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The Fate of Composition

Part One | Part Three

Part Two: The Problem of Composition

Composition appears to us today as both agency and constraint, a divided appearance adequate to our mercurial times. Caught between the unyielding floor of ecological and social survival and the descending ceiling of economic growth, political activity tends to cluster around the poles of autonomy and compulsion, hope and despair. In Part One, we charted how the political content of “composition” tended to be fixed through the 20th and early 21st centuries by distinct political strategies developed out of particular historical and geographic conditions. The dual meaning of “composition” today is a product of these historical struggles. The mid-century militant workerist movement and operaismo furnished us with a concept of “composition” that we would characterize as primarily descriptive, though clearly the theorists of operaismo derived prescriptive significance from their clarifications, such that “composition” offered a heuristic to analyze and strategize a sequence of struggles. The late-20th and early 21st century turn away from the mass worker and towards the sphere of circulation provided us with a concept of “composition” that is fundamentally prescriptive, no longer fixed by historical circumstance and increasingly finding its normative expression in discrete campaigns or else a utopian withdrawal from the capitalist world.¹

We now return from this broadly historical sketch to the present. If workerists correctly diagnosed composition as a problem confronting the worker as an alien force and organization, it was a problem that for them delivered its own resolution in the form of political recomposition of the class and its activity. Today, the problem of composition does not seem deliver these sorts of clear-minded political resolutions. It gives the impression less of being a Gordian Knot than a Sisyphean task. The composition problem appears immediately as the problem of decomposition, social disintegration, and planetary metabolic catastrophe. It is for this reason that politics of escape or exit can appear so attractive. In what follows, we provide a detailed theoretical account of the problem of composition and various attempts to resolve it in the form of practical political strategies. We pay particular attention to Endnotes’ characterization of the “composition problem,” as the standard-bearer of this formulation, as well as the limits and inadequacies of their and their fellow travelers’ treatment of the problem. We take up Hugh Farrell and the “strategy of composition” with more theoretical and historical scrutiny, given that Farrell is attempting to overcome the conditions set by Endnotes, and especially because Farrell argues that this strategy finds its most adequate expression in territorial struggle. We will thus treat “territoriality” to a closer investigation here and in Part Three. We then turn to alternative analyses of the contemporary problem of composition, ones that largely reject Endnotes’ and other ultra-left or “communization” theories. We argue that these accounts are neo-workerist, but make important advances on the analytical and strategic value of composition, providing an “update,” so to speak, for our current conjuncture, even if these remain insufficient or even misguided. First, a historical note to set the scene.

Bucolic Bookends

If ours is the era of decomposition—of the problem of composition—we should start with a periodization. If there is something that the many theorists surveyed thus far might seem to agree on, it is that the term “composition,” whatever its ascribed meaning, found its historical expression and social validity from the mid-20th century. The workerist account of this was given in Part One. This is the account to which we subscribe, with some caveats: particular configurations of class composition and political strategy are expressions of histories of capitalist transition, de-agrarianization, patterns of development, and rates of economic growth. For these reasons, the politics of “composition” found their home in industrial regions that benefitted from late de-peasantization, rapid industrialization, technical organizations of production, and uneven, often racialized development, such as Detroit and Northern Italy.

In contrast, Kristen Ross argues that the mid-20th century break, which saw not only the re-emergence of worker militancy, but the peculiar feature of territorial struggle that nows seems to dominate political life, is best explained as when “people throughout the world began to realize that the tension between the logic of development and that of the ecological bases of life had become the primary contradiction of their lives.”² While perhaps not a truism, this is a banal observation that mistakes itself for an explanation. If ecological contradiction or metabolic crisis did indeed begin to present itself as something primary in the 1960s, it remains to be explained how and why, even in the most detailed histories of the “environmental movement.”³ More to the point, Ross offers no explanation of who “people throughout the world” are supposed to be. Such a homogenous characterization of political actors lends itself to the very specious claim that this mass political subject has come to a realization about either “the logic of development” or the “ecological bases of life,” both treated quite generally and abstractly. Evacuated as they are of any historical content, Ross is able to claim that this new political intelligence, which emerged in the 1960s, is the “the new and incontrovertible horizon of meaning of all political struggle.”⁴ The era of territory as praxis—the era of “composition” as subjectivity and program—is what she calls the “long 1960s.” Composition, in this sense, shared by Tiqqun/TIC, is a political consciousness and strategy emergent from relational subjectivity, a “continuation of sorts of the relational subjectivity often said to be at the heart of 60s politics.”⁵

It is betrays much that Kristin Ross and, following her, Mauvaise Troupe Collective, should date the era of the ZAD, of compositional strategy, not with the ZAD as such. Rather, Ross points to a struggle against another airport project from the mid-century, the Narita Airpot in Tokyo’s exurban hinterlands.⁶ Ross makes her periodization clear when she claims that this struggle—the Sanrizuka Struggle—was the first in a series of “battles of the second half of the twentieth century that reconfigure[d] the lines of conflict of an era.” We will dwell briefly on this claim, as it demonstrates how the periodization of Ross, MTC, and other adherents of “compositional struggles” is dissociated from capitalist laws of motion and historical development, leaving itself open to utopian engineering. How well do these cases—Sanrizuka and the ZAD—conform to Ross’s “long 1960s” of ecological consciousness? What is lost by reducing these struggles to their common features? Some background is warranted.

Post-war Japan was in the cross section of US military occupation, reconstruction efforts, and rapid economic growth.⁷ Another example of “late development,” efforts of state-led capitalist transition that began during the Meiji Restoration were only truly completed in the post-war era, the period of the “Japanese economic miracle.” Despite its small landmass and the destruction of feudal elites, Japan had a persistent peasantry that lasted in the countryside well into the 20th century. By the 1950s and 60s, depeasantization was carried through by state initiatives to reallocate labor from the countryside to the cities. Feudal relations had left a radical peasant tradition, but big push industrial transition and investments in heavy industry had left what remained of agrarian populations materially destitute. Agrarian struggles took a defensive character to preserve ways of life threatened by industrial development, from Sanrizuka and Shibayama to the protests of Minamata fishing communities against mercury poisoning.⁸ It is in this historical context of state-facilitated disease and displacement, overseen by the US military, that a constellation of forces converged in opposition to the Narita Airpot in the mid-1960s. Simply known as “Sanrizuka,” the struggle here emerged in lands of historical significance to feudal shogunate, lands later used for experimental agriculture during the Meiji Restoration. That these lands should be debased and dispossessed for the development of an adjacent airport with ties to US militarization and urban modernization informed the thrust of the struggle as one against proletarianization, agrarian depopulation, farm consolidation, and rural household decline. Given the limited geography of Japan, the state was largely disinterested in investments in agrarian productivity. The countryside was in a real sense being sacrificed for the development of industry.⁹ The organizational strategy of Sanrizuka was an effect of these conditions. Drawing in urban support from the radical student movement (Zengakuren) and the ostensible leadership of the reformed communist and socialist parties,¹⁰ the real coordination at Sanrizuka was the preserve of the Hantai Dōmei (“Opposition Alliance”). The Hantai Dōmei had organizational roots in the social relations of the rural hamlet (burakumin), which was under threat of dissolution. Through the Hantai Dōmei, opponents of the airport engaged in a wide-range of tactics, from tree-spiking, to protest, to blockades, to sabotage, to expropriation, to open conflict with police. It was an “all-out insurrection,” the apogee of Japan’s long 1960s.¹¹

The Hantai Dōmei was “compositional” in the sense employed by Ross, MTC, and now many others. Indeed, it could be thought of as the model of “composition,” even synonymous with it. As the paradigm of a territorial struggle composed of disparate partisans, Hantai Dōmei would not be superseded, for the theorists of “compositional strategy,” until the first occupations at the ZAD in 2008. Yet, note here the crucial historical periodization, the substantive bracketing offered by these two paradigmatic cases of strategies and tactics. The underlying threat to modes of reproduction and subsistence represented in the agrarian populations that constituted the core of these struggles would seem to unify this epoch. Each was preceded by a period of positive, though tenuous, prospects that were shattered by swift reversal of outcomes. This would seem to conform to the J-Curve model of social unrest, in which civil disturbances, rebellions, and revolutions are explained socio-historically when rising subjective expectations become suddenly frustrated by objective decline.¹² As we shall see, however, the J-Curve hypothesis tells only a partial story. A fuller historical picture requires attention to social composition in relation to capital. A comparative glance at the two paradigms—Sanrizuka and the ZAD—will make this more clear.

While Shōwa Era economic growth was concentrated in manufacturing and urbanization, this had the effect of weakening the power of rural landlords, something that the central government supported to increase agricultural productivity. While agriculture decreased in significance as a share of Japan’s GDP, the expansion of the Japanese Empire abroad and domestic industrialization was fueled through its agricultural sector. This delicate vestige of agrarian prestige was eroded by the Pacific War. When prospects for growth returned in the post-war era, it was at the expense of the agrarian population.¹³ However, as Makoto Itoh has argued, despite a radical reduction in agrarian population and demographic shift from primary to secondary and tertiary industries, the persistence of traditional forms of agrarian social reproduction was instrumental to Japanese development, allowing the state to reduce costs of social provision, relative to other industrial economies.¹⁴ As the case of Sanrizuka illustrates, these obstinate agrarian relations were also instrumental to organizational capacity throughout this cycle of struggle.

The French case shares some of these generic features. It too underwent a great rural exodus and upheaval of class relations in the countryside throughout post-war “Economic Miracle.” Farm consolidation was supported by the government to bolster agricultural productivity.¹⁵ By the 1970s, however, the resulting agricultural depopulation was counteracted by an opposite trend of urban to rural migration, which diversified the agrarian economy. This non-agricultural rural economic development was supported by the government, with agriculture itself eventually becoming a minor sector in the economic mix of the countryside to an extent unique among Western European industrial economies.¹⁶ This policy of mixed land use is central to the concept of bocage, which Ross and MTC urge is essential to the politics of “composition.”¹⁷ By 2008 though, the non-agricultural character of the countryside would only ensure its exposure to the crisis.¹⁸ Productivity in France, as in elsewhere in the advanced economies, had been in stagnation or steady decline for decades. This trend was reversed slightly in the second half of 1990s.¹⁹ This would prove short-lived. After the crisis, productivity gains were effectively wiped across all sectors.²⁰ Unemployment rose. The structural nature of the resulting fiscal crisis pressed the government towards implementation of austerity.²¹ It is in this context that costly and disruptive development projects, such as the Nantes airport, should seem so irrational and corrupt.

What is at play across this history is not simply “composition” around the defense of a threatened territory and its associated bocage of life ways. At the Hantai Dōmei of Sanrizuka, the tradition of peasant rebellions shaped not only the forms of struggle—its tactics and strategic investments—but also the substance of the struggle itself. It was to a certain extent a struggle against capital because it was a struggle against proletarianization and depeasantization—against subsumption into the material community. Here, Ross’ insistence that one finds the coordinates for “composition” in the Paris Commune, or in Marx’s letters to Zasulich on the communist prospects of the peasant mir,²² is perhaps more historically adequate. If there are “outlines of autonomous territory, the beginnings of a free commune” prefigured in “compositional” struggles, this might have been more readily apparent at Sanrizuka.²³ Yet, despite reference to Sanrizuka, or to the defense of Larzac, the paradigm of “composition” remains the case of the ZAD and to a lesser extent NoTAV. And here the case being made seems far less clear, far more specious in its assertions of autonomy, of prefiguration, of desertion and creation.²⁴ Unlike the Hantai Dōmei, the ZAD was not a place of defense against the encroachments of capital, but a geography and social fracture that is destituted and abject as already fully within the capital-relation, within its circuits of commodities, subsistence, and labor, even if those swallowed by their dependency on capital are not fully or evenly integrated into the process of production. It would seem the MTC and Ross forget Marx’s caveat in his letters to Zasulich: the potential of the mir to prefigure communism is limited by the extent to which it has been formally integrated and dissolved into capitalist relations of production and especially its state mediation.²⁵ The bocage against the state is little more than a mirage. It is a representation of escape, but no less a mediation in the reproduction of capital. What sets the terms of these two struggles is not a common solution to a common problem, but in fact superficially similar forms of struggle against historically separated social contents of capitalist expansion and contraction, of boom and crisis, fervent hope and abject pessimism. Without accounting for this longer arc of capital’s uneven development, MTC and Ross see Sanrizuka and the ZAD as part of the same cycles of struggle, when they in fact mark the opening and closing of an era. It is this paradoxically ahistorical thread that shows us the limit of “compositional strategy” as such, as a strategy on its own terms. Its terms are never its own. They are the terms of capital. They are historically organized, but remain substantively indeterminate. The extent to which composition forms a real organizational strategy is the extent to which composition is confronted as a fate, and in actual fact a nightmarish inheritance of history.

