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[ Machine translated from the original athttps://non.copyriot.com/joshua-clovers-riot-strike-riot-theorie-und-praxis-der-sozialen-aktion/ ]
Joshua Clovers "Riot.Strike.Riot": Theory and Practice of Collective Action By Achim Szepanski 23 May, 2016Joshua Clover's Theory of Insurrection is the impressive attempt of a Marxist explanation of the political and socio-economic conditions that lead to fighting time and again, bearing in mind from the outset that it takes into account only the fully developed industrialized nations, especially the US. For Clover, the theory of insurgency includes the theory of crisis, that of a community or city, an hour or days. It is about the internal and structural significance or about the historical movement, which is responsible for the form and substance of the uprising, and further about the reference to the crisis. The first relationship between rebellion and crisis makes Clover in surplus. Usually the uprising is understood in the context of deprivation, lack and deficit, while for Clover it indicates in itself the experience of surplus, surplus danger, surplus instruments and surplus affects (Clover speaks of emotion, we speak with Deleuze / Guattari in deposition of affects). However, the most important surplus is the population itself. The moment when the uprising breaks the police management of the situation and decouples itself from everyday life. This kind of insurgent surplus production always relates to socio-economic transformations that respond to crises or that constitute them and that include the surplus of capital as well as that of the population. All this indicates the uprising as a necessary form of struggle.
The theory is inherent in the struggles, but often enough they precede the theory, with Clover's theory, much like Laruelle's, being understood as one of lived experience and confrontation (Laruelle always uses the notion of the real here) and less as interpretation, program or description. The uprising has no place in the Leninist concept of the proletarian vanguard party, but is often enough understood as an apolitical, spasmodic, anarchist-oriented interruption, a disorder that must be adjusted by the party that possesses a scientifically sound historical mission. In this context, uprising and strikes are also recorded as opposites. Today, with some melancholy, some Marxists react to the death of the classical industrial proletariat, which is also characterized as white and male, and which now has to be replaced by a new revolutionary subject, possibly the multitude, in the course of globalization. For Clover, certain points of reference to his own theory can be identified here, but they must be condensed into a problem concerning the uprising itself, with the current uprising being dramatically different from those of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Clover relates his theory of insurgency to Marx's theory of values and crises, to the accumulation rhythms of capital in the global framework, to local cycles and the theory of long waves. Decisive for a theory of insurrection is first the early industrialization and later the present phase of deindustrialization in the West. Although these historical phases are not privileged places for the uprising, they do indicate the terrain on which both the logic of insurgency and that of capital can be seen in its catastrophic autumn. Quite deterministically, for Clover, the uprising expresses the global transformations of capital and their objective conditions. This requires a) the exact definitions of the insurrection and the strike, b) the justification of the return of the uprising, and c) the relationship between the logic of (future) uprisings and the global transformations of capital. Clover wants to add a heuristic theory of passages and transitions between the insurgency and the strike. While the uprising is associated with violent disruption of social peace, lawless extravagance, and noise, the strike, which emerged sometime between 1790 and 1842, picks up certain forms of early rebellion, but also opposes it. At certain intervals of time, rebellion and strikes co-exist, for example, around 1968, until the crisis in 1973 led to a reclassification of the class, the global division of labor and the weakening of the possibilities of militant workers' organizations.
The (historical) line insurrection strike insurgency designates a form, less a theory. The food riots of the 19th century in England, which were to prevent that grain was removed from the country, where food prices and insurgency were directly linked, especially in the underdeveloped nations to the present, but today's uprisings In the metropolises, they do not take place at the granaries but in confrontation with the police. Paradigmically for the Riots in 1992 in Los Angeles, as the ill-treatment of Rodney King by the police was recorded and disseminated. The current riots are carried out within a logic of racism and relate less to the economy than to the state as a direct opponent. And the uprisings do not refer to another world, but they change themselves. Better to draw the line uprising strike primary rebellion. The early uprising has its primary place at the marketplace or at the harbor, the strike has its place in the factory, and the current uprising occupies places and streets. Clover wants to examine continuity and difference between the two forms of insurgency, the turmoil in the marketplace and direct practices against the state. At the same time, equating the insurgency with violence darkens the systematic, everyday and ecological violence that is the norm for the majority of the population. The strike can not be separated from violent actions. If violence does not make the difference between rebellion and strike, then the difference has to be sought elsewhere. EP Thompson has studied more closely the political economy of the uprising. While prices in the markets are the most important measure for the population, wages (even a price) are the decisive yardstick for the workers of the factory. The uprising is the setting at which goods are priced at prices The strikes for the level of wages are being fought. The action involves all social reproduction during the uprising, while in terms of strike the consumer and producer represent two roles of a collective activity necessary to reproduce a class. The modern working class is trapped in the wage-goods nexus.
