The time of flexible accumulation corresponds to the advent of a re-feudalized and post-democratic epoch, in which decisions are sovereignly taken by an unaccountable financial elite operating in the most rigorous anonymity, in the inter-worlds of corporations and rhizomatic multinationals, and in its own exclusive interest.
The processes of de-sovereignization and denationalization, which became central after 1989 and coincided with the “end of the State” evoked by Hobsbawm (although it would be better to speak of liberal refunctionalization of the State), correspond to the necessary moments of demolition both of the very largely perfectible democracies (to date, there are no truly democratic transnational entities), and of the residual eticizing power of politics, capable of disciplining and governing the economy in the process of absolutization.
Today the Servant cannot win, because in the present situation he can no longer even fight, forced as he is, in global spaces, to passively endure in his own living flesh an accumulation of exploitations and injustices which, like production in this global era, are increasingly delocalized and evasive.
Reduced to a purely passive pole, deprived of consciousness, to a mere provider of flexible and precarious labor power, the post-proletarian Servant suffers in silence, unable to assign a face and a name to the source of his suffering.
The latter often come from the other side of the ocean or, in any case, from sidereally distant places, which makes impossible that exchange of glances between Servant and Lord which, as Hegel recalled, constitutes the first moment of “recognition” (Anerkennung) and, we would add, of the conflict aimed at overcoming the nexus between Lordship and Servitude.
The actio in distans, which would be more appropriately defined as violence at a distance, allows the globalist Lord sans frontières to escape the moment of confrontation and conflict and, at the same time, to exercise his daily violence without response.
Summarizing what Hayek enthusiastically pointed out in reference to the federal experiences of limitation of national sovereignties, “even legislative measures to reduce child labor and working hours become difficult to adopt by a single State.” And so finally, the lex of pure competition can prevail, without output limitations, following the binomial proposed by Hayek, centered on faith in the spontaneous order of the market and on the demonization of the immorality of any form of equality (distributive justice, in fact, denies the sacred liberal commandment of competition).
The overcoming of sovereign nation-states is pursued by capital and its disguised characters (with the full support of the new progressive and post-communist left), with a view only to the intensification on a planetary scale of the processes of extortion of surplus value to the detriment of the cursed mass of the losers of globalization.
The “great transformation” proclaimed by Karl Polanyi or Schumpeter has arrived, but not in a socialist direction—it has set in motion the new absolute capitalism with integral commercialization of the real and the imaginary. The overcoming of national states, which the masters of discourse and the rainbow brigades of the everlasting anti-fascism justify in terms of the neutralization of a possible return of fascism, represents a decisive moment in the triumph of the new globalist totalitarianism of the speculative markets.
The globalization of the economy implies, through the general extension of flexibility, “the control of the conflictuality of the workers and of social antagonism in general.” It also entails, through the practices of delocalization without borders, the movement on a global scale of the game of the laws of the market, but certainly not of rights. Strictly speaking, quite the opposite. The globalization of the rules of the market and of competition presupposes, precisely for this reason, the dynamic of the erosion of rights—competition causes production to move, by relocating, to where labor costs are more contained, because of the absence or limitation of rights.
Thus, in order not to succumb to the competition that has now become planetary, the areas in which social rights were historically present thanks to the conquests of the Servant, adapt to those of the “periphery,” as Wallerstein described it. The latter, due to the lack of rights, can produce at lower costs, still benefiting from the presence not only of the Fordist factory model, but also of scenarios of true and real direct slavery. In the words of Capital, “our suffering comes not only from the living, but also from the dead.”
In the framework of globalization as a planetarized status naturae, the winner is the rule of capital—the free cannibalism that prescribes the permanent search for new workers willing to produce the same at a lower cost.
From what has been described as the new international division of labor derives the processes of offshoring, outsourcing and competitive pressure on the wages of the meager number of workers who still benefit from rights and working hours limited by law.
Deregulated competitiveness, more solito, does not rhyme with democracy and rights, but with desalarization and plummeting production costs. In fact, offshoring corresponds, in technical terms, to the “spatial dispersion of production stages, especially to nations with low labor costs.”
From whatever perspective it is explored, globalization exasperates competitiveness in the circulation of capital and goods, including those sui generis goods which, from the point of view of capital, are the workers themselves. It favors on a planetary scale the contraction of wages, the demolition of social power and the annulment of the resistance capacity of the working-living-class.
For this reason, in the new foreshortening of the millennium, legitimized by the cognitive framework made available by the militant Fukuyamists of the end of history, the law of centralization and concentration of capital, but also that of the agglomeration of the surplus overpopulation, which presses to be integrated into the world of work, is being projected at the global level to an ever-increasing extent.
