SALT

SALT
ESCALATE
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CONTENTS
1. Afterwardness
4
2. Anti-union legislation and strike action
14
3. Debt and decay
23
4. Accumulating fear
47
5. Temporal autonomy
56

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To all friends in prison
Who can truly tell
How cruel sheriffs are?
Of their hardness to poor people
No tale can go too far.
If a man cannot pay
They drag him here and there,
They put him in the courts,
The juror's oath to swear.
He dares not breathe a murmur,
Or he has to pay again,
And the saltness of the sea
Is less bitter than his pain.
Anonymous, late 13th century

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1. AFTERWARDNESS
i.
Salt
One of the greatest discoveries that humans ever made
was that salt allowed meat to be kept throughout the
winter season. After this we started painting on cave
walls, reflecting on the stars and thinking about more
efficient tools for hunting. We had time.
Under capital, austerity is necessary. If about nothing
else, the cretinous impresarios of our transnational
political circus are right about this. In crisis, capital
accumulation (and therefore social reproduction) cannot
be resumed without huge additional inputs of unpaid
human labour. Without the calculated and brutal robbery
of an immense quantity of human time and energy - and,
at bottom, this is all that `austerity' is - capital will
remain frozen in its contradictions: it will congeal into
meaningless numbers in the accounts of the banks which
are charged with investing it; it will cease to be capital.
But for so long as capital accumulation remains the basic
principle of social reproduction across the enlightened
earth, radiant with calamnity, capital cannot congeal like
this, because, wherever it does, unemployment will rise,
poverty will increase, and houses will be taken from
those who most need them. All in order to glut uselessly
the asset sheets of mortgage lenders. And this is capital's
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most basic paradox: that the only way for it to remove
itself from crisis is to rob those whom the crisis causes to
suffer the most.
But remember the raising of retirement ages in France;
and the reduction of minimum wages in Ireland; and the
extra half hour soon to be added to the shifts of all
Portuguese public sector workers under the indisputable
aegis of "improved productivity"; and recall Cameron
announcing that the British state will allow private sector
developers to pay later for the public estate which they
convert into private housing, with the intention of
stimulating once again domestic mortgage lending. Time
is of the essence here, it should be obvious; and all of
these forms of theft have their basis in a still deeper
structure of deferral. Since the period of financialisation
began, in response to the stagnation of the old industrial
economies of the capitalist West, the rise of debt - of
household debt, of sovereign debt, of securitised debt,
and of the financial institutions which administer and
which profit from all these - has been at the crux of
global capital accumulation.
All around Europe we see the effects of this paradox. It is
incalculably damaging: there is no way out of it that
doesn't lead away from the sovereignty of capital. We
state this at the outset. Is it indulgent, therefore, to launch
a high-minded inquiry into the relationship between
capital and `time'?
The current crisis, more than any that has ever preceded
it, is a crisis of debt accumulation: it is the greatest crisis
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of capitalist deferral in capital's history, and the political
potential of our conjuncture must surely be understood in
its terms.
ii.
In defence of the grasshopper
Aesop tells of an ant and a grasshopper. The ant spends
the summer working each day, gathering food.
Meanwhile, the grasshopper sings. When the winter
comes, the grasshopper asks the ant for food. The ant
refuses and the grasshopper dies.
It is, like most fables, a simple story; the moral is that we
ought to prepare for the future. But when the future is
merely another summer of work, when no-one is allowed
to sing, the moral is difficult to stomach. Already all
those fictional accounts of hot and sticky summers, pink
evening sunlight, human warmth and leisure - all of
these collide with lived experience and disagree with it.
It is now late autumn. Things are not so good.
Perhaps the ant knows that after many years his efforts
will be rewarded not with mere survival, but with a gold-
plated pension. Soon the gold rubs off, and beneath it,
exposed is shit. The shit is composed of the memories of
the minutiae of a life wasted toiling. Today's workers
have superseded the consciousness of that primordial ant:
already with the life of work belongs the premonition of
its memory. Work today is nothing but the self-conscious
wading through shit composed of the knowledge of the
dreadfulness of any memories the present and future are
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bound to inspire. We wade through shit in search of that
flake of gold in the centre, and many of us know that it
was never there. Young people today can expect to toil
until they die. All that is secure is knowledge that the
next year will be at least as awful as the last, and that
there will be no singing.
Today, `official' working class struggles no longer
address the misery of present working class existence.
Union leaders tell their memberships that pensions are
the only issue upon which national action can be taken,
and in doing so submit to and reproduce the ruling
