Jarin Haley: The nature of work and the role of the worker as you describe it has evolved within Capitalism to a more broader ranging definition that contextualizes the role of work and the worker not just from the standpoint of a traditional interpretation of Marxism but within a broader societal context. The “worker” is not now so much purely struggling against capitalism in the classical sense but against capitalism having intertwined itself into every aspect of life. What to you is a “worker” in America today and what is the role of the worker in this changed dynamic?
Workers' Power: It is only a “broader ranging definition” in the sense that it affects a larger demographic than orthodox Marxism or positive sociology allows. It seems to us that it has always been a pursuit of sociology to compartmentalize various demographics into trivial social classes (lower-middle class, upper-middle class, etc.). These parceled out social statuses not only cloud an innate connection within capitalism between workers, but also distort the extreme schism between exploiters and exploited. Insomuch as our concept of “worker” is concerned, we hope that it provides a more precise explication of what it means to work in our epoch.
Not that we give a shit about defending Marx, but it is pertinent here to highlight that even within Marx's work he is constructing a critique of capital more so than capitalism. Capital, for example, is an interdisciplinary work, in the academic sense, precisely because of capital's intertwining. Marx had to use various methodologies because of capital's permeation of all facets of life. Under capital our lives are volatile, and this has always been true. Throughout the oeuvre of Marx you find direct comments on the omnipresence of work (hence Marx's influence on Michel Foucault) and capital's morphology (hence the autonomist Marxist tradition).
As far as the “American worker”: Our definition of worker is a planetary concept. There is not a fundamental distinction between workers. It is capital's primary goal to normalize, to manifest a status quo, in order to pacify and usurp subjectivity. Nevertheless, due to the fluctuations of capital, workers do find themselves in a multiplicity of circumstances. In other words, your boss is fundamentally a subject of capital (thus a worker) nonetheless your boss exploits. Now how does one combat exploitation in this new dynamic? In the same light we can view nationalism: the role of the American worker, although at times more privileged than others, is not fundamentally different than workers elsewhere. This is another area where sociology has difficulties because postindustrialism is not the absence of industry, nor the unencessity of industry, but rather the ebb and flow of industry. It is the deindustrialization, reindustrialization, or the industrialization of a certain spatial zone. It is the flux of the metropolis. So even though specific geographic areas are less industrialized than others (what we consider the third-world) postindustrialism is a global imperial force. Thus it becomes difficult to solely analyze the “American worker.”
The question of “now what does this new dynamic mean for struggle and how it looks” is a prominent question of ours and exactly the question we want to raise to others. We do not think we have the answer, nor the capabilities to present one via any type of “program.” Workers' Power is not programatic in any sense. So the workers' role is simply to create discourse, or rather, discursive relationships.
JH: I know you're more than familiar with the quote “Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance.” What has more resonance in 21st Century America, at least in terms of social and revolutionary change, education and discourse or direct action?
WP: We are not sure it is a matter of “what has more resonance,” instead we propose how to create resonance. One creates resonance by acting; by making a break with the status quo; by grasping abstract desires and making them concrete. It is only when one acts, when one comes into battle with capital, that this battle has the potential to resonate with others. And this is the manner in which micro-revolutions become macro-revolutions. It is when the lifestyle of insurrection reaches its apogee and becomes the struggle of communism.
This is all to say, to create resonance, and to let this resonance spread, is to make action a discourse in itself. Let the squats speak, let the rocks speak, let sharing speak, let becoming speak, let communism speak. Action for us is a twofold concept: it is to act and to speak—but it is to act and to speak simultaneously. The synthesis of what is called “direct action” and “education” for us is the single act of a discursive action.
So for us there is no problematic of “awareness raising” versus “attack” as the anarchist milieu posits it; nor is there the Leninist problematic of building the party versus armed struggle. Historically socialist blocs and vanguard parties have discussed this until their throats bleed. For us this problematic is nonexistent because if your “action” or “education” does not open up a discursive space, a place of becoming, if it is not constituting forms of life, then it is not insurrectional. “Freedom isn't the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them” (The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection). We propose something entirely new in the realm of revolutionary methodologies.
JH: In the creation or opening up of a discursive space, should we continue to look to the total obliteration between the traditionally held concepts of the public sphere and the private one?
