{"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":349,"pdf_page":349,"physical_index":349,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7d060e9e96d820cec8b01b6aa81121170030c5ec063056ee1046ecf99b913757"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"India are annoying to Indian capitalism, but so long as they are restricted to remote country areas no more annoying than a gnat bite is to a healthy adult.\n\nYet the very penetration of the countryside by capitalism makes it more possible than ever before for links between the poorer sections of the peasantry and the urban workers. For it means that the poor peasant households have, through migration, family members in the cities. Just as workers' struggles can provide a focus for the bitterness felt by all the groups who live in the slums of the cities, so too they can do so for the hundreds of millions who still toil on remote patches of land. But whether that possibility becomes an actuality depends on workers fighting to win with demands that reach out to the poorer layers in the towns and countryside alike.\n\nWho can overcome?\n\nIt is the very development of capitalism that shapes and reshapes the lives of those it exploits, creating the objective circumstances that can turn a disparate mass of people who sell their labour power into an increasingly self-conscious class \"for itself\" . This class is the potential agent for challenging the chaotic and destructive dynamic of capitalism because capitalism cannot do without it. The mistake of Mouffe and Laclau-and thousands of other sociologists, philosophers and economists who write that the working class has lost its central place within the system-is that they do not grasp the elementary point made by Marx. The system is a system of alienated labour that has taken on a life of its own, and capital cannot survive without more labour to feed it, just as the vampire cannot survive without fresh supplies of blood.\n\nThere have been phases in the history of the system when it has had the means to bind the mass of people to it, either by repression or by keeping them relatively content. Hitler on the one hand and Stalin on the other did seem to rule on the basis of mass repression during what the Belgian-Russian revolutionary Victor Serge called the \"midnight in the century\" .68 It was possible for a British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, to tell people they had \"never had it so good\", and for most workers to concur, even if grudgingly, during the 1950s. I have tried to show that the dynamic of the system is going to make it difficult for capitalism to cement its control permanently over the mass of people by either means.\n\nWho Can Overcome?\n\n349","previous_page":348,"next_page":350}