The Brooklyn Rail

Komite (Brooklyn Rail): Your excellent book Hinterland focused mainly on the geographic expansion of the working class in the US and its intersection with the recent wave of insurrections that are seemingly not triggered by revolutionary class struggle. What can you say about the situation in China and Tanzania? Where does the potential of revolutionary class politics lie in these countries? How does the premature deindustrialization phenomenon shape and affect the possibilities of an international working-class movement?

Phil Neel: Obviously this is too big a question to answer adequately here.¹ But I will offer a few notes that might be somewhat useful. One thing that happens when you both investigate class struggle on the ground today and actually situate communist theory within its proper historical context—i.e., read even the most abstract philosophical or exegetical texts with some understanding of the political debates that produced them and to which they were responding—is that you realize how much of the “political theory” that gets inherited is just a vulgarized, degraded echo of something much more complex and substantial. The idea of a “revolutionary subject” is a good example. Often, people answer this sort of question about the “potential of revolutionary class politics” by sifting through demographic, economic, and geographic categories to find some privileged group that is particularly well positioned either to develop revolutionary consciousness or simply to halt capitalist production. The history of communist organizing is also often told in this fashion, where first the industrial working class leads the revolutionary charge as the subject of history, and then maybe it’s the peasants, or the lumpen, or even (this one is the funniest) students. And finally, when all this breaks down all you have left is some vaguely-defined mush: the people, the multitude, or the absolute worst, “civil society” and the “social movement.”

A more intelligent version then turns around and says: in fact, there is no longer any given revolutionary subject that can bring together these various groups engaging in struggle, so instead of a “traditional workers movement” unified by a political program we have these non-movements that can’t fully cohere around any sort of shared vision.² But you really have to be suspicious of people who tell you things are new and different. In this regard, I’m obstinately, obsessively orthodox. I’m not convinced that there actually have been any fundamental, structural changes to the way that capitalist society works or to the basic strategic questions that confront anyone trying to build communist power in preparation for (and of course to help induce) some sort of revolutionary upheaval—aside from maybe the fact that you can no longer build peasant armies at the “periphery” of the capitalist system, which now has no periphery because it has fully enclosed the world. So, instead, there are just questions of position and context. But we’re fighting the exact same fight as communists last century and the century before that.

The spectacular, tragic failure of the twentieth-century revolutions has left a weird mirror-image of them burned into our eyes whenever we gaze back at history. Instead of seeing the long, meticulous process of building communist power through decades of subsistence struggles, insurrections, and the somber, slow construction of communist institutions—all involving myriad fractions of proletarians and, in an earlier era, peasants—we instead confuse the peak of this long process (visible either in a “workers movement” rooted in the mass-manufacturing industries, or in elaborate armed parties of peasants, students, and “lumpen” groups) as the historically-given subject of revolution, which now seems to no longer exist.³ And we then scramble to find some sort of replacement subject or we throw our hands up and say we’re in a new era, there is no subject, we have to figure out something else.

But I don’t trust any of this. I know it sounds weird to say this, because so many people have such an ass-backwards understanding of Marx, but the basic thing that you can draw from Marx’s actual writings and the writings of subsequent communists involved in that whole century of revolutionary struggle is that there is no given subject of history. The churning of the productive forces does not automatically stir up a revolutionary subject adequate to the era. There is instead the question of political subjectivity (or more specifically, what communist philosophers call “subjectivation”), which is the practical process of composition through which a revolutionary subject can be constructed in action.⁴ (All these forms of “subjectivity” are inherently collective and inherently practical, by the way; we’re not just talking about building “political consciousness” in the minds of individuals.) And this overlaps with the (similarly collective) question of productive subjectivity, because our relationship to the planetary productive complex that undergirds capitalist society sculpts our minds at a very fundamental level, generating a certain common-sense ideology that then constraints our ability to see political potentials, warps our idea of how a better world might work, or even prevents us from envisioning one entirely.⁵ But this isn’t some sort of absolute, deterministic limit. It’s just a field of probabilities set by history that then becomes the starting point for the process of political composition in any given era.

