Angelus Novus
>
>
> This reminds me of a brilliant sticker by the group Gender Killer I once
saw
> on a lamppost: "Capitalism is Not a Conspiracy of the Few. It Works
Because
> You Work."
>
> =====
>
> Perhaps I'm being thick, but couldn't the above statement be true of any
economic system?
Yet, "not working" is not a feasible revolutionary action. One only has to glance at Marx's discussions of various communes and co-ops to debunk this myth, which should have died along with platform shoes in the 1970's. The worker is bound to wage-labour in order to secure use-values for the reproduction of his/her vital resources. "Opting out" -- even in mass numbers, which is a childish fantasy -- still leaves the accumulated forces of production (i.e. the wealth of society) in the hands of the capitalists.
And though it's not an optimal scenario for them, they can hold out without us longer than we can hold out without access to society's wealth. I will not hear any utopian notions to the contrary, as if there weren't tens of thousands of pages of commentary since Proudhon and the like.
Capitalism doesn't work because you work. Labour is required in all societies. It is the necessary mover of the "social metabolism" of humanity. Capitalism works because the vast majority of the surplus labour-time is accumulated NOT by the workers who create it, but by a small, minority capitalist class. This class has worked to rig the system in their favor such that the political-economic machine is akin to a giant vacuum, sucking capital -- finance, industrial, and otherwise -- straight up to the top.
Let's bury this notion of "opting out" which rests on the naive supposition of the relative simplicity of the machinations of the capitalist mode of production.
Any revolutionary practice worthy of the name, going forth, will involve building radical left movements and institutions that foster a movement of value that runs contrary to the subject of capital presented by Marx: "value-for-itself". After all, the subject of Capital is NOT "capital" as such, nor is it the capitalist, and it's certainly not the worker. The subject of Capital is this movement of the self-valorization of capital.
This springs from the assumption that all relative surplus value is accumulated by the capitalist. Revolutionary practice today will challenge this assumption by building these left movements and institutions that are meant to accumulate the wealth of society for society; the subject of the worker in today's capitalism is thus "social-value-for-itself." This is the rallying cry--not fantasies involving "opting out" of reality.
I don't expect any of you to understand much of that. If this conference paper would just hurry up and finish itself (ha ha...), I could offer it up as background info.
-Adam