Coordinating and Demanding

Composition is a tradition of dead generations. It is in this sense that composition constitutes a problem to be confronted and overcome. The “problem of composition” is Endnotes’ initial characterization of the current limit of organizational methods in an era of stagnation, crisis, and austerity.²⁶ It is worth quoting at length the first appearance of “the problem of composition” in the their work, as this is what orient’s Farrell’s own project, along with many communist theorizations of revolutionary organization today.²⁷

“The composition problem names the problem of composing, coordinating or unifying proletarian fractions, in the course of their struggle. Unlike in the past — or at least, unlike in ideal-typical representations of the past — it is no longer possible to read class fractions as already composing themselves, as if their unity were somehow given ‘in-itself’ (as the unity of the craft, mass or ‘social’ worker). Today, no such unity exists; nor can it be expected to come into existence with further changes in the technical composition of production. In that sense, there is no predefined revolutionary subject. There is no ‘for-itself’ class-consciousness, as the consciousness of a general interest, shared among all workers. Or rather, such consciousness can only be the consciousness of capital, of what unifies workers precisely by separating them.”²⁸

We can see here the clear influence of the workerist conception of class composition that we outline in Part One. We can also see a prelude to Endnotes’ historicization of the “mass worker,” or more accurately, the rise and decline of the classical workers’ movement, around which such a representation of “worker” subjectivity can cohere as a product of a particular historical composition and tendency towards the massification of this subjectivity. For Endnotes, pace the periodization offered by Théorie Communiste or Négation, the basis of this “revolutionary subject” is found in not in “formal subsumption,” but the twinned process of economic expansion and de-peasantization, and the dissolution of old regime social structures. The rise of the “worker” and “worker identity” is thus an aspect of the rise of capitalism itself, which composes the worker as as the concentration of labor-power. Rising productivity throughout this long expansion is what gives an economic basis to the augmentation of worker power, whether in its representation in unions, councils, of parties. The period of the long crisis, with its erosion of productivity gains and virtually completed process of agrarian dispossession and de-peasantization, undermined this basis. The decline of the workers’ movement and the fragmentation of this particular composition—the one which bedazzled the minds of the best workerists—is a tendency of capitalist development itself.²⁹ The problem of composition is thus really expressed in the process of decomposition.³⁰

The dialectic of composition and decomposition is one of the basic preoccupations of Endnotes’ work, and can be found in analyses of gender, race, or “balkanization.”³¹ Their analysis of the composition problem keeps an eye towards strategy, and so tends to anticipate the question of what a “strategy of composition” might look like. The turn from descriptive to prescriptive is perhaps most clear in their presentation of the “coordination problem,” which to us seems little more than alternative phrasing. Here, the process of atomization gives way to the practical question of how to coordinate masses of fragmented beings—atomized, abstract humans—in the crucible of spontaneity. The fragmentation of belonging, identity, and subjectivity is the essential condition for this spontaneous self-activity, but it finds its limits in the problem of coordination—the composition problem, redux. If this mass of proletarian reflux can organize formal mediations of this decomposition, Endnotes wagers, then it can achieve the partisanship necessary for a rupture with capitalist relations of production.³² This is only an opening, however, and not the production of communism itself.³³ Still, it is in this moment of rupture that something like a communist party has any real historical purchase. It is little more than a partisanship of the rupture, a Party of Anarchy, if you like, that emerges through the conjuncture in which the process of materially negating capitalist relations is generalized through a partisan coordination.³⁴ This party is neither a formal organization, nor a unity. It is simply and profoundly the historical party of insurrection finding ephemeral form, of historical continuity becoming rupture.³⁵

We thus remain at a very abstract level. This is to some extent par for the course, given that any analysis of the composition problem in a moment of true break from capitalist society is a bit like reading tea leaves. There is thus something trite about this observation of the composition problem. It can lead to any number of pompous missives about the present “lack of organization” as the problem of our times.³⁶ These observations do little to clarify matters at hand: the false antinomy of spontaneity and organization, the relation between organization and particular forms of organization, coordination and mass action, and, as will be important further on, the relationship between production and reproduction. These all carry a historical content such that simply posing an abstract formula for mediation or coordination of generalized spontaneity does little to solve.³⁷ Rosa Luxemburg observed this as unity of “political” and “economic” struggles that have as their form the “mass strike,” when, under revolutionary conditions, the “partial” or concrete characteristics of particular struggles are immediately general. Partisanship must be understood less as a form of mediation, a form of organization which is all too easy to reify in non-revolutionary times, and more as a historical content—the horizon for which cannot be made apparent until after it has passed.

This is the impasse of the era of decomposition. But this is also a tendency immanent to the capital relation that finds its practical truth expressed in a period of unmooring, such as ours. Over its long arc, the uneven development of capital has involved both a centripetal and centrifugal balance of forces that determine composition. The reproduction process has both a centripetal and centrifugal character. Centripetal, because capital organizes production through valorization and humanization,³⁸ homogenizing labor while dehumanizing its source. Centrifugal, because this unification is achieved only through expulsion, dehumanization, and the capillarization of the dominion beyond the reach of immediate subsumption by abstract labor. When the capitalist system was rapidly expanding, dissolving non-capitalist modes of life, and absorbing supplies of agrarian labor into markets for labor-power, the centripetal character—the binding together of the immediate process of production—appeared to overtake the centrifugal character. Social reproduction and subsistence was increasingly bound to the reproduction of capital. High rates of profit mitigated the productivity growth that was tendentially shedding labor from the process of production, allowing relatively higher wages shares and investment in new lines of production that would in turn absorb redundant labor in the floating surplus population. It was really only with the dawning of the era of secular crisis and stagnation that these homogenizing effects would be displaced by social fragmentation, when the centrifugal character that was always present would appear to outstrip the centripetal character. The combined forces of composition and decomposition appear now fundamentally as a decomposition, as a possibility of non-reproduction of the class relation that is its own limit.³⁹ Endnotes describes this as the “holding pattern” and imagines its overcoming in a partisan mediation, the concrete details of which are left to the reader’s imagination.

When we analyze specific struggles through this framework, we often find that their limits take the form of political demands, or the inadequacy of democratic representation. Decomposition takes the form of atomized and competing demands for some palliative or representative solution to particular problems or grievances. Given this discrete particularity, which is the condition of possibility for spontaneity, demands are unable to generalize—they cannot attain the level of partisan mediation required for a rupture with capitalist society:

“​​Let’s venture a hypothesis: that the problem of demands is identical to the problem of composition. For any singular, consistent social agent in struggle, the essential demands of the struggle will be evident in the simple facts of who the agent of the struggle is, and what has caused this agent to form in struggle. But where a struggle manifests an unsynthesised multiplicity of social agents — where it expresses a problem of composing a unified agent of struggle — by the same token it will express a problem of demand-making. In such a situation it is not that demands are absent, for in fact there’s a multiplicity of them, but rather, that they’re not synthesised at the general level, as unifying demands of the whole movement. Thus their absence in one sense is directly related to their multiplicity in another. What should then probably be done in pursuing the question of demands in a particular movement is, rather than simply posing the question of their presence or absence, to ask what the consistency of demands, as well as their content, tells us about composition. Demands, we could say, are a direct index of the composition and texture of a movement.”⁴⁰

Anyone with a passing familiarity and experience with “social movements” will likely assent to this—still quite abstract—characterization of the “non-movements” of our time and their conflicting compositions. This is not particularly new, and certainly the problem of demands as a necessary but insufficient mediation of composition has been discussed elsewhere.⁴¹ Despite the insistence on diffusion and confusion, this analysis is still in a sense haunted by the specter of the “revolutionary subject,” now a bygone relic of the period of capitalist expansion. For Endnotes, it is no longer given by the movements of capital, as it ostensibly once was, when the workers’ movement was on the ascendancy and worker identity was able to represent itself in the interest of the species as such. Yet, like the capital-labor relation itself, the dialectic of composition and decomposition is invariant in the capitalist mode of production, despite its historical unfolding. There was never a revolutionary subject, and the worker appears as a positive representation of humanity only by standing on the corpses of the dehumanized.⁴² Our present moment simply reveals this figment more easily for what it is, and so ushers in the successive search for a “new composition” that can more adequately end the hell on earth.⁴³ It was operaismo thus first raised this specter, after their own sequence of struggles had failed to produce a revolutionary crisis on the basis of the “mass worker,” but it remains with us, in various forms and under new names.

It is quite tempting to turn from these modulations of class composition and social lot to the process of composing as an act, as a gesture that transcends the given conditions of belonging and surviving. For some, especially following recent cycles of struggle, such as the George Floyd Rebellion, this has taken the form of fetishizing the actions themselves. These destituent gestures are said to be all that coheres partisans in moments of rebellion.⁴⁴ A true party of insurrection has at its core a tactical unity, and it is by reproducing this fidelity that “all the historical and contemporary notions of solidarity, politics, and organization” can be undone.⁴⁵ While it is true that rebellion produces subjectivity, this is a truth of all social practice. It is quite another thing to argue that the most recent sequence of riots produced a “new subjectivity,” or in other words, a new composition, born from the fires, looting, and teargas,⁴⁶ that overcomes the limits of race, gender, nation, class. This is the thread to be drawn from such claims: atomized “identities” are decomposed by unrest itself.⁴⁷ Its ultimate reification would be in a “Party of George Floyd,” doomed, it would seem, from the start.⁴⁸ In the structural retreat from the sphere of production, many have found consolation in the sphere of circulation.⁴⁹ When the complex processes of this sphere are treated one-sidedly as the square, the streets, or the riot, as they often are, composition appears a matter of pure militancy and will. So, as the cycle of struggle unfolds and the seemingly inevitable retreat to atomized relations of reproduction comes into view, the militant is left with the same puzzle.⁵⁰ The implicit premise would seem to be that, if riots could overcome their tendency toward exhaustion, this unity-in-tactics in the figure of the abstract (read: raceless) militant could overcome the problem of composition.⁵¹ When this fails to coalesce, it leaves the militant with that bitter feeling of betrayal and wandering, unable to explain what happened.⁵²

Pledging Fealty?

Some take a different tactic altogether. Where “the riot” seems insufficient, but a fidelity to tactics still prevails, we find the struggle over “territory.” This is the wager of Hugh Farrell. He attempts to answer the riddle posed by Endnotes with the legacy of “compositional struggle” as has been deciphered by its acolytes, most clearly in the work of Mauvaise Troupe Collective and Kristin Ross. We use Farrell’s work as representative, not because it presents an easy straw-man,⁵³ but rather because it is a brilliant attempt to address the genealogy of “composition” as a strategy to the material problem of decomposition that we sketch above. It also provides the most sophisticated account of composition as a self-conscious process of coordination in an era of confusion and chaos. The “Strategy of Composition,” unlike so many analyses of the present moment, makes an earnest attempt to confront the limits of social organization where it is at and through the real unfolding of concrete struggles. There is no better elaboration or defense, certainly not among the Tiqqunists who originated this conceptual meaning, nor among the anarchists who steadfastly defend it.⁵⁴ Adding to the conceptual confusion, most recent criticism has argued that “composition” is little more than window dressing for a new brand of “vanguardism” or a “Blanquism,” a secrete society of authoritarian (by which they probably more accurately mean “centralist”) communists seeking to covertly guide struggle or insurrection towards its aims and via its means.⁵⁵ Would that it were true. Unfortunately, to us, it would seem that “compositional struggle,” if such current does indeed exist, does not have sights set so loftily on coup d’etats or the production of communism. The scale on which it unfolds seems quite different.

It is for Farrell, following Ross, territorial struggle from which this strategy seems to crystallize. As we indicated in Part One, most of the recent discourse has been proximately grappling with Stop Cop City/Defend the Atlanta Forest, and Farrell is no different. If we have exhausted disproportionate space on Defend the Atlanta Forest, it is only to confront the terms of the strategy of composition as Farrell has established them. But there are other contemporary examples. There is of course the ZAD and NoTAV, and Farrell draws from the former as an example of the merits of composition. More recently, there is Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth Uprising), which notably was initiated as “L’appel des Soulèvements de la Terre” (The call for Earth Uprising), which has carried out large scale demonstrations and sabotage of the the “megabasin” at Sainte-Soline.⁵⁶ There has been the occupation of the Hambach Forest and the defense of the village of Lützerath, both in Germany’s Rhineland coal country, where protesters and residents oppose the further development of open-pit mines.⁵⁷ Some have even discovered “composition” in the street battles of 2020, which in certain cities became struggles over sites of symbolic power.⁵⁸ Farrell himself includes Standing Rock, along with DFA/SCC and the ZAD, as the paradigmatic example. This is telling in more ways than one, which we will soon explore. First, it is worth pausing to consider why territory, place, or space seem to form the substrate of compositional struggle, which is to say, according to Farrell, the struggles of our era.

“The Strategy of Composition” begins by outlining many of the same premises we established above. He takes seriously the basic problem of composition, a la Endnotes, as the defining feature of a period of stagnation, crisis, and profound “social reflux.” Any material basis for a coherent worker identity has collapsed, any hope of a communist program has been shredded by the decomposition of reproduction:

“If the left can no longer claim to extrapolate a stable program, this is not due solely to the watering-down of its supposedly ‘core’ Marxist values by postmodernist criticisms of neoliberalism, but rather because, at a material level, there is no longer any reasonable claim to an homogenous, shared experience that could serve as its foundation.”⁵⁹

Like us, Farrell is skeptical of the activist milieu and the “direct action” and “decentralization” that characterized the period of the anti-globalization and anti-war movements in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis:

“​​Today, the legacy of the 20th century left bequeaths to us a sad binary: on one side, there is the classical labor movement’s singular program, with its dialectical resolution of difference, and its dependence on the leadership of a now-extinct mass subject; on the other, the contemporary activist approach, itself based on the prioritization of tactics, the non-resolution of difference, and the abandonment of any strategic horizon of victory.”⁶⁰

With this, we can mostly agree.⁶¹ We also share with Farrell an uncertainty about the prospects of “pure” fidelity to struggle, which often just means fidelity to tactical militancy, that was supposedly produced in the latest sequence of crises and uprisings. Here, Farrell uses Phil Neel’s “oaths of water” as a general coordinate to orient his criticisms. Neel, Farrell argues, is similarly grappling with the problem of composition and proposes that the only viable solution is found in the unfolding sequence of crisis activity in the raw moments of rebellion. In the absence of a historically given revolutionary subject, revolutionary subjectivity must be forged. Unrest itself is all that binds. Neel argues that this is Marx’s Party of Anarchy. For him, it is an “oath of water,” a fidelity to the flood.⁶² We observed this becoming-partisan during the George Floyd Uprising.⁶³ This process—which must of necessity remain fluid—routinely became calcified in the supposed defense of territory. In Seattle, it was the appearance of the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.” In Portland, it was the polar magnetism of the Justice Center and adjacent Chapman Square. These reifications of either autonomy or authority often form a peculiar polarity around which practical questions of partisanship become stifled by the reproduction of these rituals themselves.⁶⁴ Neel is responding to these traps of LARPing and the more broad tradition of defending leftist and anarchist “spaces” when he insists instead on a fidelity to the act. In the insular and inverted world of the activist, the radical clique, the leftist sect, or the groupuscule, the act is consumed by the program—whether communist, anarchist, or “anti-fascist.” The program becomes the measure of all practice, and this is nothing but utopia.⁶⁵

Farrell correctly diagnoses a certain utopianism of its own present throughout the sublime fidelity to insurrection. Though we find it more apparent in those joyous celebrations of the riot as the great social cleansing, the return of the “race-traitor,”⁶⁶ there is something sobering about his appraisal and criticism more generally:

“…oaths of water tell us very little about how to organize, and they represent only the ethical distillation of those sequences of rapid erosion which occur during vast movements and uprisings. These insurrectional sequences hardly make up the majority of our lives, even in the context of capitalist stagnation and growing instability. Thinking only from within these moments constitutes its distorting trap, risking a politics of urgency and sacrifice.”⁶⁷

As quickly as he touches on something rather determinate and critical, though, Farrell pivots away from it. For us, this line is crucial: “insurrectional sequences hardly make up the majority of our lives.” Then what does? Instead of setting his sights on the bizarre and irregular contours of daily life, the material shapes of social production and reproduction, their atomization and conflictuality, Farrell turns to the abstract question of land—or more precisely “territoriality”—which he sees as a solution to the problems presented by both Endnotes and Neel.

