V. Class Composition and Developing a New Working Class Strategy

Working class strategies of the twentieth century typically had at their core, as leading subject, a particular class sector. For example, in the wage strategy and social democratic deal, the mass worker of the industrial factory acted as the "vanguard" of the class as a whole. ("Vanguard" here indicates who, within the whole class, is most effective against the capitalists; it does not equate to "vanguard party," nor to "class consciousness.") That sector could provide the power to launch a potentially revolutionary assault on capital by blocking accumulation based on particular structures and processes which themselves rested on this sector. A class vanguard also acts to gather the rest of the class around it as a focus of demands and struggles.(14) As noted in part II, by the late 1960s the class vanguards of the various basic deals around the planet were simultaneously putting those deals into crisis.

However, we must question whether the apparent vanguards were as they appeared. Again within the Keynesian-Fordist deals, a focus on the apparent vanguard ignored too many powerful aspects of the class and its struggles, most particularly the struggles of women against reproducing labor power for capital. The notion of a vanguard of the class -- a sector of the class, not a self-proclaimed organizational vanguard, e.g., a party -- is thus problematic even where seemingly most clear.

Vanguardism tends to ignore the complexity of divisions within the class or to attempt to overcome those divisions by asserting the primacy of some sectors. The conception of the vanguard is that the privileged sectors can impose a unity on other sectors through an assault on capital. The problem, as noted in part II, is that this unity papers over contradictions that actually prevent the unity from withstanding capital's counterattacks.

Ignoring the complexity of the division of labor also induces an overestimation of the structural power of the vanguard sector, not so much in its ability to provoke a crisis of capital, but in its ability to resolve the crisis in favor of the working class. The capitalist division of labor fragments the class, producing within each sector a partialness that renders the sector inadequate as a basis for constructing a new society.

The EZLN suggests an anti-vanguardist bringing together of class sectors to not simply attack capital and the state, but to begin reconstructing society out of the fragments of the division of labor. It refuses vanguardism, not only of the party but also of class sectors. It says everyone is a vanguard when they struggle against capital and for a new, non-exploitative society.

The traditions from which Midnight Notes comes suggest that if analysis and theory is to be useful for developing a class strategy in practice, we need to analyze and theorize the dynamically changing class composition on a world scale, looking for the material and social bases of anti-capitalism and post-capitalism; that is, to do a class composition analysis -- not to locate a new vanguard, but to help the many class sectors come together.

Class Composition Analysis

The roots of class composition analysis are in Italian workerist theorizing in the 1960s (c.f., Baldi, 1972; Bologna, 1972; Tronti, 1972). Much of it involved analyzing or searching out class vanguards. Alquati (n.d.) argued that movements of working class struggles comprise a network, not just regionally or nationally, but even on the international level. A network is the unity of struggles in both their vertical and horizontal articulations. The vertical articulation is the point within the capitalist circuit of production/reproduction; the horizontal articulation is the spatial distribution and linkage. This combined vertical-horizontal articulation of struggles pivots around decisive points of interconnection: nodal points.

Nodes are points of connection within the network. These may be strategically hierarchized, including internationally. They will represent the points of advanced mass struggles of the working class. But, there is no simple (mechanical) correspondence on the vertical plane alone: that is, there is no direct equivalence between the level of capitalist production and the avant garde of mass struggles of the class. The 1968 cycle of struggles itself transformed the network of struggles, both vertically and horizontally, thereby recomposing the class (see also Zerowork, 1975).

It appears that Alquati is explaining that the political composition of the class cannot be deduced from the technical composition. Rather, technical composition reflects previous political compositions (struggles and deals shaping the development of capitalism, locally and on a world scale); and political recomposition of the working class must both use and attack the technical composition of capital, that is, move within and attack all the circuits of capital.

Thus, class recomposition is the dynamic development of the class through struggle in given or changing conditions of capitalist deployment of labor power. As noted, recomposition is not a mechanical reflection of the current capitalist articulation of labor power. Even if the recomposition makes political use of the objective articulation (the value composition and productive structures of capital), the class' recomposition dynamically transcends the static and objective differences between the technological levels and the levels of exploitation of living labor, i.e., within the working class. That is, it transcends the hierarchies of capitalist work and wages embodied in the working class.

