… for, the “contradiction” in class struggle that primarily appears to us is, per du Bois, the color line. That is, a relation of domination and exploitation between the Global North or imperial core and the Global South or (semi-)peripheries + internal colonies. Yet, the interpenetration of these apparent opposites is both a simultaneous competition and a collaboration between forms of “headship” (political, familial, and otherwise) within the superstructure—over the usurpation of meta-industrial inputs or regenerative capacities. Hence the “gendered” threads of the color line. And the conversion of regenerative capacities into social reproductive labor visavis the economic substructure is driven by primary accumulation and its disimbrication of the metabolic holdings and sociogenic valences which prefigured these. Hence, the ableist strands of the color line. From here we detect the present realization of a world-proletariat: who has become an increasingly precariatized-lumpenized and ultimately debilitated substratum of workers, an underclass or marginalized horde addled by environmental decay, instability, discard, refuse, detritus, disease, and pollution whilst sequestered beneath a labor aristocracy and both real as well as wanna-be middle classes who enjoy a steady output of convenience goods, consumer luxuries, and a surveillance technoculture/carceral-military industrial complex.
Autonomy as a revolutionary tendency must transect this dialectic. By contrast, there is an undue emphasis on production, coupled with the backseat place of social reproduction in the thinking of non-autonomist (aka authoritarian) radicals, and finally, among their feminists, the tendency to regard the political elaboration of the embodied consequences of social reproduction in binary terms, as functions of the base (adapted to the economic substructure)—which involves an asociogenic regard for the superstructure. How then can they clarify the nature of “unity” between supposed opposites, ie, the contradiction between West and non-West in a neocolonial (and increasingly multipolar) era?
Any account of the “highest stage of capitalism,” and indeed, the “highest stage of imperialism”—must identify how organized labor during the imperialist wars was most notable for its reconstruction of the meta-industrial continuum. Those regenerative capacities exerted by unwaged and underwaged subjects had to be appropriated for the reproduction of labor-power under capitalism. Amidst investment of wartime superprofits into both technological advances and public infrastructure/welfare, however, the regime of accumulation was mystified as “progressive.” The counterinsurgent thrust of this programme is given the most attention as far as its usurpation of our embodiments—the spread of anticommunism, the proliferation of fascistic and reformist tendencies, the inclusive component to political representation etc. But, seldom is it acknowledged that a Second Reconstruction was at play, which continued in the Cold War phase and proceeded after the fall of the Soviet Union. The neglect here is about realpolitikal posture, not a science of revolution.
American predominance in both Cold War and post-Soviet epochs help demonstrate the importance of a reconstruction of organized labor with reference to a meta-industrial continuum, because the First Reconstruction in the States was part of a general response within racial capitalism to the disaccumulation crisis forced by the loss of plantations in the Haitian Revolution. Haiti, and its shockwaves, the ensuing emancipation and independence achievements by rebels, maroons, early nationalists and abolitionists, of the 19th century—often with support from Haitian revolutionaries—galvanized in the Americas a cascade of rebellious activity that needed to be resolved at a global level. This universal response amongst the colonial powers was a two-pronged one: in the metropole, having spent centuries taking their attempts to address the earlier disaccumulation crisis caused by the late feudal peasantry and early modern proletariat and externalizing them to imperial subjects and settler polities—the bourgeoisie elaborated on the embodied consequences in the homefront of the effects of that earlier war with regards to new imperatives. Here, agrarian capitalism was to be redefined by industrialization and any extant medieval relations and communal holdings were to be increasingly sidelined by bourgeois civil society and an atomized social reality. As such: a secularization of right/representation, the increased bureacratization of avenues for political action, the spread of both the franchise and access to property as well as wage-work for marginalized groups, and ultimately the tightening of domestic relegations, the invigoration of State oversight of household (re)production—including criminalization of the street-based poor, pauperized, or those exploited in the underground/illicit economy or making a living informally (and the expansion of illegal markets).
