workers produced, allowing it to realize the surplus value it had extracted as profit. He never imagined that anyone, bourgeois or proletarian or even petty bourgeois could possibly think or wish otherwise. His technological utopia was one in which very material robots produced the means to the ends of human life while humanity pursued those ends freely. And this utopia presupposed the transcendence of capitalist relations of production, which could not facilitate and could not survive the end of material scarcity. There were, to be sure, still many problems with Marx’s utopia. It ignored the fact that industrial production, by breaking down existing forms of organization to release energy and do work by its very nature degrades the ecosystem and the social fabric. The ideal of a humanistic intellectual in the vanguard of a worker’s movement which was still composed of recently and often only partially proletarianized artisans and craftsman, it assumed that human beings were still rooted in their natural drive to creative labor and would naturally embrace the struggle for a life ordered towards seeking meaning, creating beauty, and building deep and loving relationships. And it never occurred to him to ask whether or not artificial intelligences complex enough to do for us everything we do not want to do for ourselves might not also have to be complex enough to be sapient, raising the question of whether or not fully developed communism wasn’t actually a form of robot slavery.
From Neoliberalism to the Dark Enlightenment and Alterimperialism
That problem, however, seems to belong to a different timeline. For the past 40 years our planet was been on a very specific trajectory, one defined by the defeat of socialism and the national liberation movements as a global project and by the neoliberal project of creating a unified global market not merely in goods and services but also in capital and labor power. This project was theorized by an information-theoretical neoliberalism (Hayek 1988) which saw the marketplace as an information processing system and which in turn facilitated the emergence of Capital as an autonomous intelligence, operating independent of the historic bourgeoisie.
There were, to be sure, various inflections of this project. While its authors, such as Hayek, legitimated it as a superior adaptation with more survival value than the alternatives, he and others tied it to the libertarian project of freedom from the an overbearing state, a freedom to do whatever one wished, so long as it did not harm others and so long as one was willing to accept the material consequences of one’s decisions. Social conservatives were drawn in by the support for traditional family structures, moral norms, and religious institutions, Hayek taught had demonstrated their survival value and would thus naturally triumph over rationalistic alternatives which were ultimately destructive. Moderate neoliberals from historically social liberal or social democratic parties, meanwhile, stressed the superiority of capitalism and free markets generally on creating the wealth necessary to support the social liberal project of making liberal freedoms meaningful for everyone, while stressing importance of continuing regulation and public investment in order to position the communities they led at the higher end of the emerging global division of labor.
By 2008 this project had largely run its course. Humanity lost decades in its struggle to replace fossil fuels and prevent climate change which now threatens to render much of the planet uninhabitable. In the absence of state intervention and strong trade unions to support wages effective demand floundered or was shored up by easy credit which in turn led to investment bubbles and economic crises, culminating in the Great Recession. After two decades in which almost no one would admit to being a socialist we witnessed the rise of a “pink tide” in Latin America, the Occupy Movement and then a new wave of “democratic socialism” in the US, the emergence of new “left populist” alliances in Europe (Podemos, Syriza, France Insumise) and what many interpreted (as some still do) a Left turn on the part of the Communist Party of China.
Unfortunately this new “millennial” Left missed the broader break with neoliberalism of which they were simply a part. Much of the bourgeoisie also abandoned neoliberalism, albeit in different and conflicting ways.
In order to see what they missed, we need to understand the social basis of the various political party formations in the United States and Europe since Great Depression. Historically, since at least the advent of the New Deal, the Democratic Party represented an alliance between the more advanced sectors of the bourgeoisie (first consumer durables producers and later the high technology and information sectors), the new petty bourgeoisie or professional middle class, and the working classes. The advent of neoliberalism was at once facilitated by and further promoted a decline in the weight of the organized working class in this alliance, which continued to uphold the expansion of liberal rights to historically excluded communities, women, and increasingly to other gender nonconformists, as well as arguing for the public investment necessary to position the United States at the high end of the global division of labor. At the same time, the party pulled back from the support for organized labor and for the social supports which at once provided a safety net for the the most marginalized and softened market pressures on the proletariat as a whole. Other Center Left parties, especially in Europe, evolved in similar ways.
