END OF THE MONTH, END OF THE WORLD

Endnotes has been an irregular publication for a decade now. The journal began, however, as a by-product of a discussion group that started in 2005. That group has gone through distinct phases, from years of intense fortnightly meetings in London and Brighton to a larger and more dispersed network connected by electrical filaments. With the inevitable complications of life, we have become once more a small group, which explains, in part, the delay of this issue.¹ For all these reasons, it seems fitting that we return—both in this issue and this editorial—to our beginnings.

One of the guiding principles around which the group formed was to prioritize the quality and openness of our internal conversations.² In these conversations, we often asked ourselves what is living and what is dead in Marxism, and whether the “theory of the proletariat” can still shed light on struggles today. But we also spoke of much else, including current affairs, aesthetic concerns, and our emotional lives, as well as questions of survival: as individuals (how to make money or go without); as a group (questions of identity and allegiance); and as a species (on a warming planet). Although we rarely wrote about any of these matters, these conversations fed into the journal in indirect ways.

The lead article in this issue, “We Unhappy Few”, takes a more direct approach.³ Drawing on our shared experience, it interrogates the phenomenon of groups that nurture, contain or embody aspirations to communism. The article (along with several others in this issue) takes us beyond the comfort zone of revolutionary theory. We enter the hidden abode of the mind, albeit with the recognition that thought is necessarily social. Like all thought, revolutionary thought emerges in conversations, both those that spread everywhere at times of intense struggles and those that take place within and between revolutionary groups of various formal and informal kinds. Such groups conventionally feel possessed by “urgent tasks”. But, before we can ask “what is to be done?”, we have to recognize what it is that we are already doing. In this issue, we hold up a mirror to the “we” who think, talk, read, and write about communism and revolution, as well as the “we” who act or invite action toward these goals.⁴ We may not always like what we see, but we expect that readers will recognize some of what we describe.

Things Fall Apart

The first issue of Endnotes was published during the fast-moving collapse of the global financial crisis of 2008. Today, as we stand on the verge of another global recession, it may be instructive to return to that crisis and the account we gave of it. In September 2008, as Endnotes 1 was being printed in Greenwich Village, Lehman Brothers analysts were traipsing down 7th Avenue with their possessions in cardboard boxes. By the first week of October, when the first wild demo strolled down Wall Street, the US government was implementing its “Emergency Stabilisation Act of 2008”, which provided for the purchase or insurance of up to $700bn of “toxic assets”. The wider and seemingly unrelenting fallout from the crisis became clear just as Endnotes 2 appeared in April 2010: US jobless rates were as high as they’d ever been in the post-war period, while one in five Spaniards were unemployed. In “Crisis in the Class Relation” and “Misery and Debt”, we tried to make sense of what was unfolding around us. In the latter text, in particular, we looked to Marx’s “general law of accumulation” to sketch a theory of capitalist crisis attuned to a contemporary moment characterized by the amassing of surplus capital alongside surplus populations.⁵

The crisis would lead to a coordinated state response across the globe: bank bailouts and quantitative easing (QE) provided a monetary solution to deflationary pressures, with central banks running relay on the printing press. The response simultaneously prevented the global economy from bottoming out into another Great Depression and helped to undermine any substantive recovery.⁶ In almost all of the advanced industrial nations throughout this period, wages and labour productivity stagnated, investment in capital goods fell, and GDP growth barely budged. Instead, the monetary machinations of the central banks led to yet another asset price bubble, as QE injected cheap credit into urban real estate and stock markets. Private businesses, households, and governments alike soon began to pile on more debt, even as the economies of the high-income countries muddled through the weakest post-recession recovery since WWII.