Such trends had defined capitalism in its “child years” too, but the scale and proliferation during capitalism’s road to “adolescence” is key. Although understood as “progressive” maneuvers under the sign of rennaissance and enlightenment or Protestant and even Counter-Reformation rationality, reason, logic, etc—this reconstruction in the metropole was externalized, too, but only so that the “afterlife of slavery” could be conjured up from a demonic ground. The ghost of racial capitalism as it had been arranged up until the Haitian Revolution and its shockwaves was to now be propitiated by a new organization of unfree labor and colonial superexploitation, but with key differences from the preceding paradigm as far as the registers of abstraction. For now, “chattel,” as in a regime of personal ownership of the body and its both libidinal and material inputs in the economy, was steadily being rearticulated through an ever-more-mystified, because supposedly more “secular,” set of personal entitlements defined by commodity fetishism. And, therein a more broadly cross-class set of competitors and collaborators justifying their accumulation imperatives.
This initial solution to the post-Haitian Revolution disaccumulation crisis would be followed by various “final solution” style elaborations on the embodied and metabolic constraints exhibited once competition and collaboration galvanized unification of remaining kingdoms in the homefront but also scrambles for Africa and new hostile takeovers in Latin America and the Caribbean overseas. The ensuing wars between the emerging oligopolies, however, foretold another disaccumulation crisis. The scale of mass death and the destruction of planetary systems across the First Reconstruction, especially once genocides had become more industrial and “scientific” in their implementation and justification, was unsustainable. There needed to be a new appropriation of regenerative capacities exerted in care for the body as well as for ecosystems. A “meta-industrial” continuum thereof had already been realized through grand-style patriarchal imbrication. So-called “unproductive” labors had been steadily regimented outside the market, “productive” labors organized as the deictic center of all life, “counterproductive” labors excised and surveilled, and reproductive labor cemented via a sexual division, atomized/alienated and reductionistic in the household unit.
The regime of private accumulation that emerged visavis this grand-style patriarchy realized particular metabolic holdings and sociogenic valences as “gendered” subjects commanded by the capital-wage hegemony and exploited according to the pursuit of surplus value (even in the more circuitous routes to the same qua reorganization of unproductive and counterproductive labors). But, it would only become somewhat clear that a gender “nexus” was articulating all hitherto existing configurations of embodiment in this increasingly world-scale racial capitalism system once the First Reconstruction—the the post-Haitian Revolution redevelopment of empires/colonies—had matured to a point that it brought about another disaccumulation crisis. In the metropole, this consciousness identified the gender “nexus” in terms of a metabolic rift, the deleterious effects on both soil health (ecology) and the nutrient life of the working masses (the body) under economic domination and industrial production—which proliferated as the peasantry was dispossessed of the commons and wildlands, and the urban proletariat was more intensely enclosed to and by the workplace and nuclear-style social relations. There were regenerative capacities exerted both for the soil’s nutrient profile and the body’s nutritional needs that got disorganized and reorganized then, in accordance to productive demands, with those pertinent to the reproduction of labor-power given primacy in the formal/aboveground sphere (while unproductive inputs relegated to informal and underground spheres and “counterproductive” inputs made targets of elimination as witchcraft/backwards).
In the colonies, however, the consciousness of the gender “nexus” became expressed in terms of metaphysics, cosmology, myth, spiritual beliefs, for these had exhibited a combining and displacing force within metabolic exchanges, ie, a valency. And such valences, being sociogenic in origin, had psycho-affective outcomes, neurochemical and behavior regulatory consequences in the substructure, articulating superstructurally an exchange of feeling that imposed its own set of constraints on embodiment. That libidinal economy also was to be disorganized and reorganized in accordance to productive demands, with those pertinent to the reproduction of labor-power given primacy in the formal/aboveground sphere (while unproductive inputs relegated to informal and underground spheres and “counterproductive” inputs made targets of elimination or study/surveillance). Therefore the attack on communal holdings, the dissolution of kin groups, the rearticulation of ancestral lineages as stratified “ethnicities” and “tribes” under colonial divide & conquer tactics—involved a war on totemistic and ancestor-venerating lifeways in the land, and on various “nexuses” of Age, Trophicity, and more which organized social reproduction both in and beyond the family compound.