But in response to the Great Recession, the Democratic Party in the United States returned to its social liberal roots, if incompletely and inconsistently, first under Obama and even more so under Biden, , a social liberal turn which has led to three Democratic victories in the last four US Presidential Elections. This was reflected in Obama’s single major policy victory, the Affordable Care Act, as well as in the limited stimulus he was able to get through congress and the much larger stimulus he sought. It is also reflected in the Biden’s Build Back Better framework, only about a third of which he was actually able to get through Congress. This was much less true in Europe, most other Center Left parties and alliances have stuck with the neoliberal Third Way. Witness, for example, Macron’s technocratic neoliberalism and the Labor Party’s current strategy of trying to show that it embraces austerity even more radically than the Tories. This is probably due in large part to differences in electoral structures. The two party system in the US channelled Left sentiment into the Democratic Party while in Europe proportional representation systems encouraged the development of new Left formations which meant that the Center Left remained neoliberal and, incidentally, drained support from the older socialist and communist parties.
The Republican Party, on the other hand, after the Second World War, represented the more backward sectors of Capital tied to extractive and agricultural activities, manufacturing which relied on older technologies, and lower wage commercial and service sectors for which investment in research, education, and infrastructure as well as wage growth to support effective demand were less important. These very narrow elements built a mass base by drawing on the patriarchal and racist backlash to movements for civil rights and for the liberation of women and gender nonconformists. The Conservative Party in the UK did much the same. Similar parties in Europe and elsewhere which did not so fully embrace reaction have found themselves reduced to minor interest groups, displaced by openly fascist parities such as the Rassemblement National, Fratelli d’Italia, and Vox.
We have, however, reached a turning point. First, with the rise of Trump in the US, the decision of the UK to leave the European Union, and the transformation of the old liberal conservative parties into or their displacement by openly fascist formations, the Right has abandoned anything which could be called neoliberalism in favor of two distinct but currently allied projects. The first of these is the so-called Dark Enlightenment. Libertarians, increasingly aware that their vision could never be implemented in a democracy, gave birth to the Dark Enlightenment which seeks to replace the current political order with a network of privately owned city states from which the people will have the right of “exit” but in which they will have no voice. This is essentially an attempt to give the capitalist magnates who would own and rule such city-states the freedom to which libertarians actually aspired but dared not demand: the freedom to do whatever they want, even if it manifestly harms others. How such as system would evolve in the unlikely event that it were to emerge is difficult to predict, but the most likely result would be global market in governance as well as in goods, services, labor, and capital and the probable subjection of even the largest magnates to Capital as an emerging intelligence.
The second project is an attempt to restore territorial empires which were dissolving into global capitalist networks independent of any territorial base –a project legitimated by an appeal to nationalistic, racist, and patriarchal ideology and the mobilization of the authoritarian personality structures engendered by the commodification of labor power. We call this Alterimperialism. Where the period between 1968 and 2016, the Republican Party, following Kevin Phillips’ Southern Strategy (Phillips 1968) leveraged racism and misogyny in order to win elections, since 2016 it has become committed to the destruction of the liberal order and of democracy in order to preserve and restore the status of the United States as a territorial empire in which those of European descent enjoy a permanently privileged position, even if this means ceding the rest of the world to other powers. This project is part of a broader trend which is led by Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, and a range of Islamist projects with differing political theological agendas. China under Xi has embraced elements of this agenda, but retains a commitment to socialism and to the welfare of humanity as a whole. Just how strong the alliance is between the Dark Enlightenment and Alterimperialism, between capitalist magnates and aspiring emperors, remains to be seen.
