by Quinn McGarrigle

In the past week in Philadelphia, a group of homeless people have begun building homes for themselves. They are determined to defend their new homes, and more than that, they are ready to take the fight to the city to make sure everyone has decent housing. An encampment of mostly tents and tarps has been constructed around the baseball cage in the Southeast edge of Von Colln Memorial Field, on the corner of 22nd Street and Ben Franklin Parkway. This encampment has grown rapidly, with around 50 tents and tarp structures housing both residents and supplies, all in the shade of the beech trees along the Parkway, one of Philadelphia’s central thoroughfares. The camp is located directly in view of the Rodin Museum across 22nd Street and is just out of reach of the shadows of the Center City skyscrapers towering only a few blocks away. This is an extremely wealthy neighborhood, and the main tourist district of Philadelphia. Just a block away and up a slight hill, a Whole Foods grocery store overlooks the encampment. Based on the information provided to me, the plan to construct the camp went into motion on Monday (June 8th) and was effectively established and taking in residents by Wednesday (June 10th). 

My main intention for writing an account of the camp and its direction is to preemptively avoid both the genuine confusion and the targeted misinformation to which these kinds of  space-taking projects are seemingly vulnerable. Accounts of the so-called “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” in Seattle have been circulating on social media, much of the information about the “CHAZ” being heavily exaggerated and misleading, whether in a positive or negative sense, to the extent that a Fox News reporter in Seattle referred to themselves as reporting from the “U.S./CHAZ border.” The real situation in Seattle remains somewhat unclear, but initial characterizations (hopeful from radicals and fearful from reactionaries) treated the 6-block radius as a kind of willfully organized and defiant effort at building a commune. The evidence given for this claim was largely in the form of signs declaring the neighborhood autonomous, small roadblocks somewhat misleadingly referred to as “barricades,” and the lack of police presence in the “CHAZ.” Rumors about its “anarchist” governance circulated quicker than any information about what the goals or internal organization of the Zone actually consisted of. As these stories circulated, Seattle protesters occupied their City Hall after elected socialist city council member Kshama Sawant unlocked the door for them, and President Trump demanded on Twitter that the Seattle Mayor “take the city back” from “anarchists.” 

As the “CHAZ” gained a higher profile, it attracted a variety of local and national media that have allowed for a more sober view of the situation. The Zone has no cops patrolling or stationed there, though it did allow in a police detachment that wanted to check on the state of their station within the Zone (which, at the time of writing, remains unoccupied by protestors). Besides the current lack of a permanent police presence, and the protests, speaking events, and food distribution that have become commonplace in the neighborhood, things largely go on as normal within the “CHAZ.” USA Today’s account of the Zone is in accordance with the local media in describing it as a “festival-like atmosphere.” Businesses and prior residents in the area have not reported any disturbance of their lives or property, and the businesses actually claimed that the neighborhood becoming a center of the city’s protest has been good for business. The overall character is nearly identical to other peaceful protests around the country. It should be clear that the excitement and fear over the CHAZ being some kind of revolutionary project was based only on rumor. The absence of the police in the CHAZ is a good thing, and the presence of creative and sustained protest and community projects is certainly worth admiration, but neither of these situations constitute revolutionary organization. They don’t need to be revolutionary to be good and worthy of support, but it is crucial to make the distinction.

 To avoid the rumor-based misinterpretation circulating around the “CHAZ” in Seattle, I felt it was important to develop and share an account of what exactly is happening on the ground in Philly. I will take on a personal tone to report on what I saw and interpreted from speaking with residents and organizers. This is primarily because, though I was careful to record as best I could whatever information was provided to me, I do not want to unintentionally misreport anything based on my own misunderstanding or misperception. This Philadelphia homeless encampment and the police-free zone in Seattle are incomparable, though, for the sake of clarity, I will focus more on my observations and interviews within the Van Colln Field Encampment (through which the difference should become clear) than on any comparison of the two.

Late Thursday the 11th and early Friday the 12th, I was in the encampment for the first time, due to a call for people to provide a night watch to deter a potential police raid (or other interference or attacks) in the late night and early morning when most residents would be asleep and many of the supporters filling auxiliary roles would have gone home. Though at that point the camp was quiet, it was clearly well organized. Three primary supply tents were set up as a buffer between 22nd Street and the area where homeless residents had their tents. A medical tent, food tent, and miscellaneous supply tent were operated by volunteers throughout the night. I spoke with the volunteers operating these tents and there were clearly defined lists of their existing stock, as well as what they needed to get as soon as possible, what they would need long term, etc. There were very practical considerations regarding what kind of medicine or medical supplies are needed and how they might be acquired. For example, as with food, any opened or partially used medical supplies need to be turned away for safety and hygiene reasons, which is necessary but complicates the issue of acquiring prescription medications that may be necessary but are unavailable to the residents. None of this is surprising, but the attention to practical challenges and calmly taking on the responsibility of dealing with them in a rapidly shifting situation seemed to be an immediate strength. When I left the camp early Thursday morning around 3:00 AM, there were roughly 30 tents occupied by homeless residents, with some other residents in sleeping bags on the ground. 

When I returned Thursday afternoon, the camp had already grown, now with at least 40 tents. During the day the camp was bustling with people working on various projects. Welcoming new residents, helping pitch their tents, taking donations, organizing the donations, and updating stock, distributing food and supplies where needed, speaking to interested passersby and potential volunteers: these are the primary activities I saw carried out on site. Away from the site itself, those with the means to do so were picking up supplies and delivering them both to the Parkway Encampment itself and to other homeless people around the city, both as a way to supply direct aid and spread the word about the project and its goals. 

The encampment and the organizational methods developing for its operation include two primary parties: the ideological revolutionary leftists and the homeless population making up the residents. These groups play somewhat different roles and are approaching the management and expansion of the encampment from different positions, but are almost indistinguishable without asking around about details, as they are engaged in largely the same activities and come from similar backgrounds. I will refer to the leftists as socialists, though that might not be strictly how each describes their individual politics. The ideological peculiarities are not relevant to the immediate priorities of running the camp or the stated demands of the camp, all of which can be correctly described as revolutionary and anti-capitalist, for which “socialist” is as good a shorthand as any. The camp socialists are made up of two distinct Philadelphia organizations, the Workers Revolutionary Collective and OccupyPHA, as well as miscellaneous socialist volunteers, some with specialized experience (such as medics and nurses). The WRC and OccupyPHA serve as the primary guiding force — what this means will be clarified later. The other volunteers serve what might be called auxiliary roles in the sense that they use their experience with direction action, and/or their particular skill sets, to facilitate the camp’s survival in the form of managing, sorting, and distributing donations, as well as assisting with whatever other work might need to be done around camp. OccupyPHA is an organization formed in opposition to the abuses of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, especially their role in gentrification, aggressive eviction of people from their homes, and total failure to address the issues of homelessness in the city. 

Workers Revolutionary Collective is an explicitly revolutionary socialist organization —  they outline their beliefs, goals, and methods in a well-presented and accessible way on their website. They provide both summarized and detailed descriptions of the methods they intend to utilize to meet their goals. These methods do not incite or encourage violence against people, but they are not the “peaceful protests” we see encouraged by liberals. They advocate for civil disobedience that is non-violent but uncompromisingly disruptive and confrontational. Whereas liberals are only comfortable with protests that take part in a revisionist pageantry reenacting an imaginary white-washed Civil Rights movement (urging protestors to follow all laws and police demands, equivocating expressions of anger and frustration with violent agitation, treating any assertion of power as “diluting the message” or “endangering people”, etc), the Workers Revolutionary Collective has within their strategic toolkit the selection of disruptive civil disobedience utilized in the real historical Civil Rights Movement: illegal sit-ins, illegal marches, illegal occupation of public and private property, etc. Just as it was in the 60s, liberal detractors consider illegality to be inherently violent, and balk and call for law and order. Their broader demands are openly drawn from the demands of the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program. Like the Panthers, at the end of their list of demands the WRC includes an altered version of the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence: a potent appropriation of mythical American language. Many American socialists (and some reactionaries) claim to draw on the legacy of the Panthers, but the WRC does not only claim the continuation of the Panther’s principles and long term goals. As far as I can tell, they are actively, effectively, and courageously putting the principles of the BPP into practice, of which this encampment is evidence.

Besides those who became involved as ideological socialists, the other primary group working in the encampment are the homeless residents who are working to both build themselves a home and get enough leverage to enforce their uncompromising demands for universal housing. I qualify socialism with “ideological” only because I do not want to strictly distinguish those involved on the basis of having more abstract political convictions, from those (especially among the homeless population) who may not have much familiarity with the ideological abstractions of socialism but nonetheless find themselves embodying the struggle for true liberty and equality, and understand its necessity in an immediate and urgent way. I spoke with several residents making a home in the encampment. I had no recording equipment and may have opted not to use it on the basis of privacy regardless, so I will paraphrase what residents told me and only include what was clear so as not to unintentionally misrepresent them. All names and descriptions were included with residents permission and with the agreement of representatives from the camp.

I met first with Teddy, a man who is not himself homeless but was inspired to join on Wednesday the 10th after walking by and “falling in love with it.” He was very friendly and enthusiastically working towards the camp’s efforts, doing whatever was needed of him. He was glad to hear that I wanted to speak to the residents, and directed me first to William. William claimed he didn’t have anything useful to say, but after some prodding from Teddy he opened up and had a lot to say. I hardly had to open with a vague inquiry into what was going on in the camp before he stated unequivocally that they were out there to get housing, nothing less. For clarification, I asked: “The point isn’t to live here permanently then, it’s to get housing?” He affirmed this enthusiastically, saying they were sick of having no permanent place to live and getting no help, and that they were there to demand housing for everyone once and for all. A few times he described this housing as “public housing,” and I asked him if he distinguished this from existing “low-income housing,”, and though he didn’t specify what the difference would be, he said “Any kind of housing, doesn’t matter,” and reiterated that everyone needed homes and that they were ready to fight for them. This sentiment was shared by every resident I spoke with. There was an overwhelming precision of purpose: every homeless person staying in the camp that I spoke to said that they were there to demand housing. 

Some prejudiced and reactionary people may see the homeless as “below” the political. They might see a homeless encampment, even one organized with a broader goal such as this one, as simply desperate people looking for a place to stay and something to eat without caring much for the circumstances outside of those primary needs. But in the camp there is a tangible unity of purpose and an angry determination. The opinions and goals of the residents in the encampment reflect actual social conditions, and the necessary steps to improve them, in a way that is far more convincingly political than the empty spectacle of the media, the speeches of politicians, or the parades and festivals of liberal activism. William did however have some concerns about the camp residents and their supplies being exploited by those who pretended to be homeless, but took the supplies they received elsewhere and sold them. He said that the people doing this were usually addicts who were not homeless themselves, but poor and dependent on substances, and taking the supplies that were meant for the homeless residents. I asked whether some of these addicts may be homeless themselves and struggling with their addictions, and he conceded that this may be true, but reiterated that it was still wrong and was sabotaging their effort. William went further, saying that nobody should be staying there if they’re not ready to take part in the struggle for housing. Another resident, Tianna Frisby, came over to watch William and I speak. I asked if she wanted to be interviewed, and she seemed surprised and shied away from the offer. William encouraged her as Teddy had encouraged him and she relented a little, saying that the main thing was the demand for housing, and they weren’t stopping until they got it. She stopped after this and laughed and said she didn’t have anything else to say. We got word that the resident meeting was happening shortly in the baseball field, and someone clarified for me that it was a planning and decision making meeting that only residents could participate in, but I could stay to the side and watch and take notes. Before the meeting started, I spoke briefly with a few more residents as they prepared for the meeting, and every one of them affirmed that they were there to demand housing and the end of homelessness. 

The meeting was held in a large circle of residents and members of WRC and OccupyPHA. That only residents could attend the meeting was not strictly true, seeing as WRC/OccupyPHA were involved as facilitators and mediators, but the rule effectively ensured that discussion and decision making was happening only among those staying in the camp. I haven’t mentioned the demographics of the camp yet, but they are noteworthy. The camp residents and WRC/PhillyPHA are both, by a large majority, black, poor, Philadelphia residents. Because this is the standard, assume that anybody I describe fits this description unless noted otherwise. There is no immediately striking difference in the dress or language of WRC/PhillyPHA socialists in general and the camp residents in general —  there is a wide variety overall, but the variety is common among both the residents and WRC/PhillyPHA. Throughout the meeting, and speaking to some members of WRC/PhillyPHA afterwards, it became clear that WRC/PhillyPHA are distinguished by having theoretical, political, and legal familiarity to varying degrees, but are largely from similar circumstances as those they are helping to organize themselves. Multiple WRC/PhillyPHA members expressed that they had themselves at some point been homeless or lived in crackhouses. 

