Wednesday, April 22, 2020


Students, Workers and the Specter of Surplus Value

Delhi.
It’s six in the morning in Delhi, India. The smog sits above the sprawling city as I and some friends take the long auto-rickshaw ride to the industrial belt on the outskirts of the nation’s capital. We left early to help distribute workers’ newspapers to the thousands of workers walking to their morning shifts. As we approach the industrial belt—shielded from the eyes of the city’s increasing and increasingly isolated middle class—the smog gets thicker. Already the most polluted city in the world, the air in the industrial belt is suffocating. It’s no wonder why. Just past where we stand to distribute the papers, an interminable line of factories stretches out into the distance, guarded by bouncers. Many of these factories are where raw materials are fused with human labor to produce products for U.S. multinational capital. Indeed, this setting is where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” initiative is being realized, as the country surpasses China and the U.S. as the number one global destination for foreign direct investment.
The constant stream of workers walking to these factories for hours at a time seems more reminiscent of early 19th century London than it does 2015 in a leading “developing” economy, one in which the Prime Minister tells the country’s dispossessed, “achhe din aane waale hain” (the good days are about to come). As I was distributing papers along with three other students and the publishers of the newspaper, I realized on a visceral level that this was the setting in which the core exploitation to fuel global capitalism was happening. I also began to reflect on my position as a student in relation to these workers. Far from the peaceful green environment of the campus space where I was studying, the industrial belt literally felt like a whole other world. Upon returning to the U.S., I wondered if these two worlds may have a parallel even in the imperial center of the globe.
Switch contexts to Grinnell, Iowa, home of Grinnell College and, despite the College’s efforts to downplay the fact to prospective students, roughly 9,000 rural Iowans. As I was in town distributing leaflets and a workers’ newsletter on a crisp fall evening, I met a man smoking a cigarette outside of a dilapidated house behind a grocery store. After striking up a conversation with him, I quickly found out that he worked at one of two plastics factories in Grinnell. Shortly after meeting me, the worker said in a suspicious and even accusatory tone, “Are you studying here or something?” As a senior, I was already well aware of the stark “town-gown” divide between Grinnell and Grinnell College, but it is always a clear reminder of this physical and social partition to hear it implied so strongly after just meeting a “townie.”
Before getting ready for his 12-hour graveyard shift on a Friday night at the factory, the worker continued, “You wanna know what it’s like out here? It sucks out here.” The causes of his cynicism are readily visible throughout the town. When entering Grinnell’s Davis Elementary School, the first thing you see is a poster bearing the message, “Homeless? It can happen to anyone.” The statistics explain why this sign is necessary: over 40% of students at Davis qualify for free or reduced lunch. Contrast this with the economic prosperity of the College, whose $1.8 billion endowment, one of the top 10 per pupil endowments in the country, posted a 20.4% return in 2014.
Indeed, the difference in material well-being between the College and town is striking in its magnitude, as is the College’s indifference towards doing anything about it. Much could be written on this topic alone, but here I want to focus in on one particular dimension of the “town-gown” contradiction, one I pondered both while standing in the industrial belt of Delhi and during my conversation with the man getting ready for his shift at the plastics factory in Grinnell: the relation of the student to the worker.
This factory worker’s visible distaste for the fact that I was studying at the College led me to take a fresh look at some questions I had begun to consider back in Delhi: Are students workers? Is the social difference between students and workers found in the kind labor they do, cultural background, or is it a question of value production for capital? Why does there appear to be a disconnect between student and worker movements in both the U.S. and abroad?
These questions also stem from other concrete realities on the ground, realities that are desperately in need of theorizing: why was Batay Ouvriye, an autonomous workers’ organization in Haiti, compelled to put students in a separate organization after the students had tried organizing alongside workers? Why do so many leftist students in Delhi, India’s progressive Jawaharlal Nehru University seem disinterested in finding a way to actively support rampant labor unrest in the National Capital Region’s own industrial belt? Why have student-led campaigns for fossil fuel divestment in the U.S. been unable to gain traction outside of a handful of small institutions?
To answer these kinds of questions, we must move beyond a populist portrayal of capitalism, a portrayal that, to use contemporary examples from the Occupy Movement and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, identifies “the 1%” or “the billionaire class” and collapses the rest of society into one class comprised of everyone who is not a capitalist. It is not enough to simply say that we are all dominated by capitalism and, therefore, should unite to rein it in or stop it. Rather, if we actually want to end capitalism, our theory must be in service of uncovering the mechanisms through which capital reproduces itself and the class or classes capable of halting this reproduction. To this end, I will offer an analysis of surplus value—the driving force behind capitalism’s reproduction—and explain why this analysis matters to students and student participation in class struggle. I will then apply this analysis to concrete struggles like the ones mentioned above and suggest some tentative answers to my biggest political question: What is the role of the student militant in relation to the working class?
Surplus Value: The Engine of the Capitalist Machine
The production of surplus value is the defining feature of capitalism as a mode of production that distinguishes it from historical modes of production, namely feudalism. Under feudalism, the appropriation of surplus is empirically visible: the lord is entitled to a certain portion of the product of the peasant’s labor on the land at harvest time. In other words, exploitation of labor is executed outside the production process as an ex post facto claim on the surplus product of the peasant’s agricultural labor. In contrast, under capitalism, the appropriation of surplus occurs inside the production process. Instead of having a portion of her surplus product retroactively appropriated by the owning class, the worker is exploited during the production process itself.
For example, if a worker is paid $100 for eight hours of work, but produces goods worth $100 in just two hours, then the rest of that time—six hours—she is not paid for her work. During those remaining six hours, the worker produces $300 of goods. That amount is surplus value. By way of his ownership of the means of production, the capitalist appropriates the surplus value by also claiming ownership over the newly produced commodities. This surplus value, embodied in these physical commodities, is realized as profit when they are sold, and a portion is reinvested as capital to allow the industry to expand. This extraction of surplus value is not merely a quantitative measure—the $300—but, rather, is made possible by a qualitative social relation of domination between capital and labor.
Because the extraction of surplus value occurs within the time-disciplined production process under capitalism, the point of production itself becomes politicized. For example, in February of this year in the same industrial belt where I was passing out newspapers, a garment worker at a Richa Global factory was prevented from entering the factory—an action which indicated the termination of his contract—just for arriving ten minutes late to his work shift. After he refused to leave without due compensation, he was beaten to hospitalization by factory bouncers. When ten minutes of tardiness is equal to ten minutes of lost surplus value extraction, the stakes are potentially fatal.
