On the Unclass of Precarians

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/06/on-the-unclass-of-precarians/#comments



By Zygmunt Bauman



It has been, as far as I now, the economist Professor Guy Standing who (hitting the bull’s eye!) coined the term “precariat” to replace, simultaneously, the terms “proletariat” and “middle class” – both well beyond their use-by date, fully and truly “zombie terms”, as Ulrich Beck would have undoubtedly classified them. As the blogger hiding under the penname “Ageing Baby Boomer” (http://www.creditcrunch.co.uk/forum/topic/8222-goodbye-proletariat-hello-precariat) suggests,


it is the market that defines our choices and isolates us, ensuring that none of us questions how those choices are defined. Make the wrong choices and you will be punished. But what makes it so savage is that it takes no account of how some people are much better equipped than others – have the social capital, knowledge or financial resources – in order to make good choices.

What “unites” the precariat, integrating that exceedingly variegated aggregate into a cohesive category, is the condition of extreme disintegration, pulverization, atomization. Whatever their provenance or denomination, all precarians suffer – and each suffers alone, each individual suffering being well-deserved individual punishment for individually committed sins of insufficient shrewdness and deficit of industry. Individually born sufferings are all strikingly similar: whether induced by a growing pile of utility bills and college fees invoices, miserliness of wages topped up by the fragility of available jobs and inaccessibility of solid and reliable ones, fogginess of longer-term life prospects, restless spectre of redundancy and/or demotion – they all boil down to existential uncertainty: that awesome blend of ignorance and impotence, and inexhaustible source of humiliation.

Such sufferings don’t add up: they divide and separate the sufferers. They deny commonality of fate. They render calls to solidarity sound ludicrous. Precarians may envy or fear each other; sometimes they may pity, or even (though not too often) like one another. Few of them if any, however, would ever respect another creature ‘like him’ (or her). Indeed, why should s/he? Being “like” I am myself, those other people must be as unworthy of respect as I am and deserve as much contempt and derision as I do! Precarians have good reason to refuse respect to other precarians and not to expect being respected by them in turn: their miserable and painful condition is an indelible trace and a vivid evidence of inferiority and indignity. That condition, all-too-visible however carefully swept under the carpet, testifies that those in authority, people who have the power to allow or to refuse rights, have refused to grant them the rights due to other, “normal” and so respectable, humans. And so it testifies, by proxy, to the humiliation and self-contempt that inevitably follow social endorsement of personal unworthiness and ignominy.

The prime meaning of being “precarious” is, according to OED, to be “held by the favour and at the pleasure of another; hence, uncertain”. The uncertainty dubbed “precariousness” conveys preordained and predetermined a-symmetry of power to act: they can, we can’t. And it’s by their grace that we go on living: yet the grace may be withdrawn at short notice or without notice, and it’s not in our power to prevent its withdrawal or even mitigate its threat. After all, we depend on that grace for our livelihood, whereas they would easily, and with much more comfort and much less worry, go on living had we disappeared from their view altogether…

Originally, the idea of “precariousness” was a gloss over the plight and living experience of the large echelons of hangers-on, boarders and other parasites crowding around the princely and lordly kitchens. It is on the whim of the princes, lords of the manor and other high and mighty like them that their daily bread depended. The boarders owed their hosts/benefactors sycophancy and amusement; nothing was owed to them by their hosts. Those hosts, unlike their present-day successors, had however names and fixed addresses. They since have lost (got free from?) both. The owners of the exquisitely frail and mobile tables at which contemporary precarians are occasionally allowed to sit are summarily called by abstract names like “labour markets”, “economic prosperity/depression cycle”, or “global forces”.

Unlike their liquid-modern descendants a century later, contemporaries of Henry Ford Sr., Morgan, or Rockefeller were denied the ultimate “insecurity weapon” and so unable to recycle the proletariat into precariat. The choice to move their wealth to other places – places teeming with people ready to suffer without murmur any, however cruel factory regime, in exchange for any, however miserable, living wage – was not available to them. Just as their factory hands, their capital was “fixed” to the place: it was sunk in heavy and bulky machinery and locked inside tall factory walls. That the dependence was for those reasons mutual, and that the two sides were therefore bound to stay together for a long, very long time to come, was a public secret of which both sides were acutely aware.

