{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":345,"pdf_page":345,"physical_index":345,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"755362b23ff410bd5bbda8315e0000ca7bb256d7df99145099e29182a42bda37"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"Those engaged in informal-sector competition under conditions of infinite labour supply usually stop short of a total war of all against all; conflict, instead, is usually transmuted into ethnic, religious or racial violence. The godfathers and landlords of the informal sector (invisible in most of the literature) intelligently use coercion, even chronic violence to regulate competition and protect their investments . . .\n\nThe reality of such developments cannot be denied by anyone who has read accounts of the interethnic and Sunni-Shia riots that periodically paralyse the Pakistan city of Karachi, of the history of attacks on the Chinese populations of Malaysia and Indonesia, or of the wave of attacks on Zimbabwean refugees in the very South African cities described by Leo Zeilig and Claire Ceruti.\n\nThe city of Mumbai provides a graphic example of how the mood can shift. A semi-spontaneous upsurge from below by the workers in the city's textile mills in 1982 developed into one of the biggest prolonged strikes in world history, lasting a year, involving hundreds of thousands of workers and dominating the political life of India's commercial and industrial capital as it built networks of support going right back into the villages from which many of the workers had originally come.57 During the strike there was unity between the different religious and caste groups that make up the mass of Bombay's lower classes. But the strike was defeated. In the aftermath Shiv Sena, a political organisation built by turning the local Marathi speakers against other groups and then Hindus against Muslims, rose to a dominant position in wide areas of the city. This culminated in murderous riots against the Muslim population in 1992-3.\n\nUnity in struggle had created a sense of solidarity which then exerted a pull on the vast mass of the informal workers, self-employed, the unemployed poor and the impoverished sections of the petty bourgeoisie. The defeat led to the sectional attitudes and communal conflicts of the petty bourgeoisie influencing the self-employed, the unemployed and wide layers of workers.\n\nThis was a vivid example of how there are two different directions in which the despair and bitterness that exist among the \"multitudes\" in the great cities of the Third World can go. One direction involves workers struggling collectively and pulling millions of other impoverished people behind them. The other involves demagogues exploiting the sense of hopelessness, demoralisation and fragmentation to direct the bitterness of one section of the impoverished mass against other sections. That is why the working class cannot simply be seen as just another grouping within \"the multitude\" or \"the people\", and of no intrinsic importance for the struggle against the system. Nor can workers' struggles be seen by those who organise them as important simply because of their economic content. Their struggles are important precisely because they have the capacity to provide a direction for all the bitterness among the mass of people otherwise without hope as they try to survive in the slums of the world's megacities.\n\nWho Can Overcome?\n\n345","previous_page":344,"next_page":346}