workers_power_poster.pdf |
It is not enough for capital to only exploit us at work. We are exploited on the bus, in the streets, at home, in the bar, in bed—on our way to work, on our way from work.
Thanks to psychiatry, even our dreams are exploited.
In our globalized economy, postindustrial society, this fucking neoliberal wasteland, etc., capital has created its own limit—a threshold it must transcend. (Although it’s pertinent to highlight that the only thing globally connected in our culture is the market: some planetary postmodern wonderland where all the commodities and commercials roam free.) If no one is in the factory how would capital exploit us, estrange us, dominate us? Capital manifests its own barriers, surmounts them, evades them, leaves them in the dust. Hence now we are exploited within every facet of society.
It doesn’t even matter if we conceptualize this phenomenon of the omnipresence of work in our society as one big factory, one big prison, or one grandiose playboy mansion anymore ("The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fuck the proletariat; and so on.” Deleuze & Guattari). Capitalism has become the constant phenomenon of mass estrangement: a colossal mechanism constituted for the exploitation of every movement, every moment, every thought…
We are not dealing with global apathy, a content society, or an immobilized working class. On the contrary, we are dealing with a fully mobilized worker—but mobilized for capital. In a sense, thus, the task of communism is no longer to mobilize the working class, but rather to demobilize the worker. To demobilize is a positive task, to leave capitalism is not reductive: it is utterly positive, completely creative—it is enmeshed in desire. The production of desire: “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.” (Deleuze & Guattari)
Henceforth communism seeks to demobilize workers out of capitalism. That is to say, communism is desire that embodies itself as the centrifugal organization of an interminable general strike.
“As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one soul driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make it constants part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labor. Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has brought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.”
Let us consume all of our time for ourselves and others in order to starve capital to death. The less we work the more we create. In other words, communism is the process of expropriating the time stolen by capitalism to an irreversible point: consequently capital is extinguished from our cultural criterion. “The expropriators are expropriated.” (Marx) '