Weighed down by the cumulative debt overhang, and facing significant headwinds on many fronts, the global economy was stuck in what, in Endnotes 3, we described as a “holding pattern”. Published in September 2013, we had reached what seems, in retrospect, to have been a turning point in the crisis decade. Both the limits and capacities of central bank interventions were becoming evident. Southern European countries were especially devastated. Both Greece and Spain had, at this point, unemployment levels near 30 percent, reminiscent of the 1930s, with GDP numbers well under their 2008 peaks; youth joblessness in Spain climaxed at an astounding 56 percent that year. While the severity of the crisis has eased up in the years since, we think our original metaphor still resonates, as the world economy hovers yet again on the verge of a new recession. Our analysis held that states found themselves torn between two contradictory constraints: they had to borrow and spend to stave off deflationary threats, while at the same time needing to impose austerity on their populations in order to slow the expansion of what had become untenable debt burdens, acquired through several epochs of sputtering income growth.

Yet even as today the same pressures maintain states in an unsustainable double-bind, the closely-coordinated actions of central banks seen in the first phase of the crisis have given way to increasingly divergent trajectories. Turning and turning in the holding pattern, economic policymakers have lost contact with the control tower, while fuel reserves run ever lower. A limp and drawn-out recovery in the US was the delayed fruit of the Fed’s pump-priming—holding short-term interest rates near zero for a decade—together with a weak dollar for which there remains insatiable global demand. The weak recovery shifted the burden of the US trade deficit onto its trading partners, and thus stimulated the US economy at their expense. The largest trading partner—Europe—has (as a whole) still not experienced any sustained recovery, while the second largest partner—China—sits atop a massive real estate bubble that risks unfolding into a Japanese-style debt crisis. These diverging paths of flight reflect divergent fiscal responses to the crisis. Whereas central banks had initially coordinated the monetary backstop for both European contraction and Chinese expansion, it is precisely this coordination that is at risk of breaking down in the next trade war or banking crisis. The Bank of England, which has presided over a decade-long decline not seen since the 1860s, has turned to Marx’s Capital for guidance.⁷ At the time of writing this editorial, the stalled Chinese megamachine has already sent Germany into a technical recession, with the rest of the West likely to follow soon.

The Centre Cannot Hold

We think that our assessment of the fundamental tendencies of the crisis, and its pattern of unfolding, has largely been borne out by events thus far. What we missed or did not anticipate was the political turn within the crisis; one that began to consolidate itself just as our third issue entered circulation. In retrospect, such a turn was a probable, if paradoxical, outcome of the mass movements of the first years of the crisis.

In “The Holding Pattern”, we wrote of the universal disgust, in the 2011–13 movements, with the political status quo, commonly envisaged in terms of the corruption of the entire political class. In the conclusion to that article we speculated on the possibility of a resurgent radical democratic movement that might resemble the anti-globalisation movement of the turn of the century, but with a mass rather than activist base, with demands that might radiate out in any number of directions: “protesters may be able to foist the fallout of the crisis on to the super rich: with a new Tobin Tax, progressive income taxes, or limitations on CEO pay”.⁸ What we didn’t anticipate was the emergence of political formations with roots in the squares movements assuming an outsized role in Greece and Spain — or, for that matter, a resurgent Labour Party, whose marginal, Bennite left wing has been thrust into leadership in the wake of the vibrant anti-austerity movements in Britain.

In September 2013, as unemployment rates reached historical highs in Europe, and many countries were in the midst of a double-dip recession, the global squares movement was undergoing a significant mutation. In Egypt, where the movement began, Mohammed Morsi was deposed in July by a deep-state coup, replaced by army general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who was later elected president. In March, the Syrian opposition captured the strategic city of Raqqah in Western Syria; after subsequent, intense struggles among opposition groups for control over the city, the still relatively unknown Islamic State would prevail by January 2014. Meanwhile, in still another permutation of the squares movement, the Maidan revolt erupted in the Ukraine, fuelled by nationalist elements, including neo-nazis. In Greece — which had also seen the rise of a violent neo-nazi movement — GDP contracted by a third and unemployment soared as socialist and centre-right governments alike imposed austerity, leading the upstart coalition Syriza to make extraordinary strides at the polls. Their surprise victory in January 2015 permitted the party to form what they heralded as an “insurgent government”; in less than a year, it would humiliated by its masters in Brussels into administering the Troika’s medicine to the Greek population.⁹ Meanwhile, the Spanish Podemos party’s ambitions to govern were stymied by a third-place finish in parliamentary elections in late 2015.