Clover sums it up: The strike is a collective action that revolves around a) the price of labor and better working conditions, b) where workers are in the position of the worker, and c) takes place in the context of capitalist production, during the Uprising a) includes the struggle for prices and the availability of market goods, b) its participants are expropriated, and c) takes place in the context of consumption or circulation. The primary uprising, which began around 1960 and was accompanied by the decline of the major strikes, adds new conditions and structures related to the technical and social transformations of capital.
The transition from early insurgency to strikes is historically and logically linked to industrialization in England in the 19th century, while the passage from strike to primary insurgency correlates with the rise and fall of US hegemony in the second half of the 20th century. Clover refers here to the divisions of Giovanni Arrighi: mercantilism, industrialization and financialization. Markets precede capital and later remain an integral part of the surplus-value production of capital (this concerns the transition from insurrectionary strike). The periodization of the riot strike primary riot maps for Clover the periodization of the circulation-production-circulation (of capital). While Clover sets the period of productive capital for 1784-73, he sees from 1973 onwards the crucial mode of capital in the West in the circulation, the financialization and the accompanying deindustrialization. In this context, Clover tries to establish relations between the historical self-movement of capital and the lived struggles, in order to tighten the synchronous attachment of the strike to production and that of uprisings to circulation, not allowing the diachrony between the respective phases to be ignored , (In his short run through Marx's value theory, Clover refers to the writings of II Rubin on value form analysis.) Ultimately, Clover sees in globalization and financialization much like David Harvey spatial and temporal strategies of capital at work, which goes astray to internalize the value somewhere and at some point, but the shift of monetary capital towards circulation tends to collapse value creation, for which Clover blames the troika of toyotism, information technology, and finance. The triumph of containerization, part of both the valorization and the realization of value, and the acceleration in turnover times of capital since the 1970s, are accompanied by the decline of industrial production in developed countries - finance and new technologies, Clover said Gilles Chatelet termed "cyber-mercantilism" could not break the stagnation of profit rates in the industrial sector, although they repeatedly contributed to the cost reductions of individual companies. Clover's brief treatise on Marx's theory of crisis, which, as with many authors, focuses on the downward trend of the rate of profit, concludes by stating that the overproduction of goods, capital, and labor constitutes a production of nonproduction combined with the production of a new surplus population goes hand in hand. Clover here refers to Marx's law of capitalist accumulation, reintroduced by the Endnotes group, according to which an industrial reserve army or surplus population on the margins of the official labor market is moving towards low wages, slave labor, part-time jobs, and illegal activities to secure their reproduction. This surplus population is constantly exposed to racist attacks in terms of wage differentials between whites and blacks, segregation of the labor market and the superfluid population of the slums in the metropolises. This also works in the context of the current uprising, a surplus rebellion characterized by race as it produces it. The illegality of the primary uprising is the illegality of the racialized body.
The population, whose ability to reproduce is massively characterized by the shift of capital from production to circulation, is part of a consumer society (in the sense of the Baudrillard), but its exclusion and the production of a surplus population today place the uprising on the agenda at all times an insurrection that must ultimately be understood as a struggle in the sphere of circulation and in which surplus rebellion and price formation are separate but interdependent forms.
This new proletariat, which includes the surplus population and has similarities with Guy Standing's precariat (as a class), today faces directly the state and the police (in the early uprisings of the 17th century, the economy was near and the state far away). While today production is isosoloped, goods are being channeled through global logistics chains, and in developed industrialized countries even many staple foods are coming from other continents, the state's standing army, the police (now in the context of the "fight against drugs and terror") is highly militarized ), always on site. The local uprising must therefore be directed against the police. Nevertheless, the relation of the upheavals to the socio-economic conditions remains, pillage and destruction are to be understood as an answer to the logic of the market. If the uprising brings the question of economic reproduction into play, then it is a negation, an inversion of the workers 'power, based on participation in the economic surplus, but now completely defensive, in that it preserves the workers' own reproduction with stabilization the success of your own company. The uprising is the negation of the trap into which the workers have fallen. The insurrection, as Clover concludes, is a privileged tactic that stands for the struggles in the sphere of circulation, the uprising, the blockade, the occupation, and finally, on the horizon, the Commune.