According to Farrell, it is the doubled crises of our time—ecological and economic—that have returned many, especially younger generations to the primacy of the local struggle:

“On the one hand, the climate crisis sharpens the sense of ecological loss in every local development controversy, at the same time as it raises the stakes. On the other hand, an entire generation facing high unemployment rates and the collapse of institutional legitimacy has sensitized itself to these losses and has, especially since the 2008 housing crisis, responded evermore sharply to formerly local controversies.”⁶⁸

This locality is simultaneously a universality, as organizers commonly remind. Whereas, for Farrell, the worker may previously have been able to present their particular interests as universal interests of the species, that honor now falls to the territory. But instead of the narrow interests of the species, these struggles have as their horizon the conditions of planetary life itself. This is no platitude. It captures something fundamentally true about the cycles of struggle of our era. Yet there is a the metaphysical slippage, found most clearly in Farrell’s adoption of Ross’s assertion that composition represents a “transvaluation of values.” Farrell sees this most clearly in the “territory,” which overcomes the limits of fleeting fidelity by grounding that practice to place: “Whereas Neel is right to claim that, in the flood of insurrection, it is unrest itself that binds participants together, territorial struggles differ in that there is something worth defending.”⁶⁹ What Farrell believes is that a strategy of composition bridges the gap from a pure fidelity to the event, to the temporal, which is clearly necessary but insufficient, with the more complex background social processes that produce the “components” of a given struggle across a territory. But here, with a somewhat tepid acknowledgement of reproduction, Farrell sets his own trap. For Farrell, these social processes are constituted by the territory and what it demands. We see here another endless list of examples of different tactics and practices that are emergent from the land: ecological restoration, plant walks, agro-ecology, or hosting music festivals and raves, or building camps, tree-sites, and blockades. But these tactics-cum-composition are not suspended above the material composition that give rise to them. There is thus conflict over differing terms of production and reproduction that are mediated as conflict over tactics and strategy. To Farrell’s criticism of the “oaths of water” model of partisanship, we could simply respond: “compositional” practices hardly make up the majority of our lives, even in the context of an increasingly ecological crisis.

By obviating the material circumstances of reproduction as concrete constraints and generative possibilities, “territory” becomes only an abstraction. Perhaps Farrell forgets his history of “environmental struggles” in the United States: something or somewhere is “worth defending” to the extent that subsistence and reproduction is meaningfully bound to place, to the extent that the daily life is woven through the fabric of a place, to the extent that a particular land or waters is constitutes a mode of life, survival, and reproduction. Given the settler history of the United States, the largely urban “radical environmental” movement has never been so bound to place. When activity is so practically untethered, the question of “worth” is transformed into a question of risk. Is it worth it in the face of terrorism charges? Prison time? Death? The Defend the Atlanta Forest movement has genuinely raised these questions practically since Farrell published his essay. But even a cursory examination of even the most “radical” iterations of the (predominantly urban white) environmental movement in the US, bound both by fidelity to tactics and fetishism of the land as “wilderness,” demonstrates the limits to this “transvaluation of values” when reality sets in.⁷⁰ This gap can only be explained if we understand composition to be a function of social reproduction, which is always classed, racialized, and gendered. Farrell gestures at this at times, such as in his discussion of Standing Rock as a novel attempt of social reproduction outside the circuits of capital, but such discussion always comes at the expense of an honest appraisal of limits, of conflicting dynamics that are given to the process of composition itself. How any conflictuality is negotiated is presumed to be the special province of the compositional matrix in its churning, in the act of composing, weaving, integrating and disintegrating. Never, however, are these conflicts grounded clearly in the noisiness of social reproduction.

It is precisely the common but heterogenous forms of social reproduction that form the limit of a compositional strategy, as they cannot take shape as anything other than a politics of the least common denominator. His chosen examples all illuminate this, if one would choose to look. We will not belabor this point vis-a-vis the struggle to Stop Cop City/Defend the Atlanta Forest. Many criticisms have been made over the last year, since the murder of Tortuguita, the initial wave of terrorism charges, and the South River Music festival raid. It is worth digesting just how this sequence of crises and struggles has unfolded since Farrell penned his piece over a year ago. Then, it could have been argued that “The movement is based less on protests — which do still occur frequently at construction company offices and in downtown Atlanta, where a group of elementary school children regularly demonstrate in solidarity — than on forest raves and a patchwork of distinct camps” or that “​​the inability to fall back on the mediation of institutions has forced participants to develop customs and practices of compromise and conflict resolution,” but hardly is this the case in the present. Now, the core momentum of the movement orbits around more familiar mass protest actions and pressure campaign strategies, with the diffuse clandestine action here and there that keeps the fires burning. Arguably, as even many of the strategic thinkers have conceded, these larger umbrella campaigns provide the radical-flank effect necessary for the various legal efforts to Stop Cop City to achieve victory.⁷¹ In other words, practical objectives are to be achieved precisely by falling back on institutional mediation. It is not that this is good or bad. It is that it no longer resembles the qualitatively distinct characteristics that Farrell assigns to compositional struggles. What does a strategy of composition explain about this lurch toward the activist world, with its spokes-councils, affinity groups, media strategies, and action agreements?

Similarly, Farrell praises the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes for successfully blocking the construction of the airport at Nantes. The “victory” of the ZAD has been called many things, from “reformist” to “Tiqqunist,” each with their own niche charge. What seems important to clarify is how the occupations unfolded as increasingly state mediated, in an effort of some organizers, participants, and residents to secure the legalization of their various land projects and clientelist artisan economy. Though it was always market-mediated, as agricultural projects were foundational to the ZAD, that some partisans of composition sought state security to protect these projects following the defeat of the airport is what fueled the conflict over evictions in 2018. As some participants observed, “composition, like an ode to the legendary peace and understanding which supposedly reign in the struggle against the airport, with as a side effect the rendering invisible of internal conflict to the advantage of the most powerful.”⁷² If composition is a balance of forces, it tells us very little about the relations between those forces, their social material bases, and their relative power. It subsumes all of the social chaos of conflict into the neat package of strategy. This could be sufficient, if we were on the terrain of the campaign, with its discrete and limited horizons, goals, strategies, and tactics. But this is not how the strategy of composition announces itself. No, compositional struggles are supposed to be immanently generalizable.⁷³ What makes it the strategy of composition “the mode of organization in profoundly disordered times,” is its universality. Its form may indeed be universal, but only to the extent that it manifests as atomized. Farrell does not err in characterizing these tendencies as a mode of organization for our times. He errs in not adequately charactering the limits of compositional organization, such that it does exist. In fact, his account rather inadvertently helps to explain why this mode of organization tends to drift towards diluted popular front politics and remain mired in the pitfalls of activism and discrete campaigns in search of discrete victories, as if each victory is another domino to fall on the trail to the coming rupture. This was the wager of the ZAD. It did not materialize.⁷⁴ In the era of compositional struggles, it remains entirely possible to “win” and for a communist horizon to remain out of reach. In fact, obsession with victories might just index how utterly distant we are from anything resembling communism. Remember that anytime you hear the common refrain that “we need to win” something, as if that justifies what is about take place.

The strategy of composition cannot achieve this leap to generalization, precisely because its strengths in discrete campaign efforts are transformed into limits when they are generalized. Increasing mass participation in this or that territorial struggle betrays this tendency, as the forms of self-activity that Neel argues constitute “oaths of water,” which are often nihilistic and lack clear instrumentality or purpose, are burned off by something we might call “oaths of fealty,” in which common objectives come to subordinate all that is uncommon among a given mix of participants in struggle. The measure is no longer a fidelity to unrest, nor is it some artificial fidelity to territory. Rather, the measure is commonality itself. The composition is the program. It manifests as community agreements, programs, spokes-councils, consensus processes. If the Party of Anarchy is always a subset in the matrix of upheaval, it can never generalize via a strategy of composition, as articulated by Farrell, because such a strategy is first of all characterized by a unacknowledged or even disavowed dependency on institutional mediation. This may be even more true if compositional struggles are necessarily territorial struggles, as such struggles tend to require increasing external inputs—food, energy, raw material resources, construction, legal defense, physical defense, court injunctions, protected status, childcare, medical care, etc. Unless a territorial struggle immediately unfolds during a period of mass general expropriation, or as defense of place-based modes of reproduction beyond the circuit of capital,⁷⁵ these inputs are found on the market or via the state or para-state institutions, such as nonprofit organizations. The strategy of composition is therefore reproduced through these mediations, not unlike the “autonomous zone,” “worker co-operative,” or other such “radical spaces” that Farrell insists are of a different sort. He has no qualms with critiquing the limits of activism, or diversity of tactics, but seems assured that composition cannot suffer similar fates.⁷⁶ History would suggest otherwise. This becomes more clear over time, as either DFA/SCC or the ZAD demonstrate, but mediation is a germ of the compositional strategy. Farrell repeatedly refers to the “logic of composition,” and at one point maintains that “although it operates upon the ground of capitalist stagnation and crisis, it continues to move within its own distinct compositional temporality and logic.”⁷⁷ As should by now be clear, if composition has any logic at all, it is not its own. It is nothing other than the logic of capital transmitted through the confusion of subjectivity formed through fractured and segregated modes of reproduction, separated temporally and spatially from the immediate process of production in uneven ways.

Farrell’s third example of composition warrants special attention because it invokes these separations in particular ways. Standing Rock, “the largest contemporary territorial struggle” in the United States, is a challenging example of compositional strategy because, as Farrell observes, it necessitated “serious experiments in social reproduction outside the circuits of capitalism.”⁷⁸ Precisely what this outside is, in our era of capitalist dominion, is unclear. What is clear is that it is an uneven geography, one riddled with the scars of colonial domination and racialized subsumption. Unlike Farrell’s other examples, Standing Rock is in the first instance a struggle to defend indigenous relations to place from the scouring infrastructure of crisis-plagued capitalism.⁷⁹ There are two important questions that Farrell’s account of Standing Rock elides. The first, which we noted above, is the absence of an explanation of why “territoriality” or spatiality becomes increasingly important to capital’s continued reproduction. The second is what the social content of an indigenous struggle such as Standing Rock actually is, and if it is adequately represented in the framework of composition. Regarding the first, Marx had already laid out a basic answer in the counteracting tendencies or counterbalancing forces that mitigated the fall in the rate of profit. As we argued previously:

“The declining cost of raw material inputs and constant capital acts as a countervailing force against the secular decline in the rate of profit. The long-term tendency of capital is to displace human work with these raw materials and nonhuman energy inputs. Generating and maintaining increased access to cheaper and cheaper elements of constant capital—necessarily speciated as nonhuman—will remain a central role of the state. This is already seen in policing of extraction sites and the circulation of energy flows (i.e., pipelines) as well as the repressive maintenance of animality in the form of raw material inputs.”⁸⁰

Crisis and territorial re-organization of production and extraction constitute a cyclical process that has a secular trajectory. In the Grundrisse notebooks, Marx called this the “annihilation of space by time.”⁸¹ When, on the whole, reproduction is decreasingly mediated by immediate production of surplus value, worker identity, expressed fundamentally in the struggle over time, tends to fade into a non-worker morass, certain components are expressed spatially in the struggle over land.