It’s no wonder that a revival of the occult/esotericism in the West co-occurred with the development of scientific racism/eugenics, whilst the cult of domesticity took a more clear shape alongside the beginnings of consumer culture. This conjuncture is prefigured by the grand-style patriarchy having begun to reconstruct the meta-industrial continuum, in other words. This way racial capitalism could hope to sustain itself. Yet, bourgeois “reason” has no calculus for the contingencies of metabolic life-activity and all the sociogenic principles interpenetrated therein. The imperialists had not anticipated that amongst the shockwaves kickstarted by Haiti would emerge a Marxist internationalism amongst the segments of the world-proletariat who were positioned via the light side of the coloniality of gender, and a Pan-African/anticolonial internationalism who were positioned via the dark side of the coloniality of gender.
Even more troubling for the imperialists was the possibility that the attempts to expand further might be hindered as internationalist consciousness began to examine the industrializing process’ effects on non-capitalist relations. The extant feudal orders that had not been undermined in the West’s ascendancy, and the old-world empires beyond the West—these were being met with revolutionary fervor too. This tertiary outcome of Haiti’s shockwaves, in dialectic with the march of the First Reconstruction’s initial and final solutions to a disaccumulation crisis: it is that which posed a second disaccumulation crisis alongside the devastation wrought by the imperialist wars. Authcoms incorrectly identify the contradiction in terms of the geopolitical challenge offered by internationalism, sovereignty outside the West, and State-directed socialist production and civil organization. Yet, political headmen, movement leadership, hierarchical revolutions have merely usurped the regenerative capacities that were already being disorganized and reorganized along a meta-industrial continuum. Proposing that the regime of accumulation should invest surplus value into the reproduction of the masses, rather than being pocketed by rulers/owners for private capital’s sake, the Cephales outside the West became backed into a corner as the imperialists competed with them under the auspices of more “democratically” fulfilling that same supposed mission. And indeed, many Cephales happily collaborated with the West behind the guise of class struggle or of national liberation.
From there we see a steady, haphazard assault on the challenges to the Second Reconstruction. Enabling the imperialists to proceed with an initial solution—more rapid secularization, bureacratization, expansion of rights, absorption of more groups into formal wage and property relations, new relegations to domestic life amidst State management of reproduction, and criminalization of the marginalized. And, whereas with the First Reconstruction the initial solution was haphazardly implemented in the European metropole, with the Second Reconstruction its epicenter was North American especially USian-Canadian economic and policy changes—and the spheres of influence they established by trial and error through “human rights.” Further, under the paternalistic framework of international security, European powers could elaborate upon the byproducts of the newfound North American predominance for their own regeneration’s sake.
Of course, as with the First Reconstruction, personal entitlements, fed by the afterlife of chattel slavery, become more abstracted via commodity fetishism in this phase too. Although for the Second Reconstruction, the cross-class competition and collaboration takes on unique features. For, on one hand, usurpation of libidinal and material reproductive inputs, especially from superexploited strata in the world-proletariat, is especially mystified in rhetoric of freedom, the American way, so-called Western values, and guided by anticommunism, by Zionism and Islamophobia, and other staples of “progressive” bourgeois reason. On the other hand, the shift of the color line into first geopolitical blocs and then what we now understand as First World versus Third and Second (as well as Fourth) Worlds has allowed for more State and non-state headship over those whose labors are organized visavis the meta-industrial continuum. The reproduction of the world-proletariat is thus coerced by not just the Man, but several “junior partners,” and the negrosie—who together have a minor-style patriarchal imbrication to buttress their accumulation imperatives under the hegemony of grand-style patriarchal imbrication. The gendered threads and ableist strands of the color line persist, upon which class society hangs, and of which we are most conscious in the experience of our ecologies and our embodiments—strained and corralled, surveilled and poisoned in ever more layered and complicated ways. All the socially necessary labor-time exhausted to sustain ourselves in the face of this contradiction seems to be under the command of either the wage or “aid” granted by State and non-State institutions that nonetheless have the exploitative mechanisms associated with production for commodity exchange, and the embodied consequences of primary accumulation, as their condition of possibility. Such a pattern then appears as an oscillation between left-wing and right-wing governments in some regions, the “mixed-economy” of other regions, tentative geopolitical alliances and stalemates in other regions, and—once units of social reproduction become contentious—rights-based civil unrest in other regions (be these pacifist or militant, fascist or reformist).
