II. Strategies and Deals

Strategies and deals are necessarily intertwined: a class deal is a result of class struggle and thus of the degree of success of a particular class strategy in the context of the material and social possibilities of the time and place. On the basis of a deal, new strategies are launched. In overview, then, and in a highly schematic fashion, some elements of twentieth century strategies and deals:

One strategy has focused on wages and employment: full employment and high wages could be used to put capital into crisis. That is, the Keynesian or social democratic deal, itself the result of struggles (e.g., for jobs, wages, unionization) which forced capital to incorporate the working class into its planning and into a reorganized mode of accumulation, results also in a strategy based on the deal that looks simultaneously to improve the deal and to transcend the deal and thus capital. (As a result, in this discussion we somewhat deliberately conflate "strategy" and "deal.")

By the 1960s, this strategy developed into the refusal of work based on a relatively guaranteed access to wages. It threatened the end of profitability for capital through the reduction of surplus value. To seize the means of production and reshape them to proletarian ends requires, additionally, a project of controlling the state, if not abolishing it. The notion of a strike, a general strike, flows throughout this strategic thinking, both as a generalization of a microscopic, daily refusal and as the possibility of overt, massive, public refusal of work and potentially occupying the means of production.

In the refusal of work version of this strategy, the wage is understood as political. The Italian autonomists and Wages for Housework represent the high points of conceptualizing this strategy, which was acted on much more widely, if not so defined. By understanding wages as political, they potentially overcame the split between economics and politics prominent in leftist thought at least since Lenin, and thus understand a dialectical relationship between the struggle for income within capital and the rejection of capital: gaining the wage opens the possibility of taking the money and then refusing the work, thus rejecting the legitimacy of surplus value and the wages system (Federici, 1975; Midnight Notes, 1992; Zerowork, 1975).

Additionally, the hugely developed powers of production provided a material basis for the minimization of many forms of labor, of the refusal of work. It became possible to think through more specifically what Marx (1967) suggested, using proletarian control over the means of production to reduce working time.(5) Here an environmental perspective also becomes necessary (c.f., Mies & Shiva, 1993; Dalla Costa, 1995).

A second strategy proposed the war of national liberation, the seizure of progressively larger territory, encircling the cities, using one or another military strategy (Maoist, Guevarist), culminating in the seizure of the state and the "commanding heights of the economy." Control of the national territory and state was simultaneously an end in itself and means to a wider attack on capitalism, through two routes. One was the development of an alternative to capital, "socialism"; the other was the withdrawal of labor and products from the world market, thus a form of a strike. Inasmuch as the socialist state was in actual fact part of an expanding attack on capitalism, the size and scope of the alternative and the scope of the withdrawal from the capitalist market would both increase. As a result, the model of "encircling the cities" was adapted from national to world scale.

Note that we are deliberately treating Social Democracy, Leninism and national liberation struggles as working class strategies, not just class deals, though we recognize all have proven to be aspects of capitalism. We might say that these are all variants of the major capitalist deal of the twentieth century: socialism. While some Marxists and anarchists might argue that these never were, and perhaps never were intended to be, working-class controlled societies, our point is that working class movements in fact often treated these as forms of working class power.(6)

Whether we like either strategy or not, we cannot deny their power in the twentieth century -- they substantially defined the terms of class debate, in their guises as Stalinism and Maoism; Keynesianism and social democracy, within the working class and between working class and capital, from the end of World War I, and more so from the end of World War II, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Though Lenin himself clearly understood that Russia was a capitalist nation in the 1920s (the New Economic Policy), capital's ability to block the expansion of revolution into Europe after WWI caused the Soviet Union to become the first "national liberation" model, a model that came to include, in a variety of forms, most of the world's population in "second" or "third world" variations (here including "mixed" forms such as developed in India). And social democracy has been the deal through which working classes in the "West" fought and negotiated for full employment and higher wages.

Most importantly, while the ideologies were either rather explicitly not posing the end of capitalism (social democracy and "mixed economies") or conceptualized capitalism and thus the end of capitalism in ways that fostered an autarkic capitalist fraction rather than the end of capitalism (Leninism, Maoism), the struggles of the class described within these ideologies pointed toward the possibility of the end of capitalism. That is, class practice is more important than the ideologies employed (on this, see esp. Tronti, 1972); and class struggles are typically both within and against capital, a point reflected in complex ways in ideologies of the working class.