Confronted with such tight interdependence of such a long life-expectancy, both sides had to come sooner or later to the conclusion that it is in their interest to elaborate, negotiate and observe a modus vivendi – that is a mode of coexistence which will include voluntary acceptance of unavoidable limits to their own freedom of manoeuvre and the distance to which the other side in the conflict of interests could and should be pushed. Exclusion was off limits, and so was indifference to misery and denial of rights. The sole alternative open to Henry Ford and the swelling ranks of his admirers, followers and imitators, would have been tantamount to cutting the branch on which they were willy-nilly perched, to which they were tied just as their labourers were to their workbenches, and from which they could not move to more comfortable and inviting places. Transgressing the limits set by interdependence would mean destruction of the sources of their own enrichment; or fast exhausting the fertility of the soil on which their riches have grown and hoped to grow on, year in year out, in the future – perhaps forever. To put it in a nutshell: there were limits to inequality which the capital could survive… Both sides of the conflict had vested interests in preventing inequality to run out of control. And each side had vested interests in keeping the other in the game.

There were, in other words, “natural” limits to inequality and “natural” barriers to social exclusion; the main causes of Karl Marx’s prophecy of the “proletariat’s absolute pauperisation” turning self-refuting and getting sour, and the main reasons for the introduction of the social state, a state taking care of keeping labour in a condition of readiness for employment, to become a “beyond left and right”: a non-partisan issue. Also the reasons for the state needing to protect the capitalist order against the suicidal consequences of leaving unbridled the capitalists’ morbid predilections, their fast-profit-seeking rapacity – and acting on that need by introducing minimal wages or time limits to the working day and week, as well as by legal protection of labour unions and other weapons of workers’ self-defence.

And these were the reasons for the widening of the gap separating the rich and the poor to be halted, or even, as one would say today deploying the current idiom, “turned negative”. To survive, inequality needed to invent the art of self-limitation. And it did – and practiced it, even if in fits and starts, for more than a century. All in all, those factors contributed to at least a partial reversal of the trend: to the mitigation of the degree of uncertainty haunting the subordinate classes and thereby to the relative levelling-up of the strength and chances of the sides engaged in the uncertainty game.

Those factors are now, ever more conspicuously, absent. Proletariat is turning, and fast, into precariat, accompanied by fast expanding chunk of the middle classes. Reversal of this reincarnation is not on the cards. Reshaping the proletariat of yore into a fighting class was heavily power assisted – just as is, in the present-day, the atomization of precariat, its descendant and negation.

[Hit The North]

I suppose you posted this to promote a discussion. Be nice if you'd communicate that fact.

I always find Bauman readable, but he's one the great sociological pessimists of our time. Although his observations about the condition of the proletariat in 21st Century Western capitalism strike lots of bells, his analysis is always one-sided, focussing on the negativity of modernity, the drive towards disintegration, commodity fetishism and individualisation. He never grasps that these very processes provide opportunities and reasons for resistance. His perspective is structural, reified and fatalistic. His work also relies on very little empirical evidence and is really just a kind of moral narrative dressed up as social science.

Whilst a lot of what he says about life under neo-liberal capitalism (what he calls 'liquid modernity') may be true, his categories for class are merely sociological. There's no reason, therefore, to abandon the deeper categories of historical materialism, where classes are identified in their relationship to the means of production and each other, for neologisms such as 'precariat'. Yes, life is precarious for workers under capitalism - but when has it not been? That's a consequence of our class's relationship to the mode of production. The changing sociological manifestations of that basic fact, does not alter the fundamental process of class reproduction.

[RED DAVE]

Proletariat is turning, and fast, into precariat, accompanied by fast expanding chunk of the middle classes. Reversal of this reincarnation is not on the cards. Reshaping the proletariat of yore into a fighting class was heavily power assisted – just as is, in the present-day, the atomization of precariat, its descendant and negation.What you are talking about is the impoverishment of the working class and petit-bourgeoisie. However, the working class still works. Whatever its current consciousness or subjectivity, it still works. The root of its consciousness is in the conditions of its labor. Same with the petit-bourgeoisie. It is undergoing proletarianization.

One more time, DNZ, you are trying to get away from the fundamental Marxist categories and class struggle and drown it all in a fog of words.

RED DAVE

[Jose Gracchus]

There is, however, we should agree, an essential problem of how to organize the precarious and non-productive service employees as an organic flank beside the remaining organized, unorganized productive workers in strategic industries. Nothing has worked so far; the physical dispersement and pulverization of the old industrial proletariat the bourgeoisie has undertaken since the 70s has largely succeeded in rendering many of the old means of class struggle, and thus the intensity of its existence, obsolescent.

I think we need to deal with this seriously, despite the (in my opinion) very weak presentation of DNZ and this blog.