However, all land-based struggles are not created equal. Even when not manifestly reactionary,⁸² defensive territorial struggles carry a certain ambiguity, taking on similar forms while pregnant with quite different social contents and functions. The extent to which these struggles can be rendered as communist measures is not a function of their abstract territoriality, as Ross or Farrell present it. Place-based struggles are most fertile when they are inseparable from the reproduction of the daily lives of participants and stakeholders, when they manifest as conflicts over the means of subsistence and social reproduction, immediately threatened by a given industrial, infrastructural, or extractive project.⁸³ Indigenous struggles, for instance, tend to operate as struggles over reproduction, over traditional land bases, for access to water, subsistence agriculture, hunting grounds, and foraging traditional foods and medicines. They unfold as specific concrete relations to place and thus are often registered in terms of survival.⁸⁴ Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson call this “grounded normativity.”⁸⁵ While this might superficially appear to be interchangeable with a “transvaluation of values,” this would miss the crucial distinction. While both perhaps express metaphysical and ethical dimensions, a strategy animated by a “transvaluation of values” risks degenerating into only these elements. The forms of social and cultural reproduction are the decisive measures, not “land” as such.⁸⁶ As the writer Mike Gouldhawke argues, these matters are not settled by a mere commitment to protect a place, but by social relationships and practices structured by modes of reproduction and relations to capital and the (settler) state:

“In settler-colonial societies, land appears as an immense accumulation of property titles. To traditionalist Indigenous Peoples, in contrast, land is not a thing in itself but a social relationship between all living and non-living beings… How we relate to the land is tied to who we are… Land is the terrain upon which all our relations play out, and it can even be seen as a living thing itself, constantly shaping and being shaped by other life forms. Land isn’t just a place, it’s also a territory, which implies political, legal, and cultural relationships of jurisdiction and care.”⁸⁷

Relation to place is mediated by a host of differing material capacities, including racial, gender, class, and geographic compositions. The ways that land can be confronted as a constraint and generative possibility, in settler colonial nation-states, has much to do with the particular histories of colonization, which left native populations substantially reduced in size, dispersed through the far-flung hinterlands of reserves, relatively unintegrated into the waged economy, and often dependent on commodity food distribution. Sites of indigenous struggle thus tend to be unevenly integrated into the circuits of capital, with certain definite avenues of non-capitalist subsistence practice often assuming the terms of struggle and its form.⁸⁸ Occupations and blockades are clearly also mediated by the market, or the state, in similar ways to the compositional struggles noted above, if to a lesser extent. But they are constrained in ways that give them far greater force in the sphere of circulation. This constraint is a much greater relation of interdependency with concrete land bases which gives to indigenous defense a character of necessity that is generally absent from the compositional struggles that Farrell highlights. If there is indeed something “worth defending,” it comes from this particular configuration of racialized class composition.

Indigenous land defense is something quite distinct from compositional struggles, or territorial struggles, treated in the abstract. It is not something one can “inhabit” by some utopian affinity for place, for the “wild,” or for the bocage.⁸⁹ It is a political subjectivity born from concrete modes of material reproduction. That is, it is a particular social composition, but closer to its original sense. So what of Standing Rock? In Farrell’s account, if Standing Rock had these particular characteristics, they only serve to highlight the strength of compositional struggle.⁹⁰ While this is not the space to give a full accounting of Standing Rock, it is needless to say that Farrell’s description is broad and fails to really capture the dynamics and strife that led to the initial failure of the encampments. Without detailing all of the various components of the camps, it is worth pausing over the mediation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe as a formal institution in the latter days of the battles that preceded the winter evictions. Though it was not the origin point of the sequence—that belongs to the Sacred Stone Camp—it was through the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council that both the state and many participants sought mediation. Much of this was practical, as most the encampments were constructed on the Standing Rock Reservation, and much of the protest activity was facilitated with the council’s approval, as well as the support of surrounding institutions like casinos.⁹¹ Still, it was an institutional mediation that presented itself increasingly as a contradiction as the movement proceeded. The complexities of claims to traditional indigenous governance and ceremony were made “abundantly clear” when the tribal council voted unanimously to remove the Red Warrior Camp—by far the most militant and active element of the broader composition of forces on the ground—for its celebrated use of more controversial tactics.⁹² It was also the most targeted by state and law enforcement agencies, who understood it to be an “insurgency” in the making and acted accordingly.⁹³ The purging of militant elements supported by a narrative of “outside agitators” is part of the continuity that Standing Rock offers as bridge between the Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings and the George Floyd Rebellion. But it is also a continuity it shares with “compositional struggles” and Farrell is correct to note this. He only does so by disavowing this strife and conflict, the composition achieved by dejection. Given the complex investments of competing groups—environmental agencies, native organizations, tribal councils, environmental NGOs, legal supporters—nurtured in the daily reproduction of the Standing Rock protests, it is easy to see why the more illicit—even opaque—aspects could not be tolerated. To the extent that Standing Rock was compositional, as Farrell maintains, this was its Achilles’ heel as much as a condition of its possibility. To the extent that it was a struggle over the terms of reproduction—led first and foremost by native elders and militant youth—it founds its limit in being subsumed by this composition.

The “strategy of composition” seem to be caught in this double-bind. Yet this is exactly what Farrell intends it to avert:

“Composition as a strategy positions itself between these two extremes. The negative rationale for its development resides in the disappearance of any leading identity, which forces movements — propelled as they are by the contradictions of capitalist society — into a productive crisis.

However, it also has a positive rationale. Whereas the programmatic approach to struggle relied upon dialectical resolution of conflicts — i.e., the assumption that, through the course of the struggle, a synthesis would emerge that would produce a new sort of unity — the method of composition proposes that the multiple segments of a movement remain multiple, while simultaneously weaving the necessary practical alliances between them.”

But this is a caricature, both of programmatism and composition, one that seeks to remedy any apparent resemblance between the two.⁹⁴ We have seen that this “remaining multiple” seems a tenuous position at best, hardly the generative ground for expanding the flood or producing a revolutionary crisis bringing us onto the fertile plain of communist construction. What it understands as its greatest merit is itself a positive program, one that demands constant defense, sacrifice, renunciation, and the ritual of process, so familiar to the activist campaign. It is programmatic because it has as its basis the reproduction a historically given material composition of struggle. That this composition has no leading representation, such as positive “worker identity,” does not discount the fact that its horizon remains the now disintegrated and atomized conditions from which it emerged. It is programmatic because its common cause is a program, the only unity through which the coordination of a plurality of activities is given any practical truth. Farrell, almost anticipating this criticism, calls this a “practical machine,” rather than a unity. All “social unity” is practical, so it is unclear what this distinction really accomplishes. What matters is that the process is inverted: activity finds its truth only in this program of composition. Communist partisanship cannot proceed from such a program. It must crystallize from communist measures that have as their effect the mosaic erosion of capitalist relations of production. Composition is indeed a strategy adequate to the era, but it is not adequate for the generalization of unrest that we call insurrection.

Subjectivity and Material Production

If Farrell’s proposal does not amount to a fix for the composition problem, he does correctly identify many of the limits of the common proposals on offer. Endnotes does not pose any clear resolution to the problem themselves, tending to fall back on the potential decadence of “the non-movements” to bring about a crisis of representation itself.⁹⁵ They are correct to note that decomposition is the necessary mode of politicization of struggle today, yet they rely on the tired Marxist sociology that sees behind the mediation of “identity” the real separation that is class belonging. They are better than Jacobin or Catalyst counterparts (though not without overlap) in that they do not trouble themselves with a critique of “identity politics,” discerning correctly that any real critique is emergent from the non-movements themselves. If race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, citizenship, nation, age, religion, or geography are the prerequisites of the non-movements today, that is because, for Endnotes, these are decompositions of class belonging that vaguely “calibrate” the class struggle. Rather than understanding decomposition of constitutive of the class relation, as substantively invariant, if historically organized, they see it purely as an effect of contemporary economic crisis, stagnation, and austerity, and with it, the decline of the workers’ movement and democratic representation. This leaves open the question of new universalism, which Endnotes insists the non-movements themselves covet.⁹⁶ Perhaps this is a negative universalism—something like the practical unification of the species in the moment of its undoing, in negation of the capital relation. It is perhaps in this moment that their titular “barbarians” find their role, but we suspect that Endnotes’ usage carries a more positive content that this invocation lets on.⁹⁷ The positive content of this proletarian self-abolition is the ushering in of the true human community.⁹⁸

We find greater solace in Bordiga’s appraisal of the communist “barbarians” as destroyers of the pillars of “civilization” as such.⁹⁹ Bordiga, who was far more ambivalent about human dignity, was correct to break the identity of the species with its universal mediation in the cult of man in the abstract.¹⁰⁰ Short of communism itself, which we ourselves do not think of as a universalism,¹⁰¹ what could Endnotes mean by the hunger of the non-movements for a new universalism? Certainly, this is not to pose the question of a new revolutionary subjectivity, determined by the exigencies of the period. It seems to return us to a fidelity to the event, to the barbarian rejuvenation of the species. Though they caution “against those who fetishize destitution,” they find themselves unable to overcome this same limit. It is through their destructive acts that the non-movements are supposed produce a spectral “anti-formist” possibility of eclipse of formal mediation itself, hoping, once again, for tactical unity to deliver a social carte blanche, dissolving all those pesky divisions and speciations that separate us. We are dangerously close to a wishful thinking that plagued some corners of the ultra-left during the George Floyd Rebellion. If there was a memification during that period, it was this obsession with transcending the realities of social segregation, which remain a speciation, as Fanon called it, by way of the sacrificial, destituent act. Still, despite the romanticism on this front, there is a somber and pessimistic tone in these works, and for good reason. If Endnotes holds hope for the barbarians, it is because every other possibility of overcoming the capitalist mode of production has been foreclosed. The capitalist world is rife with instability and ungovernability, yes, but that does not automatically deliver a way out. It could just as easily be swallowed by a sequence of civil wars and the fragmented continuation of capitalist orders on the ruins of a once stable climate. Perhaps this is the more likely scenario. The communist prospect seems increasingly distant as a practical possibility.¹⁰²

It is too much to ask for ready-made solutions. Most of these critiques, including our own, are little more than diagnostic, after all. But this is what has left some communists increasingly desperate for strategy. What operaismo offered was the possibility of turning class composition in on itself as a mode of organization within and against capital. It provided practical tasks to would-be revolutionaries and worker-agitators: carrying out or facilitating workers’ inquiries, political entryism, and intellectual salting. More recent fixation on “ultra-left” or “communization current” explanations of crisis and stagnation, the decline of the workers’ movement, or the limits of programmatism have not offered a clear practice adequate to these politics. This has been attended by a concurrent rise in “insurrectional anarchy,” a poor descriptor for a range of positions, from those of Stirner and egoism, to Luigi Galleani, Alfredo Bonanno, or Tiqqun/TIC. It conveys anything from general social war to clandestine cells carrying out armed struggle or attack.¹⁰³ The decomposition of the program easily lends itself to a confusion of approaches, and a skepticism of formal organization, sometimes organization as such. At worst, the abstract theorizations of the milieu offer no materialist method of class composition and thus can say nothing about organization.¹⁰⁴ We will return to this theme later. First, we turn to recent criticism not of grand historical abstractions, but of something concrete: the insurrection itself. If the decline of the workers’ movement gave us the turn from class composition to its decomposition, it seems a new generation is picking at the would-be corpse of the working class and finding life still yet. It is not the decline of worker identity that vexes them, but, as they assert, the clear history of missed insurrections that has scarred our present moment. These neo-workerists¹⁰⁵ argue for a return to the factory, yes, but more pointedly maintain the need for communists to grasp the new class composition in the services sector, in transport, shipping, and logistics, in care work and social reproduction, all shaped by newer waves of migration and the global restructuring of supply chains and labor markets. The neo-workerists operate with a basic, if unnamed understanding that political subjectivity, or at least the political subjectivity that counts, is determined in relation to material production and the circulation of commodities. We intend to take this presupposition seriously and examine what it both clarifies and mystifies about the concept of composition.

The sort of composition that Farrell refers to as a “new political intelligence” is entirely alien here. The neo-workerists are quite orthodox in their approach. Class composition still refers to a basic dialectical relation between technical and political composition, only now that composition must be understood to have permeated the entire circuit of capitalist reproduction. The global working class still appears here as a given revolutionary subject, “in the driver’s seat of social emancipation,”¹⁰⁶ albeit confused in its orientation and means of communication. It might be easy to dismiss these groupings as yet another desperate attempt at romancing the worker, adrift in the sea of neoliberal and postmodern ideology. Despite the presence of some of these crude characterizations and vulgarities, these neo-workerist groups—which range from researchers, organizers, to publications—offer a far more reasonable outlook on the global (de-)industrial condition than their more social democratic counterparts. They do not merely fetishize so-called “economic struggles” or their singular expression in the strike, for example, nor do they herald acritically any steadfast “return of labor” or union strength—the same so readily assimilated into the Democratic Party platform.¹⁰⁷ The entire gamut of struggle left in the wake of the convulsing global supply chain is here taken seriously and analyzed soberly—formal strikes, wildcat strikes, work slowdowns, absenteeism, sabotage, factory occupations, street protests, square occupations, and riots. Still, they tend to refuse any easy sublation of “working class” identity by a new composition, which they see as trendy and infused with postmodern sensibilities of “difference,” whether thats the “multitude,” “precariat,” or “surplus populations.”¹⁰⁸ The working class still exists, as do its prospects for self-emancipation. For communists in the 21st century, this reality remains unknown for all its beautiful simplicity and in its complicated specificity.¹⁰⁹ They see this lack of empirical knowledge as a basic refusal of materialist method that continues to plague the left, polarizing it into the familiar camps of utter nihilism or naive programmatism. As a direct consequence of this perspective, we see a return of the workers’ inquiry and a special attention to the category of class composition. Following the apparent impasses of the era of riots, two particular groups emerged in recent years that we think are worth close consideration here: Angry Workers of the World and Notes from Below. We shall deal with them in turn.

Angry Workers of the World refers to themselves as small political collective, based in London, UK. Cosmopolitan in their origins, the participants of Angry Workers had roots in various projects and employment, but “chose” (their words) to move to working class neighborhoods on the outskirts of London in rejection of the city’s more transient, professional, and student-based left. These characteristics reflect the city’s place in the international division of labor, especially in service sectors. In contrast, the Angry Workers had observed a re-territorialization and re-concentration of labor in urban hinterlands, where the logistics sector dominates in the form of warehouses, distribution centers, and correlated manufacturing lines. Taking inspiration from comrades in the German group WildCat,¹¹⁰ Angry Workers began their project of inquiry by “getting rooted”—finding employment in warehouses and manufacturing centers, finding rooms in suburban terraced housing, and embedding in the daily lives of working class people.¹¹¹ What is is especially interesting for us about Angry Workers is their consistent emphasis on two concepts that we share an affinity for and likewise find especially generative, concepts that we have already lingered over extensively: “class composition” and “combined and uneven development.” Why they come to rather distinct political conclusions requires a bit closer look at how they use and integrate these concepts.

