antagonism

anti capitalist & anti state struggle, for world human community

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from premises now in existence."

The German Ideology, K.Marx and F.Engels



Introduction

The social world we live in, built by human creativity, is increasingly beyond human control. We work in enterprises at projects that are not of our choosing, or find ourselves excluded from the productive process. The economy, acting autonomously of human needs and desires, crushes community, destroys the natural world, leaves us isolated, alienated and lonely. The network of modern communications unites us globally but removes us ever further from our neighbours, our friends, workmates or lovers. The contradiction between the possibilities that human ingenuity has created (in terms of productivity and communication) and the misery that the social system of global capital imposes on us, has never been so acute.

The process of capitalist restructuring, underway for over two decades, has deliberately aimed at permanently destroying the old centres of proletarian power. A part of this restructuring has been globalisation, entailing widespread relocation of production from areas of high class struggle to, areas where capital can more easily expand itself.
But there have been far more fundamental changes. In the past the increasing concentration of capital tended to be realised in terms of ever larger factories, employing ever larger numbers of workers. Radicals saw this tendency as a potential weakness of capitalism, as the enterprise grouped together and organised capitalism's gravediggers, proletarians. Restructuring has tended to deal with this Achille's heel, by creating a new decentralised global system of smaller enterprises linked by modern communications infrastructure (containerisation of freight, as well as information technology, etc.).

We therefore find ourselves on a new terrain, where the proletariat is still the revolutionary subject, but where the past obsession with factory workers and trade unions is increasingly anachronistic. Our own struggle against the misery of this society and our own lives must increasingly involve an attempt to understand the changes going on in our class and in our world.


Send mail to Antagonism:
or write to - BM Makhno, London WC1N 3XX, Britain