EDIT: I must say though, after reading that piece (and the forum post linked within it), I do wonder whether there's worry that the social and state management of 'precarity' will be this century's reformism and sequestration of class struggle. I'm very suspicious of all liberal academician/sociological attempts to move aside revolutionary class categories in favor of their sociological musical chairs.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I apologize for the very weak presentation. I didn't want to "necro" my old Theory thread on the precariat ("All things precariat: a new class?"). :(

Standing is just the latest in a trend of academics trying to redefine "workers" in relation to work. Even then, the reformists in their ranks are quite ignorant of Minsky's ELR and Fully Socialized Labour Markets.

[Jose Gracchus]

I meant whats the solution, except for precarians joining ZE WORKERS PARTY'S WORKER BOWLING LEAGUE.

Specifically they addressed the fact that even those mundane levels of association are collapsing, which does not bode well for the SPD alternative culture model you adore.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I meant whats the solution, except for precarians joining ZE WORKERS PARTY'S WORKER BOWLING LEAGUE.

:lol:


Specifically they addressed the fact that even those mundane levels of association are collapsing, which does not bode well for the SPD alternative culture model you adore.

There are misguided calls today to return to "Big Society" or some other equivalent in order to stop this - misguided only because of anti-state rhetoric.

However, it doesn't bode well for spontaneous worker councils, either. How can the members focus their political thinking on councils providing social services and such during upheaval (immediate concerns), or exercise delegation powers, when they're too busy working (in need of representatives)?

On a much more serious note, that raises the spectres of May 1968 or "coachism" from my old thread, the latter of which is tied to "agitation on steroids" - these, in order to counter Standing's own spectre of "populist" nationalist parties, in turn programmatically stemming from the "cross-class" problem:


There are so many directions to take any analysis and conclusions on the "precariat" upon, and sorry for this being in note form:

1) Class vs. strata
- Always there? Revisiting "Ricardian" labour theory of price to describe unequal exchange and labour reproduction under-compensation? [Cockshott said Marx was "generous" in his LTV re. equal exchange and labour reproduction compensation before asserting that exploitation still exists.]
- Working poor only? Working-class students and pensioners? Unproductive work paid below living wage levels?
- Across classes? Back to "working classes" re. less differentiation from some poorer self-employed elements, such as freelancers?

EDIT: Tied to the first point is the question, "Iron Law of Precarity?"

2) "Organic links"
- Positive lessons of Labourism: some "organic links"? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/positive-lessons-labourism-t146759/index.html) Precariat unions affiliating a la Labour's unions?
- Japanese Communist Party's rising support among working-class youth as connection to precariat?

3) Immediate program
- “Sliding Scale of Wages”: Cost of Living Adjustments and Living Wages (http://www.revleft.com/vb/sliding-scale-wages-t98609/index.html)
- Private-Sector Collective Bargaining Representation as a Free Legal Service (http://www.revleft.com/vb/private-sector-collective-t124043/index.html)
- Public Employer of Last Resort for Consumer Services (http://www.revleft.com/vb/public-employer-last-t124658/index.html)
- Nationalizing temp/casual labour agencies? (http://www.rabble.ca/babble/labour-and-consumption/nationalizing-tempcasual-labour-agencies) (no formal commentary yet)
- National-Democratization, Health-Industrial Complexes, and Workers Insurance (http://www.revleft.com/vb/national-democratization-health-t144740/index.html)
- Educational Training Income Beyond Zero Tuitions (http://www.revleft.com/vb/educational-training-income-t139568/index.html)
- Full Belly Thesis and "Identity Politics" (http://www.revleft.com/vb/full-belly-thesis-t141396/index.html) (no formal commentary yet)

[black magick hustla]

another main reason why the trotskyist museum curator talk of building trade unions, labor parties, and other "laborist" mass organizations is obsolete. these organizations emerged from shopfloor culture, something that is nonexistent.

i think what is going to end up happening is that we will end up with the mass strike, and massive rioting as our only weapons of choice. communize everything and struggle till death against the law of value motherfuckers

[Die Neue Zeit]

another main reason why the trotskyist museum curator talk of building trade unions, labor parties, and other "laborist" mass organizations is obsolete. these organizations emerged from shopfloor culture, something that is nonexistent.

i think what is going to end up happening is that we will end up with the mass strike, and massive rioting

And massive rioting? Yeah, because riots, the tool of the lumpen, have worked in the past. Even May 1968, for all its many institutional faults, had no riots. :rolleyes:

[Hit The North]

another main reason why the trotskyist museum curator talk of building trade unions, labor parties, and other "laborist" mass organizations is obsolete. these organizations emerged from shopfloor culture, something that is nonexistent.


Shopfloor cultures exist where there are shopfloors; there are also office cultures, staffroom cultures, dock yard cultures, etc.