This beating was followed by worker agitation in the industrial belt. While this agitation, which is one of many in (removed the word “the”) Delhi’s industrial belts, was clearly a direct response to an attack on an individual worker, its roots lie in the daily struggle of all the factory workers against the hyper-exploitation of surplus value and the inhumanity that this entails. Pitiful wagescontract labor, and deadly working conditions are the norm in the industrial area. These practices and conditions are driven not by capitalists’ “greed” or a hatred of the poor, though individual capitalists may be greedy or hate the poor. Rather, they are in service of keeping the motor of capital production—surplus value—well oiled with labor-power amenable to as much exploitation as possible. Surplus value is the engine of the capitalist machine.
Productive and Unproductive Labor
A failure to grasp the process of surplus value production leads a majority of theorists on the left to only tell part of the story about how capitalism reproduces itself and little about how to politically intervene in this reproduction process. Even for the formidable theorists of the independent socialist magazine, Monthly Review, the conception of the working class is rendered mechanical and vague due to a failure to appropriate the concept of surplus value. For example, in his influential 1974 book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman points to six “occupational categories” that comprise “the unmistakably working-class population.” He bases these categories not on the distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labor that was pivotal in Marx’s definition of the working class, but rather on the socioeconomic status of laborers. As such, anyone in the “new middle class” can slide down the class spectrum into the working class as their labor is “degraded.”
While Braverman’s work is engaged in the important task of theorizing the declining material conditions of the “new middle class” that accompanied capital’s offensive in the early 1970s, he fails to frame his analysis in terms of the central question we must ask when crafting revolutionary theory: How is capitalism reproduced and how can this reproduction be stopped? By defining the working class principally in terms of socioeconomic status, Braverman strips class analysis of its qualitative social dimension, the dimension we must attend to if we wish to struggle not simply for the redistribution of already exploited surplus value, but, rather, for the overturning of the capitalist mode of production itself. In other words, description of a sliding spectrum of socioeconomic conditions does not make a class analysis. This approach also misleads us politically: due to the “degradation of labor,” we are given the impression that there is an ever-growing working class and, thus, all the more reason to expect immanent uprisings against capital culminating in revolution. But, looking back, this degradation, which has objectively continued, has not fostered uprisings of any sort. Rather, working class strength is at an historical low with its putative indicator of resurgence in the U.S., the Fight for 15 movement, controlled by collaborationist unions and NGOs that use workers as pawns.
What explains this paradox of an ostensibly numerically increasing working class paired with an objectively weaker workers’ movement? Clearly, the answer lies not in a quantitative measure of the mere number of workers in a given social formation, nor does the “collective action problem” faced by workers explain the specific historical and social crux of this paradox. Rather, we must turn to Marx’s distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labor in the Grundrisse to help us explain this seemingly unexplainable concrete reality. Well before the rise of the “new middle class,” or, more precisely what Nicos Poulantzas calls the “new petite bourgeois,” Marx made a distinction between those laborers who produce surplus value and those who do not. This is not a moral distinction, nor one that is not simply about the “occupational category” of the laborer at hand. Rather, it pertains to which laborers produce new value for capital and are, therefore, in direct antagonism to it. In his own words:
Is it not crazy, asks e.g. (or at least something similar) Mr Senior, that the piano maker is a productive worker, but not the piano player, although obviously the piano would be absurd without the piano player? But this is exactly the case. The piano maker reproduces capital; the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue.
As Marx goes on to explain, it does not matter “how useful” the labor of the pianist might be (as a musician myself, I would consider it to be wonderfully useful, even essential, for society); if it is not labor that “directly augments capital,” it is not productive labor. Indeed, even in an age of monopoly-finance capital in which value appears to be detached from any input of labor-power and short-term profit can be made from the sale of just about anything, surplus value still must be embodied in physical commodities. The crisis-prone nature of the economy under the dominance of finance capital—itself a response to the stagnation in the material economy—is evidence of the absence of new value production behind this toxic form of accumulation. As Dani Wadada Nabudere, reflecting on the meltdown of 2007-08, succinctly writes in The Crash of International Finance-Capital and its Implications for the Third World:
The [financial] ‘wealth’ has, without the production of real material goods, turned itself  into a form of ‘toxic wealth’ which can only pollute what remains of the ‘real’ economy, unless the real producers of these material goods find a new means by which they can bury this toxic economy on a new material basis.
From this distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and the related distinction between industrial and finance capital, we come to a definition of the working class as those laborers who are involved in the process of physical commodity production; in other words, those laborers who produce surplus value for capital. This distinction, rather than a theoretical abstraction, is often quite clear to those on the streets. For example, the same plastics worker who was wary of the fact that I was a student, upon hearing that I was interested in speaking with workers, immediately asked me, “What kind of workers do you want to talk to—factory workers?” His comment demonstrates that making distinctions between different kinds of labor is not an arcane, academic activity, but rather an intuitive practice to pursue under a contemporary capitalism in which different kinds of labor fulfill different roles in its reproduction.
From this definition of the working class, it becomes clear why workers’ capacity is so weak in the U.S.: while there are an increasing number of highly dominated, low-wage laborers in the workforce, the phenomenon described by Braverman’s “degradation of labor” thesis, because they are involved in the circulation rather than production of capital, they are incapable, on their own, of challenging the fundamental reproductive contradiction of capitalism: surplus value production. For instance, I recently spoke with a retail worker who said of himself and his employees, “We’re at the last stage of a product reaching the consumer, so we can’t do much to impact the economy.” Indeed, he realized intuitively that, while he had to sell his services to survive, he still did not have the ability to actually impact capitalist commodity production, let alone provide a material alternative to it. Indeed, until garment workers in countries like Haiti and Bangladesh, who are involved in producing the commodities sold in retail stores, are able to challenge capital at the point of production, unproductive workers’ struggles will only be able to weaken capital but not completely overcome it.
