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ground in a world of billions of people for revolutionary
consciousness to form. It is because this ground does not exist,
because each of us are not spontaneously encountering hundreds
of would-be revolutionaries every year that the problem is not one
of 'getting' a message across. Information has removed the
meaning from all 'messages' and this is why we must consider
concepts of crisis, collapse and economic struggle within the
sphere of production, in other words, concepts that do not rely
upon political forms and their distribution. [The archived contents of
this discussion list should be available to anyone with internet
access if they contact the group Internationalist Perspective, or the
web page of Wage Slave X, or contact R&B Notes]


Identity politics

We do not know what anyone means when they describe the
proletariat as a social category. If they are implying that the
working class as a social body have something between
themselves other than their experience of work then we utterly
reject this. MD have a penchant for Champagne and Tarkovsky
movies whereas our neighbours prefer White Lightening and WWF
wrestling, our economic position, however, is identical. We refute
all identity politics as ideology and we absolutely refuse to view the
proletariat as a political/sociological constituency equivalent to
ethnicity, gender or sexual preference. The proletariat has no
existence independent of capitalism.

There is no space in the world that is not ultimately dominated by
capitalism - the proletariat is always collectively determined by
capitalist pressures. When/if the proletariat abolishes capitalism it
will be driven into that position by capitalist imperatives. There is
nothing outside the dominion of capital, perhaps occasional
fleeting moments, but not culture nor social form, how could there
be? To assert that there are other, as Autonomists do, processes
by which value is generated independent of capital is to mystify the
nature of exploitation. Activists go looking for signs, they create
narratives whereby discreet events are connected togetether in a
totalized movement towards revolution, they tend towards an
uncritical acceptance of liberationist politics which they see as part