It's interesting that you would write-off the unions ability to provide mass dissent at a time when the Greek workers, following the example of Spanish workers, have organised a general strike in opposition to the bourgeois austerity plans, or when even the UK is enjoying its largest strike day in five years.


i think what is going to end up happening is that we will end up with the mass strike, and massive rioting as our only weapons of choice. What other weapons have we ever really had as a class? Besides, you appear to contradict yourself: it is clear that mass strikes do not happen spontaneously, but rely on networks of conscious solidarity whether organised from above or below. So some form of, let's call it grassroots rather than shopfloor, culture, must exist or be potential.


There is, however, we should agree, an essential problem of how to organize the precarious and non-productive service employees as an organic flank beside the remaining organized, unorganized productive workers in strategic industries. Nothing has worked so far; the physical dispersement and pulverization of the old industrial proletariat the bourgeoisie has undertaken since the 70s has largely succeeded in rendering many of the old means of class struggle, and thus the intensity of its existence, obsolescent.

Of course, there are always obstacles to organising workers and a pressure from the bourgeoisie for this not to happen. However, if the British dock workers of 1888, an extremely fragmented workforce, can be organised, so can modern service workers. And, actually, modern service workers in the state sector have higher trade union density than many 'productive' workers in manufacturing.

I also think we should be cautious when we advocate the obsolescence of our traditional methods of class struggle.

In contradiction to the bourgeois sociological theory of decomposition and atomisation of the working class, we are seeing workers in Europe beginning to act as a class once again - and employing some fairly tried and tested methods of struggle!

As I mentioned in my earlier post, a lot of this sociology is based on very shaky empirical ground and on the assumption that disorganisation is the unique core feature of modern capitalism. These theories argue that an increase in casualised labour, short-term contracts, etc. and a dissolution of old securities in jobs for life, sustainable pensions, etc., as well as a corresponding disintegration of community and the public sphere, has been a consequence of a change in the regimes of capitalist accumulation, chiefly as a result of uncontrollable techno-logics which defy human agency.

There are a number of things that can be said about these assumptions, including:

a) According to the most thorough analysis of the empirical data surrounding labour markets (http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Capitalism-Kevin-Doogan/dp/0745633250/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309437505&sr=1-1) in Europe, there has been an increase in long-term employment, rising from 37.6% of the total workforce to 40.3%.(1) The decline in job security, according to this report, has mainly been in the shrinking primary sectors of the European economy and, rather than this being a result of uncontrollable technological changes, it is the result in changes in state policy and subsidy.

b) For a sizeable proportion of the working class, work has always been insecure. The nostalgia for the 'jobs for life' era is misplaced as this was a myth for the majority of the working class who's employment, as always, depended upon the eddies and flows of capitalist markets. The concerns about this amongst academics might indicate that it is the professional classes, those who did actually benefited from a jobs-for-life ethos, who are effected by this trend, as even university professors become increasingly subjected to the merciless logic of capitalism.

c) The thesis of a disintegrated public sphere and atomised communities is also rooted in an unwarranted nostalgia for some Fordist idyll of settled community life that rarely existed beyond the sentimental veil. Meanwhile, there are demonstrations, almost daily across the globe, that people's ability to communicate, to disseminate, to organise dissent, is alive and well and being facilitated by the very technologies that the "prophets of 'individualisation" told us are contributing to our atomisation and seclusion.

d) Because these changes are the result of conscious political agendas by the bourgeoisie and its political and administrative agents, and not some overarching 'logic of the system', they can be opposed and countered through collective effort.

I don't want to argue that there has been no change to the working class over the last several decades, some of it negative. But as a class, we are better educated, technically superior, and more numerous than our forebears. More cause for optimism rather than not.

______________
(1) Doogan, K. (2005) Long-term Employment and the Restructuring of the Labour Market, Time & Society, 2005; 14; 65; Sage

[Die Neue Zeit]

What other weapons have we ever really had as a class?

Marmot / Maldoror / Dada has his "weapons" wrong. Before organizing on an institutional basis, the formative working class had the strike and the boycott as weapons. It did not ever consider riots, let alone "social media" organized amateurisms (regime changes supposedly "organized" by student types around Facebook, Twitter, and so on), to be part of its arsenal. That is something left to the lumpen, and I speak from recent, near-personal experience and reputation.


I also think we should be cautious when we advocate the obsolescence of our traditional methods of class struggle.

In contradiction to the bourgeois sociological theory of decomposition and atomisation of the working class, we are seeing workers in Europe beginning to act as a class once again - and employing some fairly tried and tested methods of struggle!

As I mentioned in my earlier post, a lot of this sociology is based on very shaky empirical ground and on the assumption that disorganisation is the unique core feature of modern capitalism.