Even though the role of production has remained relatively stable as a percentage of GDP in the U.S., productive work, to the tune of five million manufacturing jobs, has increasingly shifted away from the U.S between 1980 and 2004. By outsourcing production to the global periphery, capital has been able to more tightly control it by repeatedly relocating it to regions with lower wages and more repressive conditions. Indeed, only by distinguishing productive labor from labor in general can we explain how imperialism is materially reproduced in the 21st century.
Let me be clear: none of this argument is meant to discourage the organization and struggle of unproductive laborers; quite the contrary. In general, the material conditions of these fundamental laborers are nearly indistinguishable from those of productive laborers and their domination by capital is comparably severe. Furthermore, in today’s globalized capitalism, unproductive laborers often occupy strategic positions in supply chains. All this argument suggests is that, without the class strength of productive workers, any movement against capital will hit a wall due to its inability to engage the only class—the working class—with the capacity to not only weaken capital, but also to provide an alternative to it by cutting surplus value production at its root: material production.  
Do Students Produce Surplus Value?
With this theoretical framework on surplus value in place—one that is heretical for a left that has largely abandoned working class struggle in a shift to targeting capitalism’s effects—we arrive at the question of students. It is clear that the aforementioned garment worker in India, nearly beaten to death for his ten-minute tardiness, produces surplus value and that, by withholding his labor-power, the factory owner’s ability to reproduce himself as a capitalist would be negatively impacted. But what about students? For instance, can’t the student-administration contradiction in the university space be understood as representing the same antagonism that was present between the worker and capitalist in Delhi’s industrial belt? Moreover, by withholding her labor, might the student impact capital in the same way as this garment worker?
I contend that the student—unless engaged in surplus value producing work outside of his capacity as a student—does not produce surplus value and is, thus, not a member of the working class. This holds true even of students from working class backgrounds. To understand why, we must ask, “Why do students go to college?” While you’ll get many answers to this question, most are along the lines of getting “a better job,” code for a job within the new petite bourgeoisie. In other words, the goal is precisely not to end up in the working class.
Indeed, I was recently speaking with a senior at another college who mentioned that almost everyone she knew was striving for employment in finance in one way or another. In fact, finance companies are now even hiring students in the humanities and soft social sciences due to their tendency to be “self-starters.” If not finance, NGO employment has become a desirable option for those graduates who follow the ideal “getting paid to do good,” but end up undermining working class struggle in the process. One graduate recently told me that he aspired to “meaningful” employment in the NGO sector following college, but now, after five years working in it, feels alienated and thinks his salary would be better utilized if given to the state to fund social programs. Even though the economy drives some students back into the working class after college, their aspirations while studying not to become workers have political consequences concerning the relationship of students to workers’ struggles.
Here the concept of the petite bourgeoisie—the non-autonomous class that neither produces nor extracts surplus value—is particularly relevant. In French, “petite” not only connotes “small,” but also something small that will become big. Indeed, while not itself the bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie has a tendency to aspire to become the “big” bourgeoisie. Students, by virtue of their training in dispositions, desires, and skills that will allow them to rise above the sphere of commodity-producing labor, strive not to place themselves in a position to end capital accumulation at its productive source, but, if not to become capitalists, at least to find a satisfactory middle-ground between the fundamentally antagonistic classes of the bourgeoisie and proletariat.
At this point, several objections may arise. First, what do we make of current reforms in education that seek to produce workers rather than comfortable allies of capital in the petite bourgeoisie? First, we need to ask which kind of workers these colleges and universities are trying to produce. Despite dubious empirical claims that colleges are beginning to train students for productive work, there is clear evidence that productive labor and college generally do not go together. For example, the Economic Policy Institute notes that, in the U.S. “the non-college share in manufacturing was 26.9 percent greater than in all industries.” Similarly, only 20 percent of farmworkers have attended even some college, this itself an inflated figure since it includes both farmworkers and supervisors. In light of the fact that less than forty percent of working-age Americans hold college degrees, it is not surprising that this minority does not flock to productive labor. Indeed, those who overemphasize the role of colleges in producing workers invoke Braverman’s empirically insightful but theoretically unhelpful “degradation of labor” thesis, arguing, for example, that university work is “increasingly cast as piecework” and, by implication, has been degraded to an “occupational category” of the working class.
This brings us to a second objection: what about students who are also research scholars and, thus, who produce scholarly “products” for the university? Aren’t they workers, too? Again, this question comes back to the issue of productive versus unproductive laborer. While research scholars may produce surpluses, not all surplus production is surplus value production. For example, peasants under feudalism produce surplus, but this surplus does not take the form of surplus value. Similarly, ecosystems under certain conditions produce a surplus of deer, but this is a biological surplus, not a surplus of value. This is, again, not to say that research scholars do not do useful work. For example, I think that the research I completed this past summer, which was funded by my college, was “useful,” but I recognize that, just because my labor is useful, it does not automatically mean that it is surplus value-producing labor that would, then, make me a part of the working class.
Third, there is the argument that, because many universities are for-profit either overtly or covertly, they are extracting surplus value from students. Raising tuition costs, debt peonage, exorbitant textbook costs, and so on are, of course, all evidence of the advances of capitalist class struggle under monopoly-finance capital. However, to say that these phenomena are equivalent to the extraction of surplus value from the worker is wishful thinking at best and intellectual vanguardism at worst. For example, just because faculty at a university enable students to get a “better job” in the future—adding value to future labor-power just like workers’ labor-power adds value to commodities, as the argument goes—it does not follow that students have this added value “exploited” by administrators who charge them exorbitant tuition fees in the present. Using this logic, anything can “add value” to the products that this potential worker might produce at some undefined point in the future: her friends, entertainment, therapy, and so on. And since the majority of graduates will not actually produce surplus value in their future jobs, the argument is largely immaterial.