The network of struggles may be conceptualized as the dynamic process of circulation (communication) of struggles, their homogenization within the broad zones of capitalist production of given types of labor power (e.g., European zone). The present phase (late '60s, early '70s) is one of international recomposition, both vertically and horizontally, of the working class [c.f., Zerowork, 1975].

The factory workers working in the centers of power and command of international capital, Alquati argued, were the apex of the international struggle. At the lowest level were the mass struggles of the proletariat in zones still struggling to attain the introduction of specifically capitalist forms of production and accumulation.

International nodes, points of the maximum accumulation of information concerning struggles, are generally the points of maximum massification and greatest direct combination of different moments of the anti-capitalist struggle. This generally occurs in the points of greatest physical concentration of different massified masses of labor-power. But of no less strategic importance to the working class is the utilization of the integration of the capitalist circuit, as the accumulation of information is very dense within the international network of the large international capitalist groups. At these points of massification will be found the propelling forces of working class struggles.

We critique this decades-old piece from an important comrade in order to make a few points about class composition analysis. First, the analysis must transcend the "workerism" from which it sprang, as in fact it has in understanding the capitalist productivity of "women's work" (Dalla Costa and James, 1975) and in understanding the essential roles in accumulation of the working class, including women, in apparently capitalistically underdeveloped areas (James, 1975b; Caffentzis, 1990). Still, class composition discussions often appear to be limited to the founding conceptualizations.

Second, the tie to capitalist technical composition -- to workers in key industries, be they auto or computer or "service" -- poses a complex problem. As Alquati suggests, such workers occupy pivotal places in major locales of capitalist production, and as such can wreak havoc on capitalist planning and accumulation. Yet, as he notes, there is no simple mechanical relationship between the technical composition of capital and the political power of the workers employed by capital of any given technical composition. As Dalla Costa and James (1975) and Caffentzis (1990) show, workers employed at the lowest levels of technical composition of capital have been powerful sectors of the working class struggle against capital.

Third, Alquati's piece seems to focus on the vertical articulation and gives less attention to the horizontal. By "spatial distribution and linkages," it would appear he means such things as connections across sectors of production or across nations or continents. Thus, for example, a struggle gains power as either or both kinds of connections are strengthened, forming the horizontal axis of networks of struggle.

This conception, in its workerism and apparent Eurocentrism, does not make space for powerful struggles that emerged in the 1960s and '70s: the struggles of "social sectors" such as women; racial, national and cultural minorities; immigrants; and the national liberation struggles of the "third world." These struggles appear to come from outside of working class struggles.

As we have argued throughout this piece, the working class should be understood as including diverse and complexly interacting sectors. The "social struggles" are in the main working class struggles, but as happens with unions and political parties of the industrial working class as well, they are also struggles for arranging a deal within capital and thus often take an accommodationist, even capitalist form. (Just to note, women, racial minorities, etc., are often involved powerfully in struggles at their paid workplaces as well as in the "social" spheres.)

A class composition analysis that does not take account of the social struggles is an analysis of clearly limited usefulness for a class that struggles to reorganize not only its relationships to work but all its social relationships. As defined by Alquati, vertical and horizontal articulations of the working class qua workers cannot capture the potential power of the class either against capital or for itself. (We might, however, think of the horizontal articulation as including the "space" of race, gender, etc.; c.f., Midnight Notes Collective, 1981).

But, some will argue, the social struggles are not necessarily either anti-capitalist nor about capitalism. On one level of response, we can say, neither are all "workplace" struggles. But there is a deeper issue we seek to probe: capital cannot be society.

We might envision capital as a power grid overlaid on a vast nebula, with the working class as that nebula.
(15) Workers are captured by and in some ways defined by the grid. That is the sphere of exploitation. However, the nebula is life: capital must draw on it and cannot survive without it, but the workers have life and can survive without the grid. As others have discussed it, this is the sphere of everyday life, however corrupted and influenced by capital, which seeks to control it and tap its energy and creativity -- but no matter how controlling, capital cannot be everyday life, which thus remains a great reservoir of energy against capital. This is in some ways more visible when, as with the Zapatistas, everyday life incorporates social structures and relations that pre-date capital and have visible anti-capitalist potential. But such potential is everywhere -- though being everywhere is no guarantee it will be mobilized against capital.

Let us put this just a bit more formally (c.f., Caffentzis, in press). Capital creates identity via work and commodities. Workers sell their labor power and purchase consumer products, thereby creating identities as workers and consumers. Refusal and resistance move in all these circuits. More, it is only because workers can resist and refuse that they have the ability to negotiate to sell their labor power. If they have no autonomous space, if they are fully capital, they cannot negotiate and therefore cannot sell their labor power.

