This blog exists for one reason – to theoretically aid the working class in its liberatory subversion of the existing world order. This blog has no illusions of its potential impact on that subversive movement. It is a blog with the intention of providing a theoretical workshop to change the world.
My political worldview has been shaped by the international socialist tradition. The thrust of the international socialist tradition is socialism from below – that the self-emancipation of the working-class really means self-emancipation. But this tradition has more relevance than ever, as the iron cage of the universal capitalist order twists and turns wildly out of our seeming control.
Our world has been convulsed for the past five years by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. The objective laws of capitalist production has thrown millions out of work and a struggle over our collective welfare and the world of work has been forced upon us. The vampire wants more. In Greece, the IMF wants to (re) introduce the 6-day week – a crucial element of our epoch, the drive to restore profitable health to capitalist production.
Emanating from the crisis of capitalist production in the core of the globe, the balance of power between nations is changing. Obama has tilted the United States toward the Asia-Pacific whilst bets are hedged on China to beat the US on economic terms by 2020. We are likely to witness flare ups that can spiral out of control – a risk that can only be ever more volatile so long as the crisis of capitalist production grinds on. A falling beast can wildly scratch and claw to maintain its dominance. The political implications of this change are huge.
The key question is, how do we put the emergency break on an alienated world spiralling out of our control? This question demands us to get to the social roots of the problem posed.
We have been graced to have millions of subjects across the globe answer that question through their revolt. In Egypt, workers in Mahalla have answered dictatorship and neoliberalism with the strike. In Greece, workers have desperately answered their rulers’ agenda of immiseration with the overthrow of the Papandreou government and the rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. From the Asturias miners to the metal workers in Indonesia and the Foxconn workers in China we have seen our side answer the laws of capitalist reality with revolt.
Now who agrees with me that revolt can, indeed must, move into liberation?
The history and significance of this struggle of revolt tending toward liberation is the focal point of the theoretical notes in this blog.
We are faced with a capitalist world with seemingly eternal laws. We must become conscious of these laws in order to render them inoperative. Today, austerity is a law of the system. The law of our destiny seems so bleak. To become conscious of these laws is to fight these laws so that we shall open a destiny of our choosing.
The possibilities are open. But the key to the future lies in how we prepare now, theoretically and organisationally. Marx used the image of a mole, burrowing away underground, only to emerge to the surface when one last expects it. “The least prepared mole is the easiest to defeat because it has not groomed a subterranean space effectively enough (Vijay Prashad).” The significance of the mole lies in the relationship between hardship and preparation so that the emancipatory potential of any revolutionary outburst can be exhausted. A key pillar of this preparation is the burrowing of theoretical clarity. Theoretical clarity that can be one day mediated materially through an organisation of millions smashing their way through our prison.
The mole is ever present, even when the mole is concealed. As Emile Zola pointed out:
“Beneath the blazing rays of the sun, on this morning the world seemed so young such was the stirring that the world carried in its womb. New men were starting into life, a black army of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the century to come; and soon this germination would tear the earth apart.”
Beneath the surface of our world, dreams of our freedom exist. At a point where these dreams transform into the colossal clashes of our age, the working class shall win.
To win means to create a social order that is rational and democratic. A world that becomes… as we will it.
Let us leave the last word to Marx:
…When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the ful development of human control over the forces of nature – those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of this evolution – i.e. the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick – an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce himself in an y determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?
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