Of course, it is necessary to try to stop the cutbacks and to communicate to capital how high its costs will be for attempting to shift the burden of its own failures to workers.
However, we need to acknowledge that the current struggles against capital’s attempt to make the working class rescue it from yet another of its crises may yet be added to the list of glorious defeats. In his recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou describes the past defeats of May 1968, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Paris Commune as well as those of factory occupations and other such struggles as defeats ‘covered with glory.’ Because they remain in our memory as inspirations, they must be contrasted, he insists, to the ‘defeat without glory’ that social democracy brings. Such struggles, as Marx knew, are ‘indispensable’-they are the only means of preventing workers ‘from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production.’ But, who will win this class war? And, in some places (but, unfortunately, not all), we see that the working class is saying, ‘no.’ In some cases, we see that workers are fighting to defend their past successes within capitalism and that they are fighting against the racism and xenophobia which are the default position when workers are under attack but are not in struggle against capital. This is a war conducted by capitalist states against workers to compel them to give up their achievements from past struggles.
Austerity, cutbacks, the need to sacrifice-these are the demands of capital as it calls upon workers to bear the burden of capital’s own failures. And, in this crisis, capital has intensified the class war against the working class. But the class war has intensified now because of the crisis in capitalism-a crisis rooted in the over-accumulation of capital. There is always class war in capitalism-although sometimes it is hidden and sometimes there is the interlude of an apparent Carthaginian Peace. He was Director, Program in Transformative Practice and Human Development, Centro Internacional Miranda, in Caracas, Venezuela, from 2006-11. He taught at Simon Fraser University for decades and was the author of numerous books including Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class and Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st Century. Over the years, Canadian Dimension published several of his essays. Lebowitz, who passed away on Apat the age of 85, was a giant of the socialist left. Lebowitz was first published in the 2013 edition of Socialist Register. The following essay by Marxist economist Michael A.
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