These two strategies -- wages against work, socialist liberation -- are not necessarily antithetical, though historically the first has been located in the capitalistically more developed areas, the latter in the less capitalistically developed areas. It is true that adherents of one strategy often denigrated the other -- Eurocentric workerism vs. peasant, pre-proletarian uprisings, to say nothing of the battles between Communists and Social Democrats. By the late 1960s, however, several factors suggested a unifying thrust to the struggles that simultaneously built on and transcended/rejected the deals. bolo'bolo (P.M., 1985) summarized the analysis of these developments as a refusal of three "deals" that had been erected on and reflected the class composition of the period. They revealed themselves in an extension of wages and a generalization of the refusal of work.

The refusal of work in the "first world" was reflected in the rising share of the product obtained by the working class and the declining work offered in exchange, producing the profits crisis of the end of the 1960s (c.f., Caffentzis, 1980). The refusal of work in the "second world" was summed up in a joke, "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us"; but in fact, workers were paid, often in highly socialized ways, albeit by say US standards not a high wage. The result in the Soviet bloc was rising wages (under Brezhnev) and economic stagnation.

In the third world, the demand was for development without the exploitation that everywhere else attended development, the call was for socialism as simultaneously accumulation and not working in ways that produced profits. Thus, for example, substantial portions of oil revenues in oil-producing nations were spent "unproductively" as working class income, often through subsidized food, shelter, medical care and education (Neill, 1983).

(bolo'bolo did not mention them, but we could note now that stirrings of a resurgent "fourth world" or indigenous peoples refusal was taking the form of openly attempting to entirely opt out of capitalist development, to refuse a work deal entirely, and was rooted in traditions of original communism.)

These effective expressions of a generalized refusal of capitalist work occurring simultaneously in time -- a circulation of struggles -- pushed the capitalist system into crisis as the system attempted to confront the struggles launched on the terrain of the deals that had been structured in the period after the second world war. As it became clear to capitalist thinkers that they could not win on that terrain, they realized that the deals would have to be torn up, class war launched in new ways. Midnight Notes has discussed over the years the ways in which capital has used oil, debt, structural adjustment, what we summed up as New Enclosures (1990), to attack all the old deals and decompose the political homogeneity of the working class. Computers and information technology have also been basic tools of the capitalist attack. The capitalist class has been fundamentally successful in this effort, although several cycles of resistance to structural adjustment has caused capital to pause and reconfigure its attacks (see Midnight Notes, 1992, 1990).

Flaws in the Deals and Strategies

While the working class had established sufficient political homogeneity by the late 1960s to push the capitalist system into crisis, the working class did not have sufficient unity to prevail against capital's attempts to decompose the homogeneity, to force the class to fight itself, to accept "mineness" as the law of human behavior.

Thus the crisis of the deals is also the crisis of the strategies -- wages are declining, unemployment rising, and the social wage disappearing in first and second worlds, while virtually all third world states, and much of the old second world, are effectively controlled by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But why were the limits of the strategies reached, apparently quite quickly, enabling capital to recompose itself at a higher level of global integration and smash the forms and spaces of proletarian power?

Each of the strategies and each of the deals shared similar flaws, though they manifested in different particulars. We choose to mention hierarchy within the class, racism, sexism/patriarchy, nationalism, and work. Each of these was a division in the class imperfectly overcome and thus susceptible to capitalist attack in which the division would be the basis of a reshaped, more powerful division organized for capital's benefit.

(A) Hierarchy in the class, by which we mean divisions of wages, of security of employment, of status. Thus, for example, within the US one could talk of secure, high-waged workers, unionized or "white collar," who substantially failed to spread those gains across the class. In part, this failure ensures that those excluded from the gains have had little interest in supporting the efforts by those who have them to keep them; and those who had the relatively better deal have failed to support sufficiently the efforts of the more precarious, lower paid workers to maintain what little they had gained (e.g., more secure workers' failure to support a high "welfare wage" in the US). Across nations, it takes the form of support for imperialism. In the socialist bloc, there was a privileging of some class sectors over others, as has also been the case in "third world" nations.