All of this is in contrast to a broader contemporary leftist milieu that, both in Philadelphia and the US more broadly, often finds itself composed primarily of students, academics, professional activists, and various middle class extractions. Of course, there is no position in society that puts someone above the struggle for a better world (though for some, that struggle might demand uncomfortable changes). But at the core of any socialism worth the name is the understanding that a better world cannot be instituted on anybody else’s behalf. Throughout history, whenever social change has been offered as charity, as the good will of the powerful, it has always in time proven itself to be only a way of transforming and maintaining the evils of the existing world, of changing things a little bit so that things can stay mostly the same. Fundamental to a revolutionary socialism in the tradition of Marx, of Lenin, of Huey and Assata, is the idea that, in a society structured around the exploitation of a particular class, the people within that exploited class are the only ones who are able to transform society in a way that can effectively abolish the systems exploiting them. They are able to do this by identifying and exploiting the leverage available to them. This leverage exists due to the fact that, however degraded and exploited a class might be, if they continue to exist as a distinct class they (through accident and/or design) serve some kind of role necessary to allow society to function. Whether “homelessness” be considered a distinct class is not exactly relevant. Class analysis (at least, when following Marx) is not meant to neatly group people into accurate categories that reflect reality exactly, but to identify those tendencies of society and history that are responsible for the division and exploitation of people —  and then study how that division and exploitation functions, and why it functions. In the Van Colln Encampment, we see the effective use of leverage by the homeless population of Philadelphia to make their demands and invite productive struggle. The WRC/OccupyPHA understand personally the immediate needs and challenges of homelessness and adjacent impoverished conditions, and they understand theoretically the position that the homeless fill in society. This combined knowledge, and the courage to act on it, seems to me what distinguishes these socialists from many other contemporary leftist groups. 

Homelessness is, like unemployment more generally, the condition of violence and dehumanization imposed on those who have nothing to sell but their own ability to work, and fail to find someone to buy their ability to work. Homelessness —  the denial of access to the bare minimal tools for survival —  is the implicit threat levelled at every wage-worker. If you don’t own property that makes money, or you don’t sell your life in portions to whoever will take it, you will be considered extraneous, you will be considered a failure, and you will be blamed for it. The way our society is structured demands the suffering of the homeless, and it demands that they suffer separately, quietly, and humbly. If they don’t want to do that, they are expected to find a way to start selling their lives again at any cost, or remain condemned to suffer. Every grocery store and condominium may as well be inscribed with the words emblazoned on the gates into Auschwitz —  “Work Sets You Free.” 

On the corner of 22nd and Ben Franklin Parkway, on Friday June 12th, about 60 homeless people gathered in the grass of a baseball diamond in Van Colln Memorial Park and refused these terms. On one side of the field the encampment sat underneath the full green canopies of Philadelphia’s ubiquitous gray-white spectacled beech trees. Above the trees and across the parkway the glass of the Center City skyscrapers glared yellow and orange in the late afternoon sun. A few of the tallest were constructed in the past ten years when many of the camp residents lost their homes. Beyond the skyscrapers, over the Delaware and Jersey, the sky was a darker blue and gray clouds rolled in. On the other side of the field, the view was dominated by the towering Parkway House Apartments, its wide brick face lit up in a pink glow as the day moved westward. As most of the encampment’s residents put down their work and cleared out of their tents for the meeting, volunteers continued to sort donations and prepare them for distribution. Some of the joggers and dog-walkers and people passing in their cars surely wondered about what kind of homeless camp this was —  arrangements of tents and bedrolls are commonplace in the city, but rarely do camps this large show up in Center City, and for a close observer the presence of supply tents and some kind of formal organization would have seemed unusual.

The residents’ meeting began in an orderly fashion. I can’t say with any assurance that my impressions were accurate, but I sensed a nervous anticipation from some residents. These meetings were as new as the encampment itself, and it would not be surprising for there to be skepticism about the viability of this kind of organizing, or their own ability to contribute to it. From others there was a firm enthusiasm that I feel more confident in conveying — I got the impression that many residents had total faith that their project was possible, and the eagerness and seriousness with which they talked about pushing forward made clear that they were under no illusions about the difficult road ahead. Though the Workers Revolutionary Collective and OccupyPHA were instrumental in the creation of the encampment, their presence in the residents’ meeting was relatively light. WRC/OccupyPHA opened up discussion about plans to capture the lanes of the Parkway adjacent to the camp. The need for barricades to stop cars and the possibility of violent retribution from not only the police force but angry civilians was discussed. Taking the street is necessary for the homeless encampment to have more leverage to make their demands and maintain momentum, but it is a significant escalation. In addition to the strategic leverage this would provide, it would also open up possibilities for longer term infrastructure. The access to drainage would allow for outdoor showers to be installed; porta potties could be set up away from where people sleep and eat; the streetlights can provide a source of power. These plans are not simply presented by the WRC/PhillyPHA, but are discussed among the residents. People are excited about the plans and eager to make it happen. The discussion of concrete strategy and tactics is interspersed with spontaneous shouts regarding the cause and its necessity: “Nobody should be homeless, nobody!” “This is our home now!” 

At some point the main discussion uses these exclamations as a pivot and a speaker affirms: “Everyone that lives here, this is our space! Think about it like this. This is your home now. Treat it like you’ll be here forever, we’re planning like we’ll be here forever.” This was not just an inspiring sentiment. The call to treat this as their home was followed by real plans about how it could more effectively be made into a long term home. The most urgent consideration here was resisting eviction by the city. For this purpose, the experience and legal familiarity of Philadelphia housing policy from the OccupyPHA members was invaluable. They explained and emphasized that no one should let in or talk to anyone from the Philadelphia Housing Authority or any other social workers or government agencies, because, though they would be promising to help, the acknowledgment that they are living illegally on public property would give the city grounds to evict them. Many people speak up giving their own stories about how the PHA and other government assistance programs have not only failed them, but worsened their situation and wasted their time and energy before leaving them out to dry. Someone asks the OccupyPHA speakers about how they would be able to use the camp as an address. There is a plan for this —  they intend to build a small wooden building, find the exact address of the location where it is built, and register the building under that address. The tents will be given individual “apartment numbers” so that mail can be sent to the main address and then given out to the individual residents. The significance of mail for unhoused people cannot be understated: applying for any kind of government aid requires a mailing address, both to have the initial application materials sent to you, to have the aid approved, and to receive aid such as EBT cards, medical assistance information, etc. Besides government assistance: applying for jobs requires proof of address, receiving or renewing official identification requires proof of address, opening a bank account requires proof of address —  so many miscellaneous necessities depend on having a permanent, legally recognized address. Without one, your avenues to being recognized as a legitimate citizen are heavily limited, and you are in many situations effectively considered a “non-person.”

From here the conversation continues into the plans to create an ID system for residents for multiple reasons that will make organization more efficient, especially as the camp continues to grow and distribution and accountability will be necessary within a group where not everyone knows everyone else. Some other minor issues are addressed, such as trash disposal, and requests to keep the sidewalk clear to not invite any unnecessary anger from locals. A member of WRC mentions (I paraphrase): “There’s people of all different genders here that need to be respected. People use pronouns like he/him, she/her. I don’t personally know much about any of that, but, just respect each other and call people what they ask to be called. We’re here for each other.” The WRC/OccupyPHA members stated around this time that they are not there to control either the meeting or the camp, and that the facilitating role they took on should not ever be taken to mean that WRC/OccupyPHA was in charge of them. They reiterated that certain strict measures are necessary so that the residents can remain in control of the encampment. Among these are the total restriction on the presence or aid of any government, business, or non-profit organizations that would all open the ground for eroding their demands, their leverage, and inevitably lead to acknowledgement of the encampment as illegal and fair grounds for eviction. For this reason, the ability of the residents of the encampment to govern themselves is premised on a consensus that every camp resident understands how, by accepting official “aid,” they could easily undermine the camp’s integrity in a variety of ways, even through a moment of carelessness. 

The efficacy of this strategy of course depends on whether or not the city and the police will obey their own laws, which is always, at best, a gamble. Besides that, walking the tightrope of quasi-legal loopholes that depend on each camp resident understanding and following the needs of the loophole could become very challenging as the encampment grows and survives. Consensual democracy can be a viable method of governance (it has been the standard model in much of West Africa for a very long time (see Section V, parts 14 and 15)), but that doesn’t mean it’s viable without generations of precedent or as a model that can resist the dominant ideology and form of governance from within. Whether self-organization on this level can meaningfully be called governance when opting out is as simple as leaving with your tent is itself arguable. Any method of governance, or some strategy of collective cohesion resembling it, is in a context such as this encampment necessarily fragile and must adjust itself quickly and flexibly in response to attempts to undermine it, and must manage all this without sacrificing too much of the ground (literally and figuratively) that it has claimed. As they are no doubt aware, for WRC/OccupyPHA to adopt a stricter command role and attempt to institute a “formal” ban on activities endangering the encampment’s integrity would do no good at all on a strategic level. Either way, the same general consensus against outside interference would need to exist to prevent the undermining of the camp. But an attempt at asserting formal leadership in this context (a small, fragile project kept alive by tangible demands) would reframe the real necessity to protect the camp’s integrity as an abstract agreement to do what the leaders say —  an alienated deference to a group of leaders could easily dissolve the spontaneous cohesion and direction that comes from shared leadership and decision-making in such a high stakes situation. At least, these are my intuitions as to the situation. I am only inferring the situation and the strategy based on what I saw happening in the encampment. It is one thing to study history and remark on what could have been or what should have been when those circumstances are long gone. It is something else entirely to see social processes and human life swell into historical significance before your eyes. My intention is not to explain these situations and strategies, but to be a student of the situation, and learn from the people making it happen. I would advise other people to do the same.

Following WRC/OccupyPHA’s reminder that they were only there to provide advice and guidance and that both the meeting and the encampment in general depended on the collective leadership and decision making of the residents, WRC/OccupyPHA began to take an even lighter role in the discussion than they had before. Residents spoke up and talked among each other expressing various thoughts and ideas. The most pressing points had already been introduced and emphasized by WRC/OccupyPHA, so that further discussion began to take the form of broader statements, personal experiences, denouncement of the injustice of homelessness and poverty and praise of the solidarity they had shown to each other and that had been shown by volunteers and donors. It disgusts me that I feel it necessary to emphasize the focus and coherence of these dialogues and speeches, but even many of those who are sympathetic to the homeless tend to hold prejudices towards them as a certain kind of “lost children” that have “fallen” out of the ability to speak for themselves. It is true that many homeless people struggle with untreated mental illness, and among those illnesses are some that make communication difficult. But more than that, however, it is my belief that those who have never been homeless or have never been close to homelessness misunderstand the humility and deference of the panhandlers and beggars they encounter as being representative of the real personality and temperament of homeless people in general. The humility adopted by many homeless people is a necessity for survival. Even if you, as a homeless person, are as kind as possible, if you go out of your way to be non-threatening despite whatever anger or sadness you carry, non-homeless people are intimidated by your existence. So you wear masks. You become a good storyteller. You try to become invisible as a person while remaining visible as someone with needs to be met. Even your joy and laughter seem threatening to many non-homeless people. That the homeless are full people, with a full range of emotions, thoughts, and feelings, with life behind them and ahead of them, is (for many non-homeless people) more terrifying than the illusion that the homeless are only a sad part of the landscape, an opportunity for their own charity and reflection. Sympathy can be dehumanizing. 

The meeting at the Von Colln Encampment became a forum of rage, hope, and affirmation. A woman spoke about how she had run around for years trying to get help from the government and still had nothing to show for it. Many echoed this with their own experiences and agreement that they were done going through these channels that promised help but never delivered. A man stood up and stepped into the center of the circle and said, “There should be no homeless people! None! Give people some fucking homes! Fuck the homeless memorial! Every year they add new names to the memorial and they act like that’s doing something for us! They’re always talking about gun violence, about how we need to get rid of the guns, but there’s as many people dead from homelessness as from guns. I don’t want to see any names on that fucking memorial!” I made sure to write this down exactly as I had heard it. He was met with cheers and agreement. Some residents expressed that, as bad as they had been treated by the city government and many individuals, they were receiving real support from many donors and volunteers, and that these kinds of networks were a very hopeful sign for their project and these connections should be maintained. Another man stood up and, following the example of the other, went to the middle of the circle. He was not speaking loud enough for me to make out exactly what he was saying from where I sat off to the side of the meeting. I did notice that he had a southern accent of some kind, and only then did I look close enough at him to notice that he was a white man with a very dark tan. I caught small portions of his speech, and he mentioned rights and holding cops and politicians all personally accountable several times, often motioning in the direction of City Hall. Whatever he said it was more or less well-received, but I got the sense it was lacking in clarity even for those in the meeting that could hear him. Though it is crucial that all residents be able to speak and contribute and have a say in what’s happening, I do wonder if there is some better way to help with interpretation of comments that aren’t entirely clear, or some kind of alternate regulatory mechanism that can help meetings stay on track and within a reasonable timetable.