The only beneficiary of this is capital itself, in the context of the programmed de-structuring of the economic regulatory function of the national state and of economic inequality, which is being widened exponentially and without restraint by a sphere of eticity in a phase of dismantling.
As we have shown in Historia y conciencia del precariado (History and Consciousness of the Precariat), mass immigration figures in itself as a weapon in the hands of the ruling class. More precisely, the delocalization of production and mass immigration are presented as the two sides of the same globalist coin; that is to say, as the two processes, reciprocally innervated, of the logic of this competitive globalization, which aims to reduce more and more the costs and rights of the labor force, in order to impose the absolute domination of capital over labor and of the Lord over the Servant.
On the one hand, capital relocates production wherever it is most convenient, without concern for respect for the environment or the rights of workers. Such is, by its essence, the logic of multinationals, which from time to time move into new territories, plunder them and, finally, abandon them to relocate in search of new areas for which they reserve the same treatment.
On the other hand, with symmetrical movement, capital attracts migrant workers to the very sites of production, with the sole objective of procuring hands and neurons at low cost, unprotected by rights and not prone to critical demands. Thus, according to Saskia Sassen’s icastic definition, “immigration is the founding process of the new transnational economic policy.”
Relocation of production and forced immigration correspond, therefore, to the two symmetrical movements with which cosmomarketing relocates production to countries where costs are reduced or attracts labor willing to work at lower prices and with the guarantee of fewer rights. The cosmopolitanism of the unlimited opening of the material and the immaterial, with the associated demonization of any figure of the limit, of the law and of the frontier, represents the cultural superstructure of reference of the globalist structure for the benefit of the planetary Masters.
The dynamic is always the same, even if it is ennobled with the bombastic rhetoric of welcome and integration—in the words of Bales, it is of vital importance, for the valorization of value, the supply of “disposable people,” of people available for the “new slavery in global economy.” Among the objectives of competitive capital and its auri sacra fames is always also that of finding someone willing to produce the same thing at a lower cost.
If workers ask for wage increases or more dignified conditions, the ruthless captains of deregulated globalism and technocapitalist innovation hubs respond either by replacing the workforce with the industrial reserve army of immigrants or by relocating the factory abroad, where such rights are not respected or simply have never been in force.
The same logic that governs the development of the cycles of production and circulation of goods (outsourcing, offshoring, frantic search for new markets and new advantageous laboratories of production) now governs the capitalist management of the mass of the globalization plebs, reduced to the rank of mere merchandise in mobility, delocalized and forced into forced migration according to the requirements of value valorization.
Praised at every turn by the cynical publicists of the future of peoples, the dynamics of the exploitation of human labor and alienation thus reach the highest degree of intensity.
Migratory delocalization makes possible forms of overexploitation and neo-servile labor, always to the detriment of the precarious and the stateless of the contract and of existence. And, with all this, the process of reification (the conversion of man into a commodity) and alienation (the estrangement from his own nature as a human being, replaced by that of a commodity) is brought to completion—now the human is unreservedly redefined as a commodity, which freely and perpetually moves in a Brownian manner on the smooth plane of the denationalized and competitive global market, on the basis of those demands of production and circulation from which no entity will ever again be able to escape (from things to animals, from nature to man).
The new overexploited and underpaid plebs must be precarious and migrant, forced to a planetary “free circulation”—in reality, to the perpetual diasporic wandering—promoted by the single thought as the maximum figure of emancipation for peoples and individuals. Uprootedness and de-rootedness thus appear as the two complementary functions of liberal cosmopolitanism and its specific biopolitical engineering.
The dynamics with which outsourcing, delocalization and wage-dumping are practiced is, in short, the same that presides over the mass deportations of new labor slaves, ideologically called “mass migrations.”
The coin whose two sides are “offshoring” and “mass immigration” is, therefore, that of class conflict, which capital is winning without encountering resistance and with the full cultural subordination of the intellectual class and of the seductive progressive forces, geopolitically Euro-Atlantist, metaphysically nihilistic, valoristically relativistic and politically liberal.
The new cosmopolitan and deterritorialized bosses (the liberal Right of the Money) promote surplus-immigrationism and, in the name of the dogma of free circulation, use it as a new deportation of slaves from which to extract surplus-value.
In turn, it is culturally legitimized by the coryphaeans of Progress (the libertarian progressive Left of Customs), who sanctify it through the immediate and recurrent accusation of xenophobia and racism, directed against anyone who dares to criticize it.