Clover is not interested in the historical genealogy of the insurrection, but in the (theoretical) decipherment of the political significance and potential of the insurrection. Often enough, the revolt is associated with violence; it is called the armed arm of the strike, or simply illegitimate. Accordingly, the strike is considered pacifistic and its operations are always anchored within the legal framework. The equation of rebellion and violence is an important discursive tool to deprive the uprising of its political explosive power, to defame its separation from a "clean" policy - Clover points out that the double freedom of the wage laborer - free of the means of production and free to choose to rent his labor force - based on violence and integrated into the system of wage labor.
In an economistically abbreviated sense, the early uprising is often interpreted as a spontaneous protest against rising food prices, and today one also thinks of the actions against the IMF, which set the conditions for precarious food prices in underdeveloped countries, and in a more conditional sense, as if an increase in prices above a certain point could lead to reactions of the population. The political counterpart here is Alain Badiou, who subjects the insurgents to a miserable spontaneity, to which Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg have already said everything necessary. At the same time, he admits that the communist idea springs from the event of insurrection, which then gives it an organizational form and duration. In this respect, the uprising can only ever assume a protopolitical mode, which has to be translated into the revolutionary conception of political action. But it's not the party, but the idea that sets the benchmark for Badiou. Thus, the historical uprising appears as a fairly a-causal affair, which is virtually outside the (social) time. Clover sums up at this point that the purely economistic and the purely political abstract would show each other in negative, their limits, but could not grasp the uprising as a social phenomenon. And he raises the question of how to navigate between the two positions, between the uprising as a game of hunger and the Diaphanic structure of political feeling.
On the other hand, Thompson emphasizes the practical aspects of the insurgency, more precisely the life-sustaining practices of pricing, which include blockades, threats of violence, seizure and violence against traders and transporters. Thus, it is neither the hunger nor the political emotion that make up the revolt, but the dominance of the marketplace. The insurgents organize themselves at the early uprising of the 18th century on the marketplaces. Clover emphasizes that this aspect describes only a part of the current uprisings, in which not only the reference to the logic of circulation is crucial, the sphere of consumption and exchange, but the entire field of social reproduction.
Social reproduction is a double-edged sword; on the one hand, it refers to those who rent their labor and take care of their reproduction, on the other hand it is related to the valorisation of commodities in production and their realization in circulation. This is one and the same process, viewed from two antagonistic perspectives. Reproductive work, however, includes not only wage labor, but also the unpaid work of women, which takes place in homes and also in marketplaces. Consequently, the battle for reproduction is concentrated in the marketplaces, but it involves a diverse group of stakeholders. While the strike is a struggle for the price of the labor force, which presupposes the unity of the workers and unfolds in the context of production, the early uprising is a struggle for prices in the markets, whereby the unity of the parties comes about through the shared expropriation and unfolds in the context of consumption. Strike and insurrection are practical struggles in the field of reproduction, the former in the field of production, the former in the sphere of circulation. Both make a structural and at the same time improvisational use of a given terrain that they neither produced nor chose. In contrast to the strike, the rebellion, while remaining bound to the reproductive necessities, can only be political, since the surplus population no longer manages to participate in the economic surplus, which was another important opportunity for capital in Fordism to maintain social peace. In the same breath, the state replaces its Keynesian economic policy with direct police confrontation with the surplus population. The police and the uprising are therefore mutually dependent. The uprising has a necessary correlation to the current structure of the state and the economy, it is characterized by the rejection - those excluded from any increase in productivity. At the same time, the police appears as a necessity and limit of insurrection.
Between 1740 and 1820, so-called food riots were the paradigmatic form of social conflict. If the exchange becomes a pure social nature (son-Rethel), then the price becomes an urgent aspect of antagonism, which enforces social reproduction, although looting, in a certain sense, also constitutes a price. In the golden age of uprisings, in this context, so-called export riots, the physical interruption or intervention in transport, a direct response to the emerging national and international markets, the fianzialisation of the same, the capitalization of the world Agriculture and the destruction of local communities. From the beginning, the uprising was a struggle in the sphere of circulation. However, the heyday of the rebellions also includes the seeds of its decline, Clover said. England is the historical place where the transition from insurrection to strike takes place. Clover refers here to the studies of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, according to which the development of capitalism proceeded from the transformation of class relations in the countryside. The transformation of agriculture has begun and industrialization has not yet taken hold, which is the passage that Clover calls the golden age of insurrection.