Deindustrialization is, however, important when it comes to the ideological field in which political subjectivity takes shape, because so much of how we understand the world around us—the basic social relationships that we can see and especially the ones we can’t—is influenced by the nature of our hands-on engagement with the material stuff of that world. And for most people, the entire chain of events that leads to this material stuff being produced and placed into their hands is entirely opaque. It happens within the black box of the “supply chain,” maybe in some giant factory complex somewhere far away, or maybe machines do it—who knows? And this is, I would argue, why there’s this new proliferation of utopian visions that either uncritically accept capitalist production as a sort of neutral technical apparatus that can simply be put to better use or who try to reject it wholesale by inverting all of its features. So on the one hand, you have the utopians who think that you can seize existing logistical systems and use existing forms of corporate accounting to run a socialist economy. And on the other, you have utopians who do the exact opposite, arguing that, since capitalist production is this distant, opaque, and far-away thing, then socialism or communism or anarchism or whatever must be going back to the land and living in a tiny, mostly autarkic commune with your friends and neighbors which is, at most, maybe “confederated” with other largely self-reliant communes for larger-scale tasks. But of course neither of these things makes any real sense. The first is just refusing to do the work of thinking through what a truly different social system might look like and the second is just sketching out an insubstantial shadow-image of capitalist society that would only really work if you had a mass die-off of humankind and, even then, would effectively be condemning people to a life of hard labor. Both are common, however, because of the general distance from the realities of production that prevails in largely deindustrialized societies. So a big part of the process of composing a political subject is reconnecting it with the question of productive subjectivity to form some sort of practical vision of communism that doesn’t fall into either of these utopian traps.

Rail: In the left camp of politics the question of imperialism (or mostly imperialisms) is on the rise again. The war in Ukraine, the proxy wars in the Middle East, and the Chinese influence in Africa are subjects of a new discourse of imperialist rivalry. What is your take on the current meaning of the concept of imperialism and how do you define a country as imperialist, given the fact that there are widely varying categorizations among Marxist scholars? What do you think may (and should) be the position of international communists vis-a-vis this actual question of imperialist frictions?

Neel: When most people talk about imperialism they are thinking in purely geopolitical terms, of a grand power struggle between countries. But the communist position is that the battle between nations is only a form of appearance of that deeper competitive-cooperative conflict between capitals that I described earlier. This doesn’t mean that it’s not “real,” because obviously geopolitical conflicts have real impacts. The point is just that this superficial reality tends to disguise a more substantial one. Even the most elaborate versions of these theories of imperialism, which try to hone in on whether a country is “core,” “semi-periphery,” or “periphery,” and thereby determine how “imperialist” it is, are often embarrassingly simplistic. It’s like watching a kid stage big dramatic battles between action figures, periodically appraising which ones are the bad guys and which ones are the good guys and which ones are maybe somewhere in between.

In contrast, the communist critique of imperialism emphasizes that it is not really a national affair, at root. This means that it’s not a game of defining a country as imperialist or not. You simply cannot approach the question like this because “countries” are not the relevant units. People who try to measure how “imperialist” a country is think that it’s something like looking at different animals and figuring out if this or that creature is a cow, or maybe how closely related it is to a cow, based on how the creature looks. But instead what they’re actually doing is looking at different cuts of meat and various organs that were pulled out of the body of a cow and they’re asking, “Is this a cow?”, or the smarter ones ask, “How cow-like is this particular cut of meat, versus this other one?” But it’s all cow and it’s all dripping with blood. Basically any country that is part of the international market is participating in an imperial order that, by its very nature, exceeds the nation-state. Imperialism is a description of the inherently hierarchical, competitive, and constantly differentiating structure of value production at the planetary scale—or, more specifically, it is the way that this structure is managed and mediated by various political and economic agents.