The rainbow brigades of the new Left, which complement the cosmopolitical liberal and financial Right, have forgotten the class opposition between Capital and Labor, replacing it by the “law of the heart” (Gesetz des Herzens)—we would say with Hegel—of the sentimental opposition between reception and integration: with the paradoxical consequence that the cosmopolitan exploiters of labor, promoters of openness and free movement, can be glorified as “welcoming,” while they are ostracized as “xenophobic” and “intolerant” those who, in the name of the class struggle of Marxian memory, oppose deportation, trafficking in human beings and the exploitation of native and migrant labor, and demand political control of the flow of capital and people.
Forced migrations, favored by flexible accumulation and by the imperialism that this has not ceased to secrete, are a moment of universal competition in the globalized system of needs; in whose smooth plane the fact of migrating is not, in itself, more emancipating than remaining in the territoriality of origin, nor is the nomad more inclined to revolution than the sedentary subject.
In contrast to those who celebrate the cuurent immigration as an intrinsically positive, integrating and emancipating model, it is necessary to reiterate with emphasis, from a solidly Marxian point of view, that this is always and only so for capital and for the globalist Lord, who can, in this way, unreservedly employ migrants in the chains of production at a bargain price and without the just recognition of rights.
Moreover, they can easily replace the labor force protected by social rights and endowed with a residual opposing class consciousness, by a new labor force lacking both and which, moreover, is always subject to the blackmail of expulsion (through denunciation of illegal immigration because of their undocumented status), and is ready to do whatever it takes to survive.
Finally, thanks to the “weapon of mass immigration,” the globocrats of thoughtless calculation easily neutralize the vertical class conflict between the Servant and the Lord—the conflictuality is transferred to the horizontality of the clash between migrant Servants and autochthonous Servants, sponsored and celebrated by the administrators of the consensus, by the media circus and by all the other praetorians of the “silent propaganda,” who have successfully managed to transform the world into a fairy tale and who sing happily, like Zarathustra’s animals, their song for the organetto.
Through the practices of mass immigration and the capitalist uprooting associated with it, those who win are neither the immigrants nor the workers, both forming the ongoing Pole of the new precarious Servant. The immigrants lose, because they appear as blackmailable slaves and as human material deprived of rights and dignity. The immigrants, who are victims, end up being treated as guilty by the other segments of the dominated class—the latter tend to forget that the enemy is not the migrant, but those who provoke migration; it is not the desperate, but those who produce desperation; it is not those who flee, but those who force people to flee and uproot. Indigenous workers are also losers, as they now have to compete with migrant workers, who exert downward competitive pressure.
The liberal-libertarian globalist elite wins, which can sovereignly benefit from this condition of competition among the latter, but also from the fragmentation of class consciousness and the new horizontal conflicts between autochthonous workers and migrant workers.
Therefore, those who triumph once again are the neo-feudal lord and capital, with its insatiable search for hands and neurons willing to do the same at a lower price. They take advantage of the irregular and low-cost labor offered by migrants for two reasons: a) it intensifies surplus value; b) it reduces the cost of labor in general.
As Jacques Ellul has shown, the anodyne expression “laissez-faire,” on which the competitive verb is based, hides the imperative of the dominant pole, which can be condensed as follows: “let us do,” without restrictions or limitations of any kind.
The interests of the turbo-globalist Lord and those of the overexploited Servant are diametrically opposed and structurally irreconcilable. For the former, “competitiveness” means being able to maximize one’s own profit, circumventing the ethical constraints of the State, delocalizing production and, in a word, always finding someone willing to produce at lower costs (wage-dumping, outsourcing, etc.).
On the other hand, for the Servant, “competitiveness” means the need to sell one’s own labor power to the class of the liberal-globalist Lords in increasingly disadvantageous conditions, because deprived of the protection of the State and of the ethical roots, he will suffer a downward competition from the workers of the most remote areas of the world.
Even in this case, the fact that competitiveness is ubiquitously praised as a positive value in itself and beneficial to society in general, is revealing of the omnipresence of single thinking and the symbolic dominance of the new financial overlord.
Given its essence, turbo-capitalist globalism coincides with the tendency to become the world of capital and, more specifically, with the unification of the planet under the sign of the free market economy, with the neutralization of the possibility for national policies to control the economy in a phase of universal deregulation and, therefore, with the mise en forme of the optimal conditions for the massacre of the dominated by the dominant, who are now guaranteed full hegemony.
It cannot be stressed enough, following in Marx’s footsteps, how, within the framework of class society, what is bad for the dominant is good for the dominated; on the contrary, what benefits the former oppresses the latter.
For example, mobility, which for the global-elitist Lord is synonymous with offshoring, wage-dumping, deregulated space for competition and the search for adequate fiscal, social and environmental conditions to guarantee the growth of profits, for the national-popular Servant translates into further massive doses of exploitation, downward competition, forced migration, flexibility and misery.
