Working-Class Geopolitics (ii)
Part 2; Labour's Sovereignty
The labour movement in its 20th Century form underwrote a specific form of working-class citizenship, guaranteeing relatively stable wages, access to the reproductive apparatus of the welfare state, and a definite means of participation in the national community. This mode was characterised by a coterminal subjective relation to sovereign authority which was, if not uniformly affirmative, at least broadly intelligible, provided a baseline for civic recognition and social fixity. The Bevinist derivation affirms this historical compact directly, whereas the Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist derivations presuppose it in the negative; the anti-imperialist postures of both latter tendencies still ultimately depend upon a stable national-civic frame within which solidarity can be projected outward without dissolving its economic foundation.
Through the tumult of the 20th Century, this stable form of British identity amongst the working-class was coterminal with a wage-form grounded in profitability. The level, composition, and security of this wage were the product of the development of collective bargaining between organised labour and an identifiable capitalist class; concessions made at this level translated into material improvements in the life of the worker-citizen, improvements which formed the content of what the Bevinist derivation is speaking to when they invoke notions of working-class patriotism. In contrast to this prior period, of a capitalism still nominally determined by profitability wherein all three named tendencies find their historical formal referents, our contemporary wage-form arrives pre-spent by the administered credit system, flows immediately into debt servicing, rent, and financialised consumption in a manner qualitatively distinct from its classical form as some kind of intelligible share of value, accounting on the aggregate level for the exploited part of labour’s value generation. The capitalist class has, in turn, generalised itself out of this relation: Marx observed in Capital Vol. III that the development of the joint-stock company renders the capitalist into a “mere manager of money”, abolishing capitalist production within the capitalist mode of production itself; the administered credit system is the further development of this process of capitalist-abolition, wherein the allocator of capital is no longer a proprietor with concessionary power, instead rendered a fiduciary in a nesting chain of credit-anticipation. The strike as directed at the employer encounters at most a local manager operating as representative of a vast abstract credit apparatus determined beyond the immediate workplace – the wage concession, if secured, doesn’t augment the worker's real participation in the social product, because the real determinants of that participation (rent, debt-servicing costs, the allocative logic of the credit system) aren’t subject to the immediate collective bargaining relation.
At the symbolic level we can witness that the national community itself breaks down, being formerly defined by relative levels of ethno-cultural homogeneity which are no longer civically guaranteed, wherein the substantive claims of nationality find themselves variable, disputable, irregular in composition. For instance, can it be said that within the same workplace with the same concretely determinate station in the process of value-generation such as a single train depot, that a Lancastrian third-gen South Asian, a Scouse-Irish, and an Essexian white-English share the same relation with the formal ground of sovereignty and citizenship in, say, the person of the King? Is the actual content of their subjectivity (in the proper sense) identical? More to the point, even amongst the white-English, can we say that there exists a general – or at the very least generally-correlative – notion of what it ‘means’ to be British? As way of demonstrating this symbolic breakdown in normative subjectivity, it is worth noting that Charles III is routinely and increasingly criticised from the right, that the King has submitted to woke, and so on. A certain agitational republicanism has arisen on the right as a means to get a handle on this fundamental breakdown in the assumed, inherited logic of subject-formation, and direct their political energy to novel horizons.
A similar phenomenon exists amongst Catholics: a regular Sunday church-going Catholic is likely to openly and unabashedly say something like ‘I don't like what the Pope is doing’ / ‘this Pope is an improvement on the last Pope,’ etc. This is a profound novelty when put against the centuries-old mode of deference characteristic of the Catholic faith since Counter-Reformation. In any case, with either the Pope or the King, the ‘image of the father’ has lost its determinate social gravity, the ex-sovereign rendered as merely one important person amongst others, as a senior stakeholder rather than a legitimate King. All this is to say that the ephemeral cultural bonds of citizenship have broken down, can no longer be said to hold a necessarily decisive significance in the lives of the working-class. Per Bevinism, the trade union actually serves as a more fundamental guarantor of citizenship in that it maintains, or did maintain, the relatively-stable position of the worker against the destabilising effects of economic downturn and the decomposition of materially binding collective social commitments. The trade union then serves to underwrite a way of life more so than being a vehicle for the pursuit of a specific, self-directed form of power. The labour movement in its mature form established a compact both between workers as the intelligible form of the working-class, as well as between the working-class and the nation-state through a specific settlement, underwriting the worker-citizen’s participation in a national community whose sovereign symbols retained a discrete formal intelligibility. Today, all three elements of this settlement have decomposed: The wage is no longer the site of meaningful bargaining over value, sovereign authority is no longer reliably intelligible as a meaningful social referent, and nationhood no longer produces relatively-uniform subjective relations to sovereignty across the population.