The shift from rebellion to strikes is, according to Clover, inherent in the shift in the structure of capital. The strike emerged from the uprising, ending the shift from an economic mode in which profit was generated on the market to a mode of surplus-value production through self-propelled capital in production. The strike emerges in the new world of capitalist production, driven by sailors who meet urban craftsmen and traders to fight for higher wages. Once the wage employment relationship has become generalized, the market loses its central social significance, transforming it into the self-regulating market of capital, by which all communal values ​​are subsumed into the profit motives of capital. The characteristic member of the rural poor is now the landless proletarian, who becomes dependent on wage labor or remains part of the industrial reserve army. At the same time, the struggles of the workers, including those of the Luddites, for a wage that enables them to survive, they oppose unemployment and demand the right to form unions. The Luddists can not simply be called a machine-wrench insofar as machines that do not replace workers are left intact. Clover writes that in this context the strike must be understood as a social formation that relates to employment, higher wages and better working conditions and rights, while the so-called "machine storm" marks the transition from rebellion to strike, the former, however can not be reduced to a fight against the future, but an intervention that anticipates the struggle for the job. There was a brief phase of transition in which food riots and factory struggles were encountered. It is the transitions from the marketplace to the workplace, from the price of goods to the price of labor as the linchpin of reproduction, which also dictate the transition from rebellion to strikes as the most important collective action. Strike and rebellion are discussed not as given activities, but in the context of the problems of socio-economic reproduction imposed on the masses by capital as a systemic link.
The masses and the political. Masses, classes, mob, multitude. Subjects, citizens and people. The meaning of metamorphoses and antagonisms, the meaning of the political. As this can not be separated from the question of the many, the recomposition of the class body, which transforms in relation to the material basis. In this context, uprising and strikes are not singular events, but part and form of the many that are adjacent to them.
The strike is the dominant tactic of the workers, or the central form of social antagonism in the heyday of global industrial capital; it also allows a look at the uprising and vice versa, referring in each case to the metamorphoses and transformations of capital. The strike is a struggle over the level of wages or the price of labor and for employment, led by workers in their capacity as workers in production. The narrow definition of the strike characterizes him as neat, legalistic, disciplined, rooted in one place and as a denial. However, for example, the textile workers' strikes in Lyon in 1831 show that they can certainly go hand in hand with barricade struggles and guerrilla action. However, a majority of historians deny that the strike is emerging from the uprisings and are clearly in opposition to each other. It is the unions, for example, who, in 1839, put the glass workers' disciplined strike against the disciplined strike of glass workers - the strike is exactly what the uprising is not. However, the opposition here always refers only to the forms of appearance, without further examining the study of the social and political content and environment of the forms of struggle. In this context, Clover quotes a statement by Walter Benjamin that the technological conditions of production, its progress and success are related to the transparency of social content, thus glass production. Industrial production, progress and glass architecture - they represent the world of the strike. The ideology of collective action adheres to the idea of ​​transparency (think in opposition to the Black Block, the Invisible Committee and so on), the belief that one can see through the perception of the surface directly to the cause of social conflict. The strike becomes strike by being formalized against the uprising. He is the order itself, the unbroken windowpane. Accordingly, the uprising, now in direct opposition, must find its content in the form. But this remains paradoxical because its form is disorder that becomes its content. The uprising wants nothing more than itself, its luminous opacity. Shine and shards of broken glass.
Nevertheless, the conceptual separation of insurrection and strike also remains necessary for Clover. It refers to the material changes in the economic structures of capital itself. However, with the strict opposition of uprising and strikes, important moments of the historic transition are lost, as are the transformations of capital can not be understood as a serial phenomenon in which synchronous states follow one another. Synchronous is the concept of the mode of production (Jameson), while in the history of capitalism there are always different modes of production at the same time.
The social content of strike and insurrection can not be reduced to the collective will, beliefs and affects of those involved. Clover sees the strike unfolded on the one hand, the confrontation with capital and the struggle for the price of labor, on the other hand, the strike is a productivity in itself. Nevertheless, it always remains related to the productive phases of capital and capital accumulation (production and circulation are always in conflicting relation). The strike, which emerges from circulation, becomes central only when proletarian reproduction becomes mainly dependent on wages, which in turn remain an important part of the reproduction of capital. The unity of production and circulation of capital prevents the necessary separation of strike and rebellion from being set absolutely.