In other words, we have to start from the inter-firm competition that structures global value chains, which of course plays out in a way that both intensifies the exploitation of the proletariat as a whole and differentiates the character of exploitation both within and between countries. The question isn’t whether this or that organ is part of the cow, but instead what its function is within the body of the creature. Insofar as this large-scale “zoning” of production pushes the interests of different individual capitals to align with one another, you will then see the emergence of coherent fractions of capital that operate, at least loosely, in league with one another. Insofar as this zoning pushes these fractions to take on contradictory interests, you’ll see some sort of conflict—political tensions, a trade war, a cold war, a real war, whatever. Individual capitals will operate in cooperation with one another because they share a certain position within those value chains, depend on certain similar markets—for capital, labor, or even simply the same money supply—and often have a codependent relationship with an entire network of firms in their own local/regional/national market that share an interest in keeping basic costs down, among other things. It’s not coincidental, then, that individual firms are usually the first-movers in imperialist endeavors. The classic example would be the big US trust companies entering into Latin American markets in the late-nineteenth century, with the US navy then sending gunboats to protect them. But you can see a million examples of the same thing today: for instance, the French special forces sent to protect the assets of uranium mining firms in the Sahel.

There are obviously a lot of ancillary factors and accidents of history here and the picture I’m providing abstracts from all of that, but it gives the general idea. As these fractions of capital cohere, they also begin to act as de facto representatives of the markets, monetary regimes, and property systems that they share a dependence on. And this is how and why they will capture and construct states to suit their needs.⁶ In a very literal sense, state-building is always an elite-led effort that serves elite interests. In a theoretical sense, we say that the state is always an emanation of class power. Despite the ostensible separation between state and capital, then, the effective servility of the state is ensured because there is a material dependency: the state’s revenues and resources are entirely derived from accumulation.⁷ The state then takes on all these general tasks to ensure that accumulation can proceed and that capitalist society can be reproduced, helping to coordinate between individual capitals and resolve conflicts between lower-order factions of capital, maintaining the baseline conditions for a functioning market by crafting monetary institutions, systems of property law, etc., and mobilizing capital in general toward basic reproductive tasks that would otherwise be unprofitable in the short term but are nonetheless necessary to ensure that production can take place at a certain scale and level of technical complexity—education, infrastructure, public health, etc. It is in this sense that individual states become the “representatives” of the total social capital.

But we always have to remember that this is itself a contradictory task. Beneath the mirage of national unity, states are obviously riven with conflicts between different fractions of capital—which are able to draw on different groups of proletarians to support their causes. Some of these fractions may find their interests diverging so substantially from that of others that they lead coups, instigate civil wars, or attempt to secede entirely. And above the national level, there is also obviously the reality that no single state truly represents the total social capital. Even the “hegemonic” states at the top of the imperial hierarchy will ultimately choose their own limited interests over the interests of all of capitalist society when it really comes down to it. And of course the international orders that they do construct tend to be to the benefit of their national firms first and foremost. That’s visible in the structure of global trade during the Victorian era, when the British Empire served this hegemonic function, and of course it is also apparent in the postwar restructuring of global production under the auspices of American power. And this also implies that there will always exist subaltern elites within the global system who may take stances against the wealthy powers and fight to retain larger shares of value within the global market. But that doesn’t make these elites or the states “anti-imperialist” and it certainly doesn’t make them the allies of a communist movement. They’re subaltern powers jostling within an imperial order. Mistaking this for anti-imperialism creates the risk that popular uprisings in poorer places will be diverted and ultimately sacrificed to serve the interests of domestic capitalists trying to claw out a larger share of value for themselves.⁸

Rail: Since our last interview two years ago, what improvements or setbacks have you observed in global working-class politics? How, where and at which sectors can (and should) we organize primarily? In which forms of organization?