That same sociology also says, by the way, that the only partial counters to "disorganization" are riots and getting hooked into charismatic, demagogic strongman-ism (as implied by Standing's musings on only right populism and not left populism).


For a sizeable proportion of the working class, work has always been insecure. The nostalgia for the 'jobs for life' era is misplaced as this was a myth for the majority of the working class who's employment, as always, depended upon the eddies and flows of capitalist markets. The concerns about this amongst academics might indicate that it is the professional classes, those who did actually benefited from a jobs-for-life ethos, who are effected by this trend, as even university professors become increasingly subjected to the merciless logic of capitalism.

Isn't this an Iron Law of Precarity?

[Jose Gracchus]

Marmot / Maldoror / Dada has his "weapons" wrong. Before organizing on an institutional basis, the formative working class had the strike and the boycott as weapons. It did not ever consider riots, let alone "social media" organized amateurisms (regime changes supposedly "organized" by student types around Facebook, Twitter, and so on), to be part of its arsenal. That is something left to the lumpen, and I speak from recent, near-personal experience and reputation.

So you accept the CNN bourgeois line on every event in the Arab Spring, and say there was no working class presence, including in Tunisia and Egypt?

I think it is hilarious for you to pass pronouncement ex cathedra on what is or is not working class. You might humiliate yourself like when you proved totally ignorant on the origin of the black bloc tactics.


That same sociology also says, by the way, that the only partial counters to "disorganization" are riots and getting hooked into charismatic, demagogic strongman-ism (as implied by Standing's musings on only right populism and not left populism).

Sociology substitutes for class analysis. Can't beat this self-admission.


Isn't this an Iron Law of Precarity?

I prefer the laws of motion of capital, myself.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So you accept the CNN bourgeois line on every event in the Arab Spring, and say there was no working class presence, including in Tunisia and Egypt?

Not at all. I said "supposedly 'organized'" for a reason.


I think it is hilarious for you to pass pronouncement ex cathedra on what is or is not working class. You might humiliate yourself like when you proved totally ignorant on the origin of the black bloc tactics.

I had a very, very non-political riot in mind when I posted what I posted above.

BTW, you didn't respond to this:

However, it doesn't bode well for spontaneous worker councils, either. How can the members focus their political thinking on councils providing social services and such during upheaval (immediate concerns), or exercise delegation powers, when they're too busy working (in need of representatives)?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

What you are talking about is the impoverishment of the working class and petit-bourgeoisie. However, the working class still works. Whatever its current consciousness or subjectivity, it still works. The root of its consciousness is in the conditions of its labor. Same with the petit-bourgeoisie. It is undergoing proletarianization.

One more time, DNZ, you are trying to get away from the fundamental Marxist categories and class struggle and drown it all in a fog of words.

RED DAVE

I have to agree.

There never was a 'middle class', there was the petty bourgeoisie and a middle strata combined with labour aristocracy (in the developed world) who have historically been better off than many working labourers.

However, to call them middle class, or to even feel it necessary to combine proletariat and middle class to form this 'precariat' thingy, is a somewhat un-marxist view of wage, labour and capital relations. Despite the supposed blurring of relations to the MoP these days, and despite what these ABC12DE-type sociological models will try and tell you, it is still fundamentally simple:

the world, even the west, is divided into those who own business, who direct policy and who exploit Capitalist property relations to turn a profit at the expense of their rentees, and those who sell their labour. As Red Dave says, I don't really see any need to fiddle around with what was probably Marx's most solid analysis of society - the division of society into ruled, ruling and the identification of the petty bourgeoisie and their characteristics, in general.

[Hit The North]

Marmot / Maldoror / Dada has his "weapons" wrong. Before organizing on an institutional basis, the formative working class had the strike and the boycott as weapons. It did not ever consider riots, let alone "social media" organized amateurisms (regime changes supposedly "organized" by student types around Facebook, Twitter, and so on), to be part of its arsenal. That is something left to the lumpen, and I speak from recent, near-personal experience and reputation.


As well as endorsing The Inform Candidate's comments, I'd also add that you seem to be mistaking the class with the respectable Labour Movement which, indeed, has rarely endorsed non-legal dissent and has, consequently, proved itself to be the best of friends to capital and its ruling elites. However, the working class has a proud history of riotous assembly and insurrection - of course it has! It is the riot, not the strike, that contests power on the streets and throws up the barricades.

[Die Neue Zeit]

As well as endorsing The Inform Candidate's comments, I'd also add that you seem to be mistaking the class with the respectable Labour Movement which, indeed, has rarely endorsed non-legal dissent and has, consequently, proved itself to be the best of friends to capital and its ruling elites. However, the working class has a proud history of riotous assembly and insurrection - of course it has! It is the riot, not the strike, that contests power on the streets and throws up the barricades.

