nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

to live within rather than against and beyond our virtual poverty, our proletariancondition.Today, after the burst of the bubble of debt-inflated dreams of progress,the blatant value-destruction and ‘anti-production’ of capital means that thenarratives of entrepreneurialism are fading in attraction. Decades of fallingor stagnant wages in Europe and the US meant that workers could no longerreproduce themselves at their level of need and desire, but had to take on debtto do so. 45 In 2007-8 this social crisis became a crisis for capital, which soondisplaced the burden to the state, which is now making us all pay throughcuts to the social wage. 46 Whether it squeezes the conditions of its workers,swaps them for cheaper and more compliant ones, or replaces workers withlabour-saving machinery (or expensive machinery with cheaper workers), itis clear that capital cares only for reproducing its parts as long as it is profitable.When I speak of the teleology of capital it is another way of saying thatthe reproduction of the capital body is really about sustaining its principleof growth: the process of valorisation and accumulation of capital. Afteryears of reproducing ourselves on insufficient wages supplemented by debtand welfare, the crisis makes it clear that capital and the state are not justsites of our material re- production, but of our non-reproduction. In otherwords, we are forced to take on more ‘responsibility’ for our own reproduction.But how we do that remains a choice: do we do so in a way that keeps usdependent on capital and state (lowering expectations, making ‘sacrifices’), orin a way where we become more combative, more autonomous? The call ofrecent movements is to join the many that continue and renew the old struggleof taking what we need collectively, rather than asking for it individually.Political self-organisation today increasingly has to learn what capital has alwaysknown: how to pursue one’s goals through fraud, creative accountancy,funds divergence and bankruptcy, and how to appropriate what we need forour self-reproduction and self-organisation. In short: how to operate withouthaving our activities overdetermined by debt and wage labour?...today in movementWhen people and media mobilized around the occupation of a symbolic centreof power (Tahrir, Zuccotti, Puerta del Sol) in some sense they did ‘occupyan abstraction’, the symbolic heart of the capital. Other occupations weremore direct: Occupy Oakland blocked the harbour, and when workers in thetextile factories of the Nile Delta went on strike, they managed locally andtemporarily to stop the practices of real abstraction inherent in capitalist productionand exchange.214