Even in the general strike mode, the traditional labor movement will give the strike a disciplined and disciplined form of organization, an ordered form of confrontation against capital (and not against the state), with the alleged disorder of anarchist actions, which is always described as spontaneity Object of antipathy mutated. At first, spontaneity appears as a slave to the (natural) stimulus, and Clover points out, in the remarks of the group Endnotes, that Kant considers the transcendental unity of apperception, the fact that I am aware of my own experiences, quite spontaneous Act that is not natural, but free and willed. Later, in Leninist orthodoxy, spontaneity is rejected not only because of its lack of organization, but because of its supposed direct opposition to labor and hence to the proletariat. Marx had taken a similar position in his early writings on the Paris Commune, but later revised it. Clover then draws the conflictual positions of Engels and Sorel into a general strike, the latter anarchistically inspiring the general strike in the context of a catastrophic transition from capitalism and socialism. Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, admitted that, in opposition to Sorel, spontaneity could, under certain conditions, be translated into orderly forms of organization, but this was the end of anarchism. Often the tactic of the strike is associated with the organization of labor, a kind of order that reflects the rationality of the assembly line in the factory, while the uprising appears as a disorder, a-logical and nebulous.
Detroit was probably the place where the transition from strike to primary insurgency was most significantly observed in the 1960s. On the one hand, it dealt with racialization in the context of the uprisings and, on the other, with the coexistence and confrontation of uprisings and strikes. At the same time, the determination of collective forms of action by the socio-economic conditions of capital must always be taken into account - in the last instance, inasmuch as limits, but also possibilities (for the action) are set. The transition takes place in the space from the factory to the port, the public square and the market. In the context of the strike as a now popular and distinct tactic, the return of the rebellion seems at first to be a strange and heroic attempt to transform the two forms of collective action into a revolutionary process, and the uprising seems to mark two fronts of a single antagonism. In the Western countries, the strike survives as the leading tactic of the labor movement during the 1960s, it continues to relate affirmatively to the growth processes of capital, indeed it follows in frequency the business cycles and employment (the higher the unemployment, the lower the number the strikes). The correlations of the strikes with the industrial expansion, the movements of the labor market and the high rates of profit are in the long phase from 1830 to 1973 over-clear, so Clover, she even logically necessary. While in Fordism in the 1960s we still have to deal with high rates of profit in the industrial sectors of the western countries and the labor movement still maintains its position in the class compromise between capital and labor, the new uprisings are becoming increasingly visible, especially in the "long hot summers ". The historical overlap from the strike to the uprising has begun. The modern uprising, although sharing certain characteristics with the early uprisings, is reshaping in a completely different historical situation; in the US, it is a race-specific struggle stemming from civil rights movements and in direct confrontation with the whiteness of the traditional labor movement. The blackness of the uprisings appears not only as a continuity of the civil rights movement, which defends itself against state racism, but also as a movement against the whiteness of the strike. According to Clover, there is a paradox in this context: on the one hand, the uprising is always in conflict with the violence of the racist state, on the other hand, the identification of the rebellion with the race proves to be a mistake (a confusion between correlation and reason), as if Blackness is the origin of the uprisings themselves. At the same time, the ideological definition of uprisings proves to be spontaneous and undisciplined as a vehicle to portray the racialized black subject as animalistic, irrational and natural.
The black-fueled militant action in Detroit is at a distance from official labor markets; they are battles for better reproduction conditions outside the sphere of production. During this time, both the uprisings and the strikes try to overcome their own limits while competing with each other; one requires the other as the image of the revolution. In this context, Clover deals extensively with the continuity of the Black Panthers and the rebellions. In relation to the economy, state and law, blackness appears here as a surplus promising to transgress regulation and order. Negroes are Blackness are Riot. The uprising is an instance of the black life as an exclusion, but at the same time also the surplus in the noisy atmosphere of circulation; he can only expand, he is a collective action through which the struggle must happen, he is a social modality.
Again and again Clover points out that collective resistance is coupled with the transformations of the political economy of capital; Collective action refers to the decline of industrial production in the US and on a global scale, to the shift of bodies and capital into the sphere of circulation, and this along the affects and desires of those involved in the strike or insurrection, but also in the Context of those economic categories. Clover sums up: Insurrection and strike are collective embodiments of circulation and production on the border.