This is another way of saying that capital depends on the life energy of the working class -- but that life energy cannot be reduced to capital nor fully possessed by capital. This harkens back to our earlier discussion of homogeneity and diversity: capital must have access to diversity, but must reduce that diversity to a usable homogeneity to control it, while maintaining the diversity in a capitalist, hierarchical form in order to have productive energy.

As capital attempts to control all aspects of life, the logical end of capital is pure machine (as science fiction writers often suggest). Ironically, the total triumph of capital would be the end of capitalism.

It is the space outside of capital, the space of human life not defined by capital, that is the fundamental source of power against capital as well as the basic source of capital itself. That is, working class struggles necessarily come also from outside the working class' existence as working class and move not only within the circuits of capital but also extend or create spaces outside of capitalist circuits.

This point increasingly is being explored. On the one side, the analysis of the creation of the capitalist body and mind has long been developed. Arguably, this capitalist tendency to control, define and produce the human body has intensified over the centuries, and the computer is being used to intensify it still further (c.f., Midnight Notes Collective, 1982; Neill, 1995). In this, the human is fragmented, decomposed, constructed as labor power, denied humanity.

John Holloway (in press) suggests that the fundamental contribution of the Zapatistas is to recompose the human through the assertion of "dignity," that revolution starts not from capitalism, but from "dignity." He also insists on the emphasis of revolution as process, not product, arguing that "communism is not something we move towards, but something that we struggle to invent... The struggle, as [the Zapatistas] put it, is the struggle to convert 'dignity and rebellion into freedom and dignity': dignity is the means, dignity the end, there is no distinction" (internet communication, Feb. 2, 1997).

Laura Fiocco, in a similar vein, says that democratic behavior becomes communist when its central purpose is to "produce the collective subject (WE: where -ME- can feel the powerness and loveness of BEEING together). If we start from here, to enlarge the field of solidarity means to enlarge the collective subject. But this process is not just a quantitative enlargement, it is a de-location (dislocazione) [relocation?} of the field of struggle to a higher level. The new subject - constituted in this process - produces its own goals which CAN'T be thought before its constitution" (internet communication, Jan. 29, 1997).

In what we think is a conceptually related work, Dave Stratman (n.d.) says that "class struggle is a struggle over different conceptions of what it means to be human." He argues that revolution can be found in the humanity of everyday life, highlighted through struggles such as strikes.
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These arguments do run the risk of discarding entirely an understanding of structures. One can analyze structures and recognize that the structures of social relations must be revolutionized without being a "structuralist," and we suggest it is incorrect to only consider fluid subjectivities developing their being collectively. The abandonment of considering social structures (which we see in Holloway's piece particularly) also runs the risk of not thinking about such things as relations of production or ownership, that is, of class: everything becomes collapsed into "dignity."

Clearly, however, exploring these aspects (as the women's movement has certainly insisted on) continues to be correct in response to "structure-only" variants of Marxism. These are fundamentally important restatements that the goal of struggle is to create humanity: controlling means of production, defining new modes of ownership, developing participatory democratic processes and structures, etc., etc., are all for a purpose and are not in themselves the ends. Our caution is against a one-sided avoidance of structural analysis.

We also suggest that while the communist movement must create its future through its struggles, including its creation of new social structures, it is also true that glimmerings and ideas of the future, of what is desirable and could be made, continuously infuse struggles and provide some sense of a goal. If life is anti-capitalist, then social struggles asserting life have anti-capitalist energy, aspects and possibilities. As always, capital seeks to channel the energy into its productivity (thus, for example, the struggle against housework becomes work in restaurants and day care centers).

In sum, since the class struggle to cease to be proletarian necessarily and fundamentally rests on resistance to capital, which imposed proletarianization on humans, the analytical framework developed by Alquati and his comrades is valuable. But it needs correction and radical expansion, and the two are related: Correction in understanding better the planetary composition of capitalist accumulation and thus of the working class as a whole; and expansion, to understand the capitalist machine as a vampiric and parasitic structure growing out of life, but not itself living; while the working class has life based on its being outside of work as well as being "living labor" and that this life and its growth, not only resistance to capitalism, is the basis of revolution.