As these defeats brusquely unfolded, perhaps the most significant event of the crisis in Europe began to impose itself: millions of refugees from the war-torn Middle East and Africa began penetrating the Schengen border regime, seeking asylum and work in the rich countries of Europe.¹⁰ Under conditions of economic crisis, administered austerity, and anti-Muslim scapegoating of immigrants, far-right parties across Europe began to vie for state power, from France and Italy to Hungary and Germany. In the US, in late 2016, Donald Trump would destroy his challengers in the Republican primary and go on to win the presidency by a hair.

We present this recent history in the form of a geopolitical litany in order to stress just how dizzying and compressed this short sequence has been. Within this concatenation of events, perhaps it was the thoroughgoing collapse of the political centre that caught us the most off-guard, in particular the devastation of many of Europe’s social democratic parties. In France, during the first round of the 2017 presidential elections, the incumbent Parti Socialiste received just 6 percent of the vote, less than a third of that obtained by Marine Le Pen’s Front National. Today, the party of Mitterand is a political non-entity.

Europe’s remaining centre left parties have mostly survived only by playing to fear of the far-right; a strategy that is unlikely to survive the banal examples of “fascist” rule coming down the line. In the Anglosphere, where the worker’s movement never made the same gains as in continental Europe, the political centre is also in crisis, but there a revanchist social democracy has emerged to stand at the head, not of a revived labour movement, but of a hasty coalition of disillusioned millennials.

What explains this hollowing out of the centre? The answer is that it has lost its economic and social anchor. The state cannot function as a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie when there are no obvious policies around which the bourgeoisie can unite.¹¹ It’s not just that the social democratic program of shared growth, predicated on balancing wage increases and the expansion of social provisions against the accumulation of capital, is broken. This has been the case for decades. Almost all the growth there has been over the past decade has been redistributed upward, with wages stagnant and the labour share of income plummeting since the turn of the century in most advanced economies. There is only so much upward redistribution that is possible without provoking revolt, as has been seen sporadically throughout the crisis period, in the squares movement and most recently in France.

Yet the problem for the survival of centrist parties today is not just about distribution between classes, but also within them. With rates of GDP growth plummeting, even as private and public balance sheets have ballooned, the primary effect — and objective — of any economic policy is zero-sum: the redistribution of a fixed pie between classes, but also between competing class fractions. The function of the political parties has been undermined by the need to manage a horizontal redistribution among rival factions of capital, conditions that divide the bourgeoisie from within.¹² We see this in Trump’s tax and tariff reforms, in the asset purchases of the ECB, and in the chaos of Brexit negotiations.

It is not just the absence of a viable threat of revolution that undermines political stability. The hollowing out of the political centre has its roots in the absence of a viable program of long-term growth that makes it impossible for any one party or coalition to rule in the interest of a consolidated capitalist bloc. All parties have, when in power, spent the last four decades administering austerity on the pretext that it would restore growth. Their failure and its consequences have stripped them of any mass following, reducing them to technocratic husks.¹³ They could govern as long as they appeared to represent a managerial consensus, but were burst asunder when that consensus broke down. Today, new political divides replace the class divides upon which traditional parties had forged their identity, including those between the urban and rural, young and old, educated and uneducated. The resulting instability supplies an especially rich loam in which renewed appeals to nationalism — as well as ethnic and racial identities — can take root amidst ongoing stagnation and drift.