This issue, the cornerstone of Marx’s biclassist polemological conception, applies today, a fortiori, to the question of national sovereignty, understood on the economic, monetary, cultural, geopolitical and military levels.
For the financial elite, sovereignty is the supreme evil, insofar as it entails the possible re-politicization of the economy, the inevitable basis for a re-limitation of capital and its communitarian and democratic control.
And this is why, thanks to the complicity of the intellectual services of the regular journalistic clergy and the secular academia, custodians of the manipulated and millimetrically controlled consensus omnium, national sovereignty is unreservedly identified with the faux problème (false problem) of the return of fascism and communism “in a single country.”
For the dominated, the exact opposite is true. The reconquest of sovereignty is equivalent to the recovery of the constituent power of the weak social classes and to reactivate the real basis for a revolution against the dynamics of market globalization and planetary classism. It is the conditio sine qua non for an operative contestation to global chrematisation.
The acceptance of the real and symbolic field of deregulated globalism and the consequent delegitimization of national sovereignties implies, eo ipso, the neutralization of any possible revolutionary opposition to the logic of capital. Whoever accepts the plan of post-national globalization has accepted, ipso facto, the hegemony of the cosmopolitan global class.
In convergent terms, the pedagogues of globalism continually repeat that “protectionism” is pernicious and a harbinger of disaster; and for the deregulated market and its reference class, indeed, it is. Thus, Baldwin is right when, with an effective neologism, he states that, from the point of view of the dominant, protectionism is “destructionism.”
In antithesis to the semantic order of neo-language and its always updated index verborum prohibitorum, “protectionism,” in reality, means nothing other than protection of labor, of rights, of workers, of the weakest through the policy of the national State as superiorem non recognoscens and, therefore, as an ethical power capable of regulating the market, ensuring that it is at the service of the community and not the other way around.
“Protectionism” means, then, to hinder ‘global competition’ in order to avoid the massacre it generates among workers all over the world, forced by planetary competition to shed rights and protections, welfarist defenses and historical conquests.
For its part, globalization is also, if one can say so, a form of “protectionism”: of a sui generis protectionism, in which, through “invasion,” openness and the annihilation of all national sovereignty as a space of political primacy, only the ruling class and its material interests are “protected.”
The Right of Money and the Left of Customs have today, on the post-1989 horizon, a common enemy to be identified in the national state or, more precisely, in the rule of law. As has been pointed out, this coincides with the last fortress of resistance that post-1989 anarcho-capitalist globalism has before it.
That the Money Right promotes the destruction of the State form in favor of the deregulation of the market (and, therefore, of the annulment of any instance that restrains free cannibalism for the benefit of the strongest) is quite evident and falls squarely within the heterogeneous galaxy of its class interests: with Gramsci’s syntax, “competition is the staunchest enemy of the State.”
That, for its part, the Left of Customs, instead of defending national statehood as a bulwark of support for the weaker classes and the political possibility of a more democratic control of the market, openly promotes the order of the discourse of the Right of Money and, consequently, the all-out struggle against the Staatsform, is explained in the light of the metamorphic-Kafkaesque redefinition of the Left itself and its cognitive dissonance. From the Gramscian struggle “against capital and for labor,” it has shamelessly passed to fighting “for capital and against labor.” It has abdicated its historical commitment to defend the “damned part” of society, in order to take under its tutelage the interests and desires of the dominant pole.
This has also led to the complete “disappearance of the Left in Europe” or, better still, its replacement, Kafkaesque style, by a new Left which has mutated from red to progressive pink, from the hammer and sickle to the rainbow, and from the proletarian internationalism of Labor to the liberal cosmopolitanism of Capital; a new Left which, having joined post-national globalism under the absolute primacy of the market, plays the role of false opposition to globalist patronage.
Under this profile, Vattimo is right when he includes nihilism among the specific traits of the Left—as long as it is specified that the nihilistic “hammer” in question, far from producing emancipation and freedom, destroys what can really generate them. In particular, the nihilism of the Left is fulfilled in that absolute historicism that has led the new progressive Left to its own dissolution in the individualized society, falsely polychromatic (rainbow) and in the integral liberalization of consumption and customs.
Abandoning the Leninist project of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the Left has adhered to that of the cosmopolitan ruling classes of a “dictatorship over the proletariat,” which in fact has been fully implemented after 1989: with the paradoxical result that, after the fall of the Wall—dies nigro signanda lapillo—each victory of the Left has represented a triumph of the globalist ruling classes and a massacre for the dominated pole of the workers. It is what Del Noce came to define as “the suicide of the revolution” and more recently has been labeled “the night of the Left.”
This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.
Featured: Graffiti, Berlin, ca. 2017.