Some Current Uses of Class Composition Analysis

Pieces of class composition analysis are being done. Midnight Notes' analysis of class struggle and accumulation in recent decades has pointed to some elements of how capital continues to decompose struggle and where, why and how elements of struggle have emerged and continue. But our efforts are not remotely adequate. Nor yet are anyone else's. A necessary step is to bring together pieces of analysis to see what kind of a whole can be assembled. In some ways, a start was made at the first Encuentro. We need to build on those analyses, critique them, see what work has been done and where the holes are. Since the Encuentro document incorporates many contradictory viewpoints, these need to be sorted out and argued through. This analytical work in itself will not bring together struggles into a new cycle, but the knowledge and new connections might help in the process of increasing power against capital and for communism.

One aspect of the analysis must be to understand capitalist weaknesses. For example, it has become clear that the diffuse factory with just-in-time provisioning is highly vulnerable to struggles of transport workers. Smashing the power of transport workers has been of great concern to capital for a long time: defeating the dockworkers in San Francisco and removing them as an obstacle to capitalist development (indeed, bringing them into capitalist development) took decades but was clearly a planned capitalist strategy (Chris Carlsson, personal communication). The struggle over docker power in Liverpool of the past several years evidences a similar capitalist concern and particular strategy, revolving around "casualization," the creation of a non-guaranteed, often temporary, more readily replaceable work force (Graham, 1996). The transport strikes in Spain and France over the past several years reveals capital's vulnerability in this sector. We see, then, in an area vital for capital, how capital works to weaken the relevant sector of the class but how it remains vulnerable to that sector, provided the workers can retain or develop organization. French transport workers have apparently won earlier retirement and a shorter work week plus higher wages, in the face of Europe-wide capitalist austerity planning (the French work week for drivers, however, was longer than that seen as the norm in western Europe). Capital will thus be forced to live with this expensive bottleneck or find ways to isolate and weaken the transport sector.

By itself, however, this particular structural weakness of capital is not likely to be fatal. Capital can live with problematic sectors if those struggles do not generalize. The experience of the Liverpool dockers confirms the need for transport workers to planetarize their struggles. While interesting new connections are developing between dockers and other class sectors in Britain and have developed at least locally in dockers' struggles elsewhere, including in Spain, and international connections and support are being constructed and strengthened, the routes to broader local and intercontinental connections are only beginning to be explored and understood in the context of countering capitalist strategies. Some of these connections are to "community" and to struggles that are proposing "alternative" ways of living; these need to be understood not just as horizontal articulations against capital, but also as relying on non-capitalist space as energy and resources for anti-capitalist struggles.

The theory of cycles of struggles argues that the coming together of various otherwise particular struggles can provoke a deep crisis within capital. How these particular struggles can come together, not just temporally but at a higher level of politically recomposing the class across its various divisions (while continuing to level within-class hierarchies) is one area that must be developed in practice and theory. That is, the solution to capitalism is in the struggles of the working class to replace capitalism, not in calculating a new deal.

While anti-capitalists need to study carefully the structures of capital and locate particular weaknesses (which are usually revealed by struggles, as with dockers and transport workers), this is not sufficient. More generally, a deeper understanding of the processes of production and reproduction in the current and evolving capitalist structure of accumulation will not be sufficient even if the study and struggle reveals not only many weaknesses of the capitalist arrangement but also ways in which struggles of different sectors of the class might unite against capital more generally. The class must also develop organizational forms and strategies to actually mount an offensive. The proposal at the Encuentro to form networks to communicate and to support each others' resistances is therefore not yet sufficient. It may be that is all that the class can now do; but even if so, activists need to be thinking beyond these limitations -- and as suggested earlier, this recognition is present in suggestions for the discussions at the Second Encuentro.

Building post-capitalist society within capitalism

Activists need to think about ways in which we can move beyond a cycle of struggles based only on resistance to capital to a cycle of struggles that consciously includes post-capitalist possibilities. The working class cannot beat capital only with resistance and opposition. The class must keep in mind Marx' observation that the new society emerges from the womb of the old and try to protect and hasten the development of the embryo.

Elements of post-capitalism exist in many places. Most will be isolated or absorbed, sometimes smashed but mostly used as fuel for accumulation. This does not mean we should simply dismiss them: their limitations speak to the limitations of the overall class struggle, which needs to incorporate and build on struggles. That is, the class must locate and build on its non-capitalist aspects.

