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48 CINEMONTAGE / SEP-OCT 14 LABOR MAT TERS We're Here, For You Healthcare / Wellness / Aid & Services Senior Care / Residential Retirement 855-760-MPTF (6783) www.mptf.com For over 90 years, MPTF has been helping Hollywood take care of its own. Together, we ensure that the magic we create isn't just on screen. Find out more at MPTF.com UNMAKING GLOBAL CAPITALISM When Karl Marx famously declared that while philosophers interpret the world, the point is to change it, he was arguing that it was not enough to dream of a better world or to just understand the dynamics of the present, writes Sam Gindin in Jacobin. He was saying it's critical to raise the question of agency in carrying out transformative change. For Marx, that agency was the working class. The gap between workers' needs and their actual lives — between hope and reality — gave workers an interest in fundamental change, while their place in production gave them the leverage to act. The essential contradiction of capitalism, argued Marx in 1845, was that as capitalists brought workers together in factories, they opened the door to workers discovering their own potential to work together to demand more. Capitalism created its own most effective adversaries. Gindin offers some brilliant, pungent observations: "Neo- liberalism is just capitalism getting its groove back. It's the postwar Golden Age that's the aberration and there's no going back. As an ideology, neo- liberalism fits the no-alternative moment so well because its drive to universalize market dependence tends to depoliticize social life and its outcomes. 'The market made us do it' becomes a national excuse, and the capitalism-with-a-human- face of the post-war era is replaced by a capitalism with no face at all… Though capital was previously interested in a temporary compromise with labor, this is now the furthest thing from its mind, and there is no social base for a new 'social contract'… "Among activists, only 'financialization' trumps neo- liberalism as a term of abuse. As free-form abstract capital, finance is popularly understood as speculative, parasitic and at odds with 'real' production. True enough, but it's worth asking why, if finance is so especially counter-productive and has done so much damage — especially during the 2008 crisis — why have other capitalists not joined up, attacking finance? Why has there been no split within capital?" We need to buy ourselves a little time, according to Gindin. The question of more control over time is important for a new political movement, and it raises a specific set of demands to mobilize around. Neo-liberal restructuring of labor markets, like longer paid hours CONTINUED ON PAGE 54 "Neo-liberalism is just capitalism getting its groove back." –Sam Gindin