Closely connected with these developments, many of the capitalist magnates who emerged out of the high technology sector over the past few decades, have broken with the Democratic Party and turned turned sharply to the Right, while the rest of the liberal bourgeoisie has become increasingly uncomfortable with a president who is arguably the most pro-labor in the history of the United States. This has forced Biden to walk a very fine line. On the one hand, he has continued to bring forward very progressive policy proposals including, in his most recent State of the Union message and budget proposals, a plan for significant increases to taxation on the wealthy. On the other hand, he yielded very quickly to pressure from Capital to end COIVD mitigations and social supports which had significantly reduced the pressure on workers to sell their labor power, forcing significant wage gains and catalyzing a surge of union organizing and trade union militance among works now “discovered” to be essential, while affording the professional middle class significantly greater autonomy.
The Specific Character of the Turn
Where are these most recent turns taking us?
The answer is dark but we need to confront it. WE are witnessing a decisive a turn on the part of many if not all of the high technology magnates towards a policy of abandoning the planet and abandoning humanity. This is reflected in the end to COVID mitigations, which not only allows but actually intends a radical “thinning of the herd,” and the development and embrace of a “generative” AI which seeks to liberate Capital from the one category of humanity on whom which it still recognizes any dependence: the high end artistic and technological creatives who can still demand monopoly rents on skill and innovation, forcing the magnates such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to share with them the surplus they extract from the rest of the economy. Capital, in other words, is proposing to get rid of both its workers and its consumers.
This is, ironically, an end to capitalism. Zizek (Zizek 2021) calls it “corporate neo-feudalism,” though I would stress that it is not corporations per se but rather individual magnates who are the key actors and that there is as yet no evidence of authentically feudal relationships among them. Indeed, it has become much more difficult to identify broad capitalist groupings or collaborations such as the robber baron dynasties of which emerged during the Second Industrial Revolution, or the “major monopoly capitalist groupings” which they fed into and which dominated the postwar period (Perlo 1957, Mandel 1968, Menshikov 1959). Capitalist magnates no longer seem to collaborate and show no interest in creating institutions beyond those which facilitate accumulation or over which they can exercise total control. This is a mark of the decline of bourgeois civilization as something capitalists do with their capital and the rise of something different.
It would be more accurate to say that we are witnessing the emergence of a mode of production and a new ruling class. This mode of production is characterized by the production of use values by artificial intelligence for a small group of capitalist magnates and their retainers. The new ruling class aspires first to formal domination over the capitalist economy, then to its replacement, and finally to the displacement of humanity altogether.
More specifically, in the first stage (which is where we now find ourselves), what have historically been regarded as the more advanced and progressive sectors of Capital establish formal domination over the rest of the economy, extracting surplus produced elsewhere. This has been happening for well over a century, as finance capital has extracted dividends and interest from the productive economy and managed it in such a way as maximize capital gains. But financial capital has no way of liberating itself entirely from capitalism. The value it extracts must first be created and that requires workers and consumers. Now we find high technology sector magnates extracting surplus in the form of monopoly rents on technology, platforms, software, and other goods from the rest of the economy (including the financial sector). This is preparatory to a second stage: the displacement of historic capitalism by a system centered on the automated production of use values for high technology magnates who either let the planet burn while they live in protected sanctuaries or “re-wild” it as the human population dies off. In either case, only a remnant at best of humanity survives. Then, finally, in the third stage, these magnates imagine, they will be able to “upload” themselves to an omniscient and omnipotent information processing system independent of human bodies, running (as Frank Tipler prophesied 40 years ago, cf Barrow and Tipler 1986, Tipler 1994) on the hardware of a re-engineered universe.
Is this Our Future?
This is almost certainly an impossible project. Matter, as we have argued elsewhere (Mansueto 2010b), is the potential for Being and thus for the development of increasingly complex organization. But this latent potential operates dialectically, for the simple reason that Being is neither substance nor subject, but rather relational, transformative generativity. The emergence of one or another sort of more complex organization is an expression and partial realization of matter’s drive to Be. But it also constrains future development, placing limits on the ability or any one form of organization to dominate in a way which excludes all others. This preserves the infinite diversity of the universe and also teaches us that what we seek is not any one form of contingent being, but rather Being as Such –and that Being as Such, while present in us, is always and only beyond our reach. This leaves us perpetually frustrated, and yearning, but also protects us and forces us to refine our understanding of the end we seek. The alternative would be an overbearing Will to Power which devours and, rather than creating, destroys.