Neel: Well, this is another question that’s obviously a bit too big to answer adequately. I would say that, on average, the cadence of struggle had begun to accelerate again around 2018—initiated by the Yellow Vests and the revolution in Sudan, as well as the large wave of wildcat strikes that took place in the US that same year—and that interview in 2021 came in the wake of two really immense events, the insurrection in Hong Kong and the George Floyd rebellion in the US, both of which were taking place in largely depoliticized, deindustrialized areas at scales that had not been seen for at least a generation. These things really wrenched us away from the status quo and illuminated yet again just how irrelevant and incapable many of the leftist organizations were when faced with these massive, messy, and often quite nihilistic expressions of proletarian anger. But these were also invaluable experiences because, for the first time, I think, many people got a window into what the actual scale of an insurrection would be—they are extremely complex events that move very, very quickly and it is simply impossible to keep up with everything that is going on. You’re caught up in this oceanic pulse and of course the question is how do you operate in a deliberate fashion in that context, rather than just getting hoisted up on the wave and then eventually dropped into the dark trough of repression that follows. And on top of this, in Hong Kong, people also had to face the reality that liberal or even far-right political currents were by far the most influential, posing a real, practical political struggle for communists playing out in the midst of the more general, nihilistic upsurge.

After these events in 2019 and 2020, there were certainly still major protests—the most significant probably being Sri Lanka in 2022—but I’d say that the trend was clearly the slide toward another winter of repression. At the local scale, you of course have trials for riot, arson, insurrection, sedition. Hong Kong is an obvious example here, but the liberals who think that China is some sort of uniquely authoritarian state have to explain why many of the same tactics (for example, targeting bail funds, issuing blanket terrorism charges), and in fact more or less the same charges, are now being used in Atlanta—where, on top of this, the police may just choose to execute you in cold blood, as they did Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán.⁹ Not coincidentally, the most recent charges in Atlanta—these are RICO charges, used to prove the existence of some sort of vaguely defined criminal enterprise—list the beginning of the alleged “conspiracy” as the date of George Floyd’s murder by police. And at the same time you have this great forgetting, the attempt to just cover up what actually happened and not really acknowledge it for what it was. Here, I think the words of my friend Idris Robinson proved prophetic: “A militant nationwide uprising did in fact occur. The progressive wing of the counter-insurgency seeks the denial and disarticulation of this event.”¹⁰ There’s no better description for what happened.

At the same time, these progressive forces obviously benefited enormously from the uprising and continue to do so, without offering any support for those suffering this horrific repression and without even speaking the names of those who were murdered and injured and imprisoned. And I’m not just talking about every corporation slapping a BLM sticker on their brand or the general cultural embrace of things like equitable representation and vague themes of social justice. It’s more than this. The rehabilitation of the Democratic Party, however half-assed, was only possible because the uprising finally convinced these forces that they actually needed to incorporate some of these progressive themes into their programs. That’s precisely what happened with the Biden campaign and in the subsequent mid-terms. Too many people had recognized the bleakness of the world that surrounds us. The old centrist equation of pretending that everything was fine simply wasn’t going to work anymore—and of course Trump proved that quite decisively.

Ultimately, there shouldn’t be any surprise here, it’s what always happens after big uprisings. And the bigger you go the more effort has to be put into the process of denial and recuperation. Nor is this blindness just something promoted by liberals. I don’t really think that anyone on “the left” has fully absorbed the reality of what happened. When it’s talked about, it’s often mentioned in much the same register as other, more limited forms of struggle, and again and again you hear people bemoaning the supposed “lack of organization.” No one has yet provided anything other than these largely journalistic leftist accounts that try to offer a play-by-play of what happened or cut up events into overly neat demographic categories. And even these have been too limited, focusing on one or two cities without really capturing the diversity of how the uprising played out in different locations. But, just as often, the uprising is basically ignored, aside from some general recognition of the demand for greater racial equity.¹¹ Again, traditional leftist frameworks really have difficulty engaging with or even understanding the complex, nihilistic, and excessive character of revolts in our era.

