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.(16)
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.