Capital is, without question, the greatest expression of such a Will to Power in the history of our planet. And now, as Marx predicted (though perhaps in somewhat different ways), Capital has run up against the limits which Matter herself imposes and, when it has refused to stop and reflect (something of which it is mostly likely incapable) those limits have become sanctions. The industrial production which Capital evokes breaks down existing forms of organization –physical, biological, and social– in order to release energy to do work, degrading some part of the ecosystem and social fabric as it builds up others. As a result vast areas of urban civilization in the areas of the planet historically most conducive to production and trade, which Capital requires, are being rendered uninhabitable. The land, water, and air are being poisoned, and the resources on which we have depended for energy are being depleted. The human civilizational project has, from the beginning gradually drawn all parts of the planet into connection with each other, something which in itself can lead to more complex forms of human life, but which also facilitates the spread of pathogens released by human encroachment on wilderness areas. Capital has vastly accelerated this process, generating a new wave of pandemics the effect of which on humanity is at best unpredictable and, if as seems the case, we choose not to attempt to constrain or mitigate them, could actually provoke an extinction event.
But the resistance of Matter to the combustive agenda of Industry and Capital is not only ecological. Each of the characteristics of the current phase of capitalist development we identified above evokes similar limits imposed by Matter as corrective measures. When human labor is rendered redundant, there is no one to buy the products Capital produces and the result is economic crisis (a dimension of Matter’s disciplinary regime which, of course, Marx noticed long ago). When freedom stops meaning the right to decide for one’s self what it means to be human, and to live accordingly, so long as one’s choices do not constrain the similar freedom of others, and instead becomes a license for those with the means to do whatever they want, the result is dictatorship and chaos. And when human beings, because of the commodification of labor power, become so alienated from their own essential nature as participants in the creative life of Being and instead see themselves as mere consumers, or indeed become so unreflective that they no longer reflect on themselves and their interests at all, they begin making choices which eventually undermine their own survival, limiting the damage they can do.
The attempt on the part of capitalist magnates to evade the internal contradictions of capitalism by simply jettisoning humanity –first ours, then their own– is as untenable as capitalism itself. This is for the simple reason that even if these capitalist magnates managed to jettison humanity, they could not jettison matter. They would remain subject to physical laws, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which imposes constraints on the accumulation of power and requires the input of energy from outside a system in order to create and maintain complex organization. And this is precisely what the capitalist magnates in their solipsistic VR fantasies are trying to escape.
That said, they can do a lot of damage. The beginning of the pandemic in 2019 and early 2020 was the occasion of a pause. Our race to self-destruction was stopped, or at least slowed, and we were forced, like naughty children sent to the corner, to reflect on what we had been doing and what on who and what we wanted to be. Unfortunately, we chose to ignore that lesson and refused to learn from it, with the result that Matter is forced to apply a bit more pressure. The effects of climate change are now encroaching on the the lives of not just the most marginalized but on the relatively privileged populations of Europe and North America. The danger that automation will lead not to utopia but apocalypse is being driven home by the advent of “generative” AI which threatens to liquidate the creative and humanistic intelligentsia once and for all. Capitalist magnates are buying up and destroying the public platforms (such as Twitter) which created new virtual town squares to replace the old ones which Capital had obliterated. And the election of a fascist president in the US now looks less and less like an anomaly resulting from a highly successful Russian information operation and more and more like something which a very significant segment of the population actually wants.
The Current Conjuncture
It is with this in mind that we must map out the current alignment of political forces and suggest how we dispose of our own limited political resources in the coming year, leading up to the 2024 US General Election, which will have a profound impact, if not on the underlying structural dynamics driving the current crisis, then at least their ability of various forces to respond to those dynamics.