As the meeting continued, the issue of clarity and time emerged again. In addition to these potential problems, tensions appeared over the confrontational strategy of the camp and the methods through which the demands were being made. This strain came to the surface as a woman who had not talked yet spoke for a long time. She recounted her own story of addiction and having her kids taken from her by child services, and specified that that was her responsibility and her demons to wrestle with. She went on to describe her own experiences in prison, in public housing, with homelessness. She lost her family and her home during the financial crisis in 2009 and has been struggling since. Many of these experiences served as framing for her to talk about her experience with doing taxes and filling out paperwork and advocating for herself, and offering to help any residents who needed assistance with those things. She also spoke on the need for residents suffering from addiction to recover so that they can keep and maintain their housing when they get it. As she continued on, the tangents and anecdotes became less focused and more drawn out and eventually overtook her speech entirely. Some people began to mumble amongst themselves, some stopped paying attention, and a few left. Though her reason for continuing to speak was not clear, she was a good speaker and delivered many poignant phrases and scenes, unfocused as they might have been. Among those were religious allusions: “God says we can’t get our help from those we help because if they could help us they would have,” and “It’s okay if you don’t believe in the Lord, but believe in your ancestors, believe in something!” Her political calls were also evocative: “They have their knees on our necks whether we can see it or not!” and “They kill us, but I’ll die for my people.” 

At a certain point, after she had been speaking for around ten minutes and attention had drifted away from her (though most residents still remained in the circle), she spoke about the fact that there would inevitably be abusive and non-cooperative people in the camp, but if everyone else stuck together and was firm, they could get them to leave on their own when it was clear that wouldn’t be tolerated. Another woman walked over and objected to this in a way that wasn’t entirely clear —  she seemed to be put off by the idea that there wouldn’t be some kind of harsher discipline, and also brought up something about coronavirus concerns. I could hear what she was saying from where I sat but did not understand what exactly her objections or questions were, and the residents seemed to be similarly confused, as she was met with questioning glares from around the circle. The woman who had been speaking for a long time now was particularly offended by the new woman’s comments, which did in fact sound scolding and patronizing. But this original speaker responded with a strange comment about coronavirus, attributing the deaths it causes to God’s will and saying that God knows what’s in your heart and will protect you from disease if you’re meant to be protected. Though the point of her speech had trailed off and become tangled long before this, this was the first truly objectionable thing she had said, and the meeting bristled with more mumbling and confusion. The two women went back and forth for a few tense moments. The objecting speaker seemed to only just realize the nature of the encampment in this exchange, and said indignantly that “this is illegal and you can’t be doing this.” This especially riled people and there were objections from all sides. What had been quiet mumbling became several conversations about who this lady was and what she was doing here, asking if anybody knew her. 

A third woman approached the two arguing and said very firmly and for everyone to hear that everything so far had been accomplished without anybody getting anything back, that they were doing it for each other and it was working better than asking for permission from the city or the government had ever worked for any of them, and that no one had any right to come in here and tell them it was wrong to help each other. Focus shifted back for a moment and people clapped and shouted their agreement. The objecting woman wasn’t hearing any of it —  she restated that what they’re doing is illegal and is never going to work and that they need to go ask the city for help. At this point the circle broke and many people walked away, and whoever remained gathered around the confrontation that was happening. A couple of the WRC/OccupyPHA members joined with those residents walking away and listened to their disappointment with the meeting being derailed, and assured the residents that this was okay, they had covered what needed to be covered and it would take a little while for these meetings to develop. While this is certainly a sober and pragmatic way to deal with the growing pains of such a project, I do nonetheless wonder if meetings ending in such an informal and uncomfortable fashion could be bad for morale, and undermine faith in the encampment’s overall viability. Someone finally asked the objecting woman who she was and if she was a resident, and she said no. She seemed to have wandered over and did not understand the nature of the meeting. She said she was with a prison support organization, which tempered some of the suspicion of her, but a few were still angry and told her this meeting was not for her and she had no right to come here and lecture them. The original woman who the non-resident had voiced objections to walked off very angry, saying that she’s not one of us and doesn’t understand the struggle. A couple WRC/OccupyPHA members spoke to the non-resident who had inadvertently intruded and tried to explain the situation to her, and though I could not hear them, they defused the conflict successfully and from there went to speak with other residents and talk amongst themselves.

As the meeting fully broke off and the residents and WRC/OccupyPHL returned to the encampment, a very thin white resident who had been standing on my side of the meeting approached one of the WRC members who was walking in our direction. He addressed the WRC member and gestured to the Parkway House Apartments across the field. The wide building was now half shadowed. He said, quietly and excited: “Why don’t we demand they open that building up for us? Plenty of space in there.” The WRC member smiled and nodded and said that’s a good idea and walked away with him to talk about it. 

I stayed for a while longer and spoke to some other people around the camp, but I think that the account above suffices for a record of the state of the homeless encampment on 22nd and the Parkway as of June 12th. Whatever happens going forward, I would caution anyone who is not a resident of the camp away from playing “what they should have done” in too fast or loose a way, especially as far as that speculative pastime consists of grafting on ideological convictions to inapplicable situations (“if only the leaders had done such and such”, “if only they had adopted x position instead of y”, etc). Hopefully we will be learning from their resounding success (it is possible!) in getting their demands met and continuing the fight, but whatever happens, the encampment is already an accomplishment in revolutionary organizing in the United States.

I will note again that though my account of the situation is honest and accurate to the best of my abilities, it does rest on my observations and interviews from only one night and one day in the encampment. Normally in political or journalistic writing I refrain from personal anecdotes as I feel that, when writing for these purposes, observation and argument serve their purpose better when removed from self-reference. In this case I will make an exception, as I have already adopted a more personal tone for this text and I feel that this personal encounter provides some context for that tone. When interviewing residents of the camp I found my father among them, and as I had not spoken to him in a while, and he is a recovering addict who has been homeless at times, I was not sure whether he was a resident of the encampment or not. I spoke to him and he clarified that he was not staying there but was helping out and delivering supplies, and that he was friends with some of the residents in the camp. He seemed nervous, distant, and shaky, and my first assumption was that he had relapsed and gotten high again. After asking if he was okay because he seemed sick, he told me that he was starting to have an episode. He is a US Army veteran and, in addition to severe PTSD, has a bad case of Gulf War Syndrome, a poorly understood bundle of (often debilitating) neurological disorders. For my father, these episodes last weeks, and consist of extremely painful physical symptoms as well as dissociative war flashbacks. When the episodes start, he looks forward to the dissociation, as it takes away the pain until the episode is over. But the dissociative flashbacks have led him to stalk around the city, steal cars, break into our family home, relapse into his addiction, and have led to his arrest and confinement before. If he was not white it is not likely he would have survived these encounters as many times as he has. When I left the encampment for the night he assured me he was going back to the apartment he shares with a friend of his, but was hoping his friend would be understanding, as this would be the first time he was having an episode while living with this friend. I don’t think that personal experiences are a necessary prerequisite for speaking on social issues and having opinions about what is right and wrong, and I resent that we are so often challenged to perform our own tragedies to prove we have the right to speak about something that everyone should be speaking about regardless. But I am sharing this information here because I feel that my account of the encampment would feel incomplete, and somehow dishonest, if I did not include any mention of my very intimate appreciation of the courageous work these people are doing on the Parkway. 

Updated information about what the camp needs in the form of donations or other support can be found through http://www.wrc.life/contact/ or contacting WRC on twitter at @WorkersRevolut2.The demands of the encampment are as follows:

Readings in Marxist Political Economy and the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. Compiled by @titusandrgynous, @postcyborg, @sfnthk, @dailyremarx, @livediejoung, @dickophrenic

Background Materials

• Marx’s Capital
  • Capital, Volume I
  • Capital, Volume II
  • Capital, Volume III, Marx, essential reading for this specifically in Part 3, The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, Chapters 13, 14, and 15
• Guides to and elaborations on Capital
  • Marx’s Capital, Ben Fine & Alfredo Saad-Filho
  • Theory as Critique, Paul Mattick Jr.
  • Capital and Exploitation, John Weeks
  • A Companion to Marx’s Capital and A Companion to Marx’s Capital Vol. 2 by David Harvey
• Marx’s Theory of Crisis, Simon Clarke
• The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Henryk Grossman
  •   The Permanent Crisis, Paul Mattick
• Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, Paul Mattick
• Late Capitalism, Ernest Mandel
• The Capitalist Cycle: An Essay on the Marxist Theory of the Cycle, Pavel Maksakovsky
• “Surplus Alongside Excess: Uno Kozo, Imperialism and the Theory of Crisis”, Gavin Walker and Ken Kawashima – for an overview of Japanese Marxist debates on value and crisis
  • The Sublime Perversion of Capital, Gavin Walker
• Theory of the Crash, Lucio Colletti (PDF available on request)

Theorizing the Long Crisis: 1973-Present

• The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession, Andrew Kliman
• Global Slump, David McNally
  • From Financial Crisis to World Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation, and the Global Slowdown, David McNally
• The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005, Robert Brenner
• “What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America: The Origins of the Current Crisis,” Robert Brenner
• Global Crisis and Reproduction of Capital, Stavros Tombazos
• “Automation and the Future of Work,” Aaron Benanav
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Summary in The Guardian
• “No Way Forward, No Way Back: China in the Age of Riots,” Chuang 1: Dead Generations
• “Red Dust: The Transition to Capitalism in China,” Chuang 2: Frontiers
• “Notes on the New Housing Question: Home-Ownership, Credit, and Reproduction in the Post-War US Economy,” Maya Gonzalez
• Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State, Simon Clarke
• Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, ed. by Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway
• World In Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx’s Law of Profitability, ed. by Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi
• The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Deborah Cowen
• “Bolsonaro’s Conditions of Existence”, Humanesfera
• Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits, ed. Gustavo Moura de Calvacenti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini
• Business as usual: The economic crisis and the failure of capitalism, Paul Mattick Jr.
• “An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories,” Anwar Shaikh
• “On the periodization of the capitalist class relation”, Screamin’ Alice
• “Morbid Symptoms”, Unity and Struggle
  • The Rise of Trump
  • Fascism and Anti-fascism
  • The Downward Spiral
  • Conclusion
• Bourgeois theories of recession
  • Manias, Panics and Crashes by Charles P. Kindleberger and Rober Aliber (intro to Minskian theories of crisis)
  • After the Music Stopped by Alan Blinder (historical overview of the Great Recession, US-centric, and liberal economist)
  • The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis by Ben Bernanke (a series of lectures, short and best crash course on just “what happened”, same issues as above) 

Surplus Populations and the Crisis in Social Reproduction

• “Surplus Populations, Social Reproduction and the Problem of Class Formation”, Bue Rubner Hansen
• “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes #2
• Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
• “Social Reproduction, Surplus Populations and the Role of Migrant Women,” Sara Farris
• Carceral Capitalism, Jackie Wang
• “Austerity’s Spectres and Failures of Social Reproduction,” Ben Whitener
• Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore
• Riot. Strike. Riot., Joshua Clover
• Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya
• “Wageless Life”, Michael Denning
• Hinterland, Phil Neel

Value-Form Theory

• Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Isaak Rubin
• Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Moishe Postone
• “Communisation and Value-Form Theory,” Endnotes #2
• “The Moving Contradiction: The Systematic Dialectic of Capital as a Dialectic of Class Struggle,” Endnotes #2
• Marxism and the Critique of Value, ed. Mathias Nilges, Nicholas Brown, Neil Larsen, and Josh Robinson
• Value and Crisis, Alfredo Saad-Filho
• The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Chris Arthur
• New Dialectics and Political Economy, ed. Robert Albritton and John Simoulidis
• Value: The Representation of Labor in Capitalism, ed. Diane Elson
• Open Marxism (this school emerged out of debates with value-form theorists as well as autonomists, and emphasize that apparent social forms under capitalism are reifications of class struggle)
  • Volume I: Dialectics and History
  • Volume II: Theory and Practice
  • Volume III: Emancipating Marx

Bourgeois Economic Data and Reports

• OECD Economic Outlook
• World Bank Development Reports
• International Labor Organization annual and special reports
  • Statistics and Databases
• United Nations Industrial Development Reports
• US  Bureau of Labor Statistics annual and special reports
  • Unionstats.com

This post is a collaboration between postcyborg and MDL

We have no intention here of performing an autopsy on the recent UK General Election, but do wish to elaborate on some points of contention present in the surge in leftward political energy in economies of the imperial cores, particularly those of us in the US, where we reside. This post comprises some thoughts that we aim to further elaborate on in future writing. The obvious discomfort and proliferation of a seemingly infinite variety of reaction in the wake of this recent event requires much discussion as we continue to move forward. It is understandable for one to look upon the current state of things and despair. Between the abdications that simply seek another opportunity to perform the same ritual and the cynicism-inducing blanket rejections of those that see bourgeois democracy as nothing more than a dead end, there is little hope to be gained. If there is any hope, however, it can be found in the historical continuity of class struggle, and the task at hand to chart its development and engage in it.

