DH

Here’s a proposition to think over. What if every dominant mode of production, with its particular political configuration, creates a mode of opposition as a mirror image to itself?

During the era of Fordist organization of the production process, the mirror image was a large centralized trade union movement and democratically centralist political parties.

The reorganization of the production process and turn to flexible accumulation during neoliberal times has produced a Left that is also, in many ways, its mirror: networking, decentralized, non-hierarchical. I think this is very interesting.

And to some degree the mirror image confirms that which it’s trying to destroy. In the end I think that the trade union movement actually undergirded Fordism.

I think much of the Left right now, being very autonomous and anarchical, is actually reinforcing the endgame of neoliberalism. A lot of people on the Left don’t like to hear that.

But of course the question arises: Is there a way to organize which is not a mirror image? Can we smash that mirror and find something else, which is not playing into the hands of neoliberalism?

Resistance to neoliberalism can occur in a number of different ways. In my work I stress that the point at which value is realized is also a point of tension.

Value is produced in the labor process, and this is a very important aspect of class struggle. But value is realized in the market through sale, and there’s a lot of politics to that.

A lot of resistance to capital accumulation occurs not only on the point of production but also through consumption and the realization of value.

Take an auto plant: big plants used to employ around twenty-five thousand people; now they employ five thousand because technology has reduced the need for workers. So more and more labor is being displaced from the production sphere and is more and more being pushed into urban life.

The main center of discontent within the capitalist dynamic is increasingly shifting to struggles over the realization of value — over the politics of daily life in the city.

Workers obviously matter and there are many issues among workers that are crucial. If we’re in Shenzhen in China struggles over the labor process are dominant. And in the United States, we should have supported the Verizon strike, for example.

But in many parts of the world, struggles over the quality of daily life are dominant. Look at the big struggles over the past ten to fifteen years: something like Gezi Park in Istanbul wasn’t a workers’ struggle, it was discontent with the politics of daily life and the lack of democracy and decision-making processes; in the uprisings in Brazilian cities in 2013, again it was discontent with the politics of daily life: transport, possibilities, and with spending all that money on big stadiums when you’re not spending any money on building schools, hospitals, and affordable housing. The uprisings we see in London, Paris, and Stockholm are not about the labor process: they are about the politics of daily life.

This politics is rather different from the politics that exists at the point of production. At the point of production, it’s capital versus labor. Struggles over the quality of urban life are less clear in terms of their class configuration.

Clear class politics, which is usually derived out of an understanding of production, gets theoretically fuzzy as it becomes more realistic. It’s a class issue but it’s not a class issue in a classical sense.