While they draw on some of the analytical frameworks of operaismo—e.g., workers’ inquiry, class composition—where they fall quite clearly in line has everything to do with what they view as the relationship between development and working class power. Quite loyal to this framing, most clearly articulated by Mario Tronti, Angry Workers argue that capitalist development and dynamism are driven by working class socialization and organization in the process of production.¹¹² While this importantly retains the concept of social forms as mediations of social relations, it is of course quite one-sided, neglecting constraints that appear external to capital but are in fact immanent to it. Capital, rather than being merely a response to working class power, is a form of social reproduction that seeps from conditions of generalized dispossession—a compulsion that is emergent from the separation of life and its conditions. It is a kind of metabolic domination, a rupture in the continuum of planetary ecological relations, that inverts the process of social reproduction and subordinates it to the alien hostilities of value. It shapes the contours of the total social fabric and appears as much as “structural” constraints—subsumption, market competition, wage-labor, productivity gains—as the class autonomy or balance of class forces. Any distinction is ideological.¹¹³ This is what remains best about the concept of class composition, but it also where operaismo wavered, often preferring—more often, as the years wore on—to explain class behavior through the lens of political agency or autonomy. Angry Workers is aware of this limit to operaismo, critiquing the latter’s tendency to glorify the refusal of work or its implosion into “adventurism.”¹¹⁴ Yet, as they preserve the logical kernel of operaismo and the contradictory concept of “class composition,” they find themselves doing a similar dance. For Angry Workers, subjectivity is the independent variable. Workers as individuals (they refuse the problem of “atomization” here) may not enter production fully formed, but it is through their collective socialization and subjectivation that class power coheres as an emergent property that must be confronted by capital, and partially overcome through its developmental leaps. They understand capitalist development—and therefore history—as fundamentally a political strategy of the capitalist class to decompose the working class, isolate workers, and contain class conflict, which in turn re-socializes them on a new material foundation.

The workerist periodization and strategy are all familiar by now (see Part One). Angry Workers defends this perspective quite fluently. It is not their view that class behavior is any way a compulsion. That is one-way street: it is the capitalist who are compelled by the collective worker. They may allow the compulsion to sell labor-power to survive, but the subjectivity that follows from this state of dispossession is the privileged site of class agency, and more specifically, agency through socialization in production proper. This is why they so clearly reject that structural constraints are a real problem for class composition. They have no time for “surplus populations” or abject identities. The working class is irreducibly singular in their analysis. In fact, their approach to problems of class decomposition, abjection, or redundancy in relation to subject formation is quite anti-Marxist, presenting “surplus populations” as a figment of the postmodern preoccupation with difference. In their demand to understand the integration of redundant and precarious labor into value chains, they forget themselves. This uneven and conditional integration into the immediate production process is what constitutes the surplus population.¹¹⁵ They instead treat it the surplus population as identical to what Marx called pauperism or the lumpenproletariat—the permanent surplus population—which they either denigrate as irrelevant or virtually non-existent in the new supply chains of capital.¹¹⁶

All of this leaves the Angry Workers with a real problem: in their quest to exalt class power, they cannot make sense of the realities of development today: stagnating growth, de-industrialization, and productivity stalls. Where they see “massive growth” in concentrated factories, along logistic networks, or in the unfolding of new territorial industrial complexes, they neglect the ratcheting effect of competition (since they tend to ignore competition entirely): new lines are opened at the prevailing technical level in order to remain cost-competitive on the global market. They attract new constant capital at a higher rate than new labor. Angry Workers ignore that surplus populations tend to cluster around these very supply chains and territorial complexes that they propose as their fix.¹¹⁷ In their own schema, this logic and history of global development is the response to class power, but it tendentially undermines that power, even as new class compositions emerge from the restructurings. There is a cyclical and secular effect at work. Lest they be caught arguing that worker power has as its long-term consequence its own repression and atomization, Angry Workers’ ignores the secular tendency in favor of the cyclical.

There is a basic truth to their analysis though. The new class compositions and political subjectivities that sprout from the muck and mire of decomposition need to be better understood. They propose this as a first step on the material path toward communist transition. For Angry Workers, this is less a technical problem that requires particular vectors of knowledge,¹¹⁸ though it is also that. It is more fundamentally a problem of political subjectivation that accrues to workers in the immediate process of production and the (less immediate) process of distribution. One of the merits of Angry Workers, which they resurrected from operaismo, is the practical significance of communication. This is not a flighty memification of conflict, but real lines and modalities of communication that are opened by the concentration and diffusion of capital within and across sectors and value chains. Vectors of communication transmit the objective process into subject formation, occupying the rather vague liminal space between technical and political composition of the class. That they emphasize this is essential for understanding how Angry Workers views the problems of class composition today: the subjective unevenness of the class that results from the uneven combination of labor processes—and thus uneven channels of communication—in the global development of capital.

“Uneven and combined development” is the other compass that Angry Workers uses to reckon the working class today.¹¹⁹ What they actually argue more explicitly is that, other than “class composition,” “uneven and combined development” is the only genuine working class strategy to emerge from revolutionary cycles of the 20th century. This may seem a bit odd, given the original application and development of the concept in Trotsky was to account for the peculiarities of the Russian experience in 1905 and to develop a materialist basis for the revolutionary aims of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in what by more vulgar Marxist accounts would have been an “unripe” country. Conceptually, “uneven and combined development” can be traced to Marx more generally, though he also had a growing interest in the Russian experience of industrial concentration combined with large rural hinterlands and agrarian regimes.¹²⁰ It was this combination of factors that drew both strategy and scorn from democratic socialists, who saw Russian socialism as either uniquely positioned for a seizure of power, or else cursed by the long shadows of populism or nihilism. In the former camp, Trotsky analyzed how the Russian Empire had been integrated into the world capitalist economy in latter half of the 19th century, exposing its territorial security to the pressures of industrial competition. In order to modernize its industry, it had to borrow on the international financial market, primarily from France, as the regime was dominated agrarian landlords who would refuse taxation to subsidize urban development. In order to compete with the older, more established capitalist nations, the Czarist regime was forced to its incubate industrial development. Its heavy international debts would discipline it to do so. Its development was thus combined through its integration in the circuits of global capital, but uneven both geographically and temporally.

This “big push industrialization” is in fact the general form of capitalist transitions, especially through the 20th century.¹²¹ This is significant not least for how it shapes class politics, which is to say, class composition. As Angry Workers trace, Trotsky was concerned with the strategic implications of late development in his homeland. Because development was uneven, there still remained a vast agricultural hinterland, complete with large peasant populations and social structures, including landed proprietors, the obshchina or mir, as well as landless descendants of serfdom, and small landlords. There were also the large estates and landed gentry. Though they largely retained their class structures, they were not immune from the conditions of capitalist pressure. In order to service its debts, the regime was forced to tax grain exports. Given that there had been no agrarian revolution in social relations, productivity levels remained stagnant. In a scenario typical of absolutism, the state—caught between an obstinate landlord class and a productivity ceiling—was forced to expropriate peasants of their grain. The newly dispossessed that had migrated to urban centers faired little better. This proletariat, like the southern Italian experience half a century later, was formed rapidly from the stuff of the hinterlands and thrown onto factory lines with little mediation by the social institutions that might be found in England, or France. It was more restive as a consequence, while retaining direct relations and generational ties with the peasantry from which it came. Strategically, these two uneven compositions could be combined effectively in a revolutionary cycle that always sought expansion through the industrial world.

This was the basis for the theory of “permanent revolution.” Angry Workers is at pains to defend this theory from subsequent Trotskyist degenerations, and from critics who see it as limited to a particular historical situation that has since been eclipsed—namely, the persistence of an agrarian hinterland population. Given the rapid de-peasantization from the mid-20th century onwards, these criticisms seem to carry weight. Like the German workers councils, the soviets were a peculiar historical product of uneven and combined development and class composition. Yet, for Angry Workers, this misses the real content of the theory. As they argue, the development of capitalism remains combined and uneven, despite the near total integration of the planet into its inverted metabolism. This is clear in the concept of class composition, which they see as an inheritor of the theory in a sense. In their schematic, class composition today is the product of this developmental tendency which tends to concentrate workers, on the one hand, and marginalize them on the other. This is seen most clearly in the development supply chains and territorial industrial complexes, in which productivity and poverty stand in for combined and uneven development. Why this does not amount to fragmentation or atomization is unclear, but what matters is that class composition must be understood as an expression of combined and uneven development, which is really another way of saying capitalist laws of motion.

We think this is an advance worth emphasizing. Where we differ in matters of degree, the consequences become a matter of kind. For Angry Workers, the emphasis on class composition has everything to do with subjectivity, the sense of collective social power of the working class. The present issue remains for them the apparent divergence of interests that results from the real divergence in composition along capital’s globalized terrain. The industrial workers and the marginalized share common, but also uncommon experiences and develop different subjectivities in relation to material production, and thus different political horizons. Communist prospects, in Angry Workers’ view, tend to lie with the former, while the latter remain swept up in spectacular political struggles. This is little different than the false opposition of “economic struggles” and “political struggles” that Rosa Luxemburg argued become obliterated in the mass strike. In contrast, the Angry Workers hold no such hope for general insurrection. Instead, they argue that proletarians must politically overcome this division by recognizing the empirical basis of their shared condition. This is why we find repeated emphasis on the evidence of an actually existing working class, on its real unity, despite what they see as charlatan attempts to chart the decline of its real movement. It is here that they recede theoretically from their initial advances. What they continuously fail to recognize in both class composition and uneven and combined development are the secular tendencies of both against the mise en scène of capital’s long decline. Their analysis of these phenomena are always one-sided. In their emphasis on new compositions, they never recognize that composition is always also decomposition. Their emphasis on combination—through states, military alliances, trade agreements, supply chains, transport routes—belies its unevenness, or frankly, its disintegration. For neo-workerists, there is always the possibility of new lines of communication, new vectors of subject formation, to be tapped in these new compositions and combinations. Yet, when faced with the sobering realities of separation, Angry Workers also falls back on the atomization that they resoundingly disavow:

“If the two poles of the revolutionary contradiction – an increase in social productivity on one side leads to an increase in relative poverty on the other – would meet in a single experience, the system would explode. The problem is that this experience is instead diffused within the global working class (meaning different groups experience it at different times and in different ways) and mediated by nation state measures and ideologies… this creates a common condition, but this itself does not create material links as such.”¹²²

Note the appearance of ideology. This betrays more than they realize. Their diagnostics of the “problem of composition” today are far more ideological than they let on. They emphasize the “neoliberal” “postmodern” plague on the working class, because they unable to explain the decline of the workers’ movement in clearly materialist terms. They are unable to do so because they refuse to acknowledge a secular crisis of capital, the process of decomposition, the relative de-industrialization of labor, or the aerosolization of production.

For the Angry Workers, the common condition remains the global working class as such, merely diffused widely throughout the system, but still very much combined or composed as the working class. Why does this not automatically create material links? For one, as Angry Workers has it, the working class is always the prime mover. They are not conduits of capital’s logic, but the unruliness to which it responds. Here, they are forced to have the “guts” to make the leap into the subjective, universal, and strategic: the working class needs to recognize itself as the veins of the production system, which in turn through an integrated labor process provides the channels of this subjectivation. The key for Angry Workers is the subjective dimension unleashed by new combinations. It is always unleashed as there are always new combinations that are able to absorb the freshly marginalized.¹²³ For us, it the objective process of combination—which is to say the composition and reproduction of capital—on the global scale that reveals that it remains geographically and socially uneven as a condition of capital’s logic of centrifuge. The subjective dimension expresses itself only through this fragmentation. On this terrain, any easy “universals” are as ideological as “difference.” The objective unity-as-dispossession has no automatic expression in a subjective unity-as-working class. For this, Angry Workers simply hope for a return of proletarian autonomy. Oddly, they find themselves proffering a similar line to Farrell or the Tiqqunist adherents of compositional strategy: what is needed is to take the reigns of composition from capital, to compose by an act of sheer will, the universal subject, out of its objective conditions. The problem for Angry Workers, as for Farrell and others, is that the objective conditions in question no more unify than they do separate. The discrete mediations that seem to “interfere” and result in subjective experiences of race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or religion have real material bases, more material basis than any empty calls for working-class unity.¹²⁴ In their strategic analysis of class composition and uneven and combined development, the Angry Workers offer only half-measures. The riddle that they have posed clearly in the present era is developing the relationship between material production and subject formation, and thus material production and revolutionary transition. They have no real answer, beyond the more trite observations on the need to attend to production. By refusing to admit that the contemporary character of material production expresses itself in subjective vicariance, they offer a hollowed out—that is, ahistorical—politics.