WP: Absolutely. A discursive space is not meant to be understood in the sense of “public property.” If we look towards the “homeless” as an example we see the antagonism between the public and private sphere which creates a dichotomy of exile. The nomadism of the “homeless” is forced to create new territories that operate outside of both the public and private arenas. When it comes to the subversive elements within capitalism—such as “homelessness”—the public and private spheres operate as a dyad to consume and digest what capital perceives as problematic, or kinks in the system. Thus we always have to posit the construction of a new way, new experimentations, that leave behind these archaic concepts and effigies of the past. This includes the socialist romanticism of state-owned public property.
JH: With an organization (and I loathe to use that terminology) like Workers' Power how do you walk the line that many other so-called “radical” or “left-wing” groups have between education, raising awareness, discussion, etc., and a more active role in terms of “street-level” organizing via strikes, occupations, demonstrations, etc?
WP: For us, as we explained above, there is no walking the line. Occupations, strikes, etc., are the act of discourse. They are “awareness raising” precisely because they are an exhibition of new forms of life, of new ways to carry ourselves and others.
JH: In the United States in particular there seems to be an activist milieu which has led to a sort of stagnation to an extent as to what is “acceptable” for activism. Student movements have lost their militant edge and seem concerned with issues like debt reduction more so than a fundamental changes in how higher education is viewed, advocacy on behalf of the poor and homeless center around not on the underlying flaws in the system but “stop-gap” measures in terms of jobs, housing, etc. How does one ferment a change in this stagnant activist culture?
WP: Be involved with those groups and attempt to have an influence. Share your perspective, create discourse where there wasn't any. Do not get caught in their social ghettos, but also do not get caught in your own.
JH: But don't we see a distinct lack of new types of methodologies in these organizations? While some may purport to have “radical” leanings or platforms, there still seems to be an emphasis on surrogate forms of advocacy and flaccid attempts to formulate broader “mass appeal” strategies than on actively creating new modalities of organization. Do we need a more “organic” growth among workers' movements, students, the homeless, etc., in which activism and awareness grows from the experiences of these groups instead of merely being “directed” or “organized” in the more orthodox sense?
WP: A more organic movement is one way to put it, but this doesn't mean we can all sit around and wait for the “workers” to start a revolution. The prescience of our concept of worker (its planetary persona) is that we cannot just look towards some other external milieu as the actors of history. We are all within capital, although we are all its subjects.
It is not a matter of whether or not we should “direct” the masses or whether they should be left alone to naturally organize themselves against capital. Throughout history theorist of revolution have been asking the question “what is the best way to consolidate revolutionary impetus?” Whenever reactionary theorist were against the results of a revolution it was not always that they found problematics with the pathos of the revolution, but rather they were against the “anarchy” of revolutionary situations. In this sense, to want to “direct the masses” is in itself reactionary. The bolsheviks, for instance, helped to create an insurrectionary situation, but once it got out of their hands they fought to establish a norm and halt the flows of revolution. The insurgents of history have always been against the centralization of power.
JH: Do you believe that there is an apathetic undercurrent within the United States that seems to act as a bulwark (and one that is exploited to an extent by traditional power structures) against developing a more widespread popular uprising as we have seen around the world in places like Ukraine, Greece, Spain, Egypt, etc., over the last six years?
WP: No one is apathetic, we are all passionate, and this passion elucidates our concept of the worker. So the question becomes “what are we passionate for?” The neurotic are passionate about their anxiety; the bureaucrat about their papers; the wife about her cleaning; the CEO about their wealth; the politicians about their campaigns; and the judges about their ability to sentence. Namely, we are passionate about work. “Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work ...” (Heraclitus).
So nihilism today exhibits itself in a profoundly Nietzschean fashion: we are apathetic to life.
The workers of today breathe nihilism, but this nihilism is perhaps different than what you refer to as apathy. For Carl Schmitt, in comparison to what he considered the anarchy of the Medieval era, nihilism was the emblem of the 19th and 20th centuries (Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth). Giorgio Agamben, vis-a-vis Schmitt, postulates that as a result of Nazism and fascism we are living under “a single planetary bourgeoisie” that has survived the nihilism (or Nazism/fascism) of the 20th century. Nevertheless we remain to “live under their sign.” The remnants of fascism and Nazism today are the “absurdity of individual existence, inherited from the subbase of nihilism” which “has become in the meantime so senseless that it has lost all pathos. And been transformed, brought out into the open, into an everyday exhibition: Nothing resembles the life of this new humanity more than advertising footage from which every trace of the advertised product has been wiped out” (Agamben, The Coming Community). This is not nihilism in the sense that we have discarded our morals, but the nihilism that refuses life. It is an asceticism that strips the body and prepares it for pacification. Capital propagates itself by normalizing our passion for work. Work is antipode to life, yet we fight to work. This is why the socialist platform is so useless today: it only changes the environment of work rather than abolishing work.
