Tropige Trauben

Recent debates, among music critics and on music blogs, between “rockists” and “popists” are ultimately sterile, because both sides fail to take sufficient account of our curent culture of niche marketing, “long tails,” customization, and “crowdsourcing,” not to mention that the advertising and commercial strategies initially deployed on a massive scale by figures like the Beatles and Jackson are now increasingly prevalent on the micro-level. They are no longer just imposed from above; rather, they saturate all our media and all our interactions, oozing up as they do from below. It used to be that you could accuse somebody (as Marcus liked to accuse black artists) of being a bourgeois sellout; but today, everyone without exception is a “bourgeois sellout,” because (in the age of “human capital” and self-entrepreneurship) being such is a minimum requirement for mere survival. Today, this is a structural condition of social existence, rather than a matter of personal integrity or choice.

We eventually made our way back down the field but I met Gary Marshall and he told me our coaches were going and we had to leave. I couldn’t believe it! We couldn’t leave now and desert the battle. We made our way back up the field and met Tommy Wilson. He had been badly clubbed while he was trying to help an injured picket and was in a lot of pain. I advised him to get to hospital and have his injuries looked at. We reached the bridge and found most of our lads talking to Scargill. They had told him about us being ordered to leave and Arthur was furious and told us to stay to fight back. He complained bitterly about the waste of union funds to send us down for the day instead of for a whole week. He also said that if necessary he would pay for our transport himself. We all voted to stay because none of us wanted to go anyway, not without having another go at the pigs. We wanted revenge!’

Tronti: The protest follows the wrong targets. Labor – precisely because it suffered in the previous phase of neoliberal globalization – was utilized for flexibilization and precarization. It didn’t get what it was owed. From this a crisis emerged because wage incomes and the growth of consumption could not be maintained in balance. Wages were pushed down too much. The imbalance between wage incomes and capital income was even too excessive for capital. They overdid it with wage cuts. This is why what we are experiencing appears also as an overproduction and underconsumption crisis. The social contradiction did play a role in the eruption of the crisis. That is why it is important to bring the force of labor back into the game, in order to make it visible and to show that it is not demobilized.

Bucci: This is a difficult operation in two respects. Firstly with respect to culture. For decades we have been told that labor is no longer central and that individual and collective identities constitute themselves through consumption. But there is also a political problem. Precisely when the economic crisis of capital reached its lowest point our political ability to organize is also at its lowest point.