(B) Racism. Race is a hierarchy in the class (James, 1975a). As a genetic category within humans, it is essentially meaningless (Discover, 1994). In the US, African Americans, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, and indigenous American Indians have been systematically excluded from access to the high-wage deals, been treated in a caste-like fashion within a wage and class system. Nothing has been or continues to be a more powerful form of division in the US working class than racism. On a world scale, it is the racism of imperial conquest, and following that racism toward immigrants from the historically subordinated areas, a racism now virulently visible across "Fortress Europe" as well as the US. Anti-racism did emerge as parts of strategies of some sectors of higher waged workers, particularly after World War II; but the degree of success of anti-racism within various working classes has been limited, and it rapidly succumbed when capital attacked the standards of living of the entire working class (Midnight Notes Collective, 1981). Thus in the US there have been the often-successful attacks on affirmative action. In the "third world," racism also contributes to dividing the working class, as in racism against the indigenous in Latin America.

(C) Patriarchy and sexism. The sexual division of labor has been available for capitalist re-creation and manipulation from capitalism's birth. As Wages for Housework made clear, the unwaged status of women's work has been the material basis for unwaged work elsewhere in the system and for lower wages paid to women, and it provides the floor for the wages system -- all work, no pay (Dalla Costa and James, 1975). (Indeed, most of the world has never worked in a formal waged relationship; Mies and Shiva, 1993.) The socialist solution of socializing housework (day care, restaurants, etc.) and paying women to work outside the home, which developed in the first and second world deals to varying degrees, blunted the demands for more pay for less work. Women still did most of the still extensive unpaid housework, while often doing equivalent work as men but for lower wages outside the home. In the third world deals, women clearly did and do the majority of the work, producing and reproducing people and products for no or little wage (including where the "wage" takes the form of subsistence farming, marketing and peddling). By and large, the strategies of the working class prior to the post-1960's crises did not address the exploitation of women rooted in lack of social payment for their work, thus ensuring the continued subordination of women and perpetuating a fundamental division within the class.

(D) Nationalism. Classes have been defined substantially on a national basis, e.g. "the US working class." We have done so thus far in this discussion, though we also refer to classes that were organized into one or another of the deals, e.g., "third world" working class. While there has been obvious reason to use the nation-state as a basis for class struggles (and thus for speaking of nation-based classes), doing so has immediately re-posed the division of the classes along national lines. In Africa, for example, pan-African unity sank beneath the needs of emerging ruling (usually comprador) classes in a variety of nations cobbled out of the colonial boundaries.

Another example is the history of the self-labeled Communist states. For example, subordinating the branches of the Comintern and Cominform to the needs of building socialism in one country -- the USSR, the supposed alternative to capitalism that was to prove the superiority of socialism -- was central in the history of that body (Claudin, 1975). With too-rare exception, internationalism has been subordinate to nationalism.

In socialism, "nation-building" became a form of capitalist accumulation under the direction of a state "owned" by a single party. Territory was extracted from the existing world capitalist system, but an alternate capitalism emerged, only finally to be re-subsumed into one global capitalism again. Thus, rather than competing social systems, the two blocs were competing forms of capitalist development in which the existence of the other block was fundamental to organizing control over each's "own" working class, and in each of which the working class was capable of organizing particular deals. As a strategy for socialism defined as a working-class-led transition out of capitalism, nation-building failed. All told, the various forms of national struggles have failed to facilitate the development of planetary working class unity.

Discussion of the nation-state in light of the failures of nationalism as socialism necessarily raises two fundamental issues. One is imperialism (in response to which national struggles can play a positive role) and the consequences of centuries of development and underdevelopment as two necessary and complementary aspects of world capitalism (c.f., Rodney, 1974). How can the distorted fruits of capitalism be used to help a non-capitalist overcoming of the legacy of planned underdevelopment and the legacy of capitalist development?

The second, related question is that of the workers' state: can such a thing exist? If the state is merely an armed body used to ensure one class retains power over others, as Lenin argued in State and Revolution, then it is easy to say yes, there can be and for a time even must be a workers' state. But if the state necessarily means a body separate from and above society (c.f., Clastres, 1994), then "workers' state" becomes a self-contradictory term. At a minimum, another term must be used -- and more importantly, working class struggle must aim toward something other than seizing or creating a state apparatus. Thus, if nationalism presumes a state, then nationalism is necessarily not working class. It may not necessarily be the case that "nation" must presume "state."(7) On all this, the working class faces an unresolved problem bound up with not having solved the question of the transition from capitalism to communism. The working class must find a non-state form of social-economic-political organization, and part of its conception must involve overcoming the legacy of underdevelopment.

