History has been buried in the sand of a present without end. A present replete with wars and disasters constituting its own horizon: even more wars and disasters, yet again the hottest year on record, even more crises again and again. Capitalist space-time has spread throughout the world. Upon globalized production there has been superimposed a global temporal unification, notably via the internet and the synchronized network of production. Within this space-time, we are captive, isolated, and in competition against each other in submission to work. The experience of the COVID lockdown was one of the most concrete examples of this: a unified space-time that connects individuals who are increasingly isolated one from another.
The capitalists have spent the last 50 years in restructuring, by trial and error, the productive apparatus leading us to the current international division of labor. With the worldwide integration of production there are millions of proletarians, living sometimes thousands of kilometers away from each other, who work together at the same time, who are linked by screens, organized through platforms and who are paid on a piecework basis. This is also reflected in the remainder of the work and in the entire organization of society. Although we are in different places and locations, we now live in a single space-time, in a single mine-factory-warehouse-dump-world. A single civilization of pallets, containers, and tires, used to distribute goods as well as to build barricades. Capital is not just the current civilization. It is a terminus. The trajectory is clear: if humanity continues on the course it is headed, it will drown. Capitalism carries along this cold and steely fate, in a state of permanent acceleration.
This present without a future is strongly shaped by the development of algorithmic technologies. This reorganization of capitalism implies a new confrontation between imperialist blocs with shifting alliances, for the negotiation of trade agreements, for control of strategic minerals, for access to energy… Capital reduces the world to a set of resources and commodities. As in a video game, a forest is nothing more than a number of potential planks; a mountain, a few kilos of gold; clouds, water suspended in the air to be captured before they cross the border, and the same goes for rivers and groundwater. To take control over these resources, the ruling classes are multiplying wars.
As far as the working class is concerned, all states are turning into one-stop shops for distributing strikes of the baton, of tear gas, and much worse: armies are modernizing and preparing for conflicts that military leaders euphemistically describe as “hybrid,” which in practical terms means that they are organizing to repress us by presenting our movements around the world as the result of foreign manipulation. In the Western bloc, uprisings will be accused of being pro-Russian. In Russia, they will be accused of being pro-European. We see the same refrain from Hong Kong to France, from Iran to Colombia, from Kazakhstan to the United States or Sudan. This same mechanism of division into blocs is being used everywhere to stifle revolts.
States also seek to use war to extinguish or at least to freeze social conflicts under the nationalist consensus. Wars require states to mobilize and repress us, while uprisings indicate weak consent to war and weak support for the state. Uprisings and wars thus draw a global map of the relationship between states and populations in the face of the evolution of capitalism today.
Managing shortages, emphasizing national sovereignty, promising peace and making war—this is the horizon for all political leaders. In this international environment, the capitalist right is on the offensive. The left praises the status quo, promises social peace and the defense of institutions; in short, like any good citizen, it plays the “good cop”… until the bad cop returns. And the list is long: Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Meloni, Milei, Modi, Putin, Trump… In some parts of the world, it is through the construction of a macho and racist popular bloc supporting the rich and the nation that bourgeois power, centered on defending the industrial interests of extractive capital, landowners, and tech companies, maintains itself for a time. This strategy serves to promote the crushing and subjugation of the majority: our class.
In this strange modern novel, the proletariat no longer knows if it exists, but knows that it is losing every battle. Since the USSR and its collapse, the false banner of a “workers’ government” has been in crisis. The political and ideological revolution is in crisis. Socialists, Marxist-Leninists, fundamentalists of various religions, and nationalists from all countries claimed to “put politics in the driver’s seat” and build a sovereign and independent state capable of directing the economy.
But these ideologies of control, recuperation, and repression of revolutionary movements betray even their meager promises when they find themselves confronted with the task of exercising power, which boils down to the management of capital and the ministry of the interior/department of homeland security.
Political identities are another by-product of this crisis of ideologies. They form a mosaic of one of the latest narratives of capitalist modernity, that of individual powerlessness linked to the negation of any collective revolutionary perspective. Thus, it is the reign of “every man for himself,” “our community over others,” or exacerbated singularities. Whereas revolution spreads through the identification with the struggle and its extension, the watchwords of these currents are “each one at home” and “strategic alliances.” These are counter-revolutionary devices that function as fireproof doors against our movements.
Because one of the dynamics of these movements is precisely to produce new forms of identification, which seek to name what is the common in struggle, a “We” like that of the Yellow Vests, which articulates and names the constitution of the class through the struggle against our social condition. This dynamic—as we have experienced in situ—is fundamental for the struggle against racism, sexism, etc., within movements, and is an indispensable condition for the growth of our collective strength. Where the left offers only morality and appeals to the State, movements are the theater of the active overcoming of social roles and racist divisions, based on the extension of the struggle and the rejection of what weakens us, starting with reactionary ideologies that seek to divide us between nationals and foreigners, that want to send women “back to their place,” etc., in short, which push for a return to the existing order. But nothing is possible, or quickly fades away, without attacking work, without collectively organizing all the tasks of social reproduction, from childcare to caring for the sick. This is what we call “revolutionary extension.”