If subject formation appears curbed by the process of material production, perhaps this suggests an inadequacy to the concept of class composition, or, at least its political salience. As observed by the editors of Notes from Below, outside the immediate process of production, the working class remains “a mystery” from the rigid viewpoint of traditional workerism.¹²⁵ This is perhaps overstating the case, especially when considering the immanent critiques of workerism developed by the likes of Wages for Housework and Lotta Feminista. Here, the question of how the social metabolism is transformed into the commodity labor-power, all before it purchased and used in production, was paramount. Still, this is a general criticism that holds water, and one which we share, as detailed in our discussion of operaismo in Part One. As the resurgence of the concept in the work of Angry Workers of the World has made more transparent, the current usage of class composition often differs little from the narrow applications developed by operaismo, much to the detriment of its potential explanatory power. The formulaic relationship technical and political composition remains one-sided, abstracting in favor of the technical dimensions of the process of capitalist reproduction. But, as Marx and early operaismo theorists such as Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti demonstrated, the technical form of production is itself an expression of specifically capitalist social relations, which of course are far more expansive than the process of production proper.¹²⁶ Panzieri’s portable formulation was that “the relations of production are within the productive forces.”¹²⁷ Important as this corrective was, whether or not this exaggerates the power of capital is still subject to debate.¹²⁸ Part of the issue remains clarity on what precisely the “power of capital” is, as well as what constitutes “relations of production.”¹²⁹ According to Derek Sayer, for Marx, social relations “have explanatory primacy.”¹³⁰ Even if so, the concept is relatively undeveloped and abstract, even in the mature works of Marx. 20th century communist discourse often found itself bereft when confronted with this conceptual puzzle, finding itself on the shores of some of Marx’s more well-known, if not uncontroversial, islands of thought: the “Preface” to his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and the so-called German Ideology. This gives us the “economic structure” of society, but little else of concrete detail.

In Capital, Marx is more concerned with specifically capitalist relations of production and the “forms of intercourse” which corresponds to it. Here, the concept is used somewhat interchangeably with social metabolism (Stoffwechsel), indicating that for Marx the relations of production involved the totality of specific social relationships involved in the processes of production, circulation, and consumption—or, take together, social reproduction. In the capitalist mode of production, these concrete forms of intercourse are imbued with the mute compulsion unleashed by the metabolic separation of life and its conditions. The class relation of generalized dispossession is thus fundamental to capitalist social relations of production. They are necessary but not reducible to the forms of exploitation that are the object of a narrow application of class composition.¹³¹ Relations of production are incommensurate with the immediate process of production. Rather, the specific forms of the latter crystallize out of the former.¹³² As Sayer has argued, if “relations of production” merely indexes the totality of social relations which make a particular form of production (i.e. capitalism) possible, then this broadens the range of possibilities to include what conventionally or vulgarly might be considered “superstructural” epiphenomena— race, gender, legal forms, religion, kinship relations, cultural practices, ethnicity. Relations of production—and, we should emphasize, reproduction—are traversed through these particular forms and practices of concrete belonging that are irreducible to the abstract class relation. If composition only applies in the narrow sense of the labor process, then indeed it can explain little about the process of class formation and degeneration in the reproduction of everyday life.

Notes from Below offers a remedy. Where they see the inability of technical composition to explain the totality of political compositions, they propose the category of “social composition,” which has as its basis not the technical aspects of the labor process, but the shared condition of dispossession.¹³³ It is only in the process of “working class reproduction,” represented in the formula C-M-C, or the social metabolism of exchange and consumption, that the full unity of the proletarian condition comes into existence. This “general formula of working class reproduction” had already been observed by Leopoldina Fortunati as the “arcane of reproduction,” which in this case referred to the structural necessity of (gendered) activities that are unwaged and not subsumed to the immediate process of production, but are nonetheless internal to the wage relation and capital’s total circuit.¹³⁴ As conditions of capital’s reproduction, these relations of reproduction appear as natural and given. They thus form a hidden abode of their own. Notes from Below correctly deduces this problem for class composition and workers’ inquiry: “as things stand, class composition analysis cannot understand workers beyond work.”¹³⁵ If we take the commodity labor-power as a naturalized given, the political class composition is woefully impoverished. “Social composition” is intended as an update that accounts for the activities of reproduction as political activities, an entire dimension of class struggle beyond the wage.

“​​Social composition is primarily a way to understand how consumption and reproduction form part of the material basis of political class composition. It involves factors like: where workers live and in what kind of housing, the gendered division of labour, patterns of migration, racism, community infrastructure, and so on.”¹³⁶

Combined with the technical composition in the labor process, social composition makes possible “the leap” into political composition, the working class viewpoint, or collective subjectivity.¹³⁷

For the most part, this is an editorial perspective of Notes from Below, and they aim to publish working class perspective and inquiries to that suit that position. They have published a few theoretical essays that help to develop the concept of social composition, from reflections on inflation and circulation struggles, including the practice of auto-reduction (or proletarian shopping), and the means of subsistence as a universalizing horizon,¹³⁸ to the process of “territorial inquiry”¹³⁹ in response to capital switching from primary manufacturing to the service, transport, logistics, and FIRE sectors in de-industrialized regions. “Social composition” appears to have the flexibility to account not only for the sphere of reproduction, but the heterogeneity of capital’s circuity, both in terms of geography and social constraints. This is an advance to be sure, but the concept of social composition was at the same time always latent in the strife internal to operaismo and autonomia, including its Marxist-feminist critics. Consider early operaismo’s emphasis on the belated and rapid transition, proletarianization, and migration from the south of Italy to the North. This meant shared kinship networks, vectors of communication, urban concentration, housing, etc, all of which shaped the character of workplace struggles as well as struggles beyond work. The advance represented in Notes from Below is their insistence on making “social composition” a category of its own, placing it on equal footing with technical and political composition, no longer subordinated it to a background feature of the class struggle.

Where Notes from Below errs is in not going far enough. The problem with the workers’ inquiry and composition analysis model here, as with their countrymen in Angry Workers, is that it takes for granted the central thesis of workerism: that the proletariat is both within and against capital—that there is an autonomy from the capital relation that capacitates political will, discipline, base building, and practices political recomposition. They have expanded the scope of what this composition includes, to be sure, but they have done so on a foundation of a unified working class identity. This is quite clear in their recent editorial on “The Organisational Question.”¹⁴⁰ In this issue, they continue to advance their theme of political composition as a “leap” into new organizational forms adequate to the technical and social class composition. This leap is possible because, for them, organization remains fundamentally in the normative realm—that is to say, in the realm of ideas. Having traced some of the same issues that above go under the heading of “the problem of composition,” Notes from Below remains unerringly programmatic in their approach. Communism is the self-emancipation of the working class. Organization form flows from the actually-existing coherence of the class, and its common viewpoint in opposition to the viewpoint of capital.¹⁴¹

How should they arrive at such distinctly programmatic perspective on working class unity, despite the advance “social composition”? It seems, rather simply, because they (editorially, at least) do not clearly link the processes composition, recomposition, and decomposition to any logic of capital. Refusing to understand working class behavior as an expression of the mute compulsion of capital, any internal logic to capital as an alienated form of social relations is eschewed in favor of a class reductionist struggle between the capitalists and the workers. They thus tend to highlight “greed,” inequality, and profiteering, rather than the structural constraints of declining profitability and idling productivity imposed on both capital and labor. Severed from the logic of capital, composition is also severed from its historical dimension. The unity of the class appears as an invariant, only to be “discovered” and politically composed by communist intervention. In the absence of the historical periodization of capital’s combined and uneven development, Notes from Below cannot explain how these facets of class composition relate to each other under distinct conditions. Today, this is the problem of decomposition. They cannot see its practical truth: the decoupling of the double moulinet has undermined the capacity of the production process to mitigate the decomposing effects of atomized social reproduction. Now, those effects swell in relation to stagnating and uneven economic growth. Fragmentations appears not only as de-industrialization of labor, but segmentation of labor markets, segregation of social reproduction, the material barriers of language, citizenship, or religion. What appears to them as universal—the cohesion of social composition—is in fact historically relative and incomplete. They can maintain that “a political organisation, regardless of the form it takes, is a tool,”¹⁴² because for them its content—proletarian unity—remains invariant. This is of course not the case. Worker identity has never been uniform or universal, and it has always rested on the shattered plane of dehumanization. When and where it is achieved, organization, composition, coordination must be understood as historical coherences of particular social forces. There is a leap to be made, surely, but it never be a matter of sheer political will.

Both Notes from Below and Angry Workers of the World emerged from a particular socialist milieu in Western Europe, England specifically. When the cycle of struggles immediately following the 2008 crisis had reached its trough—when insurrections had died—they sought remedy in the reconfigured spaces of working class life. The groups have collaborated in their advocacy of workers’ inquiry and a return to class composition analysis. Both have tended to see themselves as the sobering counterpoint to what they see as the fatal flaw of the nihilist “ultras” — a rejection, or worse, a supersession—of worker struggle in production in favor of generalized insurrection in circulation. Strangely, they have only stumbled upon what Théorie Communiste, those ultra-left communization exponents extraordinaire, themselves termed “the glass floor” of production. To only briefly gloss, TC argue that the glass floor of production is reached when struggles over reproduction (looting, rioting, attacks against the state, police, military, etc) generalize to the extent that class belonging, the proletarian condition, is confronted as a material constraint, but the separation of reproduction and production is not abolished. To do so, reproductive struggle would need to descend through the glass floor and “go into the sphere of production in order to abolish it as a specific moment of human relations and by doing so abolish labour by abolishing wage-labour.”¹⁴³ In their case study of the 2008 Greek riots, TC argue that the rioters became stuck in an antagonism with the institutional mediations of reproduction, and thereby reproduced these forms of separation as the condition of possibility for revolt. They did not overcome the proletarian condition because they did not call into question the core of the class relation: dispossession. Friends of the Classless Society go further, in their critique of TC, by arguing that “TC has abandoned every materialist conception of production… Communism is no longer the determinate negation of society, but a total miracle.”¹⁴⁴ For it to be determinate, proletarian “self-abolition consists of nothing other than taking possession of [the] means of production.” Neel and Chavez have recently reintroduced this problem as the science of communist construction.¹⁴⁵

The dynamic between subject formation, composition, and material production will be essential to the production of communism. Even taken in its primarily negative content—the determinate negation of capitalist relations of production—communism requires attention to the subjectivities that are formed in the process of production, at least in those sectors producing means of subsistence and basic infrastructure. We would argue that, despite some socialist fear-mongering about postmodernism, this remains the horizon for most attempts at communist organization today. However, we forget ourselves if we neglect the common but atomized problem of reproduction, that messy sphere of refuge and suffering, segregation and kinship, survival, despair, and beauty. This matters not because the arcane of reproduction can be plucked away from the technological dystopia of production, as a romantic revolutionary refuge, maintained by barricades, blockades, occupations, general assemblies, and community meetings. That is a separation adequate to capital. Today, the only community is the material community. It matters because, for struggle to even reach the point of genuine insurrectionary crisis, when the problems of material production have practical relief, we require attention to a different dimension, social reproduction, not as a unity, but as a common problem mediated by difference. It is in light of this discontinuity that social reproduction must be reckoned in its primary significance in the process of class composition and decomposition. Taken together, Parts One and Two show the importance of considering material practice as the basis of composition, but also demonstrate that when reproduction is taken for granted or left unattended, any strategy that proceeds from this basis is at best incomplete. The historical and contemporary accounts of composition explored above fail to account for either one or both of these facts. It is to this that we turn in Part Three.

Notes

1. This was in many ways anticipated by the dissolution of operaismo into autonomia.↩︎

2. Kristen Ross. 2018. “The Long 1960s and ‘The Wind From The West’.” Crisis & Critique 5(2): 321.↩︎

3. We suggest our own schematic, to be developed more fully in subsequent work, in “Tragic Theses.”↩︎

4. Ross, 2018, 321↩︎

5. Ibid., 321↩︎

6. See Ross, 2018.↩︎

7. See Makoto Itoh. 1990. The World Economic Crisis and Japanese Capitalism. ​​Palgrave Macmillan; See also

   Brenner, 2006.↩︎

8. See Sabu Kohso. 2024. “Life of Militancy: Japan’s Long ’68.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/life-of-militancy; David Apter and Nagayo Sawa. 1984. Against the State: Politics and Social Protest in Japan. Harvard University Press.; AMPO. “Sanrizuka.” AMPO Magazine. https://libcom.org/article/sanrizuka.↩︎

9. Apter and Sawa, 1984.↩︎

10. This was the result of the “Red Purge.”↩︎

11. William Andrews. 2014. “Sanrizuka: The Struggle to Stop Narita Airport.” https://throwoutyourbooks.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/narita-airport-protest-movement-sanrizuka/↩︎

12. See James C Davies. 1962. “Toward a Theory of Revolution.” American Sociological Review: 5-19. Phil Neal explores this tendency in relation to contemporary class conflict, especially as it informs antagonism within the class. See Neel, Hinterlands.↩︎

13. Itoh, 1990; Apter and Sawa, 1984.; Thomas RH Havens. 2015. Farm and nation in modern Japan: Agrarian nationalism, 1870-1940. Vol. 1335. Princeton University Press.;↩︎

14. “By making use of both family ties, and the reality that there were home villages for the majority of wage-workers to go back to when necessary, Japanese capitalism could dispense with many of the costs of social expenditure, or the burden of taxes and other direct costs upon capitalist firms in this regard, compared with rival capitalist countries. By the early 1970s, the proportion of GDP devoted to social expenditure was only 10 per cent in Japan, while it was a little over 20 per cent in a typical European continental country or 17-18 per cent in the USA and the UK.” Itoh, 154.↩︎

15. Here, Sanrizuka shares more in common with its contemporary in the struggle against a military base in the Larzac region in France. MTC and Ross makes this connection as well, but blur the commonalities with the ZAD, NoTAV, and current territorial struggles.↩︎

16. Elena Fourcroy and Nina Drejerska. 2019. “Agricultural Employment Transformation in France.” Annals of the Polish Association of Agricultural and Agrobusiness Economists 21(2).↩︎

17. Mauvaise Troupe Collective and Kristin Ross, 2018.↩︎

18. Florence Jany-Catrice and Michel Lallement. 2012. “France Confronts the Crisis: Economic Symptoms Exacerbate Social Inequality.” In Steffen Lehndorff, ed. A Triumph of Failed ideas European Models of Capitalism in the Crisis: 103-119.↩︎