This is no need for a retreat, nor a moment to return “back to the drawing board” as it were. History is not so kind as to give us this. We still stand on the precipice of a shift in the balance of power between labour and capital, of yet more swerves in the moving contradiction between them. Though this moment appears to demand a heavy feeling of defeat, there is potential to escalate the growing wave of energy for these movements beyond what the present holding pattern frames as possible . Another crisis is already in motion. The immobility of capital’s processes of expanded reproduction, stagnant and declining profitability of industry, the inter-imperialist antagonisms emerging from within the world bourgeoisie, the waves of revolt that are igniting throughout the peripheral regions of the world: this is a time of radical contingency. That this is an age of monsters appears certain, but what is not yet so certain to us is the actual capacities of either capital or its opposite, the proletarian class. Behind monstrous figments are human materiality, deformed and exaggerated .

The apparent stalling out of the potential for success of the Social Democratic hypothesis, encapsulated by Labour’s failed pivot, points us to an inability of the left of the Anglophone sphere to properly contextualize the composition of class struggle in their corner of the world. The political goal of a better quality of life, of a society that takes production and reproduction as a social act of the collective body, is here assumed to be shared by those within and without the specific tactical position of parliamentary democracy. Though this may be the case, we are in need of asking ourselves, with sobriety and honesty, whether this is possible to maintain within the interests of a political body under the assumed social organization of the nation-state? 

When the democratic seizure of power at the level of the nation-state’s political institutions becomes the goal of the organized working class, they inherit the task of managing capitalist development. Assuming this role causes one’s political fortunes to become firmly locked in step with the progress and wellbeing of the nation. The oft misunderstood necessary condition of a communist movement – a true proletarian internationalism – is obscured in such national horizons. Though the necessity of internationalism is increasingly understood and felt in the now-glaring visibility of a globally generalized capitalist mode of production, its realization is increasingly fading to the background of competing visions of nationalisms now predominant in the political composition of the imperial cores of our epoch. This particular statement comes to mind:

“We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.” – Mario Tronti, Lenin in England (1964)

In Marx’s Capital, Volume I, a clear relation between the real life movement in struggle of the working class is posited as the driving factor, the motive power of capitalist development. In the class struggle to reduce the standard time of the working day, the ensuing restriction of the production of absolute surplus value brought with it the revelation of relative surplus value in the technological revolutions that intensified labour productivity and the exploitation of labour-power. The relationship of labour and capital is brought forth here as inherent to each other’s mutual development. This dialectical tension reveals that capital is labour, but as structured within a class relation where the capitalist exploits living labour, subjecting the proletariat to the supremacy of the dead, objectified form of its past activity — capital. So says the voice of the worker to the capitalist: “The thing you represent when you come face to face with me has no heart in its breast. What seems to throb there is my own heartbeat.”

Although the principle holds true, the conditions of production and wage labour are different than when these words were written, and today the path towards a realization of the class struggle is not so simple in the imperial cores. The suppression of labour movements over the past half century, the rapid decline of labour unrest and work stoppages in union activity, the global restructuring of capital and labour that ensued in the neoliberal regime of accumulation of the past half century; all of these factors and more have severely incapacitated the degree to which a traditional workers’ movement in core regions can still function as an effective counter to the influence of capital. With the advent of a capitalism sustained as a globally integrated economic synthesis, and the structural reorganization of production seen during the neoliberal regime of accumulation, deindustrialization is the characteristic condition of productive capacity of the core. Finance capital and service sector employment reign supreme in an imperial core dependent on surplus value capture via commodity capital circulation, with direct valorization from production processes now largely originating in the world’s peripheries. 

The various programs proposed by the Social Democratic parties and politicians in the imperial core constitute an attempt to regroup and revive the fading class composition of the former century. This composition hinged on a family wage compact, funded through the dominant place of the collective national capitalist in the world economy, able as it was to export capital into the peripheries. The standards of living that gave definition to today’s “developed” world depended upon a general rate of profit prevailing within these national economies that could sustain capital accumulation. This situation is no more, any resemblance between the current balance of class forces, hegemonic standard of living and capital composition and those of the past is strictly illusory, as glimpsed in the increasing reliance on household debt to reserve one’s membership in the “middle class,” itself hollow and bereft of material weight. This past era of state-promoted stakeholding in the national capital withered and frayed as the national capitals themselves began to dissolve into the world market. The social transformation referred to as deindustrialization marked an epochal attempt to spatially reorganize production in order to lessen the total wage bill of the capitalist class (among other motivations and proximate causes). A pattern of stagnating production from the 1970s on stimulated a profound restructuring of the core-periphery relationships that had defined this prior compact, as capital sought new blood-christened labour markets in the peripheral regions, composed of (often recently dispossessed) proletarians with no comparable position of negotiating power, divided by borders and made more fungible through direct force from relatively less-mediated dictatorships of the bourgeoisie. In this process, certain capitals within the imperial core came to dominate proletarians over a wider geography, and captured a relatively higher share of total surplus value, but the national capital as such becomes unbundled, operating and accumulating more or less unfettered by national borders.

The horizon of the post-2008 turn to Social Democracy, with an apparent insurgent “socialism” reanimating the corpses of the old labour-aligned parties, is the attempt to rebuild such a state apparatus to discipline the national capital into returning to the negotiating table. The basis for this supposed socialist resurgence isn’t a militant and numerous worker’s movement, which has yet to recover much of its former strength, but the living memory of the spoils and signifiers of the past compact forming a nexus of affective attachments against a backdrop of objectively worsening living conditions. This expresses the double limitation of the Social Democratic program in the current conjuncture: this movement is an attempt to accomplish through political constituency, rather than social composition, a return to a labour and welfare compact with national capitals that have in the meantime ceased to exist altogether. The negotiating table has been sold for scrap parts. The problem here is two-fold, both aspects rooted in the protracted decomposition of the working classes of the imperial core. In the absence of a movement with the strength, ubiquity and capability of demanding more than the meager offerings of liberal politicians, Social Democracy is now nothing more than a campaign promise, easily backtracked. But even if such a movement was built, as long as its composition is oriented along national lines, its accomplishments will only ever be incomplete. The intransigence of a national worker’s movement in the imperial core is nothing in the face of the new weapons of capital strike and capital flight wielded by multinational capitals pumping surplus labour from a dozen or so countries apiece.

This unfortunate terrain is the immanent contradiction of Social Democracy itself: there is no national solution to a global contradiction. The working class made use of Social Democracy-oriented parties to navigate the simmering contradiction between national capitals and the world market at the turn of the last century. An international socialist movement was stitched together in the precise moments when these parties splintered and their programs reached their limits. But soon, as the long crisis between world wars turned to counter-revolution and the unmarked graves began to fill, this movement decomposed and national scale Social Democracy served as a dry enough tomb to inter the putrefying body of internationalism.  

To return to Tronti’s call-to-action, to “start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class,” it must be conceded that this struggle, though still present within the developed core of empire, has taken on an entirely new shape. To start again from the beginning is to acknowledge this and proceed accordingly. The off-shoring of direct production processes that valorize capital in the pursuit of cheaper labour in peripheries was a feat that, on the one hand, sustained profitability by reducing costs of production in variable capital and, on the other, avoided the potential for the social unrest and radical movements of the 1960’s and 70’s from finding their way into the factories. The growth of technological innovations introduced to production processes within these cores that tend towards automation have shed living labour and excluded the working class of the core from the point of production so broadly now that it is apparent that a proletarian movement here cannot rely exclusively on a traditional conception of past labour movements. To this end, it is no coincidence that a deindustrialized core is seeing a rise in popularity for political programs (often implicitly) calling for economic nationalism that promise to re-industrialize the nation while at the same time remaining utterly reliant on the fictitious profits generated from massive, speculative investments of finance capital in unproductive sectors of the economy, most notably real estate. The husks of capital left behind in its geographic shifts from the heart of empire has left now a rentier economy that survives on the cannibalism of cities through gentrification, and the increasing rise in rents to accelerate the circulation of the working class’ wages back into the hands of the collective capitalist manifest as landlord. 

These greater heights of technological development and automated labour processes has produced the now extremely visible phenomenon of the relative surplus population characterized by Marx’s general law of capital accumulation. As similar advancements in production processes to increase labour productivity have entered into the peripheral regions where it was first deployed, a global rising organic composition of capital in tandem with an increasingly predominant practice of accumulation by dispossession to reduce costs of raw materials has contributed to the displacement of proletarians across the globe. 

Proletarianization — the process of being stripped from any means of social reproduction that isn’t mediated by the commodity market, particularly the market in labour-power — does not per se automatically translate to inclusion within the reserve army of wage-labour and the material community of capital. Classically, the proletarian work-force, wandering the killing fields of capitalist social relations in search of work and subsistence, tend to exceed the mass of workers that can be profitably exploited by capital, and so are dynamically absorbed and expelled from waged work according to the needs of accumulation, enabling precise arbitrage in the capitalist struggle to dominate the proletariat. This fluctuating mass constitutes what Marx referred to as the reserve army of labour, always waiting at the gates of the social factory, or, more precisely, relative surplus populations, whose numbers gravitate around, and enable, growth in the productive forces. The phenomenon today, with mass dispossession and globally dropping necessary labour-times, has taken on the character of absolute surplus populations, with the newly dispossessed only dubiously brought into relation with a cramped global capital quagmired in overdevelopment. In an age that pushes itself toward the full realization of automated production, the growing mass of surplus population is growing more acute and manifesting itself into numerous series of fracture points in the stability of the present order. The technology promised to us as a utopian dream of luxury here in fact reveals a contradiction from which our epoch may not emerge without unleashing the most abject horrors.

The growing mass of absolute surplus populations among the proletariat in the present stage of capitalism’s development has led to a heightened awareness of capital and the state’s responses to the phenomenon. Mass incarceration, police brutality and street executions, rampant instability of housing among the proletariat, and labourers and refugees from peripheral regions migrating across weaponized landscapes to the core increasingly for greater opportunities for higher wages, are a few among the multiplying monstrous presentations of contemporary class struggle. The propertyless masses, with only labour-power to sell, must move in tandem with capital’s concentration. The distinctive feature of the social organization of this era, seeing the rising mass of surplus population, is the rising reliance on a carceral capitalism, a forced enclosure of this proletariat, deemed unproductive from the perspective of capital, except as a means of reducing the social wage, and thus a “problem” to be managed with severe brutality. The rise in absolute mass of the incarcerated, the ubiquity of police violence, and the escalation of the concentration camp system for detaining immigrants, refugees, and non-citizens bolstered by the reaction formation of intensifying nationalism the world over is a testament to this already prevalent and now expanding apparatus of repression that structures the wage-relation and thus the conditions of existence and struggle for the proletariat.

In this situation, we must come to understand that the practical realization of a proletarian internationalism as actual is not simply a necessity as determined in the abstract realm of “theory,” but the only possible way that the global proletariat may gain control of the current moment. The rise of the industrial labour force in the peripheries of empire puts the conditions for the bulk of today’s real accumulation and expanded reproduction of capital firmly out of grasp for the proletariat of the core. As the capital-labour compact of the liberal-democratic order continues to break down, the state’s abandonment of its former role as a guarantor of social reproduction via social safety net systems, so-called welfare capitalism, erodes into an increasingly vulgar privatization, commodifying further the means of subsistence of the working class. The phenomenon of the so-called middle class has entered a period of near-terminal decline, continuing a trend that began to gain prevalence and recognition during the turn of this century and saw its solidification in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, with the spectacle of debt-defaulting and mass foreclosures. 