Struggles reveal not only opposition to capital and weaknesses of capital, but elements of post-capitalism. As is well-known, strikes and other working class battles often reveal much of possible post-capitalist relations, revealed through solidarity, the joys of having time away from work, and new relations among women and men, workplace and community (c.f., Riker, 1990). Yet having been thrown up so quickly, albeit necessarily rooted in various actual experiences of the class preceding the moments of struggle, they seem ephemeral. Rather than being based on regular daily life, they demand exceptional moments to survive; thus, unless the exceptional moment lasts, the social relations of post-capitalism that are based on those moments cannot themselves last.

An alternate strategy to expecting the working class to throw up its post-capitalist possibilities in the heat of anti-capitalist battle is the rather deliberate constructing of alternative institutions or relationships within the larger current society, sometimes in hopes of living outside of capital, sometimes in hopes of creating better social arrangements within capital. The materialist critique of such efforts is usually that they are "utopian," rooted in desires of a limited class sector and not generalizable; that is, not having an adequate material basis or not adequately reflecting needs and desires of enough of the class. Many efforts quickly cease to be anti-capitalist and become simply small deals within capital or spurs to new schemes of capitalist development -- as anti-capitalism, they too are ephemeral.

Another difficulty with starting from such efforts is their particularity. How does one think about a new society based on this social center, that production coop, this equal exchange arrangement, that village? How can one generalize from a long list of discrete particulars?

If struggles against capital are in themselves insufficient for creating something new, attempting to create the new while ignoring the world capitalist system and struggling against it will merely produce new commodities or pools of labor for capital. That is, the working class must simultaneously attack capital and create its own society/societies. (P. M. (1985) coined the term "substruction" to indicate the need to simultaneously subvert the old and construct the new.)

Within the strategies of wage-based anti-capitalism there was an understanding that gaining a sufficient wage enabled not only an expanded resistance to waged work, but also the possibility of constructing different social relations within the time and space provided by this wage. Thus, for example, from wages for housework to wages against housework, in which it was understood that further development of struggle presumed development of social relations among women that could occur within the relatively liberated time and space of the higher wage (Federici, 1975). There is here a parallel with the idea of the liberated zone in which new social relationships can develop (c.f., Hinton, 1966). The EZLN also argues for such zones, the Zapatista communities, in which new relations are being developed, relations which can form the basis for further struggle against neoliberal capital and a further deepening and widening of the new society.

Toward a New Commons

The EZLN enables a revisiting of history. As capital now uses all its history to continuously decompose the working class for accumulation, so the visible experiences of the EZLN tell those of us who would look that we need to reconsider the history of struggles in the various sectors around the planet over a long time span. (As an example, consider Linebaugh, 1991). The EZLN looks in part to pre-capitalist communalism of the indigenous people. The point is not to repeat the Zapatistas, or to select one historical strategy and argue for it, but to learn to create new proletarian combinations. While not all sectors can look directly to a living continuation of the social structures of original communism, all sectors can find their non-capitalist spaces and build further on them.

The heart of capitalism is creating a working class, producing workers and social relations conducive to work for capital. The struggle against work is clearly a struggle against surplus value as the alienated product of labor used to support a ruling class and ensure expanded exploitation and capitalist social relations. It is also a struggle against unnecessary expenditure of human labor in producing use-values, against producing use-values of use only within the social construct of capital. It is also about the reorganization of time so that "work" is not reduced to inhuman efficiency but so human relations define work, not the other way around. And it about is changing the relations and values that dominate society. Thus, the fundamental questions of the economy are social and political, not "economic," and this true both within capitalism and after capitalism as the working class creates a new commons.

Capital has from its start sought to enclose the commons. From colonization to slavery, from the work day to the home, from activity to the deepest thoughts and feelings, the history of capital is its extension into the human commons. In fighting what we in Midnight Notes term the "new enclosures," the working class is not seeking simply to defend what human commons remains from the past or what commons was created under variants of twentieth-century socialism, but also to reassert, redefine, and extend the commons.

Under capital, work, be it waged in the factory or office, unwaged in home or school or prison, indirectly waged in small farming and selling, is the antithesis of the commons, however much capital fosters cooperation to spur production. Human relations remain within and outside these circuits, but capital deforms and channels them.

