#class composition

Feminism never succeeded in securing women as a collective subject of history, as the Marxist intellectual tradition once hoped to do with the working class. On the contrary, contemporary feminism is arguably defined by its refusal of woman as a political category, on the grounds that this category has historically functioned as a cruel ruse for white supremacy, the gender binary, the economic interests of the American ruling class, and possibly patriarchy itself. This has put feminism in the unenviable position of being politically obligated to defend its own impossibility. In order to be for women, feminists must refrain from making any positive claims about women. The result is a kind of negative theology, dedicated to striking down the graven images of a god whose stated preference for remaining invisible has left the business of actually worshipping her somewhat up in the air. Perhaps the simplest solution to this paradox has been to quietly shift the meaning of the word feminism. In popular culture and especially online, feminism has become the go-to signifier for what the legal scholar Janet Halley calls convergentism: the belief that justice projects with different constituencies have a moral duty to converge, like lines stretching toward a vanishing point. Once the name of a single plank in a hypothetical program of universal justice, feminism now refers, increasingly, to the whole platform — hence the so-called Unity Principles put forward on the Women’s March website, which include calls for migrant rights, a living wage, and clean air as well as the familiar demands for reproductive freedom and an end to sexual violence. “It ain’t feminism if it ain’t intersectional,” tweeted Ariana Grande in March 2019, echoing a viral 2011 blog post by the writer Flavia Dzodan. Dzodan’s original phrasing was “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”; popular variations now include the formula “If your feminism doesn’t include x, then it’s not feminism,” where x might be trans women, women of color, fat women, sex workers, nonbinary people, or any number of other groups. The idea is not that feminists, being desirous of justice, should also commit to antiracism, anti-imperialism, and all the rest; it’s that feminism by definition consists in the making of extrafeminist commitments, such that without them, it would not be feminism at all. This is weird. It is as if, having guiltily assimilated the impossibility of speaking on behalf of all women, feminism has resigned itself to the modest virtues of playing hostess for other, frankly more persuasive political discourses — most of whose constituencies are composed of women, of course, but never simply as women. In this arrangement, feminism describes not a concrete political project but the moral imperative to do politics in the first place. In other words, a feminist is a good person. If that sounds clichéd, that’s kind of the point. The conviction that it is both possible and desirable to be a feminist, in an ontologically thick way, has no parallel in any other left political discourse, and a wide array of digital media has arisen to guide and instruct initiates: just as Better Homes & Gardens once taught its readership how to cook and decorate like good women, so do Teen Vogue and The Cut offer tips on how to be a good feminist while getting dressed in the morning. The irony is that feminism, having some fifty years ago introduced the radical idea that the personal was political, has today ended up with the laborious task of making politics feel personal. Hence the possessive pronoun — my feminism, your feminism. It’s easy, and foolish, to dismiss this as neoliberalism or corporate co-optation. Digital slogans like Dzodan’s, regardless of their original intention, find popularity not because they are true (even when they are), but because their repetition across social media helps people achieve feelings of belonging, purpose, and importance that allow them to bridge the yawning gap between their individual everyday lives and the grand narrative of political universality. This is, as it were, the women’s work of the political imagination; it is thankless, sentimental, and impossible to do without. I suppose what I’m saying is not that the desire for a universal is politically defensible but, more simply, that the desire for a universal is synonymous with having a politics at all. In a punishing twist, feminism has become both the preferred name for this desire and the very politics which must not claim it. Indeed, the minimal definition of a feminist might be a person who, affirming that women will never constitute a political class, privately hopes it might happen anyway. Can you really blame the Women’s March for wanting a symbol for universal womanhood, if symbols are all we ever have? In anticipation of the march, the Twitter account for the Washington Post’s free daily newspaper, the Express, tweeted an illustration of a crowd in the shape of a circle with an arrow on one side. This was the wrong gender symbol — an eminently avoidable gaffe whose ridiculousness multiplied in proportion to the number of editors over whose desks one imagines it must have passed. But the error was easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. This may have been thanks to the illustration’s color, a radiant peach pink, or to the fact that it wasn’t even a conventional Mars symbol, the arrow boasting a full triangle reminiscent of the Clinton campaign’s rightward barb. But the mistake may have also owed its endurance to an unconscious editorial assumption that desperation for a political symbol — any symbol — was a condition so persuasively female as to render the specifics of that symbol irrelevant.