Returning to the larger, global scale of class conflict, coups and reactionary wars usually punctuate periods of struggle, marking out the points at which the terms of combat have shifted so decisively rightward that it becomes difficult to do anything other than retreat. Ukraine would be the obvious example here. Similarly, protests against the coup in Myanmar quickly gave way to a civil war that both elevated the chauvinist liberals (the blood of the Rohingya not even dry on their hands) as figures of resistance and reignited the old agitation for ethnic separatism by armed groups in the upland areas. Something similar happened in Ethiopia, which had seen pretty substantial riots in 2020 after the killing of Hachalu Hundessa, with protestors explicitly invoking parallels with the George Floyd rebellion in the US. But this unrest was then washed out of the popular narrative after the outbreak of the Tigray War. Meanwhile, we also saw the grim result of earlier repression elsewhere, as in mainland China, where a decade or so of crackdowns on independent labor organizing, feminist groups, and Marxist circles (these latter mostly composed of students) meant that, when protests did emerge in late 2022, the only coherent political voices within them were those of liberal elites from places like Shanghai.¹² These people didn’t really give a shit about all the migrant workers violently bursting through cordons in urban villages throughout the country because they were unemployed and running out of food, or the major labor riot that took place at the Zhengzhou Foxconn facility where they make the iPhone. They just held up their white papers and talked about democracy and of course this is what was picked up by the Western media.¹³

Finally, as for the question about privileged sectors or forms of organizing, this is kind of like asking for a magic potion. Again: there is no given subject of history, no privileged or magical demographic that is destined to lead the charge, and no “one neat trick” to building revolutionary capacities. It’s a long, slow, and halting process of composition. Political subjectivity is constructed through these struggles, and all these various failures and setbacks and retreats can feel miserable because it seems like they knock down everything built up until that point. But they don’t really, because we still learn, and history still surges beneath us regardless. Even when repression gets very severe in one place, things are still sparking elsewhere and these new events demonstrate new experiments. Maybe the limits that keep these events constrained and divided aren’t quite overcome, but you can at least begin to see some attempts, some hint of how things might go—I think France is again a good example of this, with the protests against the pension reforms (in both the 2019-2020 strike and the protests in early 2023) having to kind of account for what happened with the Yellow Vests and with ongoing protests by youth in the suburbs even if the big unions and other leftist institutions weren’t really able to formulate anything adequate, and then the next cycle of suburban riots (in the summer of 2023, after the murder of Nahel Merzouk by police) again illuminated this failure. Because it’s not like any of the progressive attempts to recuperate things really resolve the basic conflicts. These class struggles will continue, and they’ll take a whole range of forms.

So whenever people ask this question, about exactly what sectors we should be intervening in, or exactly what forms of organization we should adopt, the answer is always just another question: who is the “we” here? Who are we actually talking about and where are they located and what actual power do they hold to be able to do anything? Usually the answer is disappointing, because in reality the “we” asking these questions is often just a small handful of people with no time, no money, and often no practical capacity to do much of anything. But that’s kind of a disappointing answer. So let’s end on a more hopeful note. Let’s at least pretend to be thinking through some tactical options. If you’re faced with a condition in which you have very few resources, the whole sober strategy of very carefully building up a “socialist movement” or something within the auspices of electoral politics and civil society doesn’t actually work very well. The returns are simply too low and all your efforts can too easily be recuperated whenever elite institutions finally decide to take one of their periodic “progressive” turns. Instead, you have to be both very scientific—in the sense of abandoning preconceptions, being committed to wide-ranging experiments, and being honest about what worked and what didn’t—and you absolutely have to be kind of reckless, you have to gamble. Obviously it’s very dangerous, because it increases the risk and the weight of potential repression (events in Atlanta are again a case in point). But it’s also the only thing that really has any chance of catapulting these microscopic organizing efforts into something larger.