Ever since social-democracy in Britain evaporated following the dismantling of our sovereign industrial and energy infrastructure under Margaret Thatcher’s government, the inherited assumptions of trade union criticism as levelled by Lenin and others now holds less fundamental purchase. In the case of the RMT, who broke with the Labour Party more than twenty years ago, the vestiges of social-democratic reformism no longer claim any necessary determination over their outlook. Granted, inheritances persist, but these are merely formal, without any direct grounding relation, signifiers which have lingered past their point of concrete determination yet still persist on the mythic level as mechanisms for providing self-conception, situating oneself within a tradition, and so on. The actual commitment to the reinforcement of baseline standards of living are now, as made very apparent by the present Labour Government, no longer guaranteed by the ‘reformist’ party or state, whatever its projected intentions might be. Today’s reformists are, as much as the money-manager ‘capitalists’, materially incapable of providing relief or sustenance to organised labour through the strike. The quality of the trade union therefore must be reconsidered, especially given that, in the West, militant trade unions have persisted longer than both formal social-democracy and the Communist party-form as forces for the advancement of labour’s discrete interests. This is not at all to preclude the future development of a Party or some contemporary iteration thereof, only to say that with the conditions we have before us a critical reassessment of prior criticism is warranted. At the present juncture, we in the labour movement ought to limit ourselves to what we have at our disposal, and what we have is not a Party, either social-democratic or Communist, but a militant trade union whose members are intimately enmeshed in the determinate sites of valorisation from the domestic vantage.
Before proceeding, it’s necessary to lay out a few basic points on how labour engenders productive development. In classical political economy, including the tradition emanating from classical Marxism, capital is taken as the active term while labour is subordinate, rendered as a material upon which capital operates. In the 1960s Mario Tronti initiated a ‘Copernican inversion’ of this schema: “We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second.” Tronti initiates a line of enquiry which begins from the class struggle, with capitalist development as a reactive, secondary term. On this account, the historical record of capitalist restructuring cannot be seen as the autonomous unfolding of technical or financial rationality but as a chain of responses to the concrete and consistent pressure of the activity of the working-class through its political work: The strike is where we can locate the active site of revolutions in the forces and relations of production, occuring invariably – at greater or lesser degrees of immediate intelligibility – as capital’s answer to labour.
The working-class therefore assumes the responsibility of being a class-for-itself in the withdrawal of its participation in the valorisation circuit at points where that withdrawal is most consequential, and that what defines productivity in the more concrete sense is precisely the significance of a strike in relation to the economy overall. It is from this partiality, rather than from any presupposed universality borrowed from extraneous or secondary concepts, that the class constructs its sovereignty; “to discover anew what our side is and to base oneself on it so as to construct our own partial point of view, or rather to redefine the partiality of the point of view and reconstruct, from that, the consistency, the force, the organised force, the potentiality/power, of a side” (Tronti, Dello spirito libero, 2015).
This is then how we can re-read the older critiques of trade unionism on a novel basis, more commensurate with our own unique period. Lenin's argument in What Is To Be Done? that trade union consciousness left to itself produces malformed economistic consciousness, Gramsci's argument in the Prison Notebooks that the trade union reproduces economic-corporate forms within civil society, and the early Tronti’s own argument that the trade union functions as capital's internal mediation of labour-power, while holding a degree of persistent veracity in certain respects, all locate meaning within the institutional configuration that produced them, being the trade union embedded in the reformist social-democratic project. Given that today the trade union is no longer necessarily an institutional extension of reformism and the decisive site of valorisation has relocated from the domestic factory, has extended itself across the whole of the global supply chain, these critiques require reformulation.
In our period, the strike – being the sustained refusal of value-generating labour towards the ends of a concession – is still essentially coherent, still serves as the motive force of real economic development. However, the logic and scope of the strike requires readjustment in order to lift itself from the procedural doldrums of meagre wage increases, towards unearthing the theoretical-strategic ground which may grant a decisive capacity to act in respect of present forces and relations of production. For the logic of the strike to be readjusted, organised labour would need to shift its focus away from procedural demands regarding wages and conditions – concessions which, as already established by explicating the real nature of today’s wage-form, would invariably depreciate through the course of economic development along its present trajectory. In short, it doesn’t actually matter how high your wage is if the content of your pay packet is merely the recirculation of debt.
