What are the ramifications for left politics of affirming that alienation --
capital's domination of labor such that labor produces exchange-values
furthering its own subjection -- as one of the (if not _the_) major
"problems" (to use the term lightly) of capitalist society ?
(Even though I'm going to give make some provisional observations I'm
not posing a rhetorical question here -- I'm trying to open up rather than
close off discussion).
Anarcho-communists (such as they are in the advanced capitalist societies)
argue that the left should foster emancipation from alienated labor, not
"the creation of new jobs" or "better wages and benefits" or "protections
against arbitrary dismissal" or "participatory management" or other such
objectives, which tend to comprise the ideological horizon of even the
most progressive union activists and nominally left-wing political parties.
Marxist humanists and non-sectarian Trotskyists and other radical Marxists
may share the anarcho-communist vision of where they would like to push the
unpredictable dialectic of history (toward the reduction of socially
necessary labor time as capital defines it and the unfolding of free time
for collective
creativity and play and so on), but they believe that to reach this undefined
end-state one has to get theoretically and practically involved with the real
struggles of the moment (be it against IMF restructuring in South Korea or
against U.S. arms sales to Latin American militaries and police), since defense
of the material security of those social classes (be they workers or peasants)
who have the latent potential to wage the struggle for non-alienated labor
takes top priority.
My terribly incomplete knowledge of anarcho-communists in the advanced
capitalist countries informs me that their tactical focus is on trying to
forge collective experiments which involve withdrawl from the capitalist
economy and then militantly defending that sphere (squatting, welfare scams,
petty theft, dumpster diving, barter, small worker-owned and -operated
cooperatives, and so on). (Maybe I should say "anarchists" and not
"anarcho-communists," but I'm trying to refer here to those anarchists
whose collective experimentation is grounded in a conscious reading and
appreciation of the early Marx, as well as a conscious rejection of the
Third International and all the "Marxisms" that followed as bastardizations
of Marxism).
Ironically, squatters and dumpster divers and other assorted anarcho-types
in the global cities of the imperialist countries adopt a lot of the same
subsistence techniques as do the urban poor of the Third World, but under
completely different conditions, and hence with a completely different political
meaning.
Anarcho-types in the advanced capitalist countries voluntarily
opt out of the exchange-value economy (and of course this is made possible
in many cases by the continuing existence, however paltry, of the welfare
state in the advanced capitalist countries, such as France with its relatively
cushy unemployment allowances). There are so few anarcho-types in the advanced
capitalist countries taking over abandoned houses and rummaging through
garbage and turning down the temptations of consumer society that they don't
pose much
of a direct threat to the rule of private property, even though in certain
instances they may be met with belligerent police force (especially when it
comes to appopriating and defending squats in cities with hot real estate
markets, a la Tompkins Square).
The urban poor in the cities of the global South build and defend their own
housing, start up informal sector businesses, appropriate their own water
for cooking and bathing, collectively share whatever meager amount of money is
earned, and so on b/c they are structurally excluded from the formally
capitalist sector of the economy (both in terms of production and means of
consumption) -- and also b/c they "exclude themselves" from the alienation
of wage labor and import certain practices of family- and kin-based sharing
practiced in the less-commodified (though perhaps quite patriarchal)
countryside.
OK, so what's my point ? Basically, I'm just interested in opening up a
discussion of what sort of political struggles Marxists who identify alienation
as the root of all evil should be analyzing, supporting, engaging in.
Anarcho-types in the advanced capitalist countries tend to be relatively
privileged, way out the mainstream culturally, and marginal at best.
Do the Marxist humanists and ecological Marxists and so on among us,
given our sometimes Olympian predilections, really believe that in moments
of social and political crisis salaried and waged laborers the world over
will move against alienated labor (an especially pressing conundrum for
non-vanguardists who refuse to partake in the authoritarian practice of
"educating the masses") ? Do we stake our hopes in those segments of the
population in the global South who have yet to be coerced into real if
not formal subsumption by capital ? And so on.
John Gulick
Ph. D. Candidate
Sociology Graduate Program
University of California-Santa Cruz
(415) 643-8568
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
John Gulick
Ph. D. Candidate
Sociology Graduate Program
University of California-Santa Cruz
(415) 643-8568
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
