Endnotes

These notes, written between December 2019 and March 2020, chronicle the longest general strike in France’s history. I wrote them when I was working as a language assistant, teaching English to undergraduate students at the Sorbonne. The strike now seems like a long time ago, suspended and truncated. In the universities, as the pandemic was announced, classes and exams were moved online, and previously striking workers found themselves in a quandary about how best to support students. Most workers were given a “technical unemployment” pay of about 80% of their wages, but many of those who found themselves... READ MORE

Originally written for the discussion group and publishing project Stoff, who are currently translating the letter into French. Thanks to Zaschia Bouzarri and Endnotes for help with the editing. The United States was largely inert in 2019, even by its own standards, as a wave of struggles spread across the planet, from Sudan, to Haiti, then Hong Kong and beyond. The electoral campaign against President Trump, tightly bound up with the tireless Bernie Sanders and his liberal-democratic socialism, had begun as early as possible, this time with an ideological and political machine more finely attuned to... READ MORE

The following text, by the Freundinnen und Freunden der klassenlosen Gesellschaft, was published in the October and November issues of the German leftist magazine Konkret. Our Friends take a somewhat narrow view of racism, but they provide a useful overview of the politics of migration in Germany, the European country that has received the bulk of asylum claims, as well as a critique of various responses on the German left. 1. Last fall it appeared as if we were witnessing a political turning point. A mass movement of migrants showed... READ MORE

The following text is a description of the recent struggles in France as they developed over the course of four months, from late February to the middle of June 2016. It is based both on translations of material at the time and first-hand experiences. These struggles understood themselves as challenging not only the labor law handed down by the Socialist government of Manuel Valls and François Hollande, but also—as one key slogan had it—“against its world,” that is, the conditions that have made it possible but that are also left wide open in the slogan. November 13th aftermath
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in this society unity appears as accidental, separation as normal.—Marx, Theories of Surplus Value We live in an era of long-unfolding social crisis, which is fundamentally the crisis of societies organized in a capitalist mode. Indeed, the employment relations that govern production and consumption in capitalist societies are breaking down. The result has been the reappearance of a structural condition that Marx called surplus capital alongside surplus population. Technological transformations continue to take place in spite of economic stagnation, giving rise to a situation in which there are too few jobs for too... READ MORE

If the term “communisation” is absent from Endnotes 4 this is due partly to the topics we covered, and partly to our frustration with the way this word has become associated with a new theoretical brand and/or radical identity. We will return to the theme of communism in the present tense in Endnotes 5, but as a preview of that issue we here publish a critical take on “communisation” by some friends of ours and the classless society (Freundinnen und Freunden der klassenlosen Gesellschaft). We don’t agree with it all, and we will include a response in... READ MORE

We publish below a translation of “‘Questione curda’, Stato Islamico, USA e dintorni” by the Italian collective Il Lato Cattivo. Though there are limitations to the text (for example it largely ignores the Arab Spring) we think it provides an insightful analysis of recent geopolitical conflict in the Middle East. Thanks to Nicole, Marco, Matthew, and the authors for help with the translation. The following text was originally prepared for a public meeting — held in Bologna at the beginning of September... READ MORE

Over at the North Star, Matthijs Krul has written an interesting critique of Endnotes.1 We don’t typically bother with individual “responses to critics”, but in this case the entanglement of stimulating thoughts with a series of errors demanded at least an attempt to tease the two apart in a few quick, critical notes. Krul has really written a critique, not of Endnotes, but rather, of what he takes so-called “communisation theory” to be about. On the basis of a rather weak grasp of the textual evidence, Endnotes is treated in this article as a... READ MORE

What are we to make of the current round of austerity? Should we believe Keynesians like Paul Krugman, when they argue that capitalists are acting against their own best interests in calling for cuts? Are government finances really under stress, or is it all just a ploy to undermine the last remaining gains won by workers' struggles? Some members of Endnotes throw in their hats... A crisis is first and foremost a crisis for workers. But it is a crisis for workers because it is a crisis for capital. That this is the case is not... READ MORE

The history of the capitalist mode of production is punctuated by crises. One could say that crisis is the modus operandi of capital, or of the capital-labour relation. This is true insofar as capital, the self-valorisation of value, the self-expansion of abstract wealth, is at any given time a claim on future surplus-value extraction: the accumulation of capital today is a bet on tomorrow's exploitation of the proletariat. The crisis today has taken the form of a financial crisis, while the prospect of a full-blown economic crisis looms ever larger. These two crises do not merely stand in a relation... READ MORE