Not at all. I go as far as to differentiate between the class and the worker-class movement and some mere "labour movement."

Extra-legal and illegal dissent by worker-class movements can take much, much better forms than "riotous assembly" (hooliganism). Insurrections from the 18th century onwards have not employed riots.

[Tim Finnegan]

Extra-legal and illegal dissent by worker-class movements can take much, much better forms than "riotous assembly" (hooliganism). Insurrections from the 18th century onwards have not employed riots.
I don't know; it's generally agreed upon that the closet Britain ever came to revolution in the 1917-1921 period was the "Battle of George Square (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_george_square)", a large-scale police riot in Glasgow that spread throughout the city and ended with a military occupation. (And I don't just mean a few soldiers in riot gear, I mean artillery trained on working class areas, machine gun emplacements in public spaces, tanks patrolling the streets, the works.) Many communist militants who participated were later of the opinion that the proper course of action would have been to march on the Maryhill barracks- the local soldiers having been confined to barracks for fears that they would sympathise with the striker-rioters- and kick things off, so to speak.

Riots may not be the most ideal instrument of revolutionary strategy, but they oblige the state to show its true colours, and that, rather than any amount of pamphleteering, is what turns the greater masses of the working class from peaceful socialists into a revolutionary communists.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Many communist militants who participated were later of the opinion that the proper course of action would have been to march on the Maryhill barracks- the local soldiers having been confined to barracks for fears that they would sympathise with the striker-rioters- and kick things off, so to speak.

And I agree with this retrospective assessment.


Riots may not be the most ideal instrument of revolutionary strategy

I'm saying that riots are the worst instrument of strategy in a revolutionary period.


but they oblige the state to show its true colours, and that, rather than any amount of pamphleteering, is what turns the greater masses of the working class from peaceful socialists into a revolutionary communists.

I don't see any big reveals during non-political riots, including the most recent ones. :confused:

This is too much echoing of Bakunin's "move the masses into action," "masses gain consciousness only through action," etc. It's also replacing one form of "agitate, agitate, agitate" with another form of "agitate, agitate, agitate" ( pamphleteering is not a reliable form of political education).

[Tim Finnegan]

And I agree with this retrospective assessment.
:thumbup1:


I'm saying that riots are the worst instrument of strategy in a revolutionary period.Well, I meant to suggest that riots are potentially part of what brings a revolutionary period about, in that they are capable of rendering class struggle as a very concrete reality and thus helping bring it to a head, rather than that they are something which is consciously deployed.


I don't see any big reveals during non-political riots, including the most recent ones. :confused:What do you mean by a "non-political riot"? I'd certainly consider those occurring in Greece, and previously in other European countries, to constitute a political riot, however unfocused and inadvertent they may have been.


This is too much echoing of Bakunin's "move the masses into action," "masses gain consciousness only through action," etc. It's also replacing one form of "agitate, agitate, agitate" with another form of "agitate, agitate, agitate" ( pamphleteering is not a reliable form of political education).My point was simply that the tipping point from reformism to revolutionism is, for most people, not brought about by a theoretical demonstration of the necessity of revolutionism, or at least not by that alone, but by a practical demonstration of the ultimate intransigence of the state; conciousness alone is unlikely to convince people that reform is not, some way, somehow, a possibility. Again, they're not ideal, but class warriors don't really get to choose the field of battle. http://www.v-strom.co.uk/phpBB3/images/smilies/smiley_shrug.gif

[Die Neue Zeit]

Well, I meant to suggest that riots are potentially part of what brings a revolutionary period about, in that they are capable of rendering class struggle as a very concrete reality and thus helping bring it to a head, rather than that they are something which is consciously deployed.

I really, really don't like this.


What do you mean by a "non-political riot"? I'd certainly consider those occurring in Greece, and previously in other European countries, to constitute a political riot, however unfocused and inadvertent they may have been.

I'm not talking about Greece, and I'd rather talk about the kind of riots I'm talking about... elsewhere. :(


My point was simply that the tipping point from reformism to revolutionism is, for most people, not brought about by a theoretical demonstration of the necessity of revolutionism, or at least not by that alone, but by a practical demonstration of the ultimate intransigence of the state; conciousness alone is unlikely to convince people that reform is not, some way, somehow, a possibility. Again, they're not ideal, but class warriors don't really get to choose the field of battle. http://www.v-strom.co.uk/phpBB3/images/smilies/smiley_shrug.gif

An earlier tipping point on the road from reformism to revolutionism is the consideration of extra-legal political action. Yesterday's reformists were OK with civil disobedience, but today's scum aren't.