The previous means of homeownership and comparably substantial retirement plans once desired by and accessible to some members of the working class no longer exist as a buffer to ward off social antagonisms. This has resulted in a stark generational divide in broader political consensus. The results of the UK General Election this month show a sharp divide between youth votes for Labour and so-called baby boomers for the Tories. What we experience now is an unprecedented climate for politics that exists at the juncture of generation and class, for which we still lack a clear language. The past construction of this so-called middle class in the US helped neutralize the militancy of labour organizations seen in the first half of the 20th century by both entering workers into debt obligations for mortgage payments that individually dis-incentivized work stoppages and built up a racially structured property relation amongst the class through the racialization of federally-backed mortgage loans, commonly referred to as “redlining.” In tying the interests of a portion of the class directly with those of the national economy through debt structured plans for property ownership, this middle class buffer was further concretized by the US dollar’s place as a global reserve currency in the post-WWII reconstruction efforts arranged by the Bretton Woods agreements. As budget deficits rose in the next two decades and accelerated during the Vietnam War, the export of US national debt as surplus capital would soon take the place of metallic reserves. This would in turn begin the gradual erosion of this middle class construction, beginning within the core the universalizing of the condition of proletarian. 

That this has now become apparent to have reached its limits of stability as capital also reaches limits towards overaccumulation, overproduction, and overcapacity, facing down another crisis of reproduction on a global scale, must also illustrate to us the impossibility of a return to a guarantee of quality of life based on this model. To do so would entail the maintenance of an imperialist global production process, a further displacement of production processes to more cheaply exploitable labour forces, and an expansion of extraction of minerals and raw materials for production by transnational corporations of the core throughout resource-rich regions. This bind, this impasse of immobility of capital’s reproduction approaching in the current moment, now too coincides with an increasing ecological consciousness, and the task of carving out a political and economic solution to this crisis takes on an immediacy that it certainly deserves. But to concede the political task at hand solely to the terrain of the institutional political structures of the bourgeoisie is to make an error in what is the possibility of politics at present. While it is myopic to simply state that the proletarian struggle should not engage on this front, it is also certainly problematic to let there be illusions about the extent to which this can realize proletarian internationalism at this specific historical moment. 

What is missing from these prescriptions is any conception of the proletarian movement as movement. Rather we are faced with a static depiction of political power, of a project of political constituency as opposed to class composition. There are here pre-worn paths by which the working class must travel before it is to stand on its own too feet. We lack here a sober analysis of the class that we have at present, its fractures, and the material limits to its capacity within the core now to directly confront capital in the sphere of its valorization. This is why it is now crucial that we take seriously the task of realizing an international class movement in practice. 

The class struggle of the global proletariat far exceeds the activity and tactical coherence of any organized left of the imperial core. It is long past due to concede that we here in the heart of empire are in danger of a total elision of any internationalism in favor of self-limiting to the nation in a more or less zero sum competition with the working class abroad. 

In a global production process and globally integrated economic syntheses, no phenomena exist in a vacuum. There still is material solidarity we can construct and build amongst each other, and synchronization in action that may still occur. In the wake of the coming crisis, these regions will surely bear once again the brunt of any attempts at recovery or stimulus package spending that occurs within the globe, “democratic socialism” or not. We will most certainly see global shifts in the geographical organization of capital to pursue cheaper labour inputs, maintaining wage suppressions to sustain profitability, the deployment of further countertendencies to declining profitability that are now already at a limit, as capital must restructure once again if it is to survive, indeed needing the onset of crisis in order to do so. Likewise it is near certain that the national capitals of the decaying husks of empire will have exhausted many means of their own to mitigate crisis, and will too be forced to enact severe austerity measures to prevent the edifice from coming down. 

To this end, and facing these potential outcomes, does it do us any good to organize a politics on a basis for a quality of life that is now rapidly receding from the realm of possibility? And further, will it be worth it if we succeed at the expense of mobilizing the forces of imperial capital to put the rest of the global proletariat in its place, so that we may attempt to once again experience life as it was? In order to move beyond these pitfalls of the present political consensus, the challenge posed between the social democratic surge and the historical continuity of the communist movement is largely the question of the quality of life, an observation that can also be gleaned by the surge in movements globally in response to the precarity of existence and economic security from many, and even the participation of proletarianizing ex-petit bourgeoisie in many movements.

If there is a “new articulation” to be had, it is not only the Idea of Communism, but its means of practical realization, not simply in the localizable everyday, as a way of life, but as a total vision of social organization and cohesion that can allow us to see a world unbound by the logic of private property, the commodity form, of production for exchange. It is true this must exist in some manner materially before we may conceive of this in the ideal, but precisely what this calls for is that we proletarians must develop a collective technical knowledge and language of the world as is, of the present state of not simply things but relations, in order to not only state that the way out must be through, but also how this is to be achieved. We must not become so weighed down by the task that we resort to utopian schemes not themselves grounded in the construction and infrastructural limitations of the material community of capital today, from which our task properly begins. To do so echoes Hegel’s warning: “The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom.” 

The task at hand is to not only challenge the material security of social democracy and its continuity of the 20th century promise of class mobility that mystified the universalization of the proletarian condition in the core regions for a generation, but to radically reconstruct what quality of life is possible in our self-activity and seizure of the means of our social reproduction, and the methods of achieving this. There is no need to jump into such fanciful Utopianism of the FALC ilk, or to concede ground to the cultural conservatism of the reactionaries that seek to redefine socialism as the suburban ideal of the 50’s, but to re-articulate and be able to demonstrate the real possibility of the expropriation of the material forces of social production, for purposes of our own reproduction and enjoyment, to build the new world from the impasse arrived at by the old.

The material community of capital demonstrates to us the present truth that all reproduction is inherently social, and this is mystified by the fetish constructs of bourgeois ideology that render economics nothing more than the management of abstract symbols of wealth through the strategic administration of tautologies for the public, all the while concealing the brutality with which capitalism’s crises are being maintained:; the utter disposability of living labour for the dominance of its objectification in its past, dead forms. Now is a time to assert the dominance and autonomy of the living that may have proper reverence for the dead in its social appropriation for the class that is itself its sole maker.

The crisis of capital is always a crisis of reproduction on an expanded scale while maintaining the profit that the capitalist class survives on through the exploitation of the proletariat, while manifesting to the proletariat as a crisis of its own material reproduction of existence, though not as a class, but as individuals scattered by the surging gusts of alien forces designated as “economy.” Though the theological devotion to capitalism’s fetish forms leads it to automations and shedding of the living labour that poses a threat to its existence should it be too integral to its processes, capitalism is always grounded by its inability to escape the need for commodified labour-power. 

The mass generation of a relative surplus population in the event of crisis, and the new proletarianization of formerly secure middle classes, points us to a contribution to Marxist crisis theory by Uno Kozo. In his contributions to Marxist crisis theory, though capital must be able to purchase labour-power as a commodity, it is not a commodity that the capitalist mode of production can directly produce on its own. This “ontological defect,” as Uno calls it, belies that labour-power is only maintained through a structural coercion of the proletariat’s capacity to perform labour to appear as the free sale of labour-power as a commodity. Labour itself is an activity that cannot be separated from human activity; it is the metabolic interaction of our own lives, its intentional and creative character the defining quality of our species-being. Now we may look at the present moment and say that the so-called Labour Party certainly suffered a defeat, but there is no defeat for the movement towards the emancipation of labour. Labour is not lost, for it may never be so.

Much is being reported of late regarding the present state of banks, as well as the monetary policies of the US Federal Reserve and other central banks throughout the world. This post is an effort to apply a Marxist lens to the ongoing activity of the liquidity injections, negative interest rates, and other tools of monetary policy currently being deployed to mitigate the rising issues of bank insolvency and the tension between trading volume and asset liquidity. This is by no means meant to be comprehensive, but simply exploratory. I have included hyper-linked analyses throughout that may be helpful.

To begin, we need to understand that the repo market, this kind of trading in money-lending and re-purchasing, is a form of interest-bearing capital. According to Marx, interest-bearing capital does not confront labor, but instead has as its opposite functioning capital, that is, capital that functions in the production process and undergoes a process of valorization that produces a surplus value and thereby a profit. Interest-bearing capital appears as self-valorizing, capital taking on an autonomous appearance, through the accumulation of debts as collateral in these forms of money dealing. However, it is not. Interest is merely a division of the profit, afforded to a party that possesses a title to that share of the profit as the payment on principal of a loan that was made. In the ideal scenario, we understand profit as only originating from surplus value, as the product of a production process that valorizes capital in the reproduction of the value of products of past labor coming in contact with living labor. Interest here, as a division of the profit, is only so in a real sense insofar as it is directly gathering a share of profit from a production process, and then, as capital in the money form, can be loaned out once again for the purposes of financing capital outlays of a production process. 

What happens in the case of interest-bearing capital, as these demands for loans in the form of money capital increase and this process of credit creation further unites the discontinuous parts of capital’s circuits of reproduction, is that increasingly banks and lenders take on liabilities of those that they loan to, and create a debt that must be repaid. This function of debt, here, is not merely an obligation, but functions as an asset, as the money loaned out to be paid on interest (here acting as a prior title to a share of the profit as interest). It is not actually fully the property of the capitalist taking out the loan and incurring the debt. The debt functions as an asset because it is, to the lender, a title to a claim on future profits. In the case of profit from interest as a result of direct investment into a productive sector of capital, this would be a share of the surplus value. The incurring of debt here would then effectively be a claim on the fruits of future surplus labor. By its nature then, Marx has a particularly gothic passage in Capital, Vol. 3 on this:

“All wealth that can ever be produced belongs to capital in its capacity as interest-bearing capital, and everything that it has received up till now is only a first instalment for its ‘all-engrossing’ appetite. By its own inherent laws, all surplus labor that the human race can supply belongs to it. Moloch.” – Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 24

But this is merely the implication of interest-bearing capital, if we are to see it as being tied to the reproduction of capital value, which it must be if it is to actually be of any reproducible value. This is often not the case. From the standpoint of the money-dealing capitalist that profits from interest, the claim to all future surplus labor is taken as given, and with the growing concentration of power in financial markets, the ensuing recovery of crises in this sphere is carried out in a wave of brutally violent accumulation and dispossession, this being the only way to produce new surplus value and recover profitability. Where interest-bearing capital breaks and takes on the autonomous appearance is due to the money form with which this form of the trading of capital is mediated. Money, as the ideal, representative of abstract wealth, becomes the fetish construct mediating exchange, and obscuring the social relations which construct value. Within this sphere, the realm of the money markets that see only capital flows as money day-in and day-out, all traces of the social relations of production are obliterated, all that is seen is value as a self-replicating, self-valorizing thing. 

This is where an error of perception of asset trading often comes in. It is not that money becomes purely false that does it all in, it is that this money is still concretely reliant on, at some point, proving itself to be a representative measure of value. We then must look to the real processes of the bank in making loans that governs this process of credit and/or money creation. Banks creating new loan assets must also create an equal and opposite liability, in the form of a new demand deposit. This demand deposit, like all other customer deposits, is included in the banks’ measures of broad money. Banks appear to “create money,” but what has actually happened is that this new money is fully backed up by a new asset, a loan. What is crucial, however, is the source of profit that pays back the interest on the principal of these loans. If it is from an investment of the loaned out money capital into productive capital, then the expanded reproduction of capital proceeds accordingly. Increasingly today, however, in the era of finance capital, productive investment has stagnated, and much of the profits from these investments using loaned out money capital are in unproductive sectors. Profits generated, if any, are largely fictitious. 

These fictitious profits are often financial assets such as stocks, bonds, derivatives, but can also be economic sectors such as insurance or real estate. Increasingly as well tech companies are a looming figure in this crowd, as almost 80% of tech-based companies making IPO’s are reporting negative earnings, no profitability. Just take two giants of this wave, Uber and Lyft, as examples. Neither of those have ever made a profit. This can be attributed to the fact that none of their means of generating a profit comes from a direct production process, but merely the capture of wages for the rented time of the driver. In the case of financial assets and the trading of these, which can also be comprised of the debt owed in these banks as liabilities, profit is largely extant as what is recorded on the books of these companies, based on the expectation of future claims from their returns. The vast majority of these investments made with loaned out money capital from banks in the past decade have not been in productive sectors, those parts of the economy that produce commodities through the exploitation of labor-power, but instead in speculation on unproductive sectors. Profitability in the US productive sector is well below that of the peaks in 1997 and 2004. Profits these days are made in money dealing and the appearance of autonomous self-valorization that capital takes on in the trading of interest-bearing capital.

