From Crises to Commons
The Midnight Notes collective have put out a pamphlet on the crises and the opportunity of the crisis. Available for both download and sale. It’s a rock solid perspective from some of the few Autonomist Marxists writing from and about the US. Great language and check out this passage:
Let’s guarantee housing to each other. This means not only “No” to evictions, but the reoccupation of houses that have
been abandoned, the distribution or occupation of the empty housingstock that lies all around us; the collectively decided self-reduction of rent of the kind that was carried out in Italy in the 1970s; the creation
of new housing that would be organized collectively and built ecologically. Short of that we should build our version of “hobo jungles” on the steps of the White House, open soup kitchens there, show the world our empty pockets, our wounds, instead of agonizing in private.For instance: Let our struggle over housing be a struggle for the reorganization of work reproductive of daily life on a collective
basis. Enough of spending time in our solitary cages with trips to the mall as the climax of our sociality. It is time for us to join with
those who are reviving our tradition of collective, cooperative living. This “year-zero” of reproduction that the capitalist crisis cre-
ates, as evinced by the mushrooming of tent cities from California to North Carolina, is a good time to start.
However, in their recounting the reasons for the current crises, they count the struggles of different strata of the working class now integrated into the credit system. This transformation they correctly read as the transfer of the cost of social reproduction from one class to another with the concurrent creation of investment opportunities. For example, you could look at average household debt load in a given state to see just how much a given section of the working class has taken on the chin these past 30+ years. Then they ask if these struggles merit their inclusion and respond with there are struggles over repayment and bankruptcy, we should not discount and the larger history of communities against discriminatory credit practices. All of these are given as causes for the crises. We here at the Great Recession, agree that all of these struggles will shape the form of the responses to the crises but not mean they are responsible for it. You can look at the changes to bankruptcy law in the US and see not only has the creditor class been calling the tune, but they have been picking the instruments, the musicians, everything down to the wine list.