Thursday, March 26, 2020

Paupers of the World Unite!

“Wageless Life – A Manifesto for a Future Beyond Capitalism,” by IRG Shaw and M Waterstone, 2019

This is an anarcho-communist attempt by two academic geographers to solidarize and learn from the precariat in the world.  This growing segment of the proletariat is variously known as the precariat, the underclass, the lumpen-proletariat, the reserve army of the unemployed; the surplus, waste or warehoused population or re Marx, the ‘floating,’ ‘latent’ and ‘stagnant’ parts of the proletariat.  This includes paupers, peddlers, refugees, prisoners, debt-slaves, actual slaves and sole contractors.  The authors list some sociological examples like street vendors, servants and freelance recycling workers as examples of the kind of people they are concerned with. Oddly, the book ends up being a plea for a “neo-peasant ontology” of solar peasants while claiming at the same time not to be romantically yearning for a lost rustic past.  The Mexican Zapatistas in Chiapas are their template. 
 
Unlike Guy Standing, who claimed the precariat was NOT part of the proletariat, these authors clearly show that Marx and Engels understood that contingent labor was intimately connected to the life of the proletariat.  The authors attack the concept of waged labor as alienated, although some times they attack work in general - having a hard time keeping their concepts separate. They rename unalienated work as ‘alter-work.’  They deny that the proletariat has grown in the world, ignoring the vast increase in China or the massive historic strikes in India.  In some of their points they are short on empirical evidence but long on words and elegant turns of phrase, even using the royal ‘we’ when describing all workers, including themselves, as 'virtual paupers.'  This method is similar to the literary writings of Henry Giroux or Chris Hedges.  The book is chock-full of quotes from many familiar names on the left – Marx, Polyani, Davis, Harvey, Lefebvre, Arendt, the Invisible Committee, Negri, etc. - and we know that the more quotes used, the more true a manifesto is.

Geographers center on the politics of space and so the authors focus on the massive ‘enclosure of the commons’ that started in England and spread throughout the world.  Former peasants and farmers were/are forced into urban areas to become wage slaves, peddlers or paupers through the privatization of land.  Small-bore present alternatives to privatization like squats, co-op businesses, apartments and farms, community gardens, city square occupations, (no mention of factory occupations), neighborhoods run by the left or other ‘free spaces’ and volunteer work rate only a mention by them.  Instead borrowing from Lefebvre, they claim a ‘right to the world’ where virtually all space is common property instead of the present status of ‘worldlessness.’ This is another way of saying to truly socialize the land – socialism being a word they never use.   The problem with rights arguments like this, common to liberal humanists and anti-Marxists like Hannah Arendt, is that rights are not viable without power. 

So the question of the state comes up.  They quote Christian Parenti as to the need to overturn the state in order to restore the commons, then accuse him of being a pragmatist(!).  Replacing a state apparatus as a condition for progress is far, far from ‘pragmatism.’  Indeed avoiding the state might be more pragmatic.  Instead they cite the example of the Mexican Zapatistas who took over large parts of Chiapas state in southern Mexico in 1993.  27 years later there is no equivalent anywhere else in Latin America.  The rest of Mexico trundles along because the weakness of the Mexican state allows Chiapas.  In India the Naxalite free zones still exist, but also have not expanded. Again, these zones exist because of the weakness of the Indian state.   The Philippines is another example. These are rural, agrarian movements based on peasant farming or forest living and almost no leftists in the world is against them.  But that begs the question – what about the rest of Mexico?  Can regional bits be bitten off until the whole country is under the rule of different groups of farming revolutionaries?  Just asking the question in the present context answers it. Knowledge of the Mexican revolution also says otherwise, as Zapata himself returned to Morelos and Villa to Chihuahua, both uninterested in consolidating a national revolution.  Ultimately any victories in the arena of space confront the capitalist state, as Occupy quickly found out in the U.S.  Nor do they mention any revolutions led or inspired by Marxism that did succeed in taking geography back from capital or colonialism, which is a telling omission.

Street Peddler in Hanoi selling slippers
The authors discuss how ‘desire’ – i.e. strong emotions – can be harnessed by the left to reconquer the commons and counter capitalist realism.  All well and good.  However in the process they ignore any material source of the ‘desires’ bred by capital and assume it is all a psychic mirage.  Just to stay with their real estate example: the small capitalist proprietor proudly running his small shop; the farmer looking out over his land; the homeowner quietly sitting in the backyard of her home; the cabin user looking at the lake; even the apartment dweller in some exciting metropolis – all have a sense of owned ‘space’ even though the capitalist state or the bank or a landlord may actually control their land and life.  I.E. for some, spatial ‘desires’ are partially satisfied by capital.  They are real.  Just as ‘waged work’ provides a sort of a living for millions.  It cannot be willed away by turns of phrase or omissions.

Oddly, their counter-culture turn to the countryside omits any mention of the need for new organic, agro-ecology farming, which could return millions to the now depopulated farms and small towns as large-scale corporate agriculture is expropriated and cooperative, collective or small farming returns to reinvigorate agricultural land and soil.

In essence, while they avoid putting it like this, the authors' logic is to expand present counter-cultural institutions so that they become dominant in the economy and society, avoiding confrontation with the state (military and legal), the corporations, the fascists, the political system, divisions within the proletariat and the like.  They call this ‘alter-politics’ or ‘progressive localism.’ It is explicitly not based on any working class identity or waged workers, who are explicitly outside their paradigm. This unlikely scenario will only begin to be possible when society begins to crumble in the face of economic crisis, war, environmental devastation or pandemics, and a new world comes into being through the action of millions.  But it will not come alone because capital has to eventually be confronted head-on and that will also take ‘waged workers,’ not just the precariat, the ‘paupers.’  After all, workers have more clout through their labor than a peddler if they withdraw it. By itself this book promotes a version of a social-democratic ‘peaceful transition to socialism.’  We can call it ‘alt-social democracy’ instead! 

A short, interesting book which might introduce you to new concepts as well as old.  Its main strength is as a corrective to isolated consumerism and compulsive work addiction, attempting to turn people towards a future of collective effort, unalienated labor and shared prosperity instead.  This is a future that many are beginning to see as necessary, even if they come from different leftist perspectives.

Other prior and relevant reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Planet of Slums,” (Davis) “The Invisible Committee,” “The Precariat,” (Standing) “Rebel Cities,” (Harvey) “Riot, Strike, Riot,” “Hinterland,” “Modern Defacto Slavery,” “Blood and Earth,” “Slave States,”The Unseen,” “Capitalist Realism,” 'Children of Men."  

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
March 26, 2020

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