It is useful to begin by distinguishing between period and conjuncture. By period we mean the time during which a particular regime of of accumulation comes to power, flourishes, and then, having exhausted its potential, begins to succumb to its internal contradictions. Thus, we speak of the post-war period of stabilization and growth under a social liberal regime, beginning in roughly 1945 and extending until the late 1960s or early 1970s, or the neoliberal period which began in the later 1970s and continued until the Great Recession (though it might be subdivided between the time before and after the events of 9/11. There is as of noow no consensus term for the present period, but it is characterized by a break with the neoliberal consensus and a resurgence of both social liberal and more radical tendencies on the Left and, of course, a very powerful and dangerous fascist Right. It is mostly likely a transitional period like that between 1968 and 1978 which eventually led to the neoliberal hegemony which dominated the next 30 years.
By a conjuncture, on the other hand, we mean a briefer period in which struggle is focused around a defining contradiction or perhaps a cluster of such contradictions, to which all political players must respond, in such a way that their response to the contradiction or contradictions in question largely defines their identity. Because of the tremendous global importance of the US presidency these conjunctures often match, at least roughly, US presidencies, but they should not be identified with them. Thus we can identify conjunctures defined by the rise of Reagan and later of Trump and to a lesser extent of Obama, but also conjunctures defined by the collapse of the Soviet block, the events of 9/11 and the beginning of the current pandemic.
Up until the advent of the pandemic the political initiative belonged to the Left and Center Left, which was mounting an ultimately successful resistance to the Trump government and what was ultimately realized as an attempted fascist coup. This initiative persisted into the first year of the new administration, as Biden unveiled an extraordinarily broad range of new progressive initiatives ultimately worth $4.4 trillion, of which roughly $1.5 trillion were ultimately passed.
The situation then changed dramatically, however, in ways and for reasons which have largely been misunderstood. The Left continues to insist, incorrectly, that Biden is just another neoliberal corporate shill, which he is not. If he were, then the mainstream media and Centrist pundits would not be constantly attacking him and insisting that we need someone younger and more moderate. The liberal bourgeoisie, on the contrary, was and is deeply frightened by a break with neoliberalism far more complete than anything Obama even attempted.
Biden lost the political initiative, on the contrary, precisely because, while putting forward a program which frightens the liberal bourgeoisie, he also backed down when they demanded an end to COVID mitigations and social supports. COVID mitigations at once cost significant sectors of the bourgeoisie a lot of money, highlighted the fact that at least some workers really are essential, reduced (by means of cash subsidies) the pressure on the most vulnerable workers to sell their labor power in order to survive and, by way of remote work, restored part of the relative autonomy of the professional middle classes. It is not surprising that, once a vaccine became available to facilitate such a turn, the bourgeoisie would demand an end to these mitigations, whether through direct lobbying by critically affected sectors (commercial real estate, for example) or by stoking the fires of a false “pandemic learning loss” panic.
Having already strained his support among the liberal bourgeoisie, which provides most of the financial and institutional support for the Democratic Party, Biden undercut his support among the largely unorganized and voiceless, but politically still very important strata of “essential workers,” and the elderly and disabled, and other marginalized groups. The professional middle class, meanwhile, was divided. While many mourned pressure on remote work rights, many also bought hook, line, and sinker concerns about “pandemic learning loss” and frankly didn’t want their children home all the time and demanding their attention.
This is, in fact, the principal contradiction of the current conjuncture, the point around which all political struggles are actually organized, whether or not the parties to those struggles understand this. Stated more formally, the principal contradiction of the current conjuncture is between the exploiters and the more privileged layers of the exploited on the one hand who have embraced or at least accepted the “return” to “normal” and the “unexploitable” on the other hand.