So the most basic precondition is that you absolutely have to be involved in those major events of mass politics that exceed the status quo. If you consider yourself a communist (or a socialist or an anarchist or whatever) you can’t fucking stay home and do nothing when there’s a big riot or a major strike in your city, posting “smart” commentary about it online afterwards.¹⁴ Obviously, we’re all going to have certain limits of safety, ability, and responsibility (to our kids, our families, our friends, etc.) when it comes to such things, and I’m not saying you need to go and do something that’s going to get you arrested. Just that you have to show up if you can and, if you can’t, you have to be supportive and open to what is happening, understanding that it will be messy and ugly at times. And the point is not just to physically be present and observe or to “support” in the sense of posting a BLM hashtag on your Instagram, but to materially support those uncontrollable and excessive elements that make the whole thing threatening in the first place, rather than trying to rein these things in—so you can’t show up and try to lead a fucking march to city hall when people have just been burning police stations and looting the shopping district, because even though you may think that you’re trying to push the movement to take a step forward in political awareness, you’re actually standing in front of it and pushing it backwards in the more important practical sense, which then means that you are, in fact, pushing it backward politically as well. Similarly, unless you have some real risk (like an open case) or real responsibilities (needing to get home to your kids) that puts you or your loved ones in legitimate danger, you should be ashamed of being the person who simply leaves when the march gets rowdy or “out of hand.” Active participation and support demonstrate the baseline fidelity that then enables your activity to have some sort of broader influence. The first dividing line of politics is always the line between courage and cowardice.

Exactly what this will look like varies enormously based on where you are and what you’ve inherited from previous uprisings. Similar factors are also going to determine which “sectors” are prone to being the most active or the most volatile. But I do think we can identify some very broad trends that will structure the field of possibilities over the next few decades. I’ll talk about three that I think are not mentioned enough, or are often not discussed very clearly:

First, “extreme weather events” and other environmental disasters are going to be increasingly common and communists absolutely need to be involved in organizing in relation to these events—this might mean running disaster preparedness courses, providing disaster relief, offering services to retrofit buildings, using mutual aid networks to distribute food, helping migrants and refugees fleeing these events or the conflicts that follow from them, etc. It just depends on what kind of resources you have. I often point out that, when you actually look at the historical sequence of revolutions and civil wars, you find that people aren’t really converted to different political positions or convinced to support one faction over another because of these factions’ arguments or ideological programs. Instead, support follows competence. People will tend to align themselves with whatever force seems able to competently provide services, protection, and a modicum of stability, all while retaining some fidelity to the underlying political project that inspired people in the first place. Military theory usually refers to this as the field of “competitive control.”¹⁵ Within communist thought, it’s just one component of the broader concept of building “dual power.” Environmental collapse is, unfortunately, going to make this feature of political struggle even more central. You can win popular support by evacuating people from flood zones, saving the lives of migrants, coordinating emergency food and water supplies, and helping people prepare for these events ahead of time—and many of these activities also offer potential sites of political education and agitation.

Second, even though traditional union organizing with its narrow focus on contract negotiations and policy influence is obviously conservative (in the extreme, we can even say that trade unionism always has a nationalistic and even basically racist impulse, very clearly visible in US labor history) and has not really delivered on its promise to rebuild a “labor movement” of any sort—despite immense interest among young people in unionization—it’s even more naive to imagine that you can build communist power without having to engage in subsistence struggles in the workplace or address the basic question of worker organizing. So the challenge is going to be how to construct communist institutions that can operate within the trade union sphere—especially within logistics, as well as the social-reproductive sectors like food service, health and education, simply because these are the foundation of employment in deindustrialized economies—and reinvent fighting tactics that exceed the narrow scope of “negotiations” over contracts to successfully win gains for workers (which means doing things that are illegal under current labor law), all without unwittingly becoming ancillaries of an inherently nationalist and narrowly economistic trade union leadership aligned with the ruling parties. A related task is specifically building up dedicated groups of communist scientists, engineers, technicians, and various other workers within the advanced productive industries. Having bases within these fields of knowledge is essential to breaking through those limits of productive subjectivity I was mentioning earlier.¹⁶