Nationalism is the horizon of defeat
According to the various political proposals that currently dominate the public space, victory would mean rebuilding the nation. In other words, these proposals bid us to renew the “social contract” between the national community and the State, whatever their political tendencies, they define an inside and an outside: in this respect, these discourses are always nationalist, regardless of their political affiliation. For some, this will be in the language of the left and its ideological signaling, old and new: “woke”; “green”; “anti-fascist”; etc.: in short, progressivism. For others, often classified as “right-wing,” it will be “anti-wokeism”; “tradition”; “defending the family”: in short, reactionary ideology. In this cultural clash between progressivism and reaction, what they both propose is to represent us in order to govern us. To use our movements as a vehicle to take over the state, understood as the only instrument capable of changing the world or, at the very least, to make the country great again as if this would protect us from the economic and military turmoil of the world.
The movement can thus be absorbed into a Constituent Assembly, as in Chile; and into the victory of left-wing blocs in elections, as in Colombia or Sri Lanka. Social pacification and social-democratic normality pave the way for neo-fascist coups.
The various discourses of those who try to control our struggles, who claim to give them a “lesser evil” oriented agenda, who rely on the rhetoric of climate and social urgency, etc., are inept. They serve only to maintain order. They send us back to stand by and its logical outcome, disappointment. However, another dynamic is at work: that of general reversal. The strength of our uprisings does not lie in the political platforms, parties, and trade unions that channel and bury them, it lies in the refusal to submit ourselves to capitalist political realism.
As the pandemic crisis has shown, the consequences of social events (production blockages, disasters, etc.) are now globalized: our period is that of unification of the proletarian experience on a global scale.
The history of the past was made up of different space-time bubbles bringing together only tens or hundreds of millions of people at most. Each bubble lived in a relative isolation. Today, billions of us live under capitalism. Every day, the proletariat lives and experiences billions of lives; every year condenses the equivalent of a past century. It is this immense accumulation of experiences that makes the algorithmic transition of capital possible. This requires extracting and then transforming our lives into a data set which in turn can also be exploited to fuel this transition.
For example, every moment, millions of people drive vehicles and are guided around by connecting their smartphones to Google Maps. They geolocate themselves in real time, indicate their position, and follow the instructions of a global operator, which is not just a map but a device that centralizes, regulates, controls, and predicts our behavior, even suggesting stores where we might shop. All of this data is also used by delivery platforms, mobilized in wars… we could go on and on. This immense infrastructure of servers, satellites, smartphones, and vehicles, powered by various energy sources, requiring mining, industrial labor camps, and various forms of devastation, is a part of the global machine that captures us, imprisons us, and forces us to feed it more and more.
Various reformist projects are emerging in response to this transition. Some claim to lash out at a pseudo-techno-feudalism and take the opportunity to distinguish between good and bad capitalism. We’ve already seen that with those who were talking about regulating the finance. Others promise to use algorithms to plan production in a “democratic” way. These are all capitalist projects. Managers and nationalists of all stripes promise only one thing: to ensure that others suffer the worst consequences of the fires of hell they are fueling. Against all these apologists for capital, we reaffirm that we are on the side of the destruction of the economy and the State.
There is no need to theorize about it: it is already what all our struggles do as soon as they gain momentum. It is what the exploited of the world do in every uprising. Everywhere, when things start heating up, our class attacks state and capitalist infrastructures. So, we block, burn, cut off, destroy… And we will continue to do so. But to what aim? We need orientation, foresight, strategy. We need to think collectively about the prospect of victory, as we walk the paths of struggle.
We are more than the sum of all the oppressed. As a class; as a point of unity in the struggle; for its extension in time, space, and society, we are the only perspective for a way out of oppression and exploitation. Together, we have the interest of social and total revolution. We will not get lost in an endless list of what needs to be destroyed. Such lists are always reductive and create separation instead of continuity. This leads to the misconception that it is possible to end part of the problem without solving it entirely, and then, one thing leading to another, we prioritize and end up with “partial fields of struggles” each owned by a galaxy of competing political tendencies. But let’s say anyway that we want to tear down everything that keeps this world standing. The family and the state, money and prison, school and work, justice and the police, nations and religions… It is the offensive against all of this, against the capitalist social relationship in its entirety, that we call revolution, along with the production of a new and free society, or rather a myriad of new and free societies through the revolutionary opening up of possibilities.
Let’s be the terminal crisis
The worldwide revolution is the only new development capable of pulling us out of this present without a future, the only form of “crisis” that is not a continuation, but a destruction of the trap we are locked into. This is not the first time in human history that revolutionary waves have shaken the world. Since the emergence of the proletariat, this is how our strength and the global dimension of our struggle manifest themselves. The stakes at hand are, that it’s in our capacity – we who are nothing, the proletarians – to find a way out for the whole species in this great global escape-room that is contemporary capitalism.
In and against this immediacy of capital, our class struggles and fights, in the fog, without a horizon. To pierce this fog, to work towards the spread of a new revolutionary wave, for its synchronization on a global scale, for the creation of a chain of events leading the whole world into a revolutionary process: this is our wild idea!