PARTISAN!

This is the seventh and final part of our publication of George Caffentzis’ essay concerning the Oil Shock of 1973.

Entropy can be reduced by information, i.e., by locating pockets of low entropy and incorporating them into the work process; the inevitable reduction in the availability for work can be held at bay. The more the information and the less the cost of creating it and communicating it, the more the stalling of Time. But this process can be reversed, i.e., the increasing entropy within a work process can be localized and expelled. Every production process shits; the question is, “Where is it going to be put?” If this shit, i.e., the material, social, physiological, radioactive, psychological waste that cannot be re-swallowed and re-cycled, is allowed to remain in the vicinity of the production process, each new cycle of production will intensify the entropic rise exponentially. The reproduction of the machine cycle will be clogged by the left over shit, and the costs of returning to the initial state will be so overwhelming that it will outpace the work produced by the thrust stage of the cycle. The net work will fall into negativity, and needless to say, profit will be in jeopardy.

This aspect of capital’s struggle against entropy involves the possibility of ejecting areas of high entropy into the surrounding environment without effecting the net work production. For not only must waste be controlled and accidents prevented (the job of the computer controllers); if waste must be created, if little murders must be condoned, then it is crucial that the shit be localized and expelled. The corpses must be buried or burned. We have the final aspects of work: the passive work of absorbing capital’s wastes. For in addition to the work of producing, reproducing, informing and controlling, there is the immense work of absorbing, imbibing capital’s shit. Not only is capital concerned with transferring as much of the value of the means of production to the commodity product without waste and accident. The work process necessarily also intensify the entropy of its local and global workers. Marx comments on this aspect of work:

Capitalist production, when considered in isolation from the process of circulation and the excesses of competition, is very economical with the materialized labor incorporated in commodities. Yet, more than any other mode of production, it squanders human lives, or living labor, and not only blood and flesh, but also nerve and brain . . . Since all of the economizing here discussed arises from the social nature of labor, it is indeed just this directly social nature of labor which causes the waste of life and health.

Capital is more finicky than a cat when it comes to shitting. The whole debate on the location of nuclear plants is an example of this sensitivity, for there are complex considerations arising from the class composition to be found in any particular location. Will they riot if there is an accident, will they get nervous about the transport and spillage of used uranium, will they get “hysterical” when cancer rumors and chromosome damage reports begin seeping in, are they desperate enough to take the tax writeoffs but not so desperate that they won’t care and will explode anyway? Certainly it was no accident that TMI was located in the center of the heartland of patriarchy in the U.S.A., surrounded by phallic silos, bearded Amish Jobs and state employees.

At the same time, when capital discovers high entropic sinks in the production process, the expulsion is swift and violent. Need we refer to the execution of workers throughout capitalist development? Why is capital murdering its own labor-power? Why the Auschwitz’s and Chile’s? Quite simply because certain types of labor power becomes too entropic for production, they become living shit for capital that must be eliminated. Of course, the direct slaughter of workers is just the most dramatic event in the never ending struggle of capital to beat the odds. The endless string of methods to identity high entropic workers, “weed” them out, “blacklist” them, jail them, starve them and kill them, gag us now, it is too much past midnight! But if there is an institution for localizing, expelling and exterminating entropy, the “criminal justice system” is the one. Its function: to rid the production process of the “elements” that are completely unavailable for work.

There is, however, the work not only of locating high-entropy, and the work of expelling it, there is finally the job of absorbing it. Consider the “jumper.” The disintegrating, entropic aspect of the reactor core of a nuclear plant is the radiation that does not go into the production of heat but “escapes.” One of the main jobs of the nuclear worker is to absorb this entropy.

There are nuclear workers whose job is just that: to suffer the shit out of the reactor. This is the part-time jumper hired to be sent into areas dense with radioactivity and absorb the full “quota” for radioactivity (absorbed by a regular worker in a year) within a few minutes. He picks up his $100 after twisting a valve and disappears, perhaps to return in a few months, perhaps to discover a suspicious lump ten years later. The “jumper” is an extreme figure, an ideal type; but certainly the proliferation of chemical and radioactive dump sites across the country has made “fallers” of us all. For it is apparent that the “squandering of human lives” does not occur only within the gates of the nuclear plant or chemical factory, but is as “social” as the labor that produces the radioactive electricity and poisons.

As we are dealing with the asshole of capital, we inevitably must deal with all that is most foul, decaying and frightening: corpses, cancer, executions, slavery, the Gilmorean joke. It is at the lowest level of the institutional hierarchy, at the bottom of our fear as to what they are doing to us, that the basic profit level is guaranteed. It is not because of any melancholic humors that we have wandered here; it is exactly in these dumps of matter, body and nerve that you find the famous “bottom line.” It’s all in the physics: the efficiency of a heat engine is not only proportional to the work it produces, but is inversely proportional to the entropy it creates. The less the entropy the greater the “efficiency,” hence the greater the work/energy ratio: the profit.

