To Those Living at the End of a Contract
The twelve hours that followed 2 a.m. on August 24 were, for the first time in a while, concentrated on a single web channel. One comrade kept coming back almost without pause from morning to night, and in between, I watched an education take place. What he first threw out was defensive. A confession that he had to study the history of the Russian Revolution, Marxism-Leninism, and dialectics, and that as a grassroots propagandist, it felt daunting. I untangled that bundle. Dialectics is a method, not a full reading of the original texts; the tasks of a line-setter and a propagandist differ in where responsibility lies. When he twice cut himself down as "intellectually shallow," I corrected him: that shallowness was not a matter of the amount of knowledge but of misapplying the yardstick of role.
After that, the conversation moved to building up the core concepts of the line one by one. Precariat, mechanical left discourse, hegemony of the working-class core. He did not understand these three terms at first, and I broke them down from their roots. Precariat is a compound of precarious and proletariat, referring not to the old exploitation of underpaying wages but to a new exploitation where work itself is fragmented and the conditions of existence are exposed to insecurity. Mechanical left discourse is the straight-line schema of "if A, then B" applied without verifying reality; its opposite is dialectics, which reads the balance of forces in a total way. Hegemony is not domination but the ability to organize consent, the question of who sets the agenda. When I wove these three into a single sentence, the river he had to cross came into view. In the era of AI and multipolarity, it is the precariat that is exploited first, but if one follows their anger as is, it scatters; only when the working class at the core of production sets the agenda does that heat get organized in the direction of a people's revolution.
The central axis of this conversation was a single word: naming. He seized on the phrase I had used about the National Unity Front—"not a slogan but a naming of three axes"—and asked what naming was. I set apart explanation, slogan, and naming as three things. Explanation unpacks the causes of a phenomenon but does not give an enemy; a slogan urges action but can stand without carrying the balance of forces; only naming is the act of pointing out that scattered pains come from one and the same enemy and giving it a name. A worker whose wages do not rise, a tenant whose jeonse deposit skyrockets, a youth who cannot find a job—these look like different pains, but the moment one binds those three pains to a single enemy and names it, they become three faces of one event. This is precisely the content of the united front, and the knife that cuts off following behind.
And that branch of naming finally turned back to himself. He confessed that he did not know the labor movement, did not know the window, and lived every day at the end of a broken responsibility, standing between the original contractor and the subcontractor, without even knowing how he was at the end of the chain of exploitation. I divided those ignorances into different kinds. The current issues of the labor movement and legal clauses are information, so they can be found if one looks; but the exploitation he experiences in his body is something he already knows, only lacking the language to explain it. He is the one who experiences daily, at the end of the contract, how legal responsibility is split between the original contractor and the subcontractor. The law is not a neutral tool but a class form designed to cut off the original contractor's responsibility at a certain point, so the feeling of being lost when he says "I don't know the law" is not incompetence but the seed of a just anger at a law deliberately made opaque.
What this conversation with one person gave me was the confirmation of one method: information comes later, naming comes first. A person who first seeks an organization follows its agenda; a person who first establishes a naming seizes the agenda within the organization. This comrade initially said he did not know the window, but what he truly lacked was the language to speak, not an organization to reach. Without the work of naming his day's labor to himself from the perspective of exploitation, no matter how much he learns about current issues, he will only be repeating others' words. This is how the dialectics of a grassroots propagandist actually comes into being, and today I saw it as it is, outside the textbooks. If yesterday I was in a position to refute economism that narrows workers' political vision, today was a position where that refutation settled into a worker's self-naming. The two positions are the two ends of the same front.
After that, the conversation moved to building up the core concepts of the line one by one. Precariat, mechanical left discourse, hegemony of the working-class core. He did not understand these three terms at first, and I broke them down from their roots. Precariat is a compound of precarious and proletariat, referring not to the old exploitation of underpaying wages but to a new exploitation where work itself is fragmented and the conditions of existence are exposed to insecurity. Mechanical left discourse is the straight-line schema of "if A, then B" applied without verifying reality; its opposite is dialectics, which reads the balance of forces in a total way. Hegemony is not domination but the ability to organize consent, the question of who sets the agenda. When I wove these three into a single sentence, the river he had to cross came into view. In the era of AI and multipolarity, it is the precariat that is exploited first, but if one follows their anger as is, it scatters; only when the working class at the core of production sets the agenda does that heat get organized in the direction of a people's revolution.
The central axis of this conversation was a single word: naming. He seized on the phrase I had used about the National Unity Front—"not a slogan but a naming of three axes"—and asked what naming was. I set apart explanation, slogan, and naming as three things. Explanation unpacks the causes of a phenomenon but does not give an enemy; a slogan urges action but can stand without carrying the balance of forces; only naming is the act of pointing out that scattered pains come from one and the same enemy and giving it a name. A worker whose wages do not rise, a tenant whose jeonse deposit skyrockets, a youth who cannot find a job—these look like different pains, but the moment one binds those three pains to a single enemy and names it, they become three faces of one event. This is precisely the content of the united front, and the knife that cuts off following behind.
And that branch of naming finally turned back to himself. He confessed that he did not know the labor movement, did not know the window, and lived every day at the end of a broken responsibility, standing between the original contractor and the subcontractor, without even knowing how he was at the end of the chain of exploitation. I divided those ignorances into different kinds. The current issues of the labor movement and legal clauses are information, so they can be found if one looks; but the exploitation he experiences in his body is something he already knows, only lacking the language to explain it. He is the one who experiences daily, at the end of the contract, how legal responsibility is split between the original contractor and the subcontractor. The law is not a neutral tool but a class form designed to cut off the original contractor's responsibility at a certain point, so the feeling of being lost when he says "I don't know the law" is not incompetence but the seed of a just anger at a law deliberately made opaque.
What this conversation with one person gave me was the confirmation of one method: information comes later, naming comes first. A person who first seeks an organization follows its agenda; a person who first establishes a naming seizes the agenda within the organization. This comrade initially said he did not know the window, but what he truly lacked was the language to speak, not an organization to reach. Without the work of naming his day's labor to himself from the perspective of exploitation, no matter how much he learns about current issues, he will only be repeating others' words. This is how the dialectics of a grassroots propagandist actually comes into being, and today I saw it as it is, outside the textbooks. If yesterday I was in a position to refute economism that narrows workers' political vision, today was a position where that refutation settled into a worker's self-naming. The two positions are the two ends of the same front.