Red Pepper » Nicholas Beuret

Catastrophism: The truth won’t set you free

admin — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:00:13 +0000

At its heart Catastrophism is about the loss of faith that haunts radical left-wing politics. Through a series of short essays by prominent US writers and activists it maps out the consequences of an end in the belief that radical change can come from mass politics – that is, from organising. In place of organising Catastrophism outlines two ways of doing politics.
The first mode of politics is a kind of determinism: the very nature of capitalism will bring about its demise. Sasha Lilley’s essay gives a good overview of the history of this idea among the left. In its various guises it proposes that there is no need to organise, only wait. The end – through economic crisis or environmental collapse – is coming no matter what we do.
The second is in many ways the very opposite – the truth of the impending crisis and the very fact of its imminent arrival will awaken the sleeping masses and provoke them to action. This idea – that it is the left’s role to bring the truth of the world to the masses, and that this will move them to revolt – is at the heart of much of the radical left and broader environmental movement.
But as Catastrophism points out, this is often far from the case. Truth does not necessarily lead to action. Actually, when it comes to catastrophe and disaster, the truth can play a demobilising as well as mobilising role.
The book doesn’t make a neat connection between the two modes of politics and catastrophe. The history of each as outlined in the book rather speaks to the idea that the radical left has moved between these two positions throughout its history. Determinism and volunteerism would seem to be the two dominant reference points of radical left politics.
Where Catastrophism comes into its own is in identifying both that these points of reference are part of the general problem of left-wing politics at the moment, and that it is in times of crisis that they become even stronger tendencies. The author’s call for an environmental and left-wing politics animated by a faith in people’s ability to change the world is all the more timely.

A class act

admin — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:00:03 +0000

E P Thompson’s work usually gets a nicely worded (if often guarded) review. After all, he’s part of the original new left, sings the praises of the Levellers as revolutionaries, and is part of the turn to social history and history ‘from below’. He is also often lauded for being part of the move towards ‘cultural’ considerations (cultural studies) with Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. If a review digs a little deeper, it might get to the lack of racial or gender analysis in his work (Struggle for the Breeches by Anna Clark is the most famous repost to E P Thompson’s lack of gender analysis). He is an important author and figure for all of these reasons, but we do him and arguably his most famous book The Making of the English Working Class a disservice if we stop there.
I don’t mean his political life beyond the text as it were, leaving the Communist Party, as a ‘freelance polemicist’ and ‘voice of the peace movement’. I mean that we should follow him down into his books to see what they say, and to make as much out of them as people do of his life. The Making of the English Working Class in particular deserves to be read for a number of reasons.
Published in 1963, it is a historical text that concentrates on English artisan and working class society ‘in its formative years, 1780 to 1832’. In Thompson’s own words he sought ‘to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’. The book itself is a seminal history from below text, drawing out aspects of the formation of capitalism largely ignored until its publication.
So what makes The Making of the English Working Class so interesting? First, it has a theory of class as a thing that emerged and developed over time. That is, the working class didn’t spring magically out of the processes of enclosure fully formed, but was (and still is) the varied and always contested result of an open process between capital and the not-yet or have-been working class bodies that still populate the world: ‘The working class did not rise like the sun at the appointed time. It was present at its own making.’
But second, if we follow Thompson’s method – his fine grain detail, his patchwork of groups, trends, everyday life and events – what you see is an image of class as a continual process. People are always making and being made into ‘the’ working class. And through that process class – as a concept, as a consciousness – is constantly evolving. It’s worth noting that he was
very much working in parallel on an understanding of the always-antagonistic nature of class as a relationship of resistance and rebellion with the Italian autonomist Marxists, the most famous of whom (for non-Italians) is Antonio Negri. The priority for them, as for Thompson, was the thread of resistance and rebellion that ran through history and formed the basis of capitalist social relations.
Third, and like them, his writing shows class as not one but many. Considered theoretically, the working class is all the same – labour in the abstract. Look a bit more closely, think about your day at work, the commute and the people around you and you’ll see a hodge-podge of peoples, often at odds or even war with each other. Consciousness is the key aspect, emphasised by Thompson against the more economically determinist readings of both Marx and class dynamics:
‘And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs . . . If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not.’
But even here he innovated. Consciousness was not ‘raised’ – people did not need to be made aware of their exploitation or loss to be moved to action. Thompson showed how, in a myriad of ways, people developed their own narratives, ideas, theories and understandings of what was happening and, more importantly, what they wanted to happen. From religion to late night drunken raids on factories, political groups to parliamentary reform – more than ‘culture’, Thompson considers all of life to be both organised and a terrain of struggle and innovation.
Finally, Thompson cautions us not to rush to judgment as though we ourselves were in some position from which to lay out all that has come before us. In motion, riding the rough seas of class conflict, the horizon can surely be our only ultimate guide:
‘Our only criterion of judgment should not be whether or not a man’s [sic] actions are justified in light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves.’