Towards a History of the Professional: On the Class Composition of the Research University

The era of neoliberalism and 'information society' (IT bubble) was the era of post-modern thought, which also dominated the theoretical understandings within the radical left and still reverberates in the debate about the ‘social strike’. We can’t go into detail here, but want to point out the general problem. To summarise briefly: replacing a sometimes rigid and often monolithic concept of ‘working class’, the post-modern concept of ‘multitude’ (Negri and other post-autonomists) accepted the general fetish of neoliberal capitalism that either we are all indifferently/immaterially connected in a big network of value production. In this network we produce value by merely breathing in and out, or, on the other side of the coin, that we are all just atomized, precarious and supervised subjects, who have to compete by marketing our inner-selves. Once we see the working class as a mass of atomized individuals within a network of value production, the focus will inevitably be on their different status ‘as citizens’ and the step from theoretical concepts of ‘multitude’ to political strategies such as ‘real democracy’ or ‘universal rights’ or 'hailing the UN' (Negri) is only logical, but fatal for strategies of fundamental rupture. We think that even under the conditions of neoliberalism, e.g. the social experience during the IT or real estate bubble, when many workers became ‘shareholders’, the concept of ‘multitude’ tended to disguise the material hierarchies within the working class, first of all between intellectual and manual labour. The ‘feeling of precarity’ became a thin blanket, which could be wrapped around both precarious lecturers and low-paid cleaners, but which left the general hierarchy outside the picture. The movement itself had to discover this. During the course of the Occupy movement the fissures within the ‘99%’ emerged: what explains the power of the 1% if not the material divisions within the 99%? Although largely unhelpful, the emergence of the ‘privilege’ discourse was an expression of the fact that the movement realized its own separation from, and divisions within, the large parts of the proletariat in the US.

The prevalence of theoretical concepts like ‘multitude’ (as much as romantizised notions of an unhistorical ‘working class’ of most of the Marxist-Leninist variants) is explainable also because of the composition of the radical left. Being dominated by students, people in ‘student-jobs’ (editors, freelance IT workers) and ‘precarious teaching positions’ there is a danger of extrapolating general working class conditions and political strategies from one’s own experiences of, e.g. atomization or feelings of individual competition. The same is true for the trade union left, who largely views the working class through their experience of permanent employment in more stable sectors. Empirical research about the general conditions and composition of workers in the UK is necessary, it hasn’t been done thoroughly for a while - and it cannot be done as a research of outsiders.

More interesting though is Amin's argument against the idea that the developing countries in the 'emerging markets', e.g. the new Tiger states, Brazil, Turkey etc., could become the new centres of capitalism: according to him the necessary 'security valves' for that to happen are missing in these regions. Proletarianisation in Europe in the 18th century had migration to America as a security valve. Today it would need several Americas for similar processes of industrialisation to happen in the 'emerging market' countries. Therefore they don't have a chance to catch up. This argument has to be further sharpened towards the following question: What happens in the actual and current processes of industrialisation once struggles cannot be channeled into social democracy on one hand or mass migration on the other?

The novelty of the production of the surplus proletariat within the present moment can be respectively approached from the tripartite perspectives of labor, capital and state, each of which reveal nuances about the present gap between the supply and demand for labor. Present accessibility to contracting labor markets is wrought with the conditions of a flexibilized workforce and casualized employment contracts to an extent that effectively renders most employed already half unemployed. The activity of the surplus proletariat presupposes its exclusion from the market as a precondition for its entrance. The renewed trumpet of entrepreneurialism, for which anybody can become a teacher, taxi driver or motel manager, is only the language of a labor force intensifying its internal competition. Self-employment, while once appearing as a sign of success, now signals the procession of atomization marching steadfast into utter peril. Further, since the 1990s, those living near or below the poverty line as a result of mediocre labor markets have become increasingly reliant on low-interest rate consumer credit in order to augment the languishing strength of wages.