As everyday life becomes more and more prevalent in the circulation or informal economies, some of the population itself becomes surplus and is confronted with the conditions of market reproduction rather than wages, and in this situation any accumulation can to be understood as a rebellion on the corner, in the public square and in the street. Unlike the strike, it's hard to know when the uprising starts or when it ends. On the one hand it is a particular event, on the other hand a holographic miniature of a complete situation, a world picture. While the early uprising has barely faced the police and the armed state (it took place in the economic space), this has changed in the post-industrial uprising. On the one hand he finds himself confronted with an ensemble of goods in the local shops, on the other hand he discovers, when it comes to pricing the goods, that the economy has a planetary logistics and a barely reachable financial industry. Only the police can be spotted on every corner. The difference between the early and the post-industrial uprising, both of which take place in the sphere of circulation, seems at first to be that of the differences in pricing, or one between the battles on the marketplace or against the state. However, the Harlem and Watts revolts of the 1960s show that the Blacks were particularly affected by the recession and faced the double confrontation with state and capital. In this context, Guy Debord sees in the looting no hyperbolic realization of consumer ideology, but the infiltration of the commodity as such, which at the same time immediately the immediate logic of the state, the police and the armed units appear on the scene. The police are now obviously the economy, the violence of the product is meat, so Clover.
Clover tries again and again to establish a connection between insurrection and economic crisis, insofar as crisis phenomena from the 1970s relocate the center of gravity of capital in the circulation and the revolt must therefore be understood in the last instance as a fight in the circulation sphere, the fight for price fixing and the rebellion remains both separate and connected forms. For Clover, the crisis is the exclamation point of a profound social reorganization, to which the uprising responds by attempting to abolish it and thus itself.
In 1973, with the historian Ferdinand Braudel, Clover sees a time marking a new epoch of economic crisis development unfolding beyond an economic cycle, such as the series of oil shocks, the collapse of the Bretten Woods system, and the US withdrawal from Vietnam , In the context of the cycle theories of Braudel and Arrighi, Clover sees 1973 as a metonym for economic change that goes far beyond the capacity of a single year. The slowdown in growth and rates of profit represents a period of decline, while at the same time money-capital flows are wandering into the financial sector, where higher rates of profit seem to be realized. At this point, we are no further apart from Clover's accumulation and crisis theory, which closely follows Arrighi and, above all, Brenner's theory of overaccumulation of capital. In a nutshell, the theory of accumulation, oriented on the tendency of the rate of profit, is that the fall in the rate of profit is the result of an increased organic composition of capital, the increase of the dead over the living labor; The development driven by the compulsion to increase productivity cyclically leads time and again to what Clover calls the production of non-production, the overproduction of capital, goods and labor. While the accumulation of capital in the twentieth century entailed a transfer of working people from agriculture to industry, at the end of the twentieth century it reversed the transfer of capital from production to the service and information sector, including an increased one Unemployment. The connection between logical capital accumulation and historical cyclical development is arranged with Arrighi in such a way that the different phases of the cycle of capital GWG 'are interpreted empirically, whereby the phase GW corresponds to the industrial capital production and the phase WG corresponds to the financial expansion of the capital. The second phase revolves around the realization of the value of commodities in circulation, as well as the flow of capital into the financial industry, which ventures to access future capital exploitation. It begins the dominance of the fictional capital. The world capitalist system follows the line of circulation-production-primary circulation, the latter leading to the decline of the strike, ushering in a new era of rebellion in the context of a spatialization of the economy and the recomposition of the antagonistic relationship between capital and proletariat.
Insurgencies are always struggles for control and passage through space; they are organized around buildings, passages and squares, with the crowds gathering on the streets. There is something urbane in the uprisings, something architectural, not to say spatial. The barricade, one of the key instruments of the insurgency, had its origins in sealing the neighborhoods against enemy attacks until the broad boulevards and industrial growth put an end to this instrument.