But once again it is difficult to say this is strictly endemic to the U.S. This sense of nihilism we speak of exist everywhere—we deny life everywhere.
Consequently, this also means that we have the aptitude to fight for life everywhere. Just think back to the cycle of struggles in 2011: The U.S. was included in that. Those movements were powerful because of their global character. Due to our nihilism economic and social crises erupt globally, but this just seems to be capital's death-instinct.
JH: If capital is propagating itself by the normalization of “our passions for work” how do you see a change coming about in that relationship? How does one promulgate the idea that life itself is not attached to concepts like work and rejecting that sort of nihilism that permeates society? Is it through these instances of popular uprisings or is it more an individual repudiation of capital i.e. abandoning the bureaucracy, abandoning the home, abandoning the factory and forging something entirely different?
WP: Yes, a change in our passions, a channeling of our desires to something else, is precisely what we need. When we channel our passions elsewhere we are siphoning capital. Whereas in Marxist terms we once had to speak of labor-power today we must speak of the workers' passion-power.
Nothing can be done individually. As an individual there is only becoming dead. If we are to live, that is, live a life of becoming, then we have to realize this is only possible collectively—as the multitude. It is a becoming whatever. As an individual you dwell within a certain environment and you manage or survive within that environment. Only as a multitude—through collective acts administered and developed by singularities, i.e. the communication of subjectivities—have we ever created. The world might inspire, but it takes a friendship, a culture, affinity, to make desires a reality.
A repudiation of capital is not sufficient—all the leftover hippy communes can attest to that. It is a matter of attacking while exiting. The exodus from capital is a carving. And the indents we leave are the successful experiments, the forms of life that manage to wiggle out of capital's terrain and swarm it.
JH: We live in an inter-connected world thanks to technology and social media having made communication and the real time dissemination of information on a global scale possible. As the Zapatista's have taught us...the spectacle is just as important, if not more, than the event itself. Does this new reality of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc., change how revolutionary ideas and images are propagated and do the dangers of co-option and subversion no longer exist because the technology has granted full control to the user?
WP: Technology plays a huge part in the evolution of culture and always has. Obviously these tools have defects, and they can stifle as much as they propagate. Technology is not neutral, but this non-neutrality of technology has the aptitude to go either way in a struggle. It is this struggle where the lines are most often drawn today. Governmentality is constantly expanding its matrix, and this includes the internet despite all its democratic possibilities. Simultaneously with the composition of a potentially democratic space like the internet we compose a space for the potentiality of surveillance. So the fight over internet “privacy” has become the locus of struggle against the pervasive pandemic of surveillance. It is a superb example of a struggle that touches on the “root cause.” That root cause being capital.
JH: Often times a criticism that has been levied is that revolutionary thought is too “esoteric” or that it is the bastion of academics and intellectuals which doesn't accurately portray the nature of struggle or appeal to the so-called “common people.” How does one combat this line of thinking and what would you say, for example, to a factory worker or a migrant laborer or even a young professional trapped in a dead-end office job who might have never read a bit of Marx but feels a fundamental sense of wrongness perhaps in the way they're being exploited?
WP: There is no need to combat that line of thinking because it is wholly a question of academia.
The beauty of the communards, the anarchist in Spain during the civil war, May '68, or the Autonomia movement in Italy, is that the movement preceded the theory. In this sense, the workers' struggle prefigures the theory. Any theory surrounding these events are posthumous. There is nothing less esoteric than this.
So for that factory worker, migrant laborer,and the young professional trapped in a dead-end job: we say fuck your boss. Find your friends, or make new ones, and create something new—and let's do it together. Let's live communism.
Many organizations today love the catchphrase that is drenched in utopian vanity: “another world is possible.” Insomuch as Workers' Power is concerned, sure, another world is possible, but don't let utopia be terminal. If utopia is to remain fashionable, if it is not already an utterly empty phrase, then utopia must be the struggle, it must be a endless path of us reconstituting our consistencies, our rhythms, our tones, our predicates, our concepts, our sentiments. Utopia must become an immense collection of our past, a reformulation our a present, and an acceptance of the potentiality of our future. “Utopia is the very topia of things” (Agamben).
JH: Finally, in one or two words, what would you describe the end result of Workers' Power goals being?
WP: To have no end results. To dissolve domination. In other words, to live.