From these observations, we can draw several conclusions. First, the struggle against capital and for humanity exists in all social relations and circuits. Thus a strategy must consider the relationships among all the circuits and how to strengthen them against capital. Second, since the essence of capital is the creation of work, the struggle against work must be understood as central. This struggle is centuries, millennia, old, predates capital and continues throughout capitalism. The defeat of working class strategies that sought to overcome the socialist deals of the twentieth century through the struggle against work does not signal the end of the struggle against work. Rather, it signals that the working class must rethink itself and recreate itself through struggles. The struggle against work, and thus against all forms of exploitative hierarchies within the class, circulates through all the circuits of life in and outside of capital, resisting capital and creating new social forms within capital. It is the struggle for the commons.

New working class strategy will develop through multiple aspects of struggle, of practice. If theory is to be an element of struggle, it exists in the interplay between analyzing struggles and analyzing capital, in hopes class sectors in struggle can make use of the analysis.

We do not yet know how a developing analysis can be useful, or what strategies the working class will develop to further its own political recomposition against capital and to transcend capital. We are, however, arguing for deliberate impurity of method in theory and practice, for understanding either no vanguard or multiple vanguards, for listening to the particulars of struggles to hear both the anti-capitalism and the post-capitalism (commons-ism or communism) that might exist, for pushing to make all kinds of new circuits of struggle.

To move ahead, we suggest some basic work. We recognize some of it is now being done, perhaps much of it, as networks of communication slowly develop -- and we expect this effort to move ahead during and after the Second Encuentro, just as the First Encuentro proposed the possibility again of planetary anti-capitalist activity.

1. Exchanging knowledge (not just "information") about how new class political recompositions are emerging or trying to emerge in particular struggles.

2. Proposing strategies as to how such emerging recompositions can themselves deepen or can interact with other class forces in mutually reinforcing ways. This involves listening to and watching the struggles, but also participating in them.

3. Carefully analyzing how such recompositions or suggested strategies might be levelling existing class hierarchies or capitalist relations within the working class, and doing so to push and prod each of us past the narrowness and limitations we necessarily have as products of a capitalist world division of labor.

4. Using analysis of capital's strategies and development to suggest cautions the working class should heed; by learning from struggles, we might help each other avoid capitalist traps.

5. Strengthening an analysis of capital that actually helps in figuring out its weaknesses and how best to attack it.

6. Figuring out forms of immediate political organization that can utilize their own division of labor without reproducing internally a capitalistic division. Since it seems highly evident that no one person can keep up even in a cursory manner with all the aspects of struggle, sharing that work though political organizations is necessary, as is developing supportive and cooperative relations among many organizations.

7. Translating as well as developing new political language, so we can actually communicate. For example, in this piece, we tried to point out limitations of political language in understanding the struggles of the EZLN; however, the struggle does not necessarily seem closer to an improved political language by using terms such as civil society or humanity.

This work, we think, needs to be done in light of the Zapatistas. To us, this means a few essential things. The EZLN has brought to light, or created, new things about the world struggle against capitalism. To do the same in other places requires patience and humility. We -- anti-capitalist activists -- cannot easily come to conclusions; the world situation is too complex, with too many new factors; we must not quickly dismiss that which may have an appearance that does not fit a preconception of "revolutionary." Those of us in the U.S. and Europe (and perhaps elsewhere) must be beware the "Eurocentrism" of reducing all struggles to the models derived from the struggles of the European working class.

In the future, things will unfold that we have not conceived. Working class struggle is in a process of discovery. Many forms of anti-capitalism, appearing and labeled in many forms -- medicine, spirituality, stories and myths -- that on the surface seem to be antithetical to materialism, class struggle, "modern" communism, will yield a great wealth for anti-capitalist struggles -- as well as enormous complexities and difficulties.

In our analytical work, we need to be prepared to look for new things; we must try not to just package and define it, but to experience it and wrestle with it. Much will be crap -- but we must look past the surfaces before we can simply dismiss it. We must learn to rely on life beyond the realms of work, though resistance to capitalist work be the heart of the unity we strive to build against capital.

Class composition suggests that the working class composes itself, makes itself and transcends itself, through struggle. The class now is decomposed, fragmented, much defeated. The class must find ways to make itself whole, not homogenous, but united. We conclude that the Zapatistas, with whatever limitations and however uncertain their own immediate future, have given us some hope and some wisdom and have sparked new energy and creativity. We thus have a better possibility of navigating across and out of the desert of capitalism and into the time and space of a new commons.

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