For Clover, the logic of production is temporal, while the logic of circulation is spatially anchored. He speaks with regard to the first of the valorization of the value of socially necessary abstract working time, the strike as a temporal struggle over the length of working time and its price. In the product the objectified working time is cleared up. The circulation is characterized by the realization of the surplus value as profit, by dipping goods. Increasing the organic composition of capital is a process of spatialization for Clover, accompanied by the transformation of temporally organized into spatially dominated struggles. Spatialization concerns transport, communication and finance. If Marx speaks of the destruction of space through time, then, according to Clover, this has often been interpreted as an increasing irrelevance of the relation of capital to space. On the other hand, like David Harvey, Clover assumes a growing importance of space for capital and its cycles. At the same time circulation becomes a condition of production, whereby Clover by no means demands a dominance of the struggles in the circulation over those in the production. But when capital is increasingly in the sphere of circulation to cut costs and, at the same time, to further increase the turnover times for more and more goods, then the struggles in this sphere also become central to capital. The presence of capital today tends ever more towards a time of logistical space than a series of intra-capitalist and inter-state competitions. The financialized global shippment and containerization signal this change, with just-in-time production taking place since the 1970s indicating the methodological aspect of the same change. This has changed the ratio of labor to capital accumulation in developed countries as well, which is why the demand for old collective action such as the strike can no longer help. A new class policy faces the socio-economic transformations of capital. At the same time, it can only be a struggle against the existence of capital itself, and not just a new empowerment for work. Capital and labor are today in a collaboration to preserve the self-reproduction of capital or to secure the labor relations along the liabilities of the enterprises. The workers must affirm their own exploitation to ensure their own reproduction. The work has stopped being the antithesis to capital. Traditional Marxism, which treats productive labor as the transhistorical force of social constitution, has finally shed its powder. This is a result of the transformation of capital - also from the point of view of the workers' movement - the affirmation of capital is connected with the affirmation of its own existence. Although the fight for wages retains its legitimacy, it always legitimizes capital.
The uprising does not seem to preserve or affirm anything, perhaps divided antagonism, shared misery and shared negation. Often he does not even possess the positive language of a program or a demand, but only the negative language of vandalism, destruction and the unintentional. But still it does not lack determination; Clover speaks of the overdetermination of insurrection by historical transformations that make antagonism, and in particular the struggle in circulation, necessary. The social surplus that has accompanied the accumulation of capital has disappeared, and with it the possibilities of capital and state to provide social improvements for the masses. Capital and labor are moving more and more into circulation, but the surplus population is also migrating to the informal economy. Deindustrialization is also accompanied by specific racialisations. The new revolts in the circulation do not necessarily have to be borne by workers, because in principle everyone can free a market place, close a street or occupy a harbor. The insurgents may be workers, but they do not function as workers because those involved in the insurgency are not unified by their jobs, but by their role as expropriated.
In the context of the uprising, the concept of infection is often used; The Invisible Committee, on the other hand, speaks somewhat too ideally of the resonance of the revolutionary movements. In any case, the rising uprisings of the surplus population live as the basis of their own expansions. From the point of view of the uprising itself, however, it is not only about the participants, their collective actions and visions, but about the synthesis of crisis, surplus population and race. It is the fallow capacities as concomitants of the crises, the surplus of the production of non-production, which are targeted in the uprising. The relative surplus population is here an integral part of the uprising (as a result of the growing organic composition of capital and the continuation of primitive accumulation in the immanent movement of capital). The most important membrane may lie between the industrial reserve army (part of the labor market) and the surplus population, which is outside the official labor market. The surplus population is being forced into informational, semi-legal or illegal economies today. In this context, informationalisation can be understood as a way of structuring economic activities. Deleuze has spoken in this context of indebted people, but added to the ontology of indebtedness immediately that for the control powers again and again the danger of rebellions grow - the indebted and the excluded were one. They are the same global surplus. At the same time, capital must always find new agents capable of indebtedness, students, homeowners and part-time workers. Even Marx spoke of capital accumulation as a condition that multiplies the proletariat. If the uprising is not only a collective action, but a kind of class struggle, and at the same time the racialization processes are an important part of the new uprisings, then the surplus population must have a mediating and explanatory power; it is to be understood as part of the proletariat whose constitutive function consists in the negation of capital. The more the working class must affirm capital in order to survive, the more we are confronted with the political significance of an expanding proletariat that has no access to traditional forms of reproduction.