However, the global rightist turn does not entail that the antagonistic character of our times has been suppressed. Today, no political power has the capacity to govern through consensus. Politicians are forced to rely on conflict to mobilise the increasingly fractured demos. We have entered a post-hegemonic phase rather than a depoliticised world. In fact, politics as conflict is back with a vengeance. The rise of figures like Trump and Bolsonaro show that even conservatism has become a revolutionary force with no capacity to produce unity (for it is incapable of confronting the basis for the chaos in our world, namely capital). In such a situation, where the centre cannot hold, conflicts can only deepen. Desperate attempts to find stability by creating havoc are a clear sign that the old mole is still digging, and it is only when antagonism becomes mainstream that a radical rupture becomes possible.

Rough Beast

“The modern working class . . . are a rude pagan race, without ideals, without faith, without morals.” — Mario Tronti, 1968

Though at something of a lag vis-à-vis the timing of the crisis, the five issues we’ve published over the past decade were also written against the backdrop of a powerful global wave of struggles. Most of us came of age in an earlier era marked by the fall of the Soviet Union, the displacement of socialism by anarchism and identity politics as the common currency of “radical” milieus, the rise of environmental movements, and the brief ascendency of anti-globalisation. Many features of the anti-globalisation era were reproduced at a larger scale in the new wave that broke out in 2011: a deep-seated suspicion of political mediation; an embrace of horizontal forms of organization; a tendency to fight in the streets and squares (rather than workplaces or neighbourhoods); and a clearer sense of what we were against rather than for. Yet, in documenting and thinking about these struggles in Endnotes, we sought to identify what was new in them, both in their content and form as well as in the limits they encountered.¹⁴ Above all we insisted on reading these “social movements” as expressions of class struggle.

Behind this new wave of struggles lies decades of concessions on the part of workers, undertaken in order to save firms from certain destruction in the face of ever more intense global competition and its concomitant: economic stagnation. As tax revenues shrank, and welfare states became ever more streamlined, the laid-off and never-hired alike were mostly forced to fend for themselves or rely on family members for support.¹⁵ Their altogether reasonable reaction has been resentment and rage. For if the restoration of previously prevailing economic growth rates turned out to be a fantasy, the sacrifices were real and left devastation in their wake.

The class fights where it can, with the available means at its disposal. In the last decade millions have taken to the streets, occupied squares, and formed blockades, with these focal points often interrupted by riots that tended to be larger, and with a more complex social composition, but also more lacklustre, than in the past.¹⁶ The indignant masses primarily pitted themselves against austerity and corruption (or police violence). But they were generally able to confront the crisis only in the form of the state’s limited response to it, such that an earlier slogan became the watchword of the movements of the squares: “¡Que se vayan todos!”. They filled the resulting void with the day-to-day activities of the occupations themselves: popular assemblies, collective kitchens, emotional support, and the treacherous work of carving out a public space without knowing who or what might fill it.

While strikes played a key role in Egypt and Greece, a common theme was the limited capacity of the movements to seize hold of (or even disrupt) production, despite the fact that the vast majority of participants were workers. While everyone was supposed to leave their class belonging at the entrance to the occupations, along with their political and institutional affiliations, class divisions (including internal ones, often along lines of race, gender and nationality) would perpetually haunt the movements, such that a central preoccupation came to be what we described as a “problem of composition”: how to unify the “people”, the “99%”, the “indignados” etc., across so many material and ideological divides? In this context it seemed easier for struggles to harden around a singular oppressed identity: “black lives”, migrants and refugees, the indigenous, even (with climate change and school shootings) the young. But these too broke upon the jagged shards of our separations: all the mediations which we could never discard because they constitute our material reproduction in and through the reproduction of capital.