As the administered credit system absorbs the surplus product of rising productivity through fictitious asset inflation, wage increases as presently denominated inevitably depreciate against the background of that redistribution, leaving labour’s real purchasing power static/declining relative to aggregate social wealth. From this we can locate the demand for debt cancellation, for instance, as a claim on the whole of social wealth, therefore referring on the level of agitation to the real object of the strike, even if on the discrete formal level it isn’t annunciated as such. Government bonds, claims on future tax revenue – and therefore an aggregate claim on the future surplus value generated by the national productive apparatus – may be agitated towards as an instance within the credit system where domestic organised labour can most proactively intervene. The capacity for the Bank of England, or any central bank, to purchase sovereign debt means that the state can – according to the internal logic of the financial system – create the money required to service its own obligations, thus intelligibly collapsing the distinction between debt and money creation, and revealing the socialised character of the administered credit system.1
Organised labour levelling demands directly at central banks, recognised as the institutions which underwrite the entire process for the reproduction of the credit regime, then affords organised labour a means of pursuing its own sovereign demands. The Bank of England is, for agitational purposes, the ‘responsible party’ by which the present ephemerality of wages, the destabilised reproduction of baseline living standards, the grinding away of an already decomposed social-democratic settlement, and the breakdown of the worker-citizen formation in contemporary Britain materially arise.
From this, a strategic form begins to take shape: A persistent notion amongst militants in the labour movement is that of the necessity for general strike, an inheritance belonging to a long-since-foreclosed epoch of industrial syndicalism but still carried through as tradition in the varying tendencies of militant labour politics. The concept of the general strike ultimately presupposes, given the conditions of its genesis, a working-class concentrated in heavy industry and in a nation-state capable of being brought to a halt within the confines of its own borders – as discussed previously, a more adequate articulation of this would be the generalised supply chain strike, a coordinated refusal led by logistics workers and directed at the physical chokepoints of the circulation of commodities, with demands addressed directly to central banks wherein, for the distended chain of claims upon claims of future valorisation, the buck stops. Such a strike would necessarily be international, or at the very least continental in its scope, given that the supply chain is global, irreducible to its parts, and the political goal of such a strike is, in the first instance, the forced revelation of the international administered credit system in its dependence on physical production. In the event of container traffic passing through the Red Sea falling by ninety-percent-or-more, creditworthiness assessments across the whole set of firms dependent on that traffic are disturbed, thus forcing the administered credit system to reveal its fundamentally socialised political character as the geopolitical/economic guarantor of global supply-chain continuity for the reproduction of the administered credit regime. Houthi actions over the last three years have, without any such intention, conducted an empirical demonstration of this fact; a homologous exercise of leverage by organised logistics labour, on terms set by labour itself, would elevate this chokepoint leverage into a means of forging a new qualitative world-historical determination by and for organised labour itself.
The three geopolitical tendencies surveyed above all pose the activity of the working-class as derivative of struggles whose content is decided elsewhere: by the oppressed nation, by the counter-hegemony, or by the homeland and its ‘strategic partners’. A working-class geopolitics is something which the class constitutes itself, first of all in recognising through its own activity its reality as sovereign subject, then by imposing the claims of this sovereignty. Beginning, at the very least theoretically, from the standpoint of the working-class in its potential and capacity for engendering a generalised supply chain strike, the ephemeral and secondary social inheritances of the movement, whether patriotism, internationalism, anti-imperialism, multipolarism, third-worldism, or what-have-you, may be sufficiently interrogated so that their Marxist and working-class content can be isolated, re-articulated, removed from the dross of dead forms and invested with determinate import and application as part of the self-directed struggle for labour’s sovereignty.
By way of immediate historical instances, the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid crisis transferred revenue shortfalls onto sovereign balance sheets, and any potential large-scale student debt crisis in Britain would almost certainly be resolved through the same basic mechanism. From this vantage, sovereign debt is then the ultimate guarantor of the other debt categories, being the point at which administered credit reveals its socialised character most explicitly, regardless of the inherited reified market forms wherein debt circulates.