This brings me to a final and crucial point: Without productive labor, colleges and universities would have no means of materially reproducing themselves. An analysis of the fossil fuel divestment campaign in U.S. colleges and universities demonstrates this truth. Let’s look at Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university. It seems reasonable that the University would be able to sacrifice a portion of returns on its whopping $36.4 billion endowment after 72% of students voted in favor of divesting from fossil fuels. However, Harvard President Drew Faust, speaking on behalf of the University’s Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, responded that such a divestment would not be “warranted or wise.” She continued, revealing an economic savvy rarely found on the left:
Given our pervasive dependence on these [fossil fuel] companies for the energy to heat and light our buildings, to fuel our transportation, and to run our computers and appliances, it is hard for me to reconcile that reliance with a refusal to countenance any relationship with these companies through our investments.
Indeed, unlike the many leftists who equate “knowledge production” with material production, Faust is clear that the latter provides the very material conditions for the former’s reproduction. The student-led fossil fuel divestment campaign has proved so difficult to actualize on a scale that would significantly impact oil, gas, and coal companies precisely because of the stubborn nature of productive labor, in this case that employed to drill for fossil fuels. And students—due to their petite bourgeoisie class status—are unable to do anything about this on their own. Even students at Harvard, the highest player in higher education, cannot escape this reality.
Students in Chile encountered their limitations in a similar manner during the massive student mobilizations of 2011-13. On their Struggling to Win speaking tour in the U.S., a group of Chilean students noted that, despite the mobilizations of over one hundred thousand students, they did not have the leverage to achieve their demands for increased democratization and affordability of education. Only when they began to engage workers—particularly dockworkers—in this struggle were they able to win their demand prohibiting state support of for-profit educational institutions. This example illustrates that, even if we want to, students do not have the ability to make major inroads against capital on our own.
The Role of the Student Militant
In light of the social limitations of students due to our class position, how can we best fit into the struggle for socialism/communism? To start, we must realize that, on our own, we cannot provide an alternative to capitalism. Certainly students can concoct theoretical alternatives to capitalism in our papers and class discussions, but, when it comes to pushing the fundamental contradiction of capitalism—capital versus labor—in an effort to overcome it through its own inherent antagonism, we must turn to the working class. Only the working class, due to its central position in the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, is capable of providing an alternative to capitalism—a proletarian alternative.
Once we acknowledge this objective reality, how can we complement workers’ struggle? For one, we must find a way to engage with workers’ movements without opportunistically converting them into a means for our own interests, as is the risk in contexts like the student movement in Chile. As I mentioned earlier, we can observe instances in which students simply do not have an interest in workers’ struggle, which is one extreme, as well as instances in which their involvement has the effect of eroding its autonomous character. While student militants can and should work to build workers’ organizations and movements, when the rubber hits the road, workers themselves must take control of and drive these struggles. Once a struggle is in workers’ hands, we can follow their leadership when developing ways to strategically assist the struggle. This assistance could potentially manifest as demonstrations outside of a workplace in response to attacks by the bosses on workers, aid in legal battles if these are necessary to sustain class struggle, written articles on the details of working conditions or the state of particular struggles, or whatever the need of the concrete reality at hand may be.
I should be clear that this position of working class autonomy and students’ role in relation to it is not equivalent to a conception of “allyship.” Students must figure out how to straddle the line—always reacting to changing concrete conditions—between lack of involvement and over-involvement in workers’ struggles not out of deference to “worker experience” but for purely material, strategic reasons. As one railroad worker, who has previously been involved in labor militancy at a tire factory, recently told me while we were discussing the topic of workers and students, “Workers may espouse bad politics and still have a materialist innate notion of solidarity against the employers.” Indeed, workers have the unique capacity to struggle as a class even if their politics are ideologically unsound or even reactionary. While reactionary politics—such as those relating to race, gender, disability, nationality, and sexuality—must be struggled against no matter who espouses them, workers are able to engage in this struggle materialistically in practical relation to an existing class struggle. This stands in contrast with students, who are taught to hash out debates in the idealist space of the academy in which there is no material interest at stake.
Through an understanding of surplus value and productive and unproductive labor, we as students can better use our social position to aid the struggle against capitalism led by the working class. Instead of merely lamenting occasions like the beating of a worker at the Richa Global factory in India as a labor and human rights violation, we need to ask why beatings like this occur and what we can do as students to address their causes while simultaneously avoiding the pitfalls of under- and over-involvement in workers’ struggles. In short, we can slowly but surely demonstrate to workers that we are not, as the plastics factory worker told me, just “studying here or something,” but also committed to the advancement of working class struggle.
Furthermore, while we need militants in all social spheres, including within the university, there is the option for students to not only become proletarian militants within higher education, but to materially rupture with the petite bourgeoisie and become part of the working class itself. While all student militants, even if not part of the proletariat proper, must constantly strive to become proletarian revolutionaries by stripping themselves of petite bourgeois ideology, actively becoming part of the fundamental contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class—becoming proletarian through becoming part of the proletariat—can be a particularly advantageous way to push this contradiction forward.
When I was standing distributing leaflets in the industrial belt of Delhi, I was breathing in the stifling smog along with the thousands of workers streaming by on their way to the factory. This smog is symptomatic of the already proceeding environmental catastrophe whose weight sits heavily on the shoulders of students and workers alike. Likewise, the very same class war that has been waged with increasing force against these workers since the rise of monopoly-finance capital has simultaneously impacted me as a student in the form of exponentially increasing tuition costs and the inevitability of student debt. Indeed, in many ways, the two worlds of the worker and the student come closer together today than in any previous time in history. While this proximity forms the material basis for solidarity between different segments of the masses, such as students and workers, there still remains the unavoidable political question of which class is capable of not just weakening but actually overturning and providing an alternative to capitalism. Only through the aforementioned strategic shifts for student militants can we work to fight not only in our interests as students dominated by capitalism, but also in the interests of the working class, the only class with the capacity to liberate all of humanity and the planet from capitalism!
This article originally appeared on INIP.
THESE ARE CONDITIONS IN WHICH REVOLUTION BECOMES THINKABLE


