[...]
What all this seems to indicate is that there is no plausible ground for antagonism once the capital:labour divide has been effaced by the structural identification with capital. This also resonates with Foucault’s idea of the shift from the older liberal subjectivity of exchange to the neoliberal subjectivity of competition; the one presupposes equality and recognition, the other inequality and “merit.” Hence it is not just that the working classes, waged and unwaged, have undergone degrees of expropriation in the past few decades that came as a surprise to contemporaries of the post-war welfare-state compact – at least in Western Europe and the US – it has also been an expropriation of antagonism at a time when the contradictions between interests have never been fiercer, and the stock of legitimacy held by capitalist social relations has never been as low as it stands now.
“Waged and unwaged” is perhaps the crucial category here. The steady degradation of employment conditions means that labour cannot serve as an impetus for mobilization; fractalized and degraded working conditions make organising a joke in many cases, even if employees cared enough about their jobs to get together to improve their working conditions. The political culture of work has vanished, and it is not coming back. For this reason, all mobilization around the workplace is therefore immediately a matter of “social rights” and extends outside it, since work for its own sake cannot be sustained as an object around which political desires can circulate. Production and reproduction, the old Marxian categories that have produced so many category errors as costly political mistakes, seem to be immanent to the same terrain – the terrain that witnesses the evacuation of support for forms of life other than financial accumulation. Yet the enclosure of public goods in the pursuit of ever-attenuating profits, deteriorating infrastructure, speculation on value that will never exist, and the re-channelling of resources from production into management and security hints that production and reproduction are not only not self-evident worlds that can come together or drift apart, but that the breakdown of divisions between the terms is as much the breakdown of the two terms themselves, a breakdown observed by the term “non-reproduction.” Here it is not the ubiquity of value production, as designated by the Italian Autonomists, that creates the social factory, but the ubiquity of de-valorisation that ensures that the social field confronts capital as a whole. A whole wreck.
[...]
While I don't agree with Vishmidt that "the political culture of work...is not coming back," I think she correctly points to what's missing from current politics, especially the lack of revolt in response to the current crises: the existence of antagonism. Other diagnoses of what's wrong that I've heard -- apathy, apolitical masses, too many divisions, lack of alternative institutions -- sound both too old-school and like symptoms rather than causes. Those things exist, or don't, because a sense of antagonism has been lost. What I like about the recent occupations -- in the U.S., U.K., Croatia, Greece, and elsewhere -- is that they are not shying away from confrontation or aiming for consensus or agreement; they are, as one of the New School occupation communiques put it, "insisting on our antagonism." If the self-identified left wants to be useful, it could help rekindle and heighten this antagonism instead of insisting on adherence to old forms, modes, and ethics.
(FWIW, this was prompted in part by the recent despicable actions of Wendy Brown, someone whose work I admire(d?) tremendously, as outlined here <http://uncivpro.com/2009/12/21/the-emptiness-of-liberal-morality/> )