(E) Class defensive organizations and work. Finally, there is the relationship between working class strategies and the role of unions, parties and states around the question of work. Essentially, while workers launched a powerful struggle against work in the first world in the 1960s, the unions, parties and states defended the regime of work. Around the world, similar activities under highly similar social relations were merely renamed, from exploitation to "contribution to socialism," or as the worker's "contribution" to the expanding pie of wealth in which workers would get their "fair slice" (and hence supposedly were not exploited), or as "nation building."

Through considering the two sides of work -- as producing use values and as producing values -- we can consider various aspects of the strategies. For example, as use value, clearly humans produce and reproduce their existence. The question could be, Does production for nation, socialism, the "greater good," eliminate exploitation, the expropriation and accumulation of surplus value? Rephrased, the questions include: Who controls the use of that share of the product which is beyond what the workers take for personal use (in capitalism, the wage)? Who decides, through what means, just how much and what kind of use-values should be produced, as well as what should be done with what is produced?

In all three deals work remained exploitation; all were forms of accumulation, and thus variations on capitalism. It was the rejection of the deals that posed a crisis for capitalism. Yet rarely did the formal representatives of the working class, the various parties and unions, pose the escape from work as anything other than a vague future promise. Ideologically, of course, the left has generally glorified work as much as any Puritan (though, to be fair, in part to assert the dignity of working people). Moreover, none of the deals or the strategies that created those deals dealt adequately with the unwaged labor of women, housework.

This history poses, not for the first time, the question of the role of working class defensive organizations. Is it possible for the instruments of arranging a deal with capital to ever play a useful role against capital, to be both defensive and offensive, to make and undermine and transcend the deals? In the US, the IWW certainly tried to do this, but did not succeed. It remains probable that such organizations are needed, but the question of how the working class can actually create these organizations is not known. It is likely that any such organization will not be able to survive in such a precarious and self-contradictory state for long: it is possible when on the offensive, but if a new fundamental deal is organized, the organization will at a minimum splinter over its two roles. -- mediating the deal and opposing the deal.

A Cautionary Discussion of this Analysis

Before concluding, we mention that the discussion in this section has presented perhaps the most problems to friends who have read the draft of the whole article (see remarks from Harald Beyer-Arnesen, above). Hugo Aboites raised some points we think should be considered, in addition to those noted above:

"[The discussion of "Strategies and Deals"] poses the question of which should be the main direction of political work: the structure within the class itself or the relations of that class with the capitalist one (which at a level can be solved by saying - true - that any restructuring of the working class eliminating racism, etc., requires confronting the capitalist class, thus both struggles go together), but more profoundly - precisely - it focuses on obstacles rather in the objective and thus gives them a life of their own. This not only moves the thinking away from the main problem of strategy -- how to create widening zones of agreement within the class itself -- but also pre-determines for every situation that those precisely are the obstacles in every particular situation.

"If the purpose of the struggle is, bottom line, to establish and consolidate the hegemony of the working class in a planetary basis, we should start from how specific movements advance toward that goal and how they interact with a diversity of obstacles. If one starts from the obstacles, one is forced to analyze those ones in the concrete situation, kind of superimposing them onto the situation...

"More than fixed obstacles, and which removal may be determinant, I think that the focus should be set in the need and shape that such agreements can take and how to achieve them, much as it is done in the discussion of the Zapatistas [Part III]. To throw the questions of sexism, nationalism, hierarchy first and isolated from specific struggles (which may or may not see these as obstacles) poses, I think, not only the danger of creating the sense of no immediacy to the local concrete struggle (which objective is to gain a part of the disputed power territory of the ruling class), but also a different direction to the struggle. The Zapatistas objective may be, for example, to redefine the relations of an entire region with the national economy, political apparatus, and education and culture, in the terms of autonomy. Ten or twelve years of organizing and learning to take power tell them not only how they want to achieve but also how they have to change to achieve that; that is, how as a part of the class they have to restructure their relations. To do that, they proceed to rethink relations between man and woman, society and women, hierarchy, etc.