In a few months, Covid-19 has remade our political horizons entirely.


History moves slowly, then all at once. The coronavirus crisis has catapulted us into the latter rhythm. The pace of events has accelerated sharply; the course of events has become impossible to predict. In retrospect, 2020 may end up being a 1968 or a 1917: a year of leaps and ruptures, and a dividing line between one era and the next.

How might we characterize the new era? It’s difficult to draw definitive conclusions about a period that is in the earliest phases of its formation. Still, even in fast-moving moments, it’s possible to work up a preliminary sketch. For such a sketch to be useful, though, it must capture, albeit in rough strokes, the sharpness of the break and the newness of the situation produced by it. As Stuart Hall wrote:

When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no “going back.” History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment. You have to attend, “violently,” with all the “pessimism of the intellect” at your command, to the “discipline of the conjuncture.”

A conjuncture is a thing made out of other things—literally, a “joining together.” So a good way to start when trying to attend to it is to attend to the various elements that combine to create it. Ideally, this shouldn’t just be a laundry list of various things that are happening but also an account of how they fit together, a theory of the complex, contradictory whole that is generated by their interaction.

This is difficult work, and it requires a sustained, collective effort. It’ll take a lot of people thinking and acting together to make sense of our new terrain. What follows is an early contribution: a partial inventory of circumstances in the US and a provisional picture of how they fit together.

The economy is collapsing. Goldman Sachs economists have predicted an annualized 34 percent decline in GDP in the second quarter of 2020—an implosion with no historical precedent. By comparison, the worst annual decline on record is 13 percent, which happened in 1932 during the Great Depression. Goldman’s predictions for the rest of 2020 are somewhat rosier: a return to double-digit growth in the third and fourth quarters, so that GDP falls by 6.2 percent for the full year on an annual average basis.

These numbers may ultimately be too optimistic, however. They take for granted that lockdowns and social distancing will be relaxed enough towards the end of the year for something resembling normal life to resume. By contrast, the economists Warwick McKibbin and Roshen Fernando suggest, more plausibly, that the economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis will be worse. They estimate that a pandemic that lasts a year and kills a million people—well within the range of current CDC projections, and perhaps too low given the current pace of infection—would reduce GDP for the year by 8.4 percent.

But a precipitous drop in growth isn’t the only cause for concern. We may also be facing another financial crisis soon, which would make the situation considerably more painful. Corporate debt is particularly vulnerable, partly as a result of how governments handled the last financial crisis. To combat the 2008 meltdown, central bankers made money cheap. This in turn encouraged companies to issue bonds, largely to finance mergers and acquisitions and stock buybacks. Since most of these companies aren’t sitting on huge cash piles, even minor disruptions may make it impossible for them to service their debt. Given the immense volume of this debt—the global value of non-financial corporate bonds reached $13.5 trillion at the end of 2019—a crunch could easily sink the financial system, freezing up credit markets and leading to a wave of bankruptcies among employers.

It’s little comfort, then, that investors have been fleeing assets of all kinds in recent weeks: not just corporate bonds, but historical safe havens like gold and Treasury bonds. The Fed has acted aggressively, using tools similar to the ones it deployed in 2008: slashing interest rates and buying up various financial assets, including corporate bonds. Still, the ambivalent response of markets to these moves suggests they may not be enough. Stocks rallied in anticipation of the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill, and continued their gains after the bill passed. But there is little doubt that more upheaval lies ahead.

If the swiftness of the economic contraction inflicted by the pandemic is one feature that distinguishes our present crisis from previous ones, another is the particular segment of the economy that will suffer the most from that contraction: services. Services usually don’t take the worst hit during recessions. That’s because they can’t be stored, so they have to be consumed right away.

The coronavirus crisis may break this pattern, however. “This will probably be the world’s first recession that starts in the service sector,” the economist Gabriel Mathy told the New York Times. In a pandemic, services are uniquely vulnerable. For instance, people won’t go get their hair cut, either because they’re afraid of being infected or because a government-mandated shutdown has closed the barbershop. And because you can’t store the output of services—a barber can’t stockpile haircuts in a warehouse until demand picks up again—businesses quickly go bankrupt, and the layoffs come hard and fast.

The human toll of such layoffs will be immense, because the service sector is where most Americans work. According to the latest estimate by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71 percent of all non-farm payroll employees—more than a hundred million people—are in the service sector. Granted, services is a heterogenous category, encompassing everything from stockbrokers to fast-food workers. But most of the growth in recent decades has been on the lower end of the wage spectrum, and this is also where most of the pain will be felt.

That pain is already being felt on a very large scale. In the week ending March 21, 3.3 million people applied for unemployment insurance. The following week, that number doubled to 6.6 million—nearly ten times the record set in 1982. The layoffs are concentrated in the service sector, particularly its lower-wage layers. The coming weeks will almost certainly bring more bad news. Goldman expects the unemployment rate to hit 15 percent; the St. Louis Fed says it could surge as high as 32.1 percent.

These numbers reflect the disintegration of a central pillar of the US economic model. For decades, the service sector has played an essential role in stabilizing the labor market. Because services are more difficult to automate—it’s harder to automate the production of a haircut than the production of an automobile—they have lower rates of productivity growth, which means they need more labor. This is what has enabled the service sector to absorb the workers that the manufacturing sector began shedding in the 1970s as a global crisis of overcapacity set in. Services can’t serve as the growth engine that manufacturing did, as the worsening performance of the US economy since the 1970s makes clear. But they have provided a steady supply of jobs.

The pandemic shuts off this safety valve. With the service sector in freefall, there is no longer anywhere for the surplus labor generated by decades of economic stagnation to go.

Of course, some of those who were laid off will eventually find new jobs, particularly if the post-crisis rebound follows the more optimistic estimates. But the economy they return to will have permanently changed. Small businesses, which currently employ nearly half of the country’s private-sector workforce, will be decimated. Giants like Amazon and Walmart will tighten their grip over consumer spending.

Amazon and its fellow tech firms will also benefit from how the crisis reprograms consumer behavior. The pandemic has already been a boon to e-commerce, as people try to buy the things they need with a minimum of social interaction. Amazon recently announced it would hire one hundred thousand workers amid booming demand; Instacart, the online grocery delivery service, is adding three hundred thousand. This trend could very well become permanent. Consumers may come to prefer getting their groceries delivered rather than going to the supermarket, for instance, whether out of habit, convenience, or continued fear of infection. The service jobs of the future, then, will likely be concentrated in transportation and warehousing. A growing portion of the US working class will make a (meager, precarious) living packing and delivering the goods that people in extended periods of isolation need to survive.