As a result, there is a massive amount of corporate debt in the US economy. Lifting this from Michael Roberts and the IMF:

In its latest Global Financial Stability report, the IMF expressed its worry that: “corporations in eight major economies are taking on more debt, and their ability to service it is weakening. We look at the potential impact of a material economic slowdown—one that is as half as severe as the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and our conclusion is sobering: debt owed by firms unable to cover interest expenses with earnings, which we call corporate debt-at-risk, could rise to $19 trillion. That is almost 40 percent of total corporate debt in the economies we studied, which include the United States, China, and some European economies.”

And emerging countries’ economies are also increasingly burdened by corporate debt. This is itself a result of stagnation in production, which is thus a stagnation and decline in real profits. Roberts has a great full breakdown of this so I will just post the link to that: 

So what does this all have to do with the bank repo markets article in Financial Times and the activity that it has documented? Well, repo markets is shorthand for repurchase agreement markets. This is a type of agreement that refers to short-term borrowing of government-backed securities, like T-Bills or T-Bonds. A dealer sells the government-backed security to an investor with an agreement to repurchase the bond the next day (overnight) or at some later date at a higher price. These are short-term, interest-bearing loans, and the practice of engaging in this repo market has the aim of generating capital in the money form in the short-term. It should be clear here that we are seeing Marx’s observation of this autonomized money fetish in action. The goal of raising this capital in the short term is to stabilize financial markets with liquid assets (cash) that can provide a degree of solvency in their reserves and keep the market afloat for the time being, but at the expense of doing so with inflated fictitious profits.

The end result of this, however, is a dangerous dead end for banks and financial markets. All of this also relies on continually structuring debt assets as collateral for these trades. Already there is a serious and unsustainable level of corporate debt. To once again bring up the Roberts analysis cited above:

“The debt owed by corporations in the major economies has risen since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.  With global growth slowing and the prospect rising of an outright global recession recurring ten years after the last one, the debt held by corporations may soon become so burdensome to a sufficiently large number of companies that it triggers a round of corporate bankruptcies.  The banks will then see a sharp rise in non-performing loans. That could lead to a new credit crunch as banks refuse to lend to each other.

Such a credit squeeze briefly erupted last month, when the US Federal Reserve was forced to inject over $50bn into the banking system in order to reverse a very sharp rise in inter-bank interest rates as cash-flush banks refused to help out weaker ones.  The cause of that squeeze was a rise in the supply of government bonds as the Trump administration issued more to cover its rising budget deficit. Some banks were not able to fund the purchases they were committed to without borrowing. So, as bank reserves held with central banks in US, Europe and Japan have surged, interbank money market volume has declined.

As a result of this shock to the credit markets, the Fed has returned to the market to buy short-term Treasury bills to restore bank liquidity.  So, having ended quantitative easing (buying bonds) and started to hike its policy interest rate last year, the Fed has had to backtrack, cut rates and re-introduce QE again. More than half of central banks are now in easing mode, the biggest proportion since the aftermath of the financial crisis. During the third quarter of 2019, 58% of central banks cut interest rates.”

The cutting of Federal Reserve interest rates here is an important development in this stage of capital managing its motion towards recession, and a potential crisis that will deepen the Long Depression in which we currently reside. Interbank interest rates in the US, typically monitored via the federal funds rate that assesses the interest rate at which banks are lending to each other, saw a major spike in September of this year, prompting the Fed to intervene. Liquidity injections in the form of repurchase agreements up to $60 billion a month have been set, and are to continue indefinitely into 2020. (It is also worth mentioning here that China has been engaging in similar measures to relieve bank insolvency with quarterly liquidity injections since last year, upwards now of $260 billion US since October 2018). As banks seek to raise interest rates for lending money capital and credit amongst each other and their prime creditors, they move to balance out their reserves with a share of these industries’ profits. But this requires on the part of those receiving the loans an expansion of productivity and their capitals, something we will discuss below which is also in trouble at the moment. To mitigate this issue of rising debt and insolvent bank reserves, the Fed’s liquidity injections aim to provide banks and financial markets with a stabilizing measure of liquidity, and their slashing of interest rates for deposits with the Fed a measure to keep that liquidity out of deposits and still circulating within the markets to accommodate the present, inflated trading volume.

Europe and Japan have both been dealing with negative interest rates imposed to stimulate economic growth, and it has been gaining the ire and alarm of investors as well as major banks like Deutsche Bank, all who recognize this unstable position in the global economy and who would prefer to keep their money deposited at the Fed rather than lend to each other. The ostensible aim of the negative interest rate is to incentivize investors away from depositing money or locking it up into long-term investments and instead keep it circulating in order to prop up the financial markets with the cash flow that these speculatively inflated trading volumes demand. The adverse effect of this is that it increasingly pushes these investors into shorter-term, higher-risk and higher-yield investments, which severely increases the risk of inflating speculative bubbles in this sector of the economy. There is also the growing adverse effect in Europe on retirement pensions, as many are already having their pensions gutted, as pension fund investments in illiquid assets hamper the amount of circulating capital in these markets. 

The bourgeois economist sees the retirement pension as an obstruction, a saving that damages the economy by not engaging in enough consumption to meet the demands of value realization in that sphere. What they do not see is that the rate of profit forms a general limit to the rate of interest, and that the plunge taken by interest rates this year is largely due to the massive contraction in productive capital reproduction. This contraction in production is the root of the frenzied burst of rate cuts in the US and all central banks (remember, 58% of central banks globally cut interest rates this year) and the corporate debt burdening the US economy, because there is a growing possibility that there will be rise in bankruptcies and thus a rise in non-performing loans. 

To understand this, we have to turn back to the crisis of profitability happening in direct production processes that is exacerbated by the current trade war. Interest-bearing capital only captures a share of the surplus-value as profit if this surplus can be recapitalized productively as a renewed investment. The money-form of capital loses its potential as capital if this continuous motion in the reproduction process is disrupted. This disruption has its foundation in the immanent contradiction in the relation of the organic composition of capital (the ratio between constant to variable capital in production) and the rate of profit (the surplus-value produced over the total capital invested in production, the sum of the constant and variable capitals). Organic composition rises as capital’s expanding reproduction has a tendency to continually invest in technological innovations that revolutionize the production process by increasing the productivity of labor (constant capital), while at the same time shedding this living labor (variable capital) from production to maintain profitability. Since 1997, the organic composition of capital has risen 17% while the rate of profit has declined 5%. The stagnation in production in global industry that is being well-documented in the bourgeois press now should be readily apparent as a clear reason for why interest rates are plummeting. With the decline of profitability in productive sectors of the global economy, there is also a reduced demand for loans, for how will profit be made on interest? The negative interest rate thus becomes a forcing of a demand for loans and the liquidity injections an induction of some type of supply for the money capital to sustain this activity. But behind it all, there is increasingly less profitability to be found, and monetary policy is in no position to ameliorate this crisis.

The only action global capital can take within the financial and money dealing market sphere is to push circulation and consumption harder and faster to accommodate for this crisis. Though it must be stated that this is not a real countertendency to crisis, but is merely a measure of market stabilization. This is also where we see the Fed’s intervention into the repo market playing a role. The repurchase agreements here function solely to, through interest-bearing capital, inject some form of cash liquidity into central banks for their trading volume, generating more than before through interest. Trump has recently called for the introduction of negative interest rates by the Fed as part of his economic agenda for 2020. What this will effectively do is force more money from lenders into circulation and discourage any sort of productive investment. It is merely treading water in a violently thrashing motion while the current draws in the coming hurricane. Absolutely none of this makes up for the productive stagnation and declining profitability, and the contraction in foreign trade from the trade war has merely accelerated this latent crisis in production. At some point, if it is to survive, capital will have to go under. 

This piece originally published in Cosmonaut on 08/21/2019

Today the left has come to a common acceptance that the detention centers in which migrants are incarcerated are concentration camps. Despite its truth, this claim has been reduced to a popular point of partisan contention in the spectacle of institutional political theater. While it is important and necessary to expose the routine abuse and murder of those incarcerated in these camps, track ICE raids across the US, and organize legal support to confront these abuses in court, this is not enough. We also need an understanding of how these concentration camps are not merely an aberration of fascism alone but an organic development of late capitalism’s crisis management.

What we are witnessing is not a phenomenon that can be divorced from capital accumulation and the global production process in the imperial epoch. This brutal reality in the last instance is a product of capitalism in its stages of crisis. What we see in the border concentration camps and the privatization model implemented through them is a sustainability measure for capital in its spiraling descent into a new global fascism from which no extant faction of US institutional politics is exempt.

Private incarceration is often framed as a particular abuse within capitalist society so that it may serve as a point of contrast between the two major political parties. Yet from this perspective the crucial role private incarceration plays in the expansion of capital is obscured. A Marxist view of the situation reveals privatization to be an increasingly important mechanism for the appropriation of surplus-value created in production, especially in the past 40 years. It is a further development of the private-property relations fundamental to the capitalist mode of production and the reproduction of capitalist society. In its reproduction, capital overtakes and seizes conventional state functions. Capital here does not eclipse or obliterate the state but merely changes its form. Capital realizes its totalizing logic in the state, exceeds the state, and re-appropriates it as a mechanism for accumulation and concentration. 

It is no surprise to see the familiar villains of this industry at work behind these atrocities. 72% of incarcerated migrants are held in privately-owned camps, the bulk of them owned by CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group, two of the US’s most enduring and powerful figures of the private-prison industry. The contracts these private entities have with ICE are extremely lucrative, the two companies earned a combined $985 million from them in 2017 alone. Even greater capital investments lie in the many other privately-contracted services necessary to the overall function of the camps, from telephone services to healthcare and everything in between.

The further integration of the concentration camp as a model for capitalism’s sustainability is these prison corporations’ function as sites for the accumulation of finance capital through bank investments, a practice in which many major banking institutions take part. Some have pulled out this year due to public pressure generated from direct action efforts, but they may just as easily creep back into the game. The finance capital that has already been accumulated is now strategically reserved in the form of money-capital as these corporations weather the PR crisis. We can be certain that they are ready for us to stop paying attention.

CoreCivic and GEO Group also heavily involve themselves in political lobbying. The proximity of these corporations to Trump and the GOP often takes center stage in public discourse, but left out are the many contributions they make to Democrats. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee received $350,000 in contributions from private-prison industry lobbyists during the 2018 midterm election cycle alone, and there are still instances of individual Democratic candidates accepting gifts and contributions from lobbyists for the industry. What is clear is that capital’s investment in the infrastructure for genocide has bipartisan support and that the false politics represented by the electoral spectacle must not cloud that reality.

America’s failing representative democracy is now infected with a resurgent nationalism that erects itself as a psychological support to the contradiction between capital’s free global movement across borders and the simultaneous restriction of similar movement of labor. Today, the stirrings of a new industrial revolution are already underway and, combined with the looming threat of climate-driven scarcity, are producing a fractured consciousness. People fall back on secure notions of identity and self found in the nation-state.

The political buzzword now adopted by Republicans and Democrats alike is “economic nationalism.” The old rallying cry of “American jobs for American workers” is also a bi-partisan talking point, revealing the reactionary one-party state that has always dominated the US working class. In the case of the concentration camps on the border, then, we should not be fooled by either party’s posturing in addressing the matter. The dual crises of capital and ecology, as well as the descent into fascism, is well out of the hands of any managerial bureaucracy. Behind their blithe opportunism, we must understand that any party will easily maintain the existence of these camps. The nomadic proletariat made real in the Global South’s displacement to the imperial core become a relative surplus population (or industrial reserve army) for the servants of capital, to be absorbed and managed, but not without the creation of an apparatus which can still capture surplus-value. Capitalist society must not waste a chance to further capital’s self-valorization, regardless of its current political commitments.

This holds true for the current upswing in popular support for social democratic reforms in US politics. Social democratic policy prescriptions for capital’s crises and growing racial and class conflict is gaining traction on the right. For example, Tucker Carlson, on his Fox News show, now engages with critiques of free-market capitalism previously foreign to US conservatives, even inviting Angela Nagle, a so-called leftist cultural critic, on as a guest. The manifesto of the El Paso shooter similarly criticizes the failures of American capitalism while supporting social democratic reforms, such as UBI and universal healthcare, to mitigate class conflict while also advocating for an increasingly popular ethnonationalism. In the politics of the nationalist project, to which social democracy unquestionably belongs, the left side of this debate deploys much of the same rhetoric and critiques of “corporatism,” and similarly will not be able to evade the question of border protection and immigration policy that its politics demands of it. Let us not forget that Bernie Sanders too reaffirmed in the last Democratic primary debate his commitment to “stronger border protections.” The project of social democracy, or more generally that of the welfare state, is situated in an imperialist world economy that relies on the exploitation and underdevelopment of the Global South, though it dare not say so out loud.