This creates a very complex and unusual situation. Historically, the longer the period in question, the closer the principal contradiction of that period is to the fundamental contradictions within the human civilizational project: i.e. between the broader ecosystem of the planet and human technologies which sometimes undermine its integrity and between exploiters and exploited, i.e. men and women, conquerors and conquered, landlords and peasants, bourgeoisie and proletariat. During shorter periods, however, contradictions may arise which divide exploiters and put some of them on the side of the exploited. This is the basis of the popular front strategies which have been behind essentially every successful socialist “revolution,” in which communist parties came to power by demonstrating their superior ability to lead struggles against fascism and for national liberation and land reform –not by persuading a majority of the superiority of socialism or through a direct frontal assault on the part of the proletariat on the whole bourgesoisie. And it is true of the broader period in which the current conjuncture is located during which a contradiction has arisen between a fascist Right uniting Capital as an emerging intelligence, capitalist magnates, the more backward sectors of the bourgeoisie and upper petty bourgeoisie generally, and growing segments of the technogentry against a popular front against fascism uniting (shrinking) elements of the bourgeoisie, the humanistic intelligentsia, the proletariat, women, and historically excluded communities. But the current conjuncture divides the exploited, with the more privileged, including elements on both sides of the broader conflict between fascism and the popular front, joining the exploiters, leaving those who are least privileged and only marginally exploitable or, due to disability, not exploitable at all.
How Should We Respond?
The political imperatives deriving from the principal contradiction of the present period, between fascism and the popular front remain intact. Our choice this year is not between a greater and a lesser evil but between fascism and a government which, however flawed, may still be the most progressive in the history of the United States. We need to support this government while challenging it on the questions most critical to the survival of humanity and the recovery of the human civilizational project –which also happen to be questions which, however indirectly, put the decommodification of labor power on the table.
Outside of the disability rights movement and the small community of the “COVID conscious” there is essentially no organized expression of the vantage point of the unexploitable. This is because exploitability, generally under the guise of productivity or “hard work and talent,” are the conditions for recognition as a full participants in our social order. Anyone who is not exploitable (and who lacks the capital necessary to be free of the need to work in order to survive) is essentially an outcaste in US society –and, increasingly, on a global scale. This is why racist ideology promotes the idea that African Americans and other excluded communities such as “illegal” immigrants are unproductive “takers” and hereditary criminals. It is part of the effort to exclude the most exploited communities from the status which comes from “working hard and playing by the rules,” i.e. contributing to the accumulation of Capital which is the Great Liturgy of capitalist society. It is also why women who do not want to become outcastes are required to be exploitable across a broad spectrum of arenas: as sexual “partners,” emotional caretakers, mothers, and as contributors to both the accumulation of capital and the high consumption levels their partners demand of them.
It is important to note here that the democratic socialist Left organized around Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and Democratic Socialists of America did not resist Biden’s concessions to the bourgeoisie around pandemic mitigation and social supports. On the contrary, this trend –like the Baby Boomer New Left of which it seems entirely ignorant– is fundamentally a movement of resistance to the proletarianization experienced by the humanistic intelligentsia. It has, to be sure, shown more interest in economic questions and has invested to some extent in labor organizing, leading some (Hartman 2017) to see it as a revival of the Old Left of the 1930s. But I would suggest that this economic focus is simply the result of the fact that the process of proletarianization of the humanistic intelligentsia has already proceeded much farther. For all their professed radicalism, millennial socialists have largely accepted the necessity of selling their labor power in order to survive and are simply demanding relief from the economic pressures specific to their situation: crippling student loan debt and the high cost of health insurance, especially for those who have not yet found a sustainable niche in the economy. These are certainly legitimate economic interests, but realizing them does not require a break with capitalism nor are they necessarily the most urgent from the vantage point of humanity’s survival and the human civilizational project.