Many of these tendencies reached their pinnacle in the autumn of 2018, when France finally got its own indignados movement. Only the North African square movements that signalled the start of this wave had presented such a threat to the current order. The occupied roundabout provided a fruitful combination of the square and the blockade. The yellow vests (gilets jaunes) proved to be the perfect floating signifier: anyone could put it on, yet it somehow managed to retain a minimal connotation of plebeian disgust (for the politicians, the bankers, urban elite, etc.). Hundreds of thousands would join the Saturday “acts” in city centres. This was a rude and impure grouping, dominated by workers and self-employed people from outside the main metropolitan centres, who were largely unfamiliar with the ritualized traditions of French protest movements. Thus, on the one hand, the authorities had no idea how to negotiate with them, but, on the other, having no particular commitment to violence (the small “black bloc” was generally a sideshow), they had no qualms about taking the fight to the police when attacked. As a result, the fear that the yellow vests generated in the French state was palpable.¹⁷ Macron quickly withdrew his fuel tax hike, the first time a French government had conceded to a protest movement since 2006. But unlike Ben Ali and Mubarak, he managed to stay in power, offering a Christmas bonus with one hand and a hail of flashballs with the other.

This was a working-class movement, which, like all large-scale working-class movements today, was formed not in the factories but in the streets.¹⁸ Even once it had established momentum and numbers, it did not spread to workplaces. The major unions came together early to denounce the violence of the days of action, and calls for a “general strike” were largely ignored by the movement’s largely precarious base.¹⁹ In a situation characterized by a growing surplus population the fear of losing your job can apparently be greater than the fear of losing your eye to a flashball.

Despite an initially rapid expansion, and the giddy sense that “we are all yellow vests”, the movement quickly met an upper limit of participation. The numbers taking part in the days of action peaked in November 2018 (between a quarter and half a million) and declined thereafter. In the absence of growth in participation, the opinion poll became a bellwether of the movement — at first a large majority of those polled consistently expressed sympathy, but that began to fall in 2019, as Macron’s “great national debate”, while eliciting few participants, managed to revive his popular image.

Still, the yellow vests successfully resisted attempts by politicians and the metropolitan media (including much of the left) to dismiss them as anti-immigrant and anti-environment, a bunch of backward and racist hicks clinging to their right to pollute. Sans-papiers (gilets noirs) and immigrants were generally welcomed to the roundabouts, and highschool kids from the banlieue were often on the frontlines of the demos. Yellow vests also made a point of joining climate change demonstrations and adding ecological concerns to their list of demands.²⁰ They made the struggle to overcome (or suppress) potential divisions into a central principle of organization.²¹ Their opposition to all forms of mediation and representation was arrived at not as a matter of (ultra-left) principle, but as a purely pragmatic solution to what we have elsewhere called “the problem of composition”.²² It’s true that this opposition sometimes wavered (as with the failed attempts to form a “yellow vests list” in the European elections) and sometimes led down rabbit holes (as with moves to establish “citizens’ initiative referendums”). But these did not detract from the generally fertile character of the movement, which built a resolute force of opposition on the roundabouts and the Champs-Élysées, carving out a public space for new solidarities and new needs.

Lines of Flight

It is too early to tell whether globally the yellow vests will herald a renewal of the movement of squares—the indignant of all colours and seasons—or whether its late arrival in France announces the twilight of a form of struggle. Demands similar to the French movement have recently been heard in the wild demonstrations of Haiti and Ecuador, also born from the struggle over fuel prices, and at the time of writing Chile is erupting in riots.²³ But have such movements already played themselves out in the West? Instead of the “Gallic cock” awakening Europe to “sanguinary insurrections”,²⁴ the yellow vests may signal the start of a lull or descent, one at which it perhaps makes sense—with Hegel’s owl—to pause, look back and take stock. In either case it could prove useful to reflect on the broader dreams and aspirations that have been implicit or explicit in the movements, and thus to take flight—with Kant’s dove—on wings of speculation.²⁵