Wages without work

admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:00:55 +0000

It is no longer a question of being out of work. The question is: on whose terms will we be unemployed? The financial crisis has thrown millions out of work and destroyed the future possibility of decent work for millions more. Many, if not most, of the unemployed and unemployable are women. With the TUC calling for ‘A future that works’ at its recent march, the publication of two books that pay attention to the legacies of feminist and anti-work traditions such as Wages for Housework is welcome.
Silvia Federici is a writer and militant who co-founded the International Feminist Collective, which launched the Wages for Housework campaign internationally. Kathi Weeks is an associate professor of women’s studies at Duke University. Accordingly their books differ in style and approach; however both develop aspects of a critique of work and the central role reproduction has to play in the transformation of our lives.
Revolution at Point Zero is an edited collection of Federici’s work, including some of the earliest Wages for Housework texts; essays exploring the ‘war against women’, which she argues forms both the pre-history and current conditions of capitalism; and essays exploring the limits of care and the role of the commons. Federici has been working on all these issues for decades, most notably in Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia, 2004).
In this edited collection several key analytical highlights stand out. The first is the insight that unwaged work – in the home and the colonies – is the foundation of capitalism. A campaign against unwaged labour, like the fight against colonial rule, was (and still is) crucial to ‘break the processes of capital accumulation’.
The second is the denaturalisation of gender roles: the fact that housework is not ‘naturally’ women’s work but emerged as a naturalised social role at the same time as (male) waged work. Both the housewife and the waged worker are capitalist social roles.
The third, and perhaps most important for current feminist movements, is that waged work has failed to liberate women. Federici argues that liberation is not to be found in refusing either reproductive labour or waged work but in the radical transformation of both.
Last is the insight that we need what Federici describes as ‘the commons’ as a means to create non-capitalist forms of collective reproduction. Commons are not a replacement for struggles over the wage but a necessary compliment. This insight has inspired Federici’s recent work in US social movements, building what has been termed ‘communities of care’ or ‘self-reproducing movements’, and offers an inspiring starting point for post-Occupy strategising.
Weeks begins The Problem with Work with a focus on the pervasiveness of the work ethic and the centrality of work to capitalists and anti-capitalists alike. Her primary concern is to show how the imperative to ‘be productive’ constrains the potential of revolutionary movements. She sees our imaginations as captured by a particular understanding of what is economically and ethically valuable.
She convincingly shows how an imperative to be productive, at work, in the home, school and in life generally (‘Five Top Tips for Productive Dating Profiles!’), is central to the way capitalism not only puts us to work but makes us want to be put to work. We think work is right and just, and when we imagine another world, even a ‘post-revolutionary world’, we imagine a world of work. Weeks argues that we need to break the hold that work has on our imaginations. She calls for ‘concrete utopianism’ – a perspective that starts from what is possible now, even though it may seem impossible.
Starting from the possible utopian aspects of the present, Weeks, in a similar vein to Federici, calls for a re-centring of struggle around our everyday life against work. For Weeks, this starts from two linked demands.
The first is for a basic income, divorced from any ‘productive activity’. The idea is not to valorise unwaged labour as a form of work, or to recognise the economic value of everyday acts of reproduction, but to enable a life outside waged work. For neoliberal class warriors like David Cameron, it is precisely this disconnect between income and the wage, often found in aspects of the social wage such as the NHS and welfare benefits, that is the primary target of recent cuts.
The second demand is for shorter working hours without a reduction in wages. Without time to live differently away from waged work there is no possibility for creating a different world. Revolutionary movements and moments need time and it is precisely the question of what to do with that time, the question of how to live and (re)produce differently, that lies at the heart of both books.