19. On this trend, see Brenner, 2006.↩︎

20. Janu-Catrice and Lallement, 2012.↩︎

21. This tendency continues to shape politics in France, through the Yellow Vests, the movement against pension reform, and the Nahel Merzouk riots. See Roland Simon. 2023. “Statistics and Sentiments: On the riots of June 2023.” https://haters.noblogs.org/post/2023/07/07/translation-statistics-and-sentiments-on-the-riots-of-june-2023-by-r-s/↩︎

22. Kristin Ross. 2015. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. Brooklyn: Verso.; Mauvaise Troupe Collective and Kristin Ross, 2018.↩︎

23. Mauvaise Troupe Collective and Kristin Ross, 2018, 3.↩︎

24. It is in this space that the romantic politics of Tiqqun/TIC are able to insert themselves.Which, of course, they have done readily across these new territorial struggles. See any number of criticisms on the Scenes from Atlanta Forest blog: https://scenes.noblogs.org/. See also Anonymous. 2023. “Against the Party of Insurrection: A Look at Appelism in the U.S.” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/against-the-party-of-insurrection-a-look-at-appelism-in-the-us; Anonymous. 2023. “Decomposition: For Insurrection Without Vanguards.” Ungrateful Hyenas Editions. https://ungratefulhyenas.noblogs.org/post/2023/02/21/decomposition-for-insurrection-without-vanguards/; Crimethinc. 2019. “Reflections on the ZAD: Another History: Looking Back a Year after the Evictions.” https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/23/reflections-on-the-zad-looking-back-a-year-after-the-evictions; Crimethinc. 2018.“One but Many Movements: Two Translations from the ZAD on Isolation, Division, and Pacification.”↩︎

25. See Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road.↩︎

26. Endnotes. 2013. “The Holding Pattern: The Ongoing Crisis and the Class Struggles of 2011-2013” Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class, and Other Misfortunes.↩︎

27. See, e.g., Phil Neel’s discussion in a recent interview. Phil Neel. 2023. “​​Hostile Brothers: New Territories of Value and Violence.” https://haters.noblogs.org/files/2023/11/Hostile-Brothers.pdf↩︎

28. Endnotes, “The Holding Pattern”↩︎

29. Endnotes, “A History of Separation”↩︎

30. “Rather than unifying all workers behind a specific subject, growing superfluity has meant a decomposition of the class into so many particular situations — fragments among fragments — pitting the interests of those with stable jobs against precarious workers, citizens against undocumented migrants, and so on.” Endnotes. 2015. “Editorial #4.” Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation↩︎

31. Endnotes. 2013. “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection” Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class, and Other Misfortunes.; Endnotes. 2015. “Brown v Ferguson.” Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation.; Endnotes. 2015. “Gather Us From Among the Nations: The February 2014 Protests in Bosnia-Herzegovina” Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation.↩︎

32. Endnotes. 2013. “Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture.” Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class, and Other Misfortunes.↩︎

33. Neel and Chavez, “Forest and Factory”↩︎

34. “The concept of the party merely registers this fact: like spontaneous revolt itself, the rupture will not proceed automatically, out of a deep or even ‘final crisis’ of the capital-labour relation. The proletariat will not suddenly find itself holding the levers to power, after which point it is only a matter of figuring out what to do with it. Instead, the revolution will be the project of a fraction of society, i.e. the party, which solves the coordination problem in the only possible way – by abolishing class society.” Endnotes, “Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture,” fn16.↩︎

35. Amadeo Bordiga. 1965. “Considerations on the party’s organic activity when the general situation is historically unfavourable.”; Ultra. 2014. “Tomorrow’s Parties.” http://www.ultra-com.org/project/tomorrows-parties/↩︎

36. Communist Caucus. 2022. “Our Moment: Proletarian Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time.” https://communistcaucus.com/our-moment/↩︎

37. “In one sense, all of this is pretty straightforward observation. There are high points of struggle, and those high points generate coordinating efforts. It is in the details, however, that we discover the importance of the party-concept. Coordination and partisanship themselves are necessary but insufficient here. Highly coordinated organizations can emerge out of a moment of mass partisanship that have nothing to do with the party” Ultra, “Tomorrow’s Parties”↩︎

38. On our use of the “humanization process,” see “Tragic Theses.”↩︎

39. “…our point is not only to insist again that the workers’ movement has been weakened globally since the 1970s, that class composition itself primarily reveals itself negatively, as decomposition, and that new ideological symbols are therefore shaping protests and reconfiguring social movements.” Endnotes, “Onward Barbarians”↩︎

40. Endnotes, “Gather Us From Among the Nations,” 213.↩︎

41. Endnotes. 2013. “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Crisis Era Struggles in Britain.” Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class, and Other Misfortunes. https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/a-rising-tide-lifts-all-boats; ​​Jeanne Neton & Peter Åström. 2011. “How one can still put forward demands when no demands can be satisfied.” SIC 1: International Journal of Communisation. https://www.sicjournal.org/how-one-can-still-put-forward-demands-when-no-demands-can-be-satisfied/index.html; Zaschia Bouzarri. 2014. “Arson with demands – on the Swedish riots.” SIC 3: International Journal of Communisation. https://www.sicjournal.org/arson-with-demands/index.html; or, in the more normative register, Crimethinc. 2015. “Why We Don’t Make Demands.” https://crimethinc.com/2015/05/05/feature-why-we-dont-make-demands↩︎

42. “In the figure of the lumpen, we discover the dark underside of the affirmation of the working class. It was an abiding class-hatred. Workers saw themselves as originating out of a stinking morass: “At the time of the beginning of modern industry the term proletariat implied absolute degeneracy. And there are persons who believe this is still the case.” Moreover, capitalism was trying to push workers back into the muck. Thus, the crisis tendencies of capitalism could only end in one of two ways: in the victory of the working class or in its becoming lumpen.” Endnotes, “A History of Separation”↩︎

43. Endnotes describes this sequencing of struggles as “descending modulations.” Endnotes, “Brown v Ferguson”↩︎

44. For example, see, Adrian Wohlleben. 2021. “Memes Without End.” https://illwill.com/memes-without-end↩︎

45. Shemon & Arturo. 20202. “The Return of John Brown: White Race-Traitors in the 2020 Uprising.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/the-return-of-john-brown-white-race-traitors-in-the-2020-uprising↩︎

46. “The rebellion has produced a new political subjectivity—the George Floyd rebel—initiating a set of processes with many possible outcomes which will be determined by class struggles in the present.” Shemon and Arturo. 2020. “Theses on the George Floyd Rebellion.” https://illwill.com/theses-on-the-george-floyd-rebellion↩︎

47. While this theme is often found in the analyses of Shemon Salam and other writings on Ill Will Editions, it also buttresses the conceit of late stage Endnotes and appears as their solution to the composition problem. See “Onward Barbarians” and the dossier That Summer Feeling.↩︎

48. Spirit of May 28. 2023. “SM28 Dissolves: A Balance Sheet.” https://www.sm28.org/articles/sm28-dissolves-a-balance-sheet/↩︎

49. Shemon. 2021. “Missed Insurrections.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/missed-insurrections; See also Clover, Riot.Strike.Riot.↩︎

50. “When revolt ends, proletarians tend to revert to atomisation. They dissolve back into the cash nexus.” Endnotes, “Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture.”↩︎

51. “Yet today’s riots hit their limit when they exhaust available goods: when rioters find the stores empty and can no longer reproduce themselves through the wage, they tend to retreat back into capitalist social relations.” Shemon, “Missed Insurrections”↩︎

52. Shemon Salam. 2022. “Lost in the American Wasteland.” That Summer Feeling: The George Floyd Protest and America’s Hot Pandemic Summer of 2020. https://endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/that-summer-feeling↩︎

53. Many of the anti-authoritarian and anarchist critiques do indeed approach “composition” with readymade straw men.↩︎

54. Anonymous. 2023. “Ten Theses on Anti-Tiqqunism.” https://scenes.noblogs.org/post/2023/07/26/ten-theses-on-anti-tiqqunism↩︎

55. See Anonymous. 2023. “Breaking Ranks: Subverting the Hierarchy and Manipulation Behind Earth Uprisings.” https://scenes.noblogs.org/post/2023/07/02/breaking-ranks-subverting-the-hierarchy-and-manipulation-behind-earth-uprisings/; See also Anonymous, “Against the Party of Insurrection” and Anonymous, “Decomposition: For Insurrection Without Vanguards.”↩︎

56. Les Soulèvements de la Terre. 2023. “To Those Who Marched at Sainte-Soline.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/to-those-who-marched-at-sainte-soline; Anonymous. 2023. “The Trap of Sainte-Soline.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/sainte-soline↩︎

57. Crimethinc. 2023. “The Defense of Lützerath.” https://crimethinc.com/2023/01/19/the-defense-of-lutzerath-a-photoessay-and-poster-documenting-ecological-destruction-and-resistance; Crimethinc. 2021. “The Forest Occupation Movement in Germany: Tactics, Strategy, and Culture of Resistance.” https://crimethinc.com/2021/03/10/the-forest-occupation-movement-in-germany-tactics-strategy-and-culture-of-resistance;↩︎

58. Anonymous. 2020. “Rhythm and Ritual Composing Movement in Portland’s 2020.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/print/rhythm-and-ritual ↩︎

59. Farrell, “The Strategy of Composition”↩︎

60. Ibid.↩︎

61. We reject the notion of a “now-extinct” mass subject. See above.↩︎

62. Neel, Hinterlands↩︎

63. Neel observed this as well: “On the surface, many of the movement’s de facto leadership—all of whom are on the frontlines, and none of whom were established activists—hold extremely amorphous and rapidly shifting political positions. They are united not by any shared program, but instead at the tactical level, by an oath committing them to whatever action will further the unrest, pry open the rift in society and seed political potentials further afield.” Phil Neel. 2020. “The Spiral.” Field Notes. https://brooklynrail.org/2020/09/field-notes/The-Spiral-Epilogue-to-the-French-Edition-of-Hinterland-Americas-New-Landscape-of-Class-and-Conflict↩︎

64. Endnotes observed this experience during the 2011 London riots. “This riot demanded the presence of the police, as the immediate interlocutor for whom it was performed, whose recognition it insisted upon, whose presence and participation it invited, and through whose efforts it was constituted.” Endnotes, “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats”↩︎

65. “It is this fidelity to radical actions (the oath) and not to professed radical actors or language or symbology (the program) that ensures the political trajectory of such struggles.” Neel, “The Spiral”↩︎

66. See above↩︎

67. “The Strategy of Composition”↩︎

68. Ibid.↩︎

69. Ibid.↩︎

70. It is telling that the in face of 1,000 year prison sentences, only a select few of the original defendants in the “Green Scare” cases did not snitch. And two of those ended up being Nazis.↩︎

71. E.g: “…for now the city administration refuses to even count the petition signatures—stalling with bad faith legal runarounds. If it is able to clear these hurdles, the referendum will be on the ballot in the upcoming elections this March. Without a legal order to halt construction, whatever happens at the ballot box will be too late.” Block Cop City: https://blockcopcity.org/↩︎

72. Anonymous. 2018. “The ‘Movement’ Is Dead, Long Live… Reform!: A Critique of ‘Composition’ and Its Elites.” https://zad.nadir.org/IMG/pdf/splash3-a4-booklet.pdf↩︎

73. “​​While the ostensible aim of both struggles lies in protecting specific territories, they have also succeeded in challenging the more general terms of our current period of reaction.” Farrell, “The Strategy of Composition”↩︎

74. “Part of the ZADist wager was that anti-Macron mobilization would spread across the country, beyond railway workers and students, which would have relieved much of the pressure on the ZAD. For now, this has not materialized, but the games are not over yet.” Alèssi Dell’Umbria. 2018. “Being in the Zone: Concerning Conflicts Within the Zad.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/being-in-the-zone ↩︎

75. Here, indigenous territorial defense should be treated as qualitatively distinct, despite Farrell’s collation with other forms of territorial struggle. We discuss this more below and in Part Three.↩︎

76. “The problem with [diversity of tactics] is that it effectively abandoned the possibility of a collective strategy or mode of organization. In order for each section of the movement to enact its tactical program during a mobilization, it must enjoy (according to the canonical “St. Paul Principles”) a “separation of time and space.” As a result, whenever any movement-wide discussion would occur, the focus would be on allowing each tactical program to be enacted without getting in each other’s way, rather than on winning in a broader sense. This liberal concept of “autonomy” as tolerance-amidst-separation mirrors the atomized structure of neoliberal citizenship. In the end, it allowed the most conservative sections of the movement to cunningly reestablish their dominance through the back door.” Farrell, “The Strategy of Composition”↩︎

77. Ibid.↩︎

78. Ibid.↩︎

79. This is not to say that there are not indigenous stakes in the DFA/SCC struggle. The participation of the Muscogee or black residents adjacent to the project clearly complicates claims on the land and its ancestral significance.↩︎

80. “Tragic Theses”↩︎

81. “Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions o f exchange—of the means of communication and transport—the annihilation of space by time—becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.” Karl Marx. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Penguin, 524.↩︎

82. For examples see Neel, Hinterland; Antithesi, “The Ecological Crisis and the Rise of Post-Fascism,” https://illwill.com/antithesi↩︎

83. Clearly, the struggle to Stop Cop City meets this criteria, particularly for Atlanta’s black residents, whose very lives are threatened by the police training complex. But Farrell’s focus on the “territorial” character of this struggle—as something “worth defending”—tends to crowd out the clear struggles over black social reproduction because they are not immediately identifiable with the “compositional” representation. See Anonymous, “The War in Front of Us,” https://scenes.noblogs.org/post/2023/06/10/the-war-in-front-of-us/↩︎

84. See Mike Gouldhawke., 2020. “Land as a Social Relationship.” Briarpatch. https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/land-as-a-social-relationship; Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2016. “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity.” American Quarterly 68(2): 249-255; Glen Coulthard. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press.; Audra Simpson. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus. Duke University Press.↩︎

85. Coulthard and Simpson, 2016↩︎

86. This much is clear from Coulthard and Simpson’s description: “What we are calling ‘grounded normativity’ refers to the ethical frameworks provided by these Indigenous place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge. Grounded normativity houses and reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place. Grounded normativity teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner. Grounded normativity teaches us how to be in respectful diplomatic relationships with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous nations with whom we might share territorial responsibilities or common political or economic interests. Our relationship to the land itself generates the processes, practices, and knowledges that inform our political systems, and through which we practice solidarity.” Ibid., 254.↩︎

87. Gouldhawke, 2020↩︎

88. This is most clearly seen in blockades such as the Unist’ot’en Camp. https://unistoten.camp/about/governance-structure/↩︎

89. Anonymous, “Another Word for Settle”↩︎

90. “​​here was a vast and constant flow of bodies, goods, ideas and strategies through the camps, fed by multiple social strata each of which arrived with their own distinct experiences of being rendered surplus to the economy. Native people, substantially excluded from the waged economy or relegated to its lowest, rural rungs across widely-dispersed reservations, used the Standing Rock camps as a space of regroupment. Settlers, disproportionately young and hailing from a generation defined by precarious employment, flocked to the camps to support Native claims, to fight a carbon economy that holds them hostage as well, or simply (for many) because they had nothing better to do. While their exposure to precarity, as service workers or indebted college graduates, is structurally distinct from that of Native people confined to impoverished reservations, the end of Fordist career certainties allowed thousands of settler youth to spend months at a time camping in the plains of North Dakota, building defensible structures, participating in ceremony, or fighting the police. Why not quit a Starbucks job, which lacks security or any possibility of advancement, and live almost without money? How else can we renew that ethical substance which long ago disappeared from the normally-functioning metropolis?”↩︎

91. For histories and first hand accounts of Standing Rock, see Ill Will Editions. ““Dispatches from Standing Rock: Against the Dakota Access Pipeline and its World.” https://illwill.com/print/dispatches-from-standing-rock; Nick Estes. 2019. Nick Estes. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. University of Minnesota Press. Nick Estes. 2018. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Verso Books; Crimethinc. 2017. “Interview: The Standing Rock Evictions.” https://crimethinc.com/2017/02/28/interview-the-standing-rock-evictions-audio-and-transcript; Crimethinc. 2016. “Report Back from the Battle for Sacred Ground.” https://crimethinc.com/2016/11/01/feature-report-back-from-the-battle-for-sacred-ground↩︎

92. Red Warrior Camp. 2016. “Red Warrior Camp Closes.” https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2016/12/11/red-warrior-camp-closes/; n.a. 2016. “Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council votes unanimously to ask Red Warrior Camp to leave.” KFYR TV. https://www.kfyrtv.com/content/news/Standing-Rock-Sioux-Tribal-Council-votes-unanimously-to-ask-Red-Warrior-Camp-to-leave-401548985.html↩︎

93. Alleen Brown, Will Parrish, and Alice Speri. 2017. “LEAKED DOCUMENTS REVEAL COUNTERTERRORISM TACTICS USED AT STANDING ROCK TO ‘DEFEAT PIPELINE INSURGENCIES’.” The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-reveal-security-firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline-insurgencies/↩︎

94. There are other caricatures that prop up the argument. See, for example, Farrell’s rather lukewarm description of coalition building, which he must insist is a different creature entirely: ““Composing” as a practice means holding together and expanding the relations between social sectors of a struggle, and “composition” as a strategy refers to the assumption that a collective victory under current conditions is only possible provided our movements find ways to tease out such collaborative meshworks across and between various social identities. However, this is not merely a coalition of different subjects, each of whom remains the same throughout. In order for this strategy to function in practice, in order to maintain the composition of a movement, each of its component parts must be willing to step away from their identities to some degree. The aim here is not to enter into some kind of new synthesis, erasing particularity; rather, the assumption is that, in order to win, each segment must commit to a contextual form that invites all the other pieces of the movement to destabilize the identity and commitments that they may otherwise have held in normal capitalist politics. In this way, composition produces not “social unity” but a practical machine fueled by the partial desubjectification of its constituent parts.” This could just as easily be guide to action planning, campaign strategy, coalition building, or diversity of tactics.↩︎

95. Endnotes, “Onward Barbarians”↩︎

96. “​​Yet because they represent the crisis of a stagnating capitalism, and their effect is to make that stagnation ungovernable, the non-movements point to the need for a universalism that goes beyond the ruins of the workers’ movements.” Ibid.↩︎

97. “…“what every wave of mass mobilization comes up against is the limited ability to move beyond a negative unity (a unity against racism/police/elites) to establish a positive and creative social or political force. The perpetual problems of identity politics are symptomatic of this limit: the inability of a wave of struggle to embody and sustain itself given the atomization and fragmentation of its constituents. At some point each wave crashes and shatters on those fragments.” Ibid.↩︎

98. “The first stumbling steps out of our anarchic era lie in the confusions of identity that the non-movements give witness to in their hunger for human community.” Ibid.↩︎

99. “…family, property, and the state are not institutions formed with the birth of the human species and which the species requires in order to survive. We live in a society, and we had long been living in one before these concepts came to fruition. By demonstrating this scientifically, we also show that one day these three institutions will disappear. We must not write in our program the reform of these three wretched bases of civilization. Instead, we must call for their destruction.” Amadeo Bordiga. 1951. “Onward, Barbarians!” https://libcom.org/article/onwards-barbarians↩︎

100. Bordiga, “The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism.” See also Amadeo Bordiga. 1952. “The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust.” https://libcom.org/article/human-species-and-earths-crust-amadeo-bordiga↩︎

101. Phil Neel and Nick Chavez provide an interesting discussion of this in their recently published “Forest and Factory.”↩︎

102. Neel and Chavez diagnose this as well.↩︎

103. Mike Gouldhawke maintains an excellent archive of insurrectionary anarchist writings, especially as they relate to indigenous peoples: https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/; See also Michael Loadenthal. 2017. The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence. Manchester University Press.↩︎

104. These are the themes of the more thoughtful and sober criticisms, at least. See Tim Barker. 2017. “The Bleak Left: On Endnotes.” n+1 Issue 28: Half-Life. https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-28/reviews/the-bleak-left/; Bue Rübner Hansen. 2015. “Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation.” Viewpoint Issue 5: Social Reproduction. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/surplus-population-social-reproduction-and-the-problem-of-class-formation/ ↩︎

105. We include here Viewpoint, Notes from Below, and Angry Workers of the World.↩︎

106. Angry Workers of the World. 2020. “Revolutionary Working Class Strategy for the 21st Century.” https://www.angryworkers.org/2020/04/07/revolutionary-working-class-strategy-for-the-21st-century-part-1/↩︎

107. Brooklyn Rail has published several good articles chronicling this journalistic shift and its socialist appeal. See Jason Smith. 2022. “‘Striketober’ and Labor’s Long Downturn.” Field Notes. https://brooklynrail.org/2021/12/field-notes/Striketober-and-Labors-Long-Downturn, and Marianne Garneau. 2022. “‘Striketober: Hopes and Realities.” Field Notes. https://brooklynrail.org/contributor/Marianne-Garneau↩︎

108. See, e.g., Angry Workers, “Revolutionary Working Class Strategy”↩︎

109. “For the few comrades who do try and understand what ‘the global working class’ actually is, the theoretical and conceptual framework seems inadequate to deal with the amount of empirical data and multiple facets of global working class lives and struggles today.” Angry Workers, “Revolutionary Working Class Strategy”↩︎

110. WildCat represents an earlier iteration of neo-workerism, which we discussed above.↩︎

111. Angry Workers detail this in their 2020 book and report, Class Power on Zero Hours: https://www.angryworkers.org/class-power-on-zero-hours/↩︎

112. “The dynamic character of capitalism and ‘development’ in general is less explained out of ‘market-forces’ or ‘abstract greed for super-profits’, but by this dynamic relation-ship between struggle and changes in production as response. Capitalism contains class conflict through developmental leaps.” Angry Workers of the World. 2014. “On relations between capitalist development, class struggle and communist organisation.” https://www.angryworkers.org/2014/07/30/general-thoughts-on-relation-between-capitalist-development-class-struggle-and-communist-organisation/↩︎

113. We have our disagreements, but Søren Mau’s treatment of capital as a “mute compulsion” is likely one of the best. Søren Mau. 2023. Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. Verso Books.↩︎

114. See Angry Workers, “Revolutionary Working Class Strategy” and Class Power on Zero-Hours.↩︎

115. Phil Neel discussed this confusion in a recent interview. As he says: “the whole point is that people in the surplus population aren’t able to escape the economy.” Neel, “Hostile Brothers.” See also Endnotes. 2010. “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital.” Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value-Form; Aaron Benanav. 2020. Automation and the Future of Work. Verso; Jason Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work↩︎

116. “The idea that the world is dominated by ’surplus population’, which is largely excluded from value production, is equally flawed. Anyone who has a bit of insight into modern slum-economies will know that, for example, nearly half of US almonds are processed in slums in North India or that car part production reaches into Mexican shanty towns.” Angry Workers, “Revolutionary Working Class Strategy”↩︎

117. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums↩︎

118. There is a contrast here then with the case made by Neel and Chavez in “Forest and Factory.”↩︎

119. Angry Workers, “Revolutionary Working Class Strategy”↩︎

120. See Shanin, Late Marx↩︎

121. Robert C. Allen. 2013. Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. See also Endnotes, “A History of Separation”↩︎

122. Angry Workers, “Revolutionary Working Class Strategy”↩︎

123. David Ricardo thought the same.↩︎

124. The worst results of this analysis came during the George Floyd Rebellion and the 2021 Palestinian uprisings. See Angry Workers. 2020. “The necessity of a revolutionary working class program in times of coup and civil war scenarios.” https://www.angryworkers.org/2020/10/10/the-necessity-of-a-revolutionary-working-class-program-in-times-of-coup-and-civil-war-scenarios/, and Angry Workers, “Editorial #3: Palestine-Israel.”↩︎

125. Notes from Below. 2018. “The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition.” Issue 1: No Politics Without Inquiry! https://notesfrombelow.org/article/workers-inquiry-and-social-composition↩︎

126. See Raniero Panzieri. “The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the Objectivists.” https://libcom.org/library/capalist-use-machinery-raniero-panzieri; Raniero Panzier. “Surplus Value and Planning.” https://libcom.org/library/surplus-value-planning-raniero-panzieri; and Tronti, Workers and Capital↩︎

127. Panzieri, “Surplus Value and Planning”↩︎

128. For instance, there remain ecological, physical, and physiological limitations to the reproduction process that are historically invariant and similarly inhere in its technical form, even in the capitalist mode of production. They are subordinated to the compulsion of socially necessary labor-time, but never overcome by it.↩︎

129. Søren Mau provides the best contemporary account of recent Marxist theory in this area, but an important and too often overlooked precursor is Derek Sayer’s critique of analytical Marxism. Derek Sayer. 1987. The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytical Foundations of Historical Materialism. Basil Blackwell.↩︎

130. Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction, 34↩︎

131. This distinction between “relations of production” and “forms of exploitation” was articulated by Jairus Banaji. Jairus Banaji. 2011. Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. Haymarket Books↩︎

132. Ibid.↩︎

133. “…we feel that previous analysis of class composition has based workers and their resistance almost exclusively on the workplace. Yet workers are made into a class before they are employed by a capitalist. Before they are required to sell their time, they are dispossessed of the means of production. Tied to this condition is a whole range of political struggles beyond the wage. This includes those over the conditions of state-provided social services, migration and borders, housing and rent, and a wide range of other issues. We believe that analyses of technical composition alone can produce their own hidden abodes beyond work. We therefore propose a third dimension: social composition.” Notes from Below, “The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition”↩︎

134. Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, and Gonzalez, “The Gendered Circuit”↩︎

135. Notes from Below, “The Workers’ Inquiry”↩︎

136. Ibid.↩︎

137. “In all three parts, class composition is both product and producer of struggle over the social relations of the capitalist mode of production. The transition between technical/social and political composition occurs as a leap that defines the working class political viewpoint.” Ibid.↩︎

138. Notes from Below. 2023. “The Coming Indigestion.” Issue #18: Seeds of Struggle: Food in a Time of Crisis. https://notesfrombelow.org/article/coming-indigestion, and Seth Wheeler and Jamila Squire. 2023. “Food Price Hikes, Social Composition and Auto-Reduction.”Issue #18: Seeds of Struggle: Food in a Time of Crisis. https://notesfrombelow.org/article/food-price-hikes-social-composition-and-auto-reduc↩︎

139. Neil Gray. 2019. “Notes Towards a Practice of Territorial Inquiry.” Issue #10: Housing. https://notesfrombelow.org/article/notes-towards-practice-territorial-inquiry↩︎

140. Notes from Below. 2023. “The Organizational Question.” Issue #19: The Political Leap: Communist Strategy Today. https://notesfrombelow.org/article/organisational-question↩︎

141. “Social composition allows us to extend the logic of class composition analysis to the whole of the working class. This includes the unemployed and workers not directly involved in producing the capitalist form of value. Both productive and unproductive workers are members of the same class. They all lack control of the means of production, sell their labour-power to survive, and work to reproduce capitalist society. Class composition is grounded in the working class viewpoint on work, not on capital’s viewpoint of productivity.” Notes from Below, “The Workers’ Inquiry”↩︎

142. Notes from Below, “The Organizational Question”↩︎

143. Théorie Communiste, “The Glass Floor”↩︎

144. Friends of the Classless Society, “On Communisation and its Theorists”↩︎

145. “Forest and Factory”↩︎