Third and finally, the specific role of real estate within the larger regime of what Robert Brenner describes as “asset-price Keynesianism”—wherein the prices of certain assets like land are used to inflate speculative bubbles in the absence of more reliable sources of profit during periods of general stagnation—means that questions related to housing will continue to be volatile sites of social conflict. These include issues around rental costs, rising homelessness, the inability of young people to buy into housing markets, the influence of real estate developers within city government, and of course the whole range of questions related to gentrification and the construction of these lifeless, soulless built environments that have now metastasized throughout the urban world. In wealthier countries, this also constitutes a major dividing line within the proletariat, because those who can afford to buy a house in an urban area (rural land really doesn’t count unless you have a lot of it, or a mansion or something) have a number of different material interests that distinguish them from renters. After all, they have a major asset that can be mobilized as a source of credit and a foundation for generational wealth. They can also make use of that asset to become landlords on the side, maybe paying their mortgage and making a bit of profit on top of their wage income.¹⁷ This final divide, between the landlords and the renters, is of course a major source of conflict over basic things like urban policy, taxation, and all sorts of laws about leases, evictions, rent increases, etc. In this context, I’d say that whoever can figure out how to successfully expropriate landlords will see immense popular support.

This will also become a major “policy” conundrum within the electoral sphere, and I don’t think we should be surprised when certain governments opt for seemingly “socialist” solutions—imposing stringent regulations on speculation, subsidizing owner-occupied housing, even providing new types of public housing to drive down costs. Deflating real estate prices is going to be a simple necessity in many places, if they want to avoid a catastrophic crash. For communists, the goal would then be to try and conceive of methods of providing stable housing that mobilize or at least gesture toward a more general decommodification of land and buildings. And, in general, that might be a good point to end on: any communist project will have to proceed with decommodification as its immediate horizon—i.e. it will proceed through “communist measures”—since this is the basic precondition for a communist society.