[Tim Finnegan]

I really, really don't like this.
Well, again, I'm not suggesting that riots are something we should pursue, just that they are quite likely something that will happen; the miners' strike of '84-'85, the most vicious episode of class struggle of the the post-war era, saw more than a little in the way of clashes between miners and the police. Rapid escalation of class struggle produces worker-state confrontations, which in turn further escalates class struggle.


I'm not talking about Greece, and I'd rather talk about the kind of riots I'm talking about... elsewhere. :(Well, I don't think that you can over-generalise about riots in this context. Riots which embody class struggle are not the same as riots based on merely idealistic conflict.


An earlier tipping point on the road from reformism to revolutionism is the consideration of extra-legal political action. Yesterday's reformists were OK with civil disobedience, but today's scum aren't.True; the important factor, in either case, is the demonstration that the state is structurally incapable of social reconstitution, rather than merely being contemporarily staffed with individuals who are orientated against it.

Edit: And I think it is probably accurate to say that it is the rate of escalation of class struggle that produces events such as riots, rather than the level of class struggle in itself; the riots in London at the end of last year, and then again in March, were not representative of a particularly high level of class struggle- certainly lower than even the relatively peaceful era of the "post-war compromise"- but of a rapid escalation in class struggle, and a consequently heavy-handed state crackdown. I don't thing it is unreasonable to expect that more of the same will follow, so it's something that, like it or not, we have to deal with.

[Jose Gracchus]

Earth to DNZ: "yesterday's reformists" were okay with civil disobedience because they were eager with liberal/socdem reforms to civil rights, women's, and poverty social issues, hoping to tamp down and negotiate away social unrest during a revolutionary period.

In a reactionary period where capital is only okay with pushing full-speed ahead with its austerity programs, suddenly they only see law-and-order and proceduralism. History matters.

[Tim Finnegan]

Has anybody ever written in detail about riot as a political rather than sociological phenomenonm, I wonder? Would be interesting to read.

Oh, and tying this all back into the OP: I expect that the increasing level of working class precariousness will also feed into increase public violence. People who are less economically secure are, once the unsustainable farce of home-ownership and credit card debt is swept away (as I expect that it will be, within the next decade or so), less heavily invested in the status quo, and so more susceptible to the social forces that lead to rioting- and, I hope, open to more organised and productive forms of sedition, whatever they may be in this context.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Earth to DNZ: "yesterday's reformists" were okay with civil disobedience because they were eager with liberal/socdem reforms to civil rights, women's, and poverty social issues, hoping to tamp down and negotiate away social unrest during a revolutionary period.

In a reactionary period where capital is only okay with pushing full-speed ahead with its austerity programs, suddenly they only see law-and-order and proceduralism. History matters.

The Civil Rights period wasn't exactly a revolutionary period for the working class, though. :confused:

[Jose Gracchus]

1968-1972 was an international revolutionary upsurge, and that set the framework for international capital's reaction to social unrest. And afterward of course you get all the reaction we're all aware of: the neo-liberal model, deindustrialization, the Trilateral Commission and the Cultural Reaction, etc.

[black magick hustla]

Has anybody ever written in detail about riot as a political rather than sociological phenomenonm, I wonder? Would be interesting to read.

Oh, and tying this all back into the OP: I expect that the increasing level of working class precariousness will also feed into increase public violence. People who are less economically secure are, once the unsustainable farce of home-ownership and credit card debt is swept away (as I expect that it will be, within the next decade or so), less heavily invested in the status quo, and so more susceptible to the social forces that lead to rioting- and, I hope, open to more organised and productive forms of sedition, whatever they may be in this context.
insurrectionist lit. is all about rioting and how political it is

[Os Cangaceiros]

Extra-legal and illegal dissent by worker-class movements can take much, much better forms than "riotous assembly" (hooliganism). Insurrections from the 18th century onwards have not employed riots.

yeah, no roaming mobs in the early 1770's American colonies who'd smash your storefront and loot your products if you didn't conform to popular boycotts, no rioting during the French Revolution, no peasants who'd burn down the manors of the wealthy leading up to the Russian Revolution, no food riots in Germany leading up to the aborted German Revolution, no street battles or pistoleros leading up to the Spanish Revolution, no riots leading up to 8 million workers going on strike in Mai 68, no riots during the tumultous 70's in Italy, and certainly no present day rioting in hotbeds from Algeria to Greece in the present day.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Has anybody ever written in detail about riot as a political rather than sociological phenomenonm, I wonder? Would be interesting to read.

like bmh said, almost all insurrecto lit deals with this subject, from Black Mask/UATWMF, which attempted to politicize the inner city riots in places like Detroit and Newark during the height of the civil rights movement, to present day publications like Fire To The Prisons.