This issue of Endnotes is particularly speculative, for it contains various attempts to address the question of communism in direct—albeit unusual—ways.²⁶ Communist theory cannot avoid the speculative moment; it must (as a matter of theoretical coherence and practical relevance) put forward a positive vision of communism, however much we feel obliged to couch it in disclaimers about the dangers of utopianism and idealism. Yet such visions often tell us less about communism than about the needs and desires of those who compose them: needs which necessarily emerge as we find ourselves unfit for this world.²⁷ They bear the marks of our individualities and life histories, which might explain why we can just as often find among them nostalgic views (of the countryside, the family) as their opposite (abolition of the family, dreams of automation). The proliferation of visions of communism in recent years may also be seen as a response to the aporias of the movement of the squares, the felt lack, in these struggles, of a positive sense of what we are for. With this in mind, we might turn the speculative lens back on the struggles themselves, and ask what this pronounced absence might tell us about the fate of our world.

It would clearly be a mistake to evaluate the wave of uprisings we’ve seen since 2011, across continents, in country after country, according to whether they live up to some idea of communism. Rather than failed revolutions, we should treat these uprisings as what they are: desperate attempts to combat austerity, corruption, police repression, and deteriorating living standards—i.e. class struggle. But it is worth considering whether it is not these movements themselves, but rather their historical and political context, that might be “revolutionary”. Their significance may be that they come at a time during which capitalism has begun to exhibit signs of what Jacques Camatte, already four decades ago, called its potential death.²⁸

There is little doubt that, looking back over the past century, the economic expansion of the post-WWII period—a dynamic stabilization in which capital’s objective needs were expressed subjectively as demands of the workers’ movement—was a singular episode in the history of humanity. Paradoxically, the ongoing process in which capital has successfully subsumed more and more of human life appears to have set off a slow-moving but apparently irreversible crisis tendency, one that takes the form of persistent stagnation, tapering investment, and the deterioration of the wage-relation. But this decades-long crisis of accumulation, punctuated by increasingly frequent financial crises across the globe, is shadowed by a still graver threat of ecological catastrophe, as if the history of civilization found its telos in the sapping and sabotage of the conditions of life altogether. In this sense, we might view the recent wave of struggles as so many markers signalling that a form of life has grown old.

Endnotes has sometimes been understood as rejecting the classical Marxist idea that the factory and industrial production are at the centre of capitalist accumulation. But this is a misunderstanding. What we have tried to conceptualise is how the visible process of deindustrialisation expresses a crisis tendency of capitalism that Marx articulated as the “general law of accumulation”. As we have indicated above, the prospect of a capitalism without growth has transformed the political dynamics of capitalist societies profoundly. Expanding ranks of surplus populations may be read not only as a sign of the declining power of the working class to determine their own conditions of exploitation, but also as a symptom of the disarray in which the ruling classes find themselves. In this crepuscular environment, capitalism can only reproduce the industrial system as the social form of the economy in a period defined, instead, by the proliferation of rust belts and rising levels of atmospheric CO2.

In this context, it is no longer even possible to envisage the united working class developing (on its own terms) an expanding, global, industrial core. Proletarians, on the contrary, can only hope to become the conscious instrument of capital’s decline. If the concept of communisation has any meaning today it is this: the planned deindustrialisation of the world through the self-negation of the proletariat.²⁹

It is from this perspective that we find ourselves assessing uprisings in France, Algeria, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iraq, Haiti and Chile. They seem to be passing disturbances of an unravelling global order, shrapnel released by the withering away of what, to echo Giorgio Cesarano, we might call the anthropological dimension of capitalism.³⁰ The decline of capitalism is becoming conscious of itself in the youths who screamed that they had no future in 2011, and among the French pensioners who clothed themselves in yellow and fought the police in 2019. One of these old ladies, in an electric wheelchair, told us some hours after the Champs-Élysées had been trashed that “we have waited so long to scream, so no, we will never stop”. The man who was with her—a military veteran—said that he imagined the movements would weaken and disappear. “But”, he said, “we are here to find new friends and build alliances for future struggles”.