Erdogan_Mayayo writes:

"The Saturated Generic Identity of the Working Class"

An Interview with Alain Badiou

[Alain Badiou gave this interview on the occasion of a conference titled "Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?" The conference was held at the University of Washington in February, 2006. Most of the following questions were prepared by Nicolas Veroli, who could not be present. Diana George conducted the interview.]

Q: I'd like to ask you about your political and intellectual trajectory from the mid 60s until today. How have your views about revolutionary politics, Marxism, and Maoism changed since then?

Badiou: During the first years of my political activity, there were two fundamental events. The first was the fight against the colonial war in Algeria at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. I learned during this fight that political conviction is not a question of numbers, of majority. Because at the beginning of the Algerian war, we were really very few against the war. It was a lesson for me; you have to do something when you think it's a necessity, when it's right, without caring about the numbers.

The second event was May 68. During May 68, I learned that we have to organize direct relations between intellectuals and workers. We cannot do that only by the mediation of parties, associations, and so on. We have to directly experience the relation with the political. My interest in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution during the end of 60s and the beginning of the 70s, was this: a political conviction that organizes something like direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

I'll recapitulate, if you like. There were two great lessons: It's my conviction today that political action has to be a process which is a process of principles, convictions, and not of a majority. So there is a practical dimension. And secondly, there is the necessity of direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Decline of the American Empire"

John Chuckman

The rise now of China, Japan, Europe, and others – India, Korea, and to some extent Russia and Brazil – means the United States must be relatively diminished on the world stage, much as an only child whose mother just gave birth to quintuplets.

The United States is loosing its capacity as supplier of many useful things to the world. This role is being seized by China and others. The American working class, which briefly achieved the status of world's working-class aristocracy after World War II — industrial workers who enjoyed homes, cars, long vacations, and even boats — has seen real wages declining for many years. It works against rising competitors who can now deliver the benefits of their much lower costs to the world owing to the phenomenon of globalization. American manufacturing jobs are moving to the lower-cost places, replaced at home if at all by relatively low-wage service jobs.

"Economies of Affectivity"

Juan Martín Prada

Life and Biopolitics

It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that we are in the "biological
century", judging by the intense development and the dimension of the
achievements attained in recent years in some of the life sciences, such as
Genomics and Biotechnology. However, let us not forget that the increasingly
more efficient knowledge of the biological processes or genetic
determinations of life and its functional mechanisms is only a small part of
biopolitical action, whose real capacity for regulation is much more
extensive, spanning all of the vital processes that ultimately make up the
collective production of subjectivity. Thus, the capacity to improve or
transform bodies or the biological conditions of a life are no longer
prevalent among the keys of biopolitics but rather, more than anything else,
the production and reproduction of ways of living.

Therefore, the permanent questioning of the limits of what is natural and of
human ethics as regards genetic manipulation or the fact that the scientific
industries aimed at these areas of work should be the most probable
environment for the future capitalism revolutions[1] to take place, are just
a minimum number of problems within the extremely complex series of
biopolitical practices with which any exercise of power is integrated with
the logics of vitality (and from which it would be non-differentiable).

Kim Müller writes

Proletarian Management:
Informal Workplace Organization
Kim Müller

The emancipation of the working class can not only be conquered by the working class themselves but the emancipating practices of the working class are of its own making too. So the question about workers autonomy isn’t primarily a political question but a question about organization, and this article deals with concrete and actual workers autonomy and how it exist in Sweden today in the 21st century.

Our main thesis is that the workplace struggles are not first and foremost happening through the mediation of the unions, but through the informal organization that often tend to take place among fellow workers. However, this organization is not something that creates itself; it has to be produced, and can therefore be developed and extended. Our basic assumption has always been that the potentiality of radical anti-capitalist workers’ struggle exist where it is actually taking place. Today this struggle is not carried out under the regime of the unions, but through informal workplace organization, and it is the independent, informal, and immediate character of this struggle that makes it truly radical and anti-capitalist.