"I am not saying that the Strategies text opposes this view, I think there is not basic disagreement, I just think it is necessary to emphasize it. Basically what I am saying is that maybe a better starting point is the Zapatista movement. How in the Mexican situation and in the international scene the Zapatistas include radically new elements that facilitate the creation of local, regional, national and international agreements that consolidate new working class power."

We print this lengthy critique for two reasons. First, it offers a caution to a too-rigid application of our own methodology. That is, we should not simply lay over a particular struggle our own conceptions (ideology) derived from our particular experiences and our political and historical analyses; we will return to this point later in the piece.

Second, it raises a question about the relationship between "global" understandings (e.g., our admittedly schematic attempt to extract lessons from the struggles of the working class in the twentieth century) and particular struggles. Partly there is a methodological question: Aboites argues for starting from the particulars of the struggle and understanding the struggles in their own context, a quite reasonable and necessary undertaking. However, we think it is simultaneously necessary to also look from the "global" perspective. For example, the particulars of patriarchy in a society can in fundamental ways only be understood and struggled within those particulars. However, we should also understand from working class history that failure to deal with patriarchy undermines the working class movement (to say nothing of what it does to the lives of women) -- that is, we should learn from analyses of each others' struggles. That is, we conclude that patriarchy within the working class perpetuates divisions capital can use, and this is an understanding we should bring to our efforts to grasp particular revolutionary efforts. And yet, to double back, our global understandings must also always be further refined by dealing with the particulars.

We agree with Aboites that there is not a basic disagreement. We hope this discussion of working class deals and strategies is both approached with appropriate caution and that it spurs more thinking about what the working class can learn from the past so as not to make similar mistakes and about how best to share what the think we have learned. We are, of course, also arguing for what we value and therefore what we want revolutionary movements to aim for (e.g., eradication of patriarchy, racism, etc.). Thus, we do try to draw lessons and apply them.

Conclusion to Analysis of the Crisis of the Deals

Working class strategies produced three basic deals in the post-WWII period. Each contained a possibility of generating the refusal of work and of capitalist development, and thus the possibility of non-capitalist society. Unsatisfied with their deals, the working classes, often outside (autonomous from) the official organs of union, party and state, attacked the three deals. But the strategies used to establish the deals and the resulting deals had included various forms of division and hierarchy within the class: wage and occupational hierarchy, race, gender, and nation. In not understanding and often opposing the refusal of work, the ostensible organs of working class struggle revealed themselves as tools of capitalist organization of the working class, thus stating another division within the class, its organizations and institutions against its struggles. The extent of class unity against capital was insufficient to overcome the various divisions, rendering the class unable to remain unified in the face of capital's attacks.

In analyzing the history of class struggle, crisis and capitalist offensive since the 1960s, only parts of which we addressed above, we conclude that to be successful, a struggle against capital and its regime of work and accumulation requires at least the following:

1) a high degree of overcoming of class hierarchy, of divisions of wages, gender, race and nation: where insufficient, these are all moments of capitalist decomposition of proletarian unity;

2) a sense of unity of a world proletariat: that such a proletariat does exist (contra post-ism) and that "we" are all in it together: "If we do not hang together, we assuredly will all hang separately";

3) a means of subsistence: capital's control over production means it can starve the working class (note that "encircling the cities" and "alternative production" both propose solutions to this problem);

4) a means of defense, whether from armies or death penalties or prisons: if they can kill workers with impunity, the working class cannot sustain its gains; we did not above address the white terror, the military, police and death squad attacks on working class movements that were an essential element of capital's success against the planetary movements of the "sixties" (c.f., Midnight Notes Collective, 1985, for an analysis of this issue in the US);

5) a sense of an alternative possibility: the idea that another world can exist and can be created ("commons-ism" or "communism"), though that world does not presume uniformity, indeed will support great diversity.

There are no doubt more. A new proletarian strategy must take these needs into account, must learn from the limitations of the previous strategies, must see how capital is reconstructing the proletariat at this moment, and must continually and rapidly learn from its own multifold struggles, all in order to launch anti-capitalist struggles that simultaneously build and point toward communism. In new and interesting ways, the Zapatistas appear to be doing so, and so it is to their struggle we now turn our attention.

III. Reflections on the Zapatistas' Strategy||Back to Home Page