The issue of survival brings us to another core theme of the coronavirus crisis: social reproduction. Social reproduction refers to the various systems—formal and informal, waged and unwaged—that make capitalism possible by raising, socializing, educating, healing, housing, and otherwise sustaining the workers whose labor power it runs on. These systems have long been under severe strain in the US. Stagnant wages and pitiful structures of social provision have placed most of the US working class on the brink of bankruptcy or worse, with nearly 80 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

The pandemic demolishes this rickety arrangement. Soaring demand for unemployment insurance and food stamps is pushing the parsimonious US welfare state well past the breaking point. Meanwhile, the fragile condition of the country’s highly financialized healthcare system—which has spent the last decade enriching executives and investors in a mergers and acquisitions spree—has been cast into stark relief.
But the pandemic isn’t just intensifying an existing crisis of social reproduction. The pandemic is also being intensified by the crisis. The poor quality of social-reproductive systems in the US has created the ideal conditions for contagion. To take one example, nursing homes emerged as hotspots early on. A large part of the blame lies with a wave of private-equity investment in the nursing home industry over the past decade, which has forced facilities across the country to cut costs in order to shovel more profits upwards. Many homes became extremely unsanitary as a result, with state inspections uncovering appalling cases of abuse and neglect. Now they have become major sites of infection.

A virus isn’t just a biological phenomenon, but a social one. The vulnerabilities it exploits to propagate itself aren’t just the properties of human cells, but how human societies are organized. Societies that organize themselves around the accumulation of capital—that is to say, capitalist ones—place themselves at risk, especially societies like the US, where accumulation takes a particularly brutal form.

There is a contradiction here: by undermining social reproduction, capitalism undermines its own stability. Squeezing the proletariat dry feeds the engine of capital up to a certain point—then it causes the machinery to seize up, as the feminist theorist Nancy Fraser has explained. The coronavirus crisis offers a vivid illustration of this dynamic. The extreme pressure that capital has placed on social reproduction in the US has produced a hospitable environment for a pandemic that is destroying the economy. Those private-equity capitalists, by strip-mining seniors for profit, have helped create a situation in which many of their fellow capitalists will no longer be able to set capital in motion.

For accumulation to resume its normal course, the virus must be contained: the robustness of the Chinese response, for example, is motivated not just by the desire to preserve the political legitimacy of the Communist Party but to restart industrial production. In the US, returning to business as usual will require, among other things, modest increases in public support for social reproduction. This may explain how Congress managed to pass a bill mandating ten days of paid sick leave for a subset of US workers so quickly in the first week of the pandemic. Letting workers get sick and die is acceptable; letting workers get sick and threaten the accumulation process is not.

In the industrial era, labor won concessions from capital because of a basic dependency: capitalists needed workers to run the factories. The economic slowdown since the 1970s has diminished this dependency, with the decline of manufacturing inaugurating an era of stagnation characterized by persistently low demand for labor, tilting the balance of power to capital’s advantage. The pandemic has the potential to partly reverse this development. Workers may hold less leverage over the accumulation process as workers, but they can now endanger that process as vectors of viral transmission. Perhaps this offers a new basis on which to win concessions.

Of course, workers can also make trouble the old-fashioned way: by engaging in disruptive action in their workplaces and their communities. The space for such action is likely to grow dramatically in the coming weeks and months. Imagine a near future of 30 percent unemployment, widespread food and housing insecurity, and millions dead from the pandemic and from the increased mortality of an overwhelmed healthcare system. These are essentially wartime conditions. They are the conditions under which revolution becomes, if not likely, at least thinkable.

In a crisis, the parameters of political possibility expand. Dozens of municipalities have halted evictions and utility shutoffs. Trump has instructed HUD to suspend foreclosures and evictions of homeowners with mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration. California plans to move thousands of homeless people into hotels, in some cases buying the hotels outright. New York City, Houston, and Detroit have made local bus service free.

But this is the only beginning. With pressure from below, these cracks in the common sense can be widened; indeed, the survival of a significant number of people probably depends on it. Towards that end, Bernie Sanders wants the federal government to send every household $2000 per month, invoke the Defense Production Act to force private firms to produce critical goods like masks and ventilators, and institute a national moratorium on evictions, foreclosures, and utility shutoffs, among other measures.

Given the pace of events, however, even these demands may look moderate within a short period of time. Among socialists, the crisis has spurred renewed calls to nationalize various sectors. Healthcare seems like an obvious candidate, particularly given the coming flood of hospital bankruptcies, the need for rational coordination of the kind that markets can’t provide, and the moral imperative to care for the many millions of Americans who are uninsured or underinsured.

Yet a concrete analysis of the concrete situation also requires something more. A perennial temptation among socialists is to pick up models from previous eras of struggle and apply them, without modification, to the problems of the present moment. This temptation grows in times of crisis, as a weakening of the status quo creates opportunities to put old socialist ideas into wider circulation. But times of crisis are also opportunities to generate new socialist ideas: new modes of organizing, new horizons for social transformation. The socialist tradition is a valuable source of inspiration and insight. It also does not hold the answers to every question posed by every conjuncture, for the simple reason that every conjuncture poses different questions.

Marx believed the answers to such questions must be found in the struggles of the working class. The working class was not just the only social force capable of constructing socialism—it was also the only social force capable of determining what socialism would look like. This process would be advanced through practice; that is, through the innumerable collisions and resistances of class struggle. Communism, he and Engels famously wrote, is not “an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself,” but “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” The task for socialists today is to locate the tremors of that movement and draw out its implicit content: to refine its raw materials into new strategies and programs and possible futures.

There will soon be no shortage of materials to work with, as the pandemic spins up a cycle of proletarian self-activity. Workers everywhere now have an urgent issue to agitate around—their health—and are already organizing on that basis. Wildcat strikes have broken out among garbage workers, auto workers, poultry workers, warehouse workers, and bus drivers. Amazon has seen a wave of militancy, forcing management to promise better health protections and to extend paid time off to its entire workforce. Instacart and Whole Foods workers have staged labor actions. Unionized nurses have rallied to protest shortages. Workers at GE have demanded repurposing jet engine factories to make ventilators. Mutual aid groups are emerging to coordinate grocery deliveries and childcare. Tenants across the country are organizing rent strikes. In Los Angeles, homeless families are seizing vacant homes.

