To defeat capitalism as it exists in today’s United States, something we’ll need to account for is just how many of the masses have been pushed out of “normal” life. As I’ve discussed, when a massive proportion of the people born after 2000 are absolutely not on track to start families, we face an unprecedented kind of obstacle towards getting the masses organized. This is the category of individuals who big tech, the new center of monopoly finance capital, seeks to discard like past “excess” populations have been discarded under capitalism. But the way in which these tech centers aim to shove them out is also unprecedented, because they’re becoming neutralized not through force but through sedation. The solution the “tech bros” have for these left-behinds is to keep them passive through digital hallucinations, with AI pornography (largely in the form of simulated relationships) being an increasingly prevalent neutralization tool.
To overcome this problem, we can draw from history; the parts of history that have to do with how past working-class organizers rallied those who’ve been rendered “excess.” The particular manifestation of this issue that we’re seeing today—where as a rule younger people have stopped reproducing—may be something we’ve never dealt with before. But we have dealt with massive proportions of people who’ve found themselves politically unorganized, whether due to unemployment, suppression of unions, or other forms of class warfare by the capitalists. Whatever the surface-level reasons why these populations haven’t been organized, the real problem has been lack of access to a means for institutional proletarian resistance; communists are capable of organizing anyone among our class allies, including the unemployed, if we know how to build the right infrastructure.
The workers movement will either solve the question of how to bring in today’s unorganized, or lose the next battles within the class war. Wrote William Z. Foster about what an existential question this is for our cause:
The organization of the unorganized is a life and death question for the labor movement. To bring the millions into the unions is necessary not only for the protection of the unorganized workers, and to further class ends in general, but also to safeguard the life of the existing organizations…The left wing alone has a realization of the tremendous social significance of the organization of the unorganized. It speaks primarily in the name of the unskilled and semi-skilled who make up the mass on the outside of the unions, and it habitually leads a militant struggle to unionize them. It is the champion of industrial unionism and the Labor Party, the fate of both of which is bound up in the general question of organizing the unorganized. It realizes that only when the great masses are mobilized in the unions can effective assaults be made against capitalism. Hence, it is the life of every organizing campaign, and it must be such, whether these campaigns are carried on through the medium of the existing trade unions, or by the launching of new organizations.
The unorganized of today may be different from those of Foster’s time, but the essence of what they need is the same: a structure, and a clear mission. In the face of the class enemy as it primarily exists now, the mission we must offer the “left-behinds” is one of defiance against the anti-human. We need to connect with the desire that the left-behinds feel—even if they’ve become demoralized—to stop our technocratic elites from defining the future. The “tech bros” want us to concede the future to them, and we must refuse to surrender. This is the message that Marxists need to put forth if we want our movement to adapt to the new reality; the reality where our techno-social upheaval has interrupted biological reproduction, and created a class of people with no role in the future the elites have planned.
In practical terms, we should be looking to the past for guidance on how to carry out our present organizing task. We should be bringing back the unemployed councils, building dual power through serving our communities, advancing the revolutionary cause within the unions, and constructing independent worker organizations. None of these historical practices are to be discarded, just because capitalism has evolved compared to how it used to be. But these newer developments within capitalism must be accounted for, as must be their effects on family, relationships, and even platonic socialization. An ever-growing amount of the masses have been cut off from these things, and we cannot let this translate into a lack of will for joining in the class struggle. The way to overcome the obstacles towards organizing that come with this is by introducing a new means for agitation, one that’s specific to the type of inequality which our modern “left-behinds” are facing.
This is the kind of agitation where we offer those who’ve been discarded by the system a way to combat the designs of the elitist actors which are building an empire on top of the majority’s suffering. An empire of gentrifying boutique establishments in impoverished rural areas, tech monopoly headquarters next to low-income neighborhoods, and imported high-paid tech workers amid massive unemployment and dropping wages. These are the realities that the post-Covid generation sees. They’re what come about when the core of imperialism has decided to sacrifice its population via engineered economic degrowth, while still facilitating a kind of “growth” that’s concentrated entirely in profiting from a dystopian tech infrastructure.
Our increasingly post-child, post-family society is what happens after financial speculation has become the central driving force in economics, and then the “collective west” has come to have its living standards get worse with every generation. Of course, falling living standards alone don’t explain what’s happening right now, because impoverished people have been having children all throughout the history of civilization; the reason why today’s decline in living conditions has destroyed the family is that under a system built on financial speculation, introducing such a variable will kill normal human relations. The post-World War II boomer social structure was dependent on finance capital’s superprofits being sufficiently spread out among the general population; as soon as this patronage shrunk, and the cost of living exploded, starting a family became unreachable for the average person.
This is where the experience of these left-behinds will collide with the interests of those who are still receiving such patronage, and being bribed by U.S. imperialism through high wages. Beyond the aging boomers who became successful early in life, there is still an aristocracy of labor that’s younger; but this aristocracy exists in a different, more transient form than its past “yuppie” counterparts. Among its ranks are the highly paid tech workers who the Trump administration is importing from global imperial hubs, and the tech transplants who are taking advantage of the rise in remote work by moving to the struggling rural areas.
Our ruling class is deploying these lackeys for surveillance capitalism and the technological war machine; then having the media paint an absurdly elite-centered picture of modern America, one where the aristocracy’s insulated bubble supposedly represents today’s collective experience. All the while, the “excess” languish in an economy that was cut off from its industrial vitality long ago. The “excess” absolutely desire to overthrow the ones keeping them in this bleak state, but they’ll only take action if we give them the tools to do so.
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