Furthermore, left projects organizing support on a grassroots level to support these reformist initiatives must remain conscious of the limitations of the nationalist project. Whether there is a claim to reject American nationalism or not, this is the sphere of political action these projects occupy. As Medicare For All gains traction and continues to poll well, dangerous coalitions will form. The migrant as nomadic proletariat here serves a dual function for nationalist politics.

On the one hand, the migrant is that from which the national subject itself must be separate from in order to constitute itself. This separation creates a sense of lack, which is supported by the need it institutes. This psychical manufacture of need supported by a lack finds its material mirror in capitalism’s “original sin” of primitive accumulation, the act of separating laborers from their means of production, initiating the productive consumption of means of subsistence in commodity form. This displacement is the base of capital accumulation and the origin of the proletariat. For capital accumulation to continue, this displacement must continually occur, and it is that which we see functioning in the nomadic proletariat’s creation. But this nomadic proletariat’s existence and movement to the imperial core is contradicted by the core’s reliance on the increasingly fragile social ties of nationality and citizenship wrought by internal displacements for capital accumulation. The nomadic proletariat as migrant becomes a visible sign of these weakening ties, and national identity disintegrates if it absorbs them. The social organization of citizenship must remain separate from the core’s global economic entanglements if displacement as a base of capital accumulation is to continue to function. To that end, it becomes a useful development for the bearers of capital to be able to point to that which is other from the national subject, to then displace the migrant psychically as well as materially, to make them a symbol of that which is lacking in the national subject and use the need thus manufactured to maintain the drive of productive consumption towards accumulation. The political fiction of the nation, therefore, relies on the construction of such lack, and the US national citizen of today is only constituted in so far as it is not the migrant. 

This is where a further need for reform is injected. “American capitalism must be reformed, look at what it is doing to our jobs!” But, as we are not materially separate from a global production process, this return of the need for social democratic reform is then directed towards the consumption of the Global South, its people and its raw material, at the service of the imperial core’s appetite. We are comfortable, then, to see an infrastructure of state support as what we lack, and in turn to see the migrant as the visible manifestation of the state’s failures. This is the implication that the bi-partisan refrain of “economic nationalism” relies upon, for the ability to symbolize lack as such conceals the real process of production that truly directs the phenomena and the relations of which the nationalist project must conceal in order to sustain its fantasy.

This brings us to the other hand of this dual function. Forming amongst the anti-corporate strains of US politics is an understanding of the mutual share of responsibility that Republicans and Democrats possess in their inability to counter the tide of corporate influence, instead taking part in the full transformation of the state into a model of realization for capital. For both the rational actors of the right and the left, the clear reality is that the influence of corporations in politics has utterly compromised all positions on immigration, as many of these large corporations are reliant to some degree on the exploitation of cheaper labor from a nomadic proletariat. This is to an extent correct, but they fail to extend the analysis to encompass capital’s reproduction on a global scale and its role in producing the nomadic proletariat.

Considering the origin of these displacements that have created this nomadic proletariat, we must take into account the long history of US military and political intervention in the affairs of Latin American states which lays a foundation for current waves of migration. Latin American intervention, the intentional and violent arrangements of political power in those countries for the benefit of US interests, is a history with a clear end-goal, and that has been the dominance over the claim to ownership of surplus-value created in production by multinational corporations, that have in turn enforced monocultural agricultural production, super-exploitation, and further alienation of those laborers from that which they produce. 

The agricultural production of Latin American countries is now being affected by climate change as well. This will continue to be a crucial contributing factor to the rise in migration to the United States. The ensuing displacement of these countries’ domestic labor populations is now already exacerbated by the hegemonic relationship, exercised through imperialist foreign and economic policy, between the United States and other such Western liberal democracies over said countries’ production. The result is an increasingly dispossessed and immiserated proletariat in frequently unstable social, political, and economic situations. Such trade agreements as NAFTA and the new USMCA consolidate private ownership of sites of production in Latin American countries, facilitating the capture of surplus-value and further strengthening the property and class relations that global capitalist society relies on for its continual and ever-expanding reproduction.

As capital is mobile on a world scale but labor is not, greater rewards are offered for labor in the core than in the periphery. With the ensuing concentration that the general law of capital accumulation demands, as well as the implementation of dispossession as a means of achieving this accumulation, the core increasingly becomes a site of convergence for the nomadic proletariat, the eye of capital’s global hurricane. But within the core, generations of internal accumulation by dispossession, mostly facilitated by the mechanism of privatization and histories of racialized terror and violence, have fomented unstable conditions and outbursts of revolt. Capital always produces a surplus, and the capital of a global production process in the imperial epoch produces a global relative surplus population. With the situation being as it is in the core, however, what must be done?

The concentration camps here are thus crucial to maintaining the stability of an economic nationalist political program. If “American jobs” are to be maintained for “American workers,” then these relative surplus populations must in turn be utilized so that capitalist society does not forego the opportunity to extract surplus-value from their exploitation. For-profit concentration camps are thus the productive consumption of the relative surplus population produced by capitalist accumulation in the imperial epoch. Privatization as a model of realization for capital here finds its critical place in the scheme of things. The state is merely a series of connective arterial passages for the infrastructure of capital. The concentration camp of today, therefore, is critical infrastructure for valorizing capital by absorbing displaced populations. The incarceration of migrants indefinitely produces absolute surplus-value, as does the indefinite lengthening of the working day.

This can also help to explain the statistics we find currently for ICE removals reported by ICE over the last two recorded fiscal years. In FY 2017 and 2018, total ICE removals numbered 226,119 and 256,085, respectively. These are not insignificant declines from much of the Obama era’s numbers, with ICE removals for FY 2013 and 2014 reaching such heights as 368,644 and 315,943, respectively. FY 2015 and 2016 saw relative declines to 235,413 and 240,255, respectively, as a result of minor reformist initiatives undertaken at the time. This period too, however, saw a solidifying hold on privatization for ICE detention. The Trump administration’s numbers retain the average closely, and it may very well be a result of the minimum necessary population levels that these privatized models of ICE concentration camps require for their functioning and stable capture of surplus-value in their incarceration. Some analyses often discuss these declines as a result of an overloaded immigration court system unduly burdened by the escalation of ICE raids of increasingly dubious legality. It is rather more likely that indefinite detention and procedural dysfunction are vital to the continual production of absolute surplus-value and give it the elasticity that it requires.

To see how profitable indefinite incarceration in the concentration camp model is, we can look at the cost per night of maintaining detainees. According to ICE’s FY 2018 budget, the average cost of a single bed is $133.99 a day, though this figure is disputed. For mothers and children together in so-called family residential centers, it is $319.00 a day. For the beds in the tent city camps made to hold children separated from their families, they are $775.00 a day. These costs are supported by federal contracts with the corporations that own these camps, and costs are re-evaluated per annum with the potential of increasing federal funding if deemed necessary and in turn supported by Congress’ allocation and at the same time being continually bolstered by private investments made from other corporations seeking to in turn valorize their capital through consumption of products in the concentration camp. The whole apparatus is one designed for the ruthless exploitation through dispossession of the migrant’s agency and movement. It is no surprise then that, as capital seeks its expanded reproduction within this model of realization, ICE’s body count climbs and climbs. 

Any illusions as to the capacity possessed by the US state or capitalist society at large to address this current monstrosity must be extinguished. So long as migration intensifies on a global scale and the more developed core countries retain their trajectory of hyper-development by means of capital accumulated through the Global South’s continual exploitation and dispossession, the migrant concentration camp will be a stabilizing mechanism for the crisis of capital. The state machine, in pursuit of the stability of the nationalist project, seeks out structures to adapt our desires to the needs of capital and its drive towards accumulation, seen in the affirmation of the importance of the “American” worker. Even as left projects seek to better the lives of the US proletariat through social democratic reform, they are acting in the interior of the state machine in lock-step motion with the rise of fascist ideology. The incompatibility of this politics with a goal of universal emancipation that includes the abolition of the incarceration of the nomadic proletariat, therefore, necessitates a rupture with this procedural left so that we may combat the suicidal ideation of fascism. The project of border abolition is bound up with the self-abolition and emancipation of the proletariat, and affirming the importance of a national proletariat over the nomadic only sustains the lifeblood of capital. 

History shows us that the only sufficient course of action to be taken then must be the liberation of these camps and the dismantling of their supportive infrastructures, and strategies to this end are still taking shape. In the fearless example laid for us by Willem Van Spronsen, we saw transportation vehicles of the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center taken out of commission. We must seek to continue to reproduce such models of direct action on a more expansive, mass scale, with the further coordination of such with the efforts of the incarcerated. Protests and direct actions organized on banks investing in the concentration camps have made said banks pull out of their contracts with them. Direct actions on massive corporations like Amazon and other tech companies are aiming to disrupt the critical data infrastructures that are being invested into and developed in the concentration camps, and this is a crucial space of engagement. We must continue to build the capacity, scale, and mass support for these actions that will become necessary if we do indeed succeed in impeding the concentration camps function as a model of realization for capital value.

This is where we find the kinetic movement of fascism forming, its material basis for potential genocide in capitalism’s organic adoption of the concentration camp as a model of realization. We may hear the right’s racialized rhetoric on immigration and criminality as a rejection and demonization of the migrant. Rather, this rhetoric is that which wills the caravan into existence, both as a result of and a driving force of capital accumulation. As a result, this relative surplus population is made into a model of capital’s realization by means of its bodily dispossession and a psychological support for nationalism. The transition to fascism is seamless, because the progression is inherent in capital’s crisis in the US where the capitalist mode of production is so highly-developed with heavily ingrained institutions of White Supremacy. Capital’s tornado reaches an intensity in magnitude of crisis to make the qualitative shift to the black hole of fascism’s suicidal state. The movement is not yet complete, and we may yet have time to prevent a new American holocaust. Its death will only be real if we act.

This piece originally published in Cosmonaut on 12/07/2019

I spend most of my days at a front desk, staring at a window with a grate over it. I watch the light change as the hours crawl. The room is an icebox, but since I am the first face anyone sees, I must be warm. My work can be summed up as an extra layer of emails that others must go through for scheduling with my superiors, processing payments, and ordering food and arranging rooms for meetings. I smooth out the tasks that others formerly had to do themselves. This role is designed to maximize the efficiency of the office functions of the organization. I have nearly perfected the process for email responses and calendar surveys, and reliably make payments on time. In down moments, I read the news or talk to people on Twitter. The 9-5 consistency and the chance to have the most pay I have ever been offered was something I knew I wanted, at least to avoid the precarity of other jobs. But between this schedule and living on the other side of town for lower rent, I’ve been kept from time with friends. The internet is often where I feel closest to anyone. I have never uploaded a picture to my work email because I am not there. 

Here and there, complications come up that ruffle the smoothness expected from my performance. Sometimes there is not enough food at meetings. People might want hotel rooms booked for a large group with less than a week in advance to a popular location, and to add extra people at the actual last minute. Often I am sent payment information with incorrect routing numbers, delaying the transaction. Important people show up for meetings hidden from my calendars, asking about details not shared with me. When they sense my confusion, their brows furrow. I smile and think of something charming to say, hoping to see the tension in their facial muscles relax. When these moments happen, I do what I can to assuage concern and I keep things going. 

The other day, this did not go as planned and food went pretty quickly. Someone important commented on my unsanitary handling of food. Others sat where it had been served, and getting more in the room ended up being difficult, so it was a distraction. My boss called me in for a meeting, asked what I thought went wrong, and gave me more precise directions on how to avoid this in the future. A professional development class is suggested. I am asked if I think this job is still a good fit for me. I think they are trying to see if I would quit on my own. There is a brief and quick flash of what I think is fear, as I immediately think of my rent, cost of food, other job prospects. That I am burdened with knowing these difficulties, while the present moment depends on me not betraying this, brings a lump to my throat, and I feel the pressure behind my eyes. Is this really about to make me cry? I hold it back, I smile, I assure them that I want to be successful. I take the notes down, I listen to suggestions for how I can order food better. I think about going home, and the next 5 hours until my partner gets home and I can see her again.

I realize that I am expected to perform an emotional ideal much of the time at my work. This has been true for all of my working life. This is not a unique experience in the life of the collective worker today and has given rise to a growing discourse on the subject of emotional labor. It spills out into new avenues of discussion of what exactly it comprises, and where the line between our exploitation and our personal lives exactly lies. In this discourse, it is not at all unusual to come across a wide range of positions, experiences, and reactions. Some attribute the discourse on emotional labor to an ideological basis, that this is simply a form of liberalism gone amok. There are those who see this as a symptom of the most recent, cogent reformation of capitalism’s development, neoliberalism and see it as a totality of marketizing emotional relations between social peers. This appears more accurate, yet more often than not glosses over exactly why the exploitation of labor now increasingly relies upon an assurance of the emotional presentation of the worker, and worse tends to display a tenuous grasp on what “neoliberalism” means except as a bogeyman for today’s ills. 