These are strategies for survival but they are also, possibly, the seeds of a new world: sites of social power where people can collectively provision the resources they need and participate directly in the decisions that affect them. It is in these places and practices that the outlines of the next socialist project will be found. For this project to be credible to the people on whom it depends, it must be equal to the radicalism of our reality. It must offer a socialism that is not a branch of progressivism or a wing of the Democratic Party but a truly anti-systemic alternative, one that promises, however improbably, an end to the death cult of capital and the elevation of human health, dignity, and self-determination as the supreme organizing principles of our common life.


BEN TARNOFF

Ben Tarnoff is a founding editor of Logic.


4.07.2020


EPA faces court over backing of Monsanto's controversial crop system

Carey Gillam, The Guardian•April 20, 2020

Photograph: Bryce Gray/AP

The US Environmental Protection Agency is due in federal court on Tuesday to answer allegations that it broke the law to support a Monsanto system that has triggered “widespread” crop damage over the last few summers and continues to threaten farms across the country.

As farmers prepare to plant a new season of key American food crops, farmer and consumer groups are asking the ninth circuit court of appeals in San Francisco to review and overturn the EPA’s approval of a Monsanto herbicide made with a chemical called dicamba.

Related: Revealed: Monsanto predicted crop system would damage US farms

The allegations are from the National Family Farm Coalition, which represents tens of thousands of farmers across the US, and three non-profit consumer and environmental groups. They have been granted an expedited review of their legal petition and hope for a ruling that would block use of the herbicide this summer.

The court hearing, which is to be handled by phone due to the coronavirus closing of California courthouses, comes just a month after the office of inspector general for the EPA said it would open an investigation into the agency’s handling of dicamba herbicides.

Farmers have reported dicamba damage in both organic and conventional crops, including non-GMO soybeans, wheat, grapes, melons, vegetables and tobacco. A Missouri peach farmer won a $265m verdict in February against Monsanto and German chemical giant BASF after accusing the companies of creating a “defective” crop system that damaged 30,000 peach trees.

The Guardian reported last month that internal Monsanto documents obtained through the peach farmer litigation revealed that Monsanto predicted its dicamba crop system would lead to thousands of damage claims from US farmers but pushed ahead anyway, trying to downplay the risks to the EPA.

“You’ve had millions of acres impacted,” said George Kimbrell, a lawyer with the Center for Food Safety, which is one of the environmental groups seeking court review of the EPA, alongside the Center for Biological Diversity and Pesticide Action Network.

Kimbrell said: “They decided to make farmers part of an ongoing experiment. The dicamba problem is unprecedented.”
EPA approval

The crop system in question was developed by Monsanto with help from BASF to encourage farmers to buy dicamba herbicides and spray them over the top of new genetically engineered soybean and cotton crops developed by Monsanto to tolerate dicamba. The altered crops survive dicamba spray but weeds die, making it easier for farmers to eradicate weeds resistant to other herbicides such as Monsanto’s glyphosate.

Before the introduction of Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant cotton in 2015 and soybeans in 2016, farmers were largely restricted from using dicamba during the growing season because the chemical can easily drift and vaporize, traveling long distances from where it is sprayed. But the release of the new dicamba-tolerant crops upended that restraint and the EPA subsequently approved “new use” dicamba products sold by Monsanto, BASF and Corteva Agriscience for treating fields planted with the genetically engineered cotton and soybeans.

The companies said their herbicides would have low volatility and if farmers followed instructions on the product labels, they could prevent drift. But since the introduction of the new dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton, drift and volatilization has killed or injured a variety of crops, fruit trees and other plants across several millions acres.
Costs to farmers

The consumer and environmental groups claim the EPA violated federal law by failing to analyze the “significant socioeconomic and agronomic costs to farmers” and not relying on adequate data in its approvals of the herbicides. The damage over the last few summer seasons has been “catastrophic” they claim.

The groups cite government documents they say show that the EPA itself has downplayed or ignored warnings from state agricultural officials and farmer pleas for protection from dicamba drift. Instead the agency has worked closely with Monsanto to keep the company’s dicamba herbicide, called XtendiMax, on the market, they say.

Documents filed in court show Monsanto met multiple times with EPA officials about the concerns, even editing EPA language about certain steps Monsanto should take in communications with retailers. In an October 2017 email, an EPA official forwarded a Monsanto official comments from the agency regarding the company’s product label, writing: “Like I said, no surprises.”

While the EPA worked with Monsanto, the records show the agency was well aware of the extent of crop damage being reported to multiple states. In a June 2018 email an Arkansas bee keeper said dicamba had caused a 50% reduction in his honey production, and a July 2018 email from a Kansas Department of Agriculture supervisor told the EPA the department had been “overrun with dicamba complaints”.

Monsanto, which was bought by Bayer AG in 2018, said the claims raised by the farm coalition and other petitioners are “baseless” and the company “stands fully behind” its product.

“We believe the extensive body of science supporting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s registration decision will ultimately determine the outcome,” said Bayer spokesman Chris Loder. Monsanto has filed as an intervenor in the case.

For its part, BASF said dicamba herbicides are “critically important tools for growers” and said the company is providing training to dicamba applicators and is working with academics and state and federal agencies to address concerns.

Corteva declined to comment.

Despite the outcry over dicamba damage, in November 2018 the EPA granted a two-year extension for the dicamba herbicides for use over the dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybeans. That registration expires on 20 December and the agency is currently considering whether or not to further extend approval.

In the meantime, the EPA said it was working with states and with the companies selling the dicamba herbicides to “better understand the issue” to enable it to deal with “the problem of illegal drift”.

The EPA also insists that it is not certain what is causing the crop damage.

“The underlying causes of the various damage incidents are not yet clear, as ongoing investigations have yet to be concluded,” the agency told the Guardian.

The agony of Colombia's quarantined sex workers

Rodrigo ALMONACID, AFP•April 18, 2020



A Medellin sex worker and her young daughter sort through a food package donation (AFP Photo/Joaquin SARMIENTO)

Bogota (AFP) - Ana Maria broke quarantine rules to make a "home visit," while Estefania left home to sell drugs.

Survival has become a struggle for Colombia's sex workers during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, as cupboards are bare and bills pile up.

