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A characteristic failure of most mainstream economic discussions is their presumption that if human labor in production becomes technically unnecessary, then it will inevitably disappear. However, the system of capital accumulation and wage labor is both a technical device for efficient production and a system of power. Having power over others is, for many powerful people, its own reward. Thus, they will endeavor to maintain a system where others serve them, even if such a system is, from a purely productive standpoint, totally superfluous.
While in the previous models the correlation between risks and opportunities created a relative stability, the active offloading of social risk to society, as we shall see, has created a condition of generalized precarity from which the labor-market insiders—those who are skilled and have well-paying jobs—are not sheltered. Precarity is the social question of the twenty-first century.
Capitalism on Edge
Albena Azmanova;
Any “working-class ‘class politics’” in a capitalist world, in order to be at all liberatory, will have to be an abstract, theoretical politics. If we want to construct an alternative to the capital-proletarian class relation on a global scale, we are choosing to embark on the the most difficult political undertaking imaginable. In the face of that challenge,
we will always face the temptation of believing that some local struggle
is a monad of this abstract, global struggle, containing all of its determinations in an condensed and easily-graspable form. We must resist this temptation.
Class in Theory, Class in Practice
William Clare Roberts
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