ideology, that to live comfortably in old age is enough to
assuage present misery. Redemption is held firmly in the
future; the present is already lost.
In a comparable sense, notions of risk under capitalism
serve primarily as a means of controlling the future. To
"rationalize" risk is to rationalize the conditions that are
brought about by default and crisis. The discourse of risk
protects the future (the risks which don't pay off) from
being considered anything but capitalism's self-
correction on its happy steady journey to eternal growth.
Surrounded, as we currently are, by the aftermath (or
process) of a crisis - that is, household defaults on
mortgages and sovereign defaults on state debt - we find
ourselves in a world in which the truth about risk, its
realities and human impacts, extend well beyond the
need to foreclose upon debts. This is - it should be
obvious - about more than just mortgages.
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We are told that foreclosures and austerity have to be
accepted; that they are just the result of a risky debt,
itself taken on decades earlier. We are told to accept the
cuts because austerity was merely a risk incurred during
the years while "we" were enjoying the boom-time.
Much of the motivation for the displacement of current
misery is the financialisation of wages. Take, for
example, the pension scheme, in which the salaries of
workers are agglomerated and financialised. The
deferred pay-off for the worker is a further contribution
from her employer. In return, the worker hands over
control of this money, which will then be invested in
companies. It is promised that at a later date a part of the
proceeds from the investment will be returned to the
worker, who at last can live the comfortable life for
which she was expected patiently to wait. The future
comfort of workers is made contingent on their
complicity with those structures used to immiserate them
in the present. Unions which will only fight on pensions
tighten the shackles of workers locked into a grand self-
flagellation machine, from which profit is accrued
elsewhere in the market (i.e through current exploitation
of workers in production). These stockpiled assets of
work become pools of liquidity used for market
expansion.
In real terms, the sell-off of council properties through
the `Right-to-Buy' scheme functioned in a similar way.
Workers themselves were to take on financialised risk
with the promise of a comfortable future. Where
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previously those living in council houses would be able
to support themselves, albeit minimally, if they were
made redundant, the acceptance of private mortgages
threatened people with homelessness. Workers were
given credit on the condition that they invested it in the
assurance that they would remain profitable employees.
Where these mortgages are foreclosed upon, the class
motive becomes invisible: the fight for housing for all
becomes a mere after-effect of risk, acquired at the same
time as the mortgage whose final end is meant to be
security.
The structure of the benefits of work under capitalism,
whether they are wages, pensions, or access to credit,
that which we are promised will sustain us through the
winter of our lives, is always the same, insofar as they
sustain our status as ants and never as grasshoppers.
However much we work, there can be no summers of
song.
All of this impacts on how we can discuss workers'
struggles today. Moments of crisis expose a structure that
can be taken two ways: as the vindication of the notion
of risk that simply recuperates, self-corrects, and
continues; or, alternatively, as the breaking point which
shows that risk (or what is risked) is about more than the
perpetuation of capital's expanded reproduction. The
crisis offers itself as a point at which the shroud of
ideology can be ripped away. But financialisation, both
in pensions and mortgages, in effect suspended the
working class and its consciousness. Proletarians have
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been treated as the managers of their own destiny, but
that destiny has been consistently predicated on their
current immiseration. Their redemption as a class was
placed in a future which they could never reach.
Marxists have always said that crisis provides the
material basis for ideological demystification. This is
true so long as it is understood that the "ideology" which
is now demystified is not a set of bad ideas but the
galling knowledge, felt every morning of every identical
day, that the effort to live well depends on and cannot be
achieved without the kinds of deferral from which capital
has learnt to profit. With brutal simplicity, crisis spells
out that the deferral we once relied on cannot promise
heaven: that upwards ascent through years of toil was
never anything beside the symptom of capital's spiral
downwards - of its inability to valorise itself in the
present. Right now the experience of the present in its
true misery, without the palliatives of a feeble vision of
"the future" hardly need be demanded, because that
vision is crumbling under the pressure of its own
contradictions. But the undeniable toxicity of the future
shouldn't encourage us to dream of rolling back to a time
of pre-financialisation (in which different mediations
precluded the experience of now), because the toxic
image of freedom from capital in a hardly specified
future was generated directly out of the contradictions of
the past. Can we realize, visualise, or experience with
clarity the structures of ideological mediation that
financialisation imposed upon us?
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