Clover cites, in this context, Stuart Hall, who speaks of race as a modality in which the class is lived. Deindustrialization itself has a racist component, with black people's unemployment in the United States having been higher than that of the white population since the 1960s. In regions where a high rate of unemployment is also found in adolescents under constant surveillance by state control instruments, the state's only response to the surplus population appears to be the prison. The uprising is the other of imprisonment. He is the answer to the regime of exclusion, superfluidity, lack of goods and state surveillance and violence. In this context, the black movements also connect to the anti-colonial movements, the global class of Dangerous, so Clover is not unified by their role as producers, but by their common relation to state violence. This is the basis of the Surplus Rebellion. The Rase is not the reason of the uprising, but part of the Riots as a fight against racialization processes. It is not the race that makes the uprising, but the rebellion the race. The race is the modality of the lived class, which sees itself in the uprising as excluded, exploited and controlled: The logic of a structurally racialized surplus, which distinguishes the new proletariat, pervades the alleged antinomy between class and race to the fight against racism Set feature and tool of class re-composition. The surplus is not identical with the breed, nor can they be easily distinguished. According to Clover, we are in the midst of a continuing exodus to the Western world driven by geopolitical volatility and the inability of capital to adequately absorb labor in the underdeveloped countries - a diaspora inseparable from the expanding superfluity of the surplus population. In the light of the current surplus population and the policy of surplus, Clover now concludes that the uprising is the modality by which the surplus is lived. Primary circulation is a primary uprising in which the surplus life is itself, the latter as the subject of politics and as the object of state power. The state police force itself becomes part of the uprising, or to put it another way, the public of the surplus exists in an economy of state power.
The problem of proletarian reproduction now lies beyond the wages, but even the marketplace that marked the early uprisings can no longer guarantee reproduction. The separation of production from circulation and the presence of the police demonstrate the absence of previous opportunities. The recomposition of the class and the abstractions of the economy are the same. Circulation is the value in the movement to its realization; Circulation is at the same time a regime of social organization within capital. In this sense, the uprising is the sign of a situation that sets itself absolutely. And not because of the wild nature of the uprising, but because of the unfolding deterritorializing situation in which he finds himself. The primary uprising is not a demand but a civil war, Clover concludes in tandem with Tiqqun.
On the one hand, the uprising must be absolute in order to find a reproduction beyond the wages and the marketplace and towards the commune, which is indistinguishable from the civil war; On the other hand, he is constantly confronted with the police violence that seeks to block such an absolutization. As the port and factory were places of early insurrection and strike, places and streets today are places of primary insurrection.
Clover writes, "The uprising, the blockade, the barricade, the occupation. This is what we will see in the next five, fifteen, forty years. "On the one hand, the occupations of the primary uprising refer to the struggles in the marketplaces of the early insurrection (and their economic demands), and on the other they demonstrate the impossibility of return to these early struggles. The contested space today is directly related to politics, and for Clover this appears to be the transcendental problem of 2011. The population of the current uprisings is not preserving its historical function by an idea (Badiou) or by the fatal fluctuations in food prices, but rather by an underlying socio-economic structure, a material reorganization of the social body.
Since 2006, the reservoir of uprisings has grown, on the one hand, from adolescents who are barred from entering the economy and, on the other hand, from a surplus population and its counterpart governmental crisis management. The organization of the camp, as seen in the Occupy movement in Oakland, is at the same time the strength and weakness of the movement in terms of its militancy and the class composition of the excluded and the completed. The problem of the relationship between the refugee camp's abjection and the activism of the political camps also plays a role here, and the context between the political camp and its socio-economic conditions must not be overlooked. The dominant discourse of Occupy - we are the 99% - and we are entitled to a corresponding share of social wealth and class power, was unable to represent those who have long been beyond the promises of institutions and a redistributive policy. On the other hand, a link must be established between the camps of the surplus population and the political groups that operate anti-state, precisely because the production of non-production and global political volatility persist.
In this context, the blockade of traffic and the interruption of circulation express the desire to bring everything to a standstill. There are further signals of the new uprisings to announce: a penchant for populism, which looks for sympathy in the media and the population, a pacifism, which pleads for a respectable policy. The unrestrained uprising is coded as if it were the demand itself, but the existing order could recognize it if only it understood it. The other impulse found in the uprising is something that comes before or after communication, a practice that may consist in the looting, the control of space or the erosion of police violence to demonstrate the exclusion of the insurgents. The success of the former, the discursive strategy that is always close to the civil rights movement, seems more than doubtful today given the socio-economic conditions of capital. The frenzy of insurrection that goes against it is undoubtedly a measure of the social pressure exerted on the surplus population in the context of growing police violence. Finally, in the struggles one has to look at the commune, which appears as a horizon, as a social relation, a political form and as an event, or rather as a tactic of social reproduction or as a practice for which it is requires a corresponding theory. It is the form of life when the struggles in production and circulation are exhausted.
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