What I seek to achieve here is a grounding of emotional labor as such within the context of Marxist political economy. We must see the discourse surrounding this phenomenon as a process in motion interrelated with the development of labor’s exploitation in an economy that has seen a dramatic rise in its consumer service sector. This acts as an arena of exploitation where the laborer’s access to the wage is increasingly under the watchful eye of every consumer and supervisor. From this, we can see what the growth of emotional labor as a discursive regime reveals to us about the state of alienation in the development of capitalism of late.

We have to begin this analysis with the understanding that, as proletarians and wage-workers in a capitalist mode of production, we have nothing to offer in order to reproduce ourselves except our capacity to sell labor-power as a commodity to the capitalist. This labor-power, as a commodity, must possess both a use-value for its buyer and an exchange-value for its seller. The use-value here is the capacity to perform a given amount of labor within a given amount of time. We must do this in order to earn our wage, the exchange-value for labor-power expressed as a price. We do this in order to use said wage to purchase our means of subsistence, sold to us in commodity form. The key here is that, for the proletariat in a society where the capitalist mode of production prevails, a basic survival and a guarantee of some quality of life depends upon the capacity to sell labor-power and to find a buyer. We must search for a master even if there exists no desire for such. 

To this end, what is to be understood of the exploitation of emotional labor as pertains to the working life of wage laborers? Emotional labor is a term coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild, to give a name to the experience of the worker in managing, and through this, suppressing, their expressions and behavior in order to fulfill the emotional demands of a job. Hochschild finds three common elements to employment that require the use of emotional labor by the worker: “First, they require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public. Second, they require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person — gratitude or fear, for example. Third, they allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees.”¹ 

These can be seen every day in almost any job that requires some form of interaction between the worker and a consumer or superior. The use-value of labor-power as a commodity in these jobs is reliant upon the capacity of the worker to both give an emotional performance and induce a specific affect in those they engage throughout. The worker is alienated not only from their labor-power, but also from their genuine emotional expression. We need not look far to find examples in gig economy jobs, work supposedly “autonomized” by a decentralized coordination of services via app, many of which impose a customer ratings system for every transaction made.

This is made even more clear when taking into account the rapid growth of employment in the service sector, encompassing a wide variety of professions and requiring constant interaction with the public as consumers. The growth of employment in service-based industries is far outpacing that of employment in direct manufacturing and production in the United States, and is expected to keep doing so over the course of the next decade.² The stability of the wage in US capitalism of today, and thus the use-value of labor-power, is increasingly reliant on a capacity of the worker to perform an emotional labor in transactions: satisfy the boss and constantly ease the conscience of the customer, thus reifying the commodity in its exchange, transforming it into money, and allowing for capital’s reproduction to proceed accordingly. Though in Hochschild’s original research, published in the early 1980s, she found a prevalence for this type of employment in the clerical office and retail-oriented work of what then constituted the so-called middle classes, she offers a prescient observation for the future of this phenomenon: 

“If jobs that call for emotional labor grow and expand with the spread of automation and the decline of unskilled labor — as some analysts believe they will — this general social track may spread much further across other social classes. If this happens, the emotional system itself — emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange, as they come into play in a ‘personal control system’ — will grow in importance as a way through which people are persuaded and controlled both on the job and off. If, on the other hand, automation and the decline of unskilled labor leads to a decline in emotional labor, as machines replace the personal delivery of services, then this general social track may come to be replaced by another that trains people to be controlled in more impersonal ways.”³ 

The US economic situation of today is one of a rapidly deindustrializing imperial core. As a site of capital-intensive production that has shed living labor from its processes and automated many jobs out of existence, US development to date has given rise to a growing relative surplus population whose primary objective as a labor force is the circulation and consumption of commodities through sale and purchase. The privileged position of the US as a site to capture extracted surplus value from more labor-intensive production chains in global peripheries no longer supports the buffer from class struggle that the construction of a middle class once provided. As capital accumulation has intensified and reached new limits that pose as barriers to capital’s expanded reproduction, more avenues for circulation must be opened up. Over the past 40 years, during what can be understood as the neoliberal regime of accumulation, even the imperial core has seen the slashing and gutting of social support services from governments. This has led to increased privatization of that which used to sustain a state-supported social reproduction of the workforce and a degree of class mobility in the so-called middle classes. This onset of privatization and the accompanying deregulation of the financial industry that aided it can be seen as a period where capital accumulation outstripped the limits on profitability imposed by state-supported services towards social reproduction, as the organization of capital and labor underwent structural transformations on a global scale.⁴

It is important to contextualize this historically. The very reason that we see growing awareness of the exploitation of emotional labor, the fundamental coercion of this performance, is structured by the wage relation in this specific historical trajectory. This moment brings us upon convergence between, on the one hand, a stagnant, deindustrializing manufacturing sector placing the US proletariat more and more into jobs involving interpersonal social interactions, and, on the other, an era where the social reproduction of the proletariat as a workforce has increasingly failed. The expectation of emotional performance in the work environment, as well as the increased dominance of working life over personal life to accommodate for decades of suppressed wage growth to maintain profitability⁵, has led to an exhaustion of emotional capacity in personal life. The awareness of this has become a defining characteristic to the way that we understand alienation in capitalist society today.

At the base of all processes of capital accumulation is a separation, as in Marx’s “primitive accumulation” and Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession,” that acts to form the constitutive social relation between classes of production for exchange that is capital. In the instance of the worker’s emotional capacity as use-value of the commodity labor-power, a further separation is occurring. No longer is it simply the alienation of the worker from their labor-power, but now from emotional expression in this capacity as worker. Affect is commodified, and its appropriation as such here is with the intent to subvert the emotional capacity of the worker to the aims of capital. But as stated above, in the context of this period of capitalism’s countertendencies to declining profitability deployed with an intensifying aggression, we are approaching a severe limit to capital’s reproduction process. To this end, the commodity of labor-power, now as a commodified capacity to provide emotional labor in working life, is pushed to a limit in accordance with the demands of capital’s continued reproduction, and only moves to continually reach beyond that limit as capital stands on the verge of another crisis once again. We, as an increasingly debt-encumbered proletariat, sense this crisis every day. Every day at work is another day we must bear a false smile and perform positive emotional well-being if we are to stave off the looming threats of eviction, starvation, and immiseration that losing our job entails. The alienation of ourselves from autonomy over our emotions as the use-value of emotional labor is thus not only for the benefit of any given customer, but for the stability of the whole of capitalist society.

This brings us to Hochschild’s ominous foretelling of a “personal control system” above, as we have seen this degree of social alienation drastically restructure social life today. Susan Willis posits in discussing the political economy of domestic labor, in the example of the use-value of the married mother at home that in this instance does not fold the laundry, “it is only the failure to create use-value that can be made visible.”⁶ For the use-value of emotional labor, it is vital that the veneer of the laborer’s emotional state exists for the smooth realization of commodity value in exchange, and thus accumulation, to proceed uninterrupted. The failure to provide this exposes a dissatisfaction that reveals that the worker’s emotional performance is just that, a performance, and exposes all to the coercive regimes of personal control that we are all subject to under a life structured by the need to work for a wage. To this end, we find ourselves simultaneously existing at the other end of Hochschild’s prediction, where now a growing number of service-related jobs are also being automated out of existence. We need look no further than the growth of cashier-less lines at grocery stores and commodities delivered by Amazon drones. These systems themselves will never be free of human labor, though they certainly train us to internalize the fact that under the domination of the class relation of capital all human life is effectively disposable. The exploitation of living labor is merely a problem of geographic reorganization to areas where another section of the proletariat will bear the burdens of production.

We are now faced with a situation where, on the one hand, we are under the duress of an increasingly alienated and impoverished social life. This is carried out in exploitation of increasing intensity that pits us smiling, unwillingly, in front of any passing stranger that wishes to make a purchase. We are thus less emotionally reliable than any machine that may take our place. On the other hand, capital can not exist without our pliable consent to its processes and must sustain us. But this is now only possible in an environment where we are increasingly deprived of the time for the most emotionally fulfilling, deeply personal moments necessary for our own reproduction. The immobility of this immanent contradiction to capital’s expanded reproduction has driven us to a new discursive terrain for emotional labor, as we are increasingly aware of the contradiction and its effects.

There is the understanding that emotional labor, as contextualized within the working environment, is coercion of sentiment from the worker to induce a specific emotional affect in the consumer. This is fundamentally different from the role emotion plays for us in daily life, untethered to the demands of a job. To a social life amongst people outside of work, the use of our emotions is to be of authentic expression, fundamental to all communication. The labor of emotion in a context free of the wage-relation is not inherently a coerced act but part of our metabolism with ourselves and each other in social life for our own ends, for both pleasure and pain alike. To experience this as alienated labor for the drive of capital is to subvert this to the demands of the economic dictums of a mode of production that sells us back to each other in dead, objectified forms.

There is also the reaction of those who see emotional labor as coercion in life outside of the wage: the application of an awareness of the exploitation of emotional labor as a process to be mediated through an exchange where one previously did not exist. This has resulted in the notorious phrase “venmo me for my emotional labor,” a phrase that today is not always clearly situated in a space of either sincerity or irony. Phrases like “venmo me for my emotional labor” tend to draw severe ire in many online circles, and I can be sure many reading this have witnessed and participated in moments where they’ve seen this phrase used. The phenomenon to which this is a reaction to is certainly real. As seen above, it is also clearly rooted in a material situation of the prevalence of the exploitation of emotional labor. However, the application of the framework of emotional labor to interpersonal communication outside of waged work, if it aims to be a position that seeks to challenge oppression, does so by further naturalizing capitalist social relations, and thus fails. 

It is certainly healthy and important to have emotional boundaries and to operate on the basis of consensual interaction in social life, but to do so by formalizing the emotional and making further transactional interpersonal experience amongst each other is to reify the customer-worker dynamic that prevails under wage labor. In the more vulgar iterations of this, we may see demands of monetary compensation for emotional labor. To seek to address emotional labor in this manner is to take up a rigidly economic line of reasoning that abandons the possibility of redeeming the social significance of the emancipatory use of our emotions for ourselves and each other while in the process merely affirming exchange-value as the basis for struggle and the measure of all value. There is no possibility here beyond a grafting of our exploited life onto the social, and falls prey to the same misgivings of those that call for the payment of labor its “full value” in the wage; a far cry from the emancipation of labor and the self-abolition of the proletariat, leading only to momentary placation until the next wage battle.

The quickness to invoke the issue of interpersonal emotional labor is, however, part of our collective rage at present — the era of human feeling being ripped from its bearers so we can buy and sell commodities more efficiently as the ship goes down once again. The displacement of this rage onto each other can appear a sound move, as such action amongst our own class is less prone to incur a retaliation that may have an immediate effect on needs such as food and shelter.  It is the condition of having to sell one’s labor for a wage to purchase these means of subsistence that stands as the primary cause of our emotional exhaustion. The hegemony of work-life prevents us from critiquing these conditions deeply; from realizing that the wage is a scam for a rote labor of performative friendliness, politeness, denial of our free-time, emotionally taxing work-relations of sociability, or, at worst, dealing with the verbally abusive treatment common to the service industry. It is all incredibly draining, and it is no wonder that this current discursive trend exists. Insisting on a transaction to mediate emotional support might be the most revealing symptom of the domination of capitalist social relations. But bearing resentment towards friends needing emotional support should be recognized as a symptom of this. It obscures the origin of our dissatisfaction in the domination of our lives by the irrational demands of capital. If you’re looking for a target for the rage, take on the boss, the landlord, the capitalist, and abolish their class, for it is only through this conquest and transcendence of the capital relation that we may see the end of this exploitation of our emotional labor.

1. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
2. See the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Employment by Major Industry Sector: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htmThe Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City on the growth of the service sector:https://www.kansascityfed.org/en/publications/research/rme/articles/2019/rme-1q-2019
3. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
4. For more on this, see: McNally, David. “From Financial Crisis to World-Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation, and the Global Slowdown.” Historical Materialism 17, no. 2 (January 2009): 35–83.
5. See: Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume III. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Chapter 14 on Counteracting Factors of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall.
6. “Playing House: Domestic Labor as Culture” in: Willis, Susan. A Primer for Daily Life: Studies in Culture and Communication. London: Routledge, 1991.