Politics, in truth, is the interplay between different realms, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable. Therefore we say that the central political fact of the last thirty years went unnoticed. Because it took place at such a deep level of reality that it cannot be called political without bringing about a revolution in the very notion of the political. Because this level of reality is also the one where the division is elaborated between what is taken for reality and what is not. This central fact is the triumph of Existential Liberalism. The fact that it is now considered natural for everyone to have a rapport with the world based on the idea that each person has her own life. That such a life consists in a series of choices, good or bad. That each person can define herself by an ensemble of qualities, of properties, that make her, through her continual balancing of those properties, a unique and irreplaceable being. That the contract adequately epitomizes relations between individuals, and that respect epitomizes all virtue. That language is nothing but a means of arriving at an agreement. That, in reality, the world is composed on one side of things to manage, and on the other of an ocean of self-absorbed individuals, who in turn have a regrettable tendency to turn themselves into things, letting themselves become managed. Of course, cynicism is only one of the possible features of the infinite clinical diagnoses of Existential Liberalism. It also includes depression, apathy, immunodeficiency (every immune system is intrinsically collective), dishonesty, judicial harassment, chronic dissatisfaction, denied affection, isolation, illusions of citizenship, and the loss of all generosity. Existential liberalism has propagated its desert so well that even the most sincere Leftists express their utopia with its very terms. “We will rebuild an egalitarian society in which each person makes her contribution and from which each person gets her needs met from it... As far as individual desires are concerned, it could be egalitarian if each person consumes in proportion to the efforts she is ready to contribute. Naturally it will be necessary to redefine the method of evaluating the efforts contributed by each person,” write the organizers of the Alternative, Anti-capitalist, and Anti-war Village against the G8 summit in Evian in a text entitled When Capitalism and Wage Labor Will Have Been Abolished! Here is a key to the triumph of Empire: managing to keep in the shadows, to surround with silence the very terrain on which it maneuvers, the field upon which it fights the decisive battle: that of manipulating feelings, of defining the limits of the perceptible. In such a way it preventively paralyzes any defense at the very moment of its operation, and ruins the very idea of a counter-offensive. The victory is won whenever the militant, at the end of a hard day of Political Work, slumps down in front of an action movie. Anonymous, Call, p.7-8

The real has something intrinsically chaotic about it that humans need to stabilize by imposing a legibility, and thereby a foreseeability, on it. And what every institution provides is precisely a stationary legibility of the real, an ultimate stabi­lization of phenomena. If the institution suits us so well, it's because the sort of legibility it guarantees saves us above all, each one of us, from affirming anything whatsoever, from risking our singular reading of life and of things, from producing together an intelligibility of the world that is properly ours and shared in common. The problem is that choosing not to do that is the same as choosing not to exist. It's to resign from life. In reality, what we need are not institutions but forms. It so happens, in fact, that life, whether biological, singular or collective, is precisely a continual creation of forms. It suffices to perceive them, to accept allowing them to arise, to make a place for them and accompany their metamorphosis. A habit is a form. A thought is a form. A friendship is a form. A work is a form. A profession is a form. Everything that lives is only forms and interactions of forms. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.68-69

Far from representing the emergence of a coherent agent, the expansion of the surplus population marks the tendential disappearance of the previous revolutionary horizon. It was once possible — indeed quite reasonable — to think of the proletariat as an emergent social subject, becoming ever larger and more unified with the global spread and development of the capitalist mode of production, and particularly with the incorporation of a growing portion of the class into industrial employment. Today, in an era of slowing economic growth — which is also an era of general deindustrialisation — the revolutionary orientations of the past no longer make sense. The working class — always internally differentiated — displays a diminishing capacity for unification under a single hegemonic figure, thus realising its always latent tendency to decompose into fragments, facing off one against the other. At the heart of this fractiousness is the division of the class into two parts: (1) a shrinking one that retains higher wages and social protections, but must constantly fight rearguard actions against capitalist “reforms” and restructurings; and (2) a growing one that faces poor prospects of employment and is offered few social protections. The more secure sector — which is also more organised — often needs the support of the more precarious in order to win its struggles. However, calls for greater “inclusion” of such people may stoke valid fears that this will undermine more secure positions, opening up access to education and training, and thereby increasing labour supply and reducing bargaining power. At the same time, members of the more precarious part may be rightly suspicious of the motives of the more secure: after the sacrifices have been made, won’t it be merely the latter’s rearguard battles that have been won? After all, those with security rarely take to the streets when it is the less fortunate who are getting screwed. The expansion of the surplus population is important in explaining this division, but it is not the only meaningful one within the class. There is a potentially infinite variety of such distinctions, so the question of explaining current divisions can in a sense be reversed: What was the unity that is now in advanced stages of decay? How did it come about? This is a question that we have attempted to answer elsewhere in this issue, in ‘A History of Separation’. For our purposes here though, it is enough to note simply that there was once a hegemonic identity and orientation among workers that could provide grounds for affirming certain struggles as central, while excluding others as secondary or unimportant. It is equally clear that this affirmation seems less and less plausible today. In place of the identity of the worker, we are now faced with so many competing alternatives, each with its own strategic priorities: those who want more jobs against those who want to stave off environmental catastrophe; those who want to preserve the family wage for unionised male workers against those who want gender equality; those of dominant national or racial identities against those of racialised minorities, and so on. In this sense, the fractiousness of “identity politics” is symptomatic of an era. In a period of increasingly slow economic growth under the threat of ecological catastrophe, it seems diminishingly plausible to claim that fighting the battles of one part of the class will advance the class as a whole. This is why we reject any attempt to find in surplus populations an ersatz social subject that might replace the hegemonic role played by the white male factory worker in the workers’ movement. At present there seems to be no class fraction — whether “the most strategically placed” or “the most oppressed” — whose struggles express a general interest. At the same time, attempts to conjure up a new unity from this diversity by simply renaming it as “multitude” or “precariat”, for example, merely gloss over this fundamental problem of internal division. If there is any revolutionary potential at present, it seems that it stands to be actualised not in the struggle of any particular class fraction, but rather, in those moments when diverse fractions are drawn together in struggle in spite of their mutual suspicions; despite the lack of a stable, consistent hegemonic pole. In such moments, the demands of various sections of the class come into conflict with one another — a conflict that may bring the prospect of destabilising or undermining mutually exclusive demands and identities. The modes by which social life is organised and segmented within capitalist societies can then come to appear as obstacles to further struggle, dividing workers against one another. The question of how to move forward is then at least raised, though with no easy answers. After all, a definitive answer would involve an overcoming of the unity-in-separation that organises social life. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject