disaffected communists - Re-emergence and Eclipse
of the Proletariat
▻https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/ZCjeDTN67HEQi0i87Z9c9Y6W
The historical inheritance can be found today: while the professional leftists
praise the new labor movement they simultaneously decry ‘crime waves,’ including the uptick of decentralized mass lootings across the United States
in the lead up to Black Friday 2021. This attempt to distinguish labor from
the ‘criminal’ elements of the proletariat reveals the gap between the growing
surplus population and the unionizing workforce as a racialized exclusion–
the construction of a ‘virtuous’ labor movement is only possible through the
banishment and dejection of the ‘black underclass.’ The ‘service sector’–the
only sector of the economy to experience any meaningful employment growth
since the Great Recession–is disproportionately racialized and feminized. It
also remains the center of recent unionization efforts. Yet, by valorizing only
‘formal’ worker organization and treating the ‘working class’ as a moral rather
than objective category, this level of concrete differentiation and class experience is thrown aside and erased in the pursuit of building a unified ‘working class’ identity that is mediated only by acting through the ‘appropriate’
channels of struggle. Though union bureaucrats and professional leftists might
be too careful and trained in DEI to explicitly deploy racial animus (can’t
lose those journalism contracts and paid positions), they still appeal to a ‘class
unity’ that in actual practice is achieved through racialization and heteropatriarchy, contrasting and opposing it to ‘criminality,’ anarchy, and destitution and thereby breathing new life into the ideological conflict between ‘undeserving’ and ‘deserving’ poor.