>>3 well you are saying that "Marx predicted this!" but did he really? I find a few issues with your analysis. In the first place, I don't think you've done enough to justify why this completely restructured "working class" still holds the same character as the "working class" which Marx discussed. Even in this text, he's constantly referring to factory work and agriculture, absolutely nothing to do with today's gig economies, speculative economies, attention economies, bullshit jobs, digital sharecropping, etc. A completely outdated, alien world. He is actively referring to "the industrial reserve army". Completely irrelevant to our post-industrial economy. Of course in classic Marx fashion, he goes on a tirade about how capitalism is diminishing all the holy aspects of glorious labor. Marx can never decide whether he loves or hates work. You can always find some quote where he admonishes the idea of labor and toil, to debunk claims of his productivism. Nonetheless it remains core to his theory, inextricable from his entire premise of production as the heart of everything. NEETs are produced by capital merely as a reserve army of potential industrial labor (again everything is "potential" with Marx). So then what happens to this reserve army when there is no more industrial labor to perform?
You have said workers had a "shared sense of collective identity" as workers, and now that's disappeared. But that collective identity as workers which for you is a powerful weapon against capitalism, is precisely the subjectivity produced by capitalism's reduction of people to their labor power. Perhaps it is the case that "workers" (or in this case non-workers) have rejected this capitalist subjectivity, at least in some part. A refusal to be reduced to their relation to production. I mean this is the classic error of Marx, where he reproduces the capitalist logic of production or productivism. "Nooo the mass is refusing to identify itself purely in terms of it's relation to production", this is an expression of power from the mass, neutralizing any attempt at representation. Marxists can't deal with this because it is active strategy rather than virtual energy to be realized at some mysterious time in the future.
This restructuring of the working class, isn't it possible that it has been restructured into something entirely different? To use a trite example, the programmer who works on her own laptop owns her means of production, and yet is still somehow a worker, since she participates in the wage labor relation. So the wage labor relation must in fact (contra marx) precede property relations in this instance. I could go on for a long time on the fundamental changes in capitalism from the time of Dickens which Marx was critiquing, but I don't think I have to really. I think it's plain to see by just looking around you. I'll just ask you again on your final point, how can "the contradictions" possibly become any deepened. Or rather, when is this crisis supposed to happen? Isn't contemporary capitalism in a constant state of crisis? At what point does this working class wake up? What could that even entail? Striking workers, are they NEETs? So are they surplus labor in that moment? Is it not possible that the refusal of work is an active strategy, rather than a passive reaction? I have come to dislike the Marxist view of the mass as passive with only virtual, potential power, summoned by some arcane ritual called "organizing", which no one can actually know what it means or how to achieve it. Everything is always "But that's to be considered later."
well you are saying that "Marx predicted this!" but did he really? I find a few issues with your analysis. In the first place, I don't think you've done enough to justify why this completely restructured "working class" still holds the same character as the "working class" which Marx discussed. Even in this text, he's constantly referring to factory work and agriculture, absolutely nothing to do with today's gig economies, speculative economies, attention economies, bullshit jobs, digital sharecropping, etc. A completely outdated, alien world. He is actively referring to "the industrial reserve army". Completely irrelevant to our post-industrial economy. Of course in classic Marx fashion, he goes on a tirade about how capitalism is diminishing all the holy aspects of glorious labor. Marx can never decide whether he loves or hates work. You can always find some quote where he admonishes the idea of labor and toil, to debunk claims of his productivism. Nonetheless it remains core to his theory, inextricable from his entire premise of production as the heart of everything. NEETs are produced by capital merely as a reserve army of potential industrial labor (again everything is "potential" with Marx). So then what happens to this reserve army when there is no more industrial labor to perform?
You have said workers had a "shared sense of collective identity" as workers, and now that's disappeared. But that collective identity as workers which for you is a powerful weapon against capitalism, is precisely the subjectivity produced by capitalism's reduction of people to their labor power. Perhaps it is the case that "workers" (or in this case non-workers) have rejected this capitalist subjectivity, at least in some part. A refusal to be reduced to their relation to production. I mean this is the classic error of Marx, where he reproduces the capitalist logic of production or productivism. "Nooo the mass is refusing to identify itself purely in terms of it's relation to production", this is an expression of power from the mass, neutralizing any attempt at representation. Marxists can't deal with this because it is active strategy rather than virtual energy to be realized at some mysterious time in the future.
This restructuring of the working class, isn't it possible that it has been restructured into something entirely different? To use a trite example, the programmer who works on her own laptop owns her means of production, and yet is still somehow a worker, since she participates in the wage labor relation. So the wage labor relation must in fact (contra marx) precede property relations in this instance. I could go on for a long time on the fundamental changes in capitalism from the time of Dickens which Marx was critiquing, but I don't think I have to really. I think it's plain to see by just looking around you. I'll just ask you again on your final point, how can "the contradictions" possibly become any deepened. Or rather, when is this crisis supposed to happen? Isn't contemporary capitalism in a constant state of crisis? At what point does this working class wake up? What could that even entail?
Striking workers, are they NEETs? So are they surplus labor in that moment? Is it not possible that the refusal of work is an active strategy, rather than a passive reaction? I have come to dislike the Marxist view of the mass as passive with only virtual, potential power, summoned by some arcane ritual called "organizing", which no one can actually know what it means or how to achieve it. Everything is always "But that's to be considered later."