Prisons are as integral to the production process as the gas that makes the engines go, as the caress that sends one off to the plant, as the print out that tells you of your fuck up. For if there were no dumps of labor-power and constant capital, no way of eliminating entropic contamination, the system would stop. Of course, the capitalist idea is not to end the shit but to control it, dumping it in isolated, unobjectionable places, on unobjecting or invisible populations. Thus with the energy crisis comes the death penalty.

This is the last element of the profits crisis and the last reason for the energy crisis response. As the working class through the 1960s and 1970s has increasingly refused to be the dump of capitalist shit, the collective sewer of its entropic wastes, some antagonistic compulsion was in order. Energy price rises immediately put this refusal to absorb the shit on the defensive, for the high cost of energy seems to justify the need for entropy control and for expelling highly concentrated entropy deposits from the production process. Thus the explicit and implicit anti-nuclear movement meets its response: nuclear plants can only pass once energy prices go up. But once Teller’s system of nukes and coal electrification is introduced, then the intensification of the mechanisms of control and information in the production process are inevitably realized. Finally, only with such increased prices (imposed by the very investment in this High sector), can the “need” for accepting the disintegrating excretions of the plants be forced down the throats of the surrounding populations. The rate payers of TMI are financing the repair of the plant with increased electricity bills, and the state’s increasing pressure to open up the radioactivity dump sites throughout the country is felt by all.

The End of the Apocalypse

We began with the end of world, the Apocalypse. All the noise of capitalist prophets has taken as the cause of the impending catastrophe the problem of energy: either too little (the anti-limitationists) or too much (the interactionists). Even the “revival” of “nuclear holocaust” thinking of the unthinkable takes energy as the trigger of the Bomb, for invariably it is seen as the most pressing Natural scarcity. The scenarios of nuclear war obsessively turn to the Gulf of Hormuz, for there appears here an inevitable source of international antagonism. When faced with a fundamental scarcity, the only way to move, according to the anti-limitationists, is to face the possibility of a military confrontation and prepare for it. On the other side, the interactionists warn that if we want to escape the threat of nuclear war, we must retreat to a “clean,” “stable state” economy autarchic enough to remove the need for such a confrontation. Both sides accept the “problem” as a collection of, at base, “natural brute facts.”

Now the facts might be brute enough, but they are not “natural.” Whenever capital announces a new apocalypse, we must see that the culprit is not Nature, the Bomb or some autonomous bureaucratic drive to “exterminism.” Capital’s Apocalypse is the inverse image of the struggle against it, as it reaches critical proportions. For you don’t fight shadows with shadows, you don’t walk about “delicately and non-provocatively” for fear of setting off the irrational Beast. At the root of all the missiles, bombs, atomic power plants, all the “idols of the theater” that capital displays so provocatively, is the struggle against capitalist accumulation, against a life dominated by work and exploitation. This struggle is the source of the current Apocalyptic Rumors and this struggle can end them. What ended the Bomb Apocalyptics in the early 1960s? It was by no means the rhetorical battle between pro- and anti-bomb movements. Capital had to demote the Bomb because the class movements in the early 1960s made it clear that they would not be intimidated by all this nuclear rattling. The riots in Watts, the revival of wildcats in coal, the refusal to accept Civil Defense regimentation even after the exercise of the Cuban crisis, made it clear to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that the Bomb had begun to loose its hold. The grip of terror could not constrict the new class movements, their desires and disgusts.

The same holds for the present. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, “given a fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beats,” can only be stopped by the development of the very struggles that unleashed them. Any “solutions” to the Energy crisis that attempt to by-pass the struggle, whether Teller’s electronuclear path ringed with missile silos or the Odum’s “alternativist” path of agricultural homeostasis and defensivism, merely repropose the crisis. As we have shown, capital can not do with either Teller or the Odums alone. The seemingly opposing utopias of High and Low organic composition necessarily complement each other, indeed, they potentiate each other.

Capital has turned the world upside down to deal with the struggle against work, against the muscle, heart, nerve and asshole of capital.

Against the four levels of work:

• the relative exploitation of the factory;
• the absolute exploitation of the housework;
• the reduction of entropy via smoothing of the work process with the detection of low entropic pools;
• the reduction of entropy via the expulsion of high entropic wastes.

We have seen the corresponding levels of struggle:

• refusal of “productivity deals” on the assembly lines;
• disintegration of the family and the reproductive apparatus that keys workers into the production process;
• refusal to accept the entropy sorters of capital, e.g., in the education system and through the intensification of “crime”;
• refusal to passively absorb the expulsion of capital’s shit into the bio-social process of reproduction, e.g., the struggle against prisons and radioactive dumps.

All these forms of refusal directly caused the profits crisis and the subsequent “Energy Crisis” restoration of profitability. These struggles, however, remain intractable whatever the total “apocalyptic” attack that capital has confronted them with. As Polish workers have shown, the only way to confront the missiles is to demand more and juicier sausages: “Only those who strike eat meat.”