Before the health emergency, they worked on the streets or in brothels in a country where sex work is legal. Now, with half of humanity in confinement and those places off limits, they are struggling on handouts and meager savings.

Neither will suffice, though, and many risk fines or even prison to break the lockdown. Worse still, they're potentially exposing themselves to the virus, which has infected almost 3,500 Colombians and killed more than 150.

"I was in quarantine but I had to go and do a home visit," Ana Maria told AFP.

"What can I do? I can't die of hunger," said the 46-year-old from Facatativa, a town 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the capital Bogota.

With a dwindling supply of gas for cooking, and no more fruits or vegetables in her pantry, she took a taxi to a client's home for an encounter that would earn her $10.

"I couldn't wait... the state help hadn't arrived," said Ana Maria, referring to subsidies promised to vulnerable people.

The lockdown began on March 25 and Ana Maria said she had strictly complied until April 3 when she paid the home visit.

The quarantine is due to last until April 27 at least.

Sometimes she hears knocking at her door, usually a friend with hungry children.

But, "I've nothing" to give, she said.

- 'Critical situation' -

Sometimes Fidelia Suarez's cellphone rings at 2:00 am. On the other end of the line she hears the "desperate" voice of one of the 2,200 members of Colombia's union of sex workers.

"We're in a critical situation," said Suarez, the union's president.

"Some are on the brink of going hungry or of being turned out of their homes because they can't pay the rent," said Suarez, although officially there's a ban on evictions during the lockdown.

Suarez spends her days delivering food to union members in Bogota but the requests outnumber the donations.

She's furious with "the authorities' indifference" and wants "concrete solutions" for the thousands of legal Colombian sex workers.

"They only remember us in times of politicking."

There are more than 7,000 sex workers in Bogota, according to the 2017 census, said Diana Rodriguez, the district secretary for women.

"We're taking action and joining forces so that those engaged in paid sexual activities and abiding to confinement in their homes will benefit" from subsidies of $30-$60, she said.

- Clients 'are afraid' -

Rodriguez said most prostitutes the government has been in contact with are abiding with confinement.

Luz Amparo, 49, doesn't want to infect herself, her two children and four grandchildren whom she lives with. The seven of them live off donations.

"I call friends (clients) but they don't go out, they're afraid," she said.

Some 415 kilometers away in Medellin, Estefania needs money for food, rent for the tiny room she lives in, and to send to her three children.

"Today I have to go out to pay for the room. I owe two days... I don't know how but I need to pay," she said.

The room costs $5.40 a night but the landlord halved it due to the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

Before the coronavirus arrived in Colombia, 29-year-old Estefania worked at night. In general, she provided services to three clients and went home with $50.

But there are no more clients in the downtown Medellin park she calls an office.

Now she heads out around midday trying to sell candy and drugs. She was almost caught by police.

She was counting down the days for the quarantine to end when the government tacked on an extra couple of weeks.

"I have to pay for a room, food -- there are a lot of problems coming"



Join us April 22nd, 2020 at 10am PDT - 8pm PDT for the Live Event HERE!

FIRST EVER DIGITAL EARTH DAY APRIL 22 / 50TH


Earth Day Network

Today marks the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, as well as the first ever digital Earth Day. Beginning at 9am ET, join us online, as we flood the world with messages of hope, optimism and, above all, action.
Follow along with us and our hosts Ed Begley, Jr., and his daughter, Hayden, on our website for a full day of videos and actions we can all take to better our planet. You’ll be joined by global leaders, activists, actors and musicians, including Pope Francis, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Former Vice President Al Gore, Zac Efron, Dave Mathews, Jason Mraz, Dr. Sylvia Earle, Christiana Figueres and many more.
Join Roger Waters, Valerie Jarrett, Jack Johnson, Najib Saab, Michael Franti, Stephania Giannini, Maya Lin, Ashok Sridharan, Lisa Jackson, Diana Nyad, Kaddu Kiwe Sebunya and Ziggy Marley all live at earthday.org!
Climate change threatens already vulnerable communities most, and those at risk of climate impacts are those individuals who least contribute to climate change. We’re fighting for a cleaner, safer, more just and sustainable world that protects and supports all of us.
The urgency has never been greater, and the stakes have never been higher — we face mass extinction of species, catastrophic pollution of oceans, destruction of communities and displacement of millions.
We know that the fight for climate change takes more than a day — it takes a movement. That’s why Earth Day Network works across diverse programs to mobilize citizens on climate action and provide people with new, meaningful ways to act, with campaigns like Vote Earth, Earth Challenge 2020 and the Great Global Cleanup.
On #EarthDay2020, we seize all the tools and actions that we have, big and small, to change our lives and change our world, not for one day, but forever.
Together, Earth Day Network
Mark Earth Day's 50th birthday with #ClimateStrikeOnline & Amnesty International


Art by Emily Thiessen (@archipelagic)


Today marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day — a special day to celebrate the world around us, and to join others in calling attention to the urgency of protecting the place we all live.

Our human rights are intertwined with the environment. People need a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment to fully enjoy their human rights, including the rights to life, health, food and water. Other human rights, like the rights to information, freedom of expression and access to justice, are essential for protecting the environment.

We may not be able to meet in person to mark Earth Day, but we can still come together to celebrate and demand action for our planet.

Between today and Friday, April 24, you can support the next big youth-led #ClimateStrikeOnline from home! Here's how: 


Make a climate strike sign
Take a photo of yourself (or with others!) holding the sign 

Post to your favourite social media channel with the hashtags #ClimateStrikeOnline and #DigitalStrike. Be sure to tag @amnestynow!

You can find more details in our Earth Day blog here.

Don't use social media? There are many other ways you can take part!
Put a sign in your window 

Send your photo to members@amnesty.ca. We'll share some online! 

Share this email or our Earth Day blog 

Take action in support of Earth Defenders under attack in Honduras, Colombia and Ecuador with our Spring Activism Guide

For more information and design ideas for your sign please visit globalclimatestrike.net and Amnesty Canada's climate justice page.

Just as putting human rights at the heart of the fight against COVID-19 is crucial, the same is true for the climate crisis. Thank you for using your creativity and energy to speak out together for climate justice. See you at #ClimateStrikeOnline!