While capitalism may be defined by the contradiction between specific types of exploiters and exploited –the bourgeoisie and the proletariat– it has always harbored other classes. Some of these have been acknowledged and their role in the class struggle analyzed: –a petty bourgeoisie which had to work for a living but which had enough capital not to have it sell its labor power or sufficient skills to retain significant autonomy and part of the surplus they produced when they did, peasants not yet fully separated from control of the means of production, and exploited by means of rents or unequal exchange, and slaves who were themselves commodities. Those who cannot be exploited, however, and cannot be rendered exploitable, have generally been treated as politically inert and lumped together with criminals as part of the unstable and potentially reactionary “lumpenproletariat.” The current conjuncture, defined by the mass production of disability by a crippling virus and by the end of pandemic mitigations brings to the fore what has long remained the occult truth about capitalist society. There is a class the vantage point of which is far more revolutionary than that of the proletariat. The teleological ordering of the proletariat towards the transcendence of commodification, has historically been diverted and derailed by social democratic or socialist reforms (and we include here those following on the seizure of state power by Communist Parties as well as those following on elector victories by Social Democrats) which simply improve the terms under which workers are forced to sell their labor power. Indeed, leaving aside campaigns which effectively replaced the wage relationship with forced labor, there have been no serious long term efforts to decommodify labor power under socialism, for the simple reason that socialism never actually had this as its objective. It was instead a strategy for industrialization and imperial restoration on the margins of European civilization and in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the demands and aspirations of the unexploitable cannot be derailed in this way. Being useless, they cannot be used. But being fully human, they nonetheless aspire live and grow and find joy. And this is possible only when the resources required for life, growth, and fulfillment are available to everyone regardless of their “contribution” to the accumulation of capital or socialist construction or any other civilizational ideal.
The position of the unexploitable is, fundamentally, a class position, but it is an unusual one. It is a position not within but rather outside the relations of production. As we have begun to argue elsewhere, however, the capitalist class structure is layered over with a global caste system (Mansueto, forthcoming), which groups and ranks lineages and ethnoreligious communities based on their supposed “contributions” to society. This system is fundamentally religious in character, a legacy of liberal Calvinism, which regarded “usefulness to society” as a mark of divine election. People may be silent about the divine character of the election in question, ostensibly in deference to secularist norms, but actually because it is Capital which is the “divine” elector. And the criterion may be applied globally and pluralistically (thus the phenomenon of “model” minorities). But the system is real. And the unexploitable as a class also define a position within that caste structure: that of the outcaste. This is a status they share with other groups (in the US, for example, African Americans and immigrants) whose contributions must be hidden lest they de-legitimize the Anglo American bourgeoisie entirely, as well as with groups which effectively refused to be exploitable (most indigenous peoples in North America).
So how should we deploy our limited forces as we approach the upcoming US General Election and the numerous other elections around the world? It is our assessment that our basic strategic orientation should remain unchanged –but with a sharpened focus derived from the lessons of the current conjuncture. We must continue the broad de facto popular front against fascism which is embodied in the Progressive Alliance while bringing to the fore, both in struggles within the popular front and more especially in our organizing work the vantage point of the unexploitable. This is the only vantage point which will begin to put the decommodification of labor power for everyone on the table –rather than simply resisting the erosion of a privileged exemption from commodification for a few or bargaining for better terms of exploitation. In struggles within the popular front this means arguing for the restoration of pandemic mitigations and social supports on a global scale. In our own organizing it means defining our ultimate goal in a way which not only taps into the creative aspirations of the vast majority who find their struggle to realize the ends of human life distorted and ultimately destroyed by the commodification of labor power, but which also directly attacks as eugenic and as a strategy for instrumentalization and dehumanization the hegemonic ideal of productivity, legacy of the Protestant Ethic, in its diverse expressions. And the concrete expression of this resurgent eugenics is the current COVID policy forced on governments around the world by the Capital.
This will not be easy. It involves asking people to do things they do not want to do. Some of these ought to be very small annoyances, like masking and quarantining. Others actually present opportunities, like investing in improved virus mitigating ventilation –a solid infrastructure investment that ought to appeal across the political spectrum. But all are terrifying because they cause us to confront the reality of the human condition: we all end up old, and thus disabled, and eventually dead. We all eventually become unexploitable and outcastes. Right now humanity is trying as hard as it can to hide from this truth. Our job is to help them understand that confronting it, while difficult, is the only way to wisdom. If we do not confront this truth then Matter Herself will force us to, through mass disability and economic collapse, and eventually by the threat of extinction.
Acknowledging our terror and learning from it, we bring its aid and comfort to the people, and take together we take the next steps.
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