There's an interesting pamphlet online called "Grassroots Political Militants", which analyzes the French ghetto rioters of 2005 from a political perspective.

[Die Neue Zeit]

yeah, no roaming mobs in the early 1770's American colonies who'd smash your storefront and loot your products if you didn't conform to popular boycotts, no rioting during the French Revolution, no peasants who'd burn down the manors of the wealthy leading up to the Russian Revolution, no food riots in Germany leading up to the aborted German Revolution, no street battles or pistoleros leading up to the Spanish Revolution, no riots leading up to 8 million workers going on strike in Mai 68, no riots during the tumultous 70's in Italy, and certainly no present day rioting in hotbeds from Algeria to Greece in the present day.

Those riots were sideshows to the actions organized by class institutions.

[RED DAVE]

The Civil Rights period wasn't exactly a revolutionary period for the working class, though. :confused:No, it wasn't, but as the Civil Rights Movement dwindled, it was replaced by the Black Power Movement, elements of which lasted into the mid-1970s. And this was, objectively, a revolutionary period.

The actual revolutionary period commenced probably in 1968 with the events in France and Czechoslovakia. This was also the time of the accelerated anti-US revolution in Vietnam. In the US itself (hard to believe this), there was a nation-wide post office wildcat strike in 1970, which shut down the nation's mail for 8 days. During this period saw the rise of the Black Panthers, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and numerous rank-and-file movements in virtually every major industry. In the US, most left-wing groups experienced growth, and some of them began actual, fruitful work inside the working class.

One of the breaks on revolution during this period was the actions of Communist parties in Eastern and Western Europe. It was also the time of the Cultural Revolution in China during which time some elements of the Chinese working class tried to take advantage of the split in the bureaucracy.

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

No, it wasn't, but as the Civil Rights Movement dwindled, it was replaced by the Black Power Movement, elements of which lasted into the mid-1970s. And this was, objectively, a revolutionary period.

No it wasn't, re. the US.

There was no mass worker opposition to the regime.
There was no mass party-movement of the class.
There was no majority political support from the class.
There was no breakdown in the state apparatus.

I already discussed the sheer amateurism of the French situation.

[Os Cangaceiros]

The actual revolutionary period commenced probably in 1968 with the events in France and Czechoslovakia

to add a little bit to this (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2070794&postcount=10)


Those riots were sideshows to the actions organized by class institutions.

lol yeah, class institutions like the SPD in Germany or the PCF in France. :lol:

[Die Neue Zeit]

The pre-war SPD and inter-war USPD? Certainly!

As for the PCF, recall my old thread on May 1968. :)

[RED DAVE]

No it wasn't [a revolutionary period], re. the US.Why confine yourself to the US? But anyway:


There was no mass worker opposition to the regime.Actually there was, but it was mostly subsumed within the civil rights and antiwar movements, both of which were largely working class based, with working class programs, but with petit-bourgeois leadership.


There was no mass party-movement of the class.Well, taking into account your bizarre notions, no there wasn't.


There was no majority political support from the class.No, there wasn't in the US, but if you look at the international situation, it was quite different.


There was no breakdown in the state apparatus.Actually, in some situations, including the so-called Detrot Riots and other times, there was. In addition, the army had become unreliable as an international fighting force.


I already discussed the sheer amateurism of the French situation.Thanks for sharing. Apparently you wouldn't know a revolutionary situation if one bit you on the ass.

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

Thanks for sharing. Apparently you wouldn't know a revolutionary situation if one bit you on the ass.

The Road to Power, though not without flaws, is a most excellent guide to revolutionary situations, but thanks for your alleged "insight."

[RED DAVE]

The Road to Power (http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/index.htm), though not without flaws, is a most excellent guide to revolutionary situations, but thanks for your alleged "insight."(link added)

I have rarely read a less enlightened more boring piece of tendentious crap. For all his writings on war and revolution, Kautsky was unable to see the events in Germany clearly. He is one of the great sell-outs of history. He was unable to foresee clearly the actions demanded by revolutionaries either at the outbreak of WWI or during the uprisings after the war.

And yet you think he is "a most excellent guide to revolutionary situations."

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

Lenin thought so about the work.

[RED DAVE]

Lenin thought so about the work.Lenin reportedly also liked borscht. There's no accounting for personal taste.

RED DAVE

[bricolage]

Woah! Lumping borscht in with Kautsky is an insult to borscht that I will not stand for.