The relative “directionlessness” of these maneuvers is not simply a matter of unconscious or falsely conscious activity and organization. In negotiating the configurations of their embodiment via the substructure, the so-called masses and those in the margins confront and reclaim the superstructure, even exhibiting causal efficacy over the top-down constraints interpenetrated with the economic base—be it the “anti-authoritarian” paternalism from the bourgeois-democratic West or the vanguard-style/bureacratic steering of “revolution” proposed by “authoritarian” socialists or state-capitalists. Policy is, after all, epiphenomenal, like the sunlight is to the moonlight, per Modibo Kadalie. But this bottom-up pattern isn’t necessarily germane to ideologically anarchist presence per se, although there certainly are anti-political subversives engaged in spontaneous revolts and uprising. It isn’t even germane to an anti-authoritarian social movement per se, either, nor a necessarily horizontal, mutualist, decentralized way of life—although all of these things are making themselves known, whether in the Polisario Front or Rojava or the EZLN, resonating with people. What is more prevalent is a tendency towards trying to redefine statecraft but from below, and therefore many “transitional” apparatuses have emerged claiming to combat military dictatorships and one-party states, narco-states, dependant colonial powers, neocolonies, settler colonies, irredentist states, in addition to the Big Man, all while raising the banner of a local nationhood or of indigenous communalism (this is a descriptive observation, not a prescription).
But, nationhood and indigeneity are political elaboration of the embodied consequences of social reproduction; and so-called racial status, ethnicity or tribe, religious identity, sex or sexuality, and other configurations of so-called “difference” are also political elaboration of the embodied consequences of social reproduction. For, map is not territory and while a good map isn’t inherently useless, bodies and lands only become territory to be mapped as a non-adaptive consequence of historical developments. The latter, importantly, are not inevitability, but driven by choices, per Marsha P Johnson. Real and wanna-be figureheads have instrumentalized the elaborations upon spandrels of embodiment to mystify and reify the reproduction of their own class interests on a certain demonic ground, a meta-industrial continuum realized through a post-chattel reconstruction of capitalism. Such elaborations become indexes of how the world-proletariat’s various positions (aboveground and underground, formal and informal) are prefigured and configured by the “nexus” of a “progressive” wing of patriarchy and a “conservative” wing—the initial solution and final solution.
Autonomy as a revolutionary tendency needs a dialectics of embodiment: understanding how a tightening and loosening of these gender-threads of the color line become constraints in multipolar usurpation of regenerative capacities, for strata get organized in tiers along a meta-industrial continuum, with tightening and loosening of the ableist strands of the color line exhibiting constraints on how that continuum is realized visavis metabolic/sociogenic disimbrication. We must also emphasise that such a dynamic will not, in the end, sustain the imperatives of accumulation enacted by Western or non-Western powers in the age of pandemics and climate disaster. A third disaccumulation crisis is immanent, and neither campism nor anti-campism will resolve the “primary” role of the West’s contradictions (grand patriarchy) therein. It is autonomy as a revolutionary tendency we need, with the road to ungovernability or indomitability charted visavis the meta-industrial continuum, in a struggle against both grand and minor patriarchies.