On ‘Welcome to the future: this strike wave is just the start’ (WR)

https://notesfrombelow.org/article/welcome-future

This is the best thing I’ve read regarding the current political situation. I find its least articulated point to be both the most difficult and the most important one. Expressed as a question, this point would be How, in the current situation and its likely future, to move from economic demands to political ones? The fact of raising this question makes this text an unusual one in a situation where most Left thinking seems to assume that the present task is to build rank-and-file organisation as new layers of workers come into the struggle for a living wage. The Notes from below text states quite clearly that given that economic growth in the UK is impossible--under current conditions and for the foreseeable future--, real gains by working people will mean taking from one class and giving to another. In other words that the struggle for a decent life is now political, in a way that hasn’t been the experience of living generations.

But the text treats this as an incremental process: over time, workers will discover that employers (including the state) cannot give them what they need and as they do so they will need to organise differently, for instance in committees of reps reaching across several work places. Long spans of the history of workers’ struggles are at stake here, but what I want to draw attention to is something else. That is that the transition from wage demands to political demands is posed as a linear process. Ok, history does not move linearly but in leaps, but like any ‘correct’ statement that falls into banality.

Supposing we think of the curve of workers’ struggles as intersecting with another curve, that of capital. What if capital’s need for growth, in the context of planetary climate crisis, global competition for extractive resources and the geopolitical spread of falling rates of profit, translates into increasingly irrational behaviours of ruling classes? (wars, ecologically destructive industry, Caesarism and fascism in the political). And what if capital’s process is subject to sudden accelerations? (Ukraine war and its lateral outcomes, other present and future wars).

But that kind of language, too, can fall—I was going to say fall into correct description, which is true, but it’s the temporal arc we’re inside of, the intersection of the temporal arcs of subjective struggle and of capital’s infinite greed that is difficult and requires work because the narrative of 20c revolutions is of no use, is merely food for nostalgia or melancholy or for desire of being right. One can speak of tectonic shifts, quantum leaps, but the point is there’s work to be done. Mourning, if that means actually abandoning the thing that’s been lost. What does that look like?

‘A world lost, a world unsuspected, beckons to new places’. This is W C Williams in ‘The Descent’, a poem from the late 1930s.