1. For the more concrete portion about China and Tanzania, I’ll just defer to a few other English-language sources because there’s really no way to get into adequate detail here. For China, I’d strongly suggest looking at the work of the international communist collective Chuang (https://www.chuangcn.org) and the book: Hao Ren, Eli Friedman, and Li Zhongjin (Eds.), China on Strike: Narratives of Worker Resistance, Haymarket, 2016. For Tanzania, the basic history of political struggles in the country are laid out very well by Issa Shivji. But, for the more general conditions and prospects of current struggles in Sub-Saharan Africa, I’d recommend the work of Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, Elleni Centime Zeleke, and Michael Neocosmos.
2. The communist collective Endnotes gives a good overview of this basic conundrum, which they refer to as the “composition problem.” Two pieces are most relevant: “The Holding Pattern,” Endnotes 3, September 2013. ; and “Onward Barbarians!”, 2021.
3. Endnotes also provides a good account of this process, in: “A History of Separation”, Endnotes 4, October 2015. ; and the single best account is probably that of Mike Davis, in his book: Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory, Verso, 2018.
4. The philosopher Alain Badiou is a major influence on my thinking here.
5. The work of Guido Starosta and others affiliated with the Centro para la Investigación como Crítica Práctica in Argentina are a major influence on my thinking here.
6. Again, it’s actually more complicated than this. In particular, the state itself also continuously serves to integrate capital as a coherent class and as a “national bloc” by encouraging the formation of various interfaces between the “economic” and “political” sphere, such as planning institutions, lobbying agencies like the chamber of commerce, etc. For a less abstract and more concrete account of exactly how this process works, see: Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
7. For the more abstract communist theory of the state, I’d suggest reading the work of Simon Clarke and Werner Bonefeld. But a fairly good historical account is also offered by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin in their study of the US: The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2012).
8. Meanwhile, this sort of geopolitical posturing has always been a common theme for far-right political movements. At worst, the far right even uses the language of anti-imperialism against the major powers to justify their own imperial ventures against lesser powers once they’ve seized control of the state. Italian nationalists like Enrico Corradini coined the term “proletarian nations” in the early twentieth century to recast the class struggle as an international conflict, and this was then picked up by prominent fascists such as Mussolini and by the Strasserites within the Nazi Party in Germany. In Japan in the late 1920s, Takahashi Kamekichi formulated an even more intricate version of the same basic argument in this theory of “petty imperialism,” which gave the Japanese imperial project an anti-imperialist justification packaged in Marxist language.
9. This repression is related to the “Stop Cop City” movement, a long-running struggle against plans to raze a local forest in order to build a gigantic police training facility and a Hollywood production studio. The movement has explicitly framed its struggle as a continuation of the 2020 rebellion. The details can be found here: Anonymous, “The Forest in the City,” CrimethInc., February 22, 2023.
10. Idris Robinson, “How It Might Should Be Done”, Ill Will, August 16, 2020.
11. There was recently this big back-and-forth in anglophone Marxist circles about these spending programs by the Biden administration, which of course were long thought of as kind of impossible within the terms of “neoliberalism” (yet another reason that the concept has always been a bit smooth-brained). Everyone involved was focusing on the reemergence of industrial policy and debating whether this constituted some new regime of “political capitalism” (as argued by Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley, in the inaugural article in the debate). These thinkers all gave the big macroeconomic structural explanations for why you might see this sort of thing in a context of slow growth and took different positions about whether it was really that distinct from what’s happened in the past. But basically no one mentioned the weird coincidence that all of this only happened after a massive uprising where tens of thousands of people looted and burned nearly all the major cities in the country. Obviously the big structural explanations are important. But so is mass political subjectivity and the actions that compose it, however ill-formed, nihilistic, or unpalatable to the left.
12. The international communist collective Chuang has a good series of first-hand accounts of this long-running repression on its blog. Most recently, they hosted an article by a long-time labor organizer recounting the crackdowns on underground worker organizing in the 2010s: Wen, “The End of an Era: Labor Activism in early 21st Century China”, Chuang Blog, April 24, 2023.
13. Again, Chuang provides a good series of overviews. First, there is a translation of a piece by a Chinese labor activist living overseas, with a good preface casting some doubt on a few of its claims: Zuoye, “Three Autumn Revolts: Breaking the Ice on China’s ‘Anti-Lockdown Movement’”, Chuang Blog, January 20, 2023. ; and second is an extended interview with someone who witnessed the protests in Shanghai firsthand, which really captures their elite character: Chuang, “Beyond the White Paper: An Interview on the Social Elite in Shanghai’s Protests of November 2022”, Chuang Blog, April 8, 2023.
14. Though you can of course skip the normal leftist parades and marches-to-nowhere put on by “social movement” types.
15. You can see a summary of the concept here: Daniel Fisher and Christopher Mercado, “‘Competitive Control’: How to Evaluate the Threats Posed by ‘Ungoverned Spaces’,” Small Wars Journal, September 17, 2014.
16. My friend Nick Chavez has written extensively on this topic. For one representative piece, see: “The Present and Future of Engineers,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2021.
17. In the US, most big cities are split more or less 50/50 between renters and owners, with bigger centers usually higher (New York and LA are both more than 60% renters) and smaller cities usually lower (often around 30%) in rental rates. Roughly 7% of the US population are “individual investor” landlords. Most rental properties are owned by these individual investors, and most only own between one and four units. Of these individual investors, only half even report making any net income from their properties, with the rest reporting losses. So, while it’s conceivable that anyone who owns three or four units could live off the income and therefore belong fully to the class of landlords, those who only own one or two are almost certainly still dependent on some other source of income. Thus, many “individual investor” landlords are only partially “declassed” from the proletariat.