Should communists be union reps?

This is actually a great example of what you will end up being: you are already ready to defend the imposition of work, in the name of "the workers".

I don't know about shop stewards, I from the US.

I do know that if you do not represent the union and negotiate with management from the union's side, you will eventually get crushed. i also know that there are a whole range of issues that if you take them up, the union will put your local into receivership or some such. But this all assumes that you actually have an active base.

This aspect seems to be completely out of the discussion: what are your co-workers doing? What relationship do you have to them? Are you already a respected "militant" in your workplace?

If you claim you have to be a shop steward or some such to be respected, not only are you an ass, you have it backwards. First comes the fight to build support and ties. The possibility of using the union position only comes after that, otherwise you are just another Leftist ass pimple trying to take a shortcut through the unions, a shortcut that will turn you into a little union boss.

So even if taking a shop steward position was okay, it is stupid politically to take it without being recognized as a fighter, without a base of some militant activity and combatancy in the workplace from the workers themselves.

If you don't have an independent base from the union, if anything large really does break out, you will have no way to resist the pressure of the union, except of course quitting. And even then, i can't imagine ever, even if I was the equivalentof a shop steward, letting the union run a strike!!! First things first, organize a strike committee on which union members, including me, are not allowed. Period.

I think, frankly, that people who think they can go into the union apparatus and not get consumed are fools, especially without some kind of base they built up long before becoming a shop steward or rep or whatever.

Chris

I have to revise this last thought, however, as it is too democratic.

The direct action of the workers, even a minority of them, is to be defended and supported. Certainly, the more workers active, the better and this is the idea of a strike committee of and by the workers, but even this is only a formal solution and I think of it as an important way to take the running of the strike out of the hands of the union.

Of course, the person I know who did just this was the local rep at her strike, a position she did not run for until she had built a reputation over years, and as openly a communist. So it was not a strict rejection of being in the union, even as a rep. But it also involved her using her position to take the union out of control of the strike.

I think this experience is why I have always felt that even if we are in the union, we have to recognize the fact that unions are and always will be implicated in the imposition of work (its terms and conditions can be debated, not its necessity) and the basic acceptance of wage-labor and capital (no class struggle, no need for unions.)

And it is very, very hard to be in the union, I suspect even as a shop steward rather than a paid official, and not do the day-to-day "work" of the union with no regard for the level of activity of the workers themselves, regardless of the level of militancy, of fight, etc. At that point, you have to make a choice between acting on behalf of the workers (i.e. to be a labor lawyer/social worker/politician) or to quit in the abscence of conditions in which it is possible to be more than that.

Chris

Good posts Red Twister, I totally agree that getting involved as a representitive is something that should be done after you have won the respect of your co-workers. I might add that being respected as a worker who knows the job is also pretty important.

I thought Redtwister made a pretty good case for not being involved as a shop steward, then spoiled it all by saying it would be Ok if you had first won the respect of the workers. And Edmonton took this error to be the best thing about his post.

If you win the respect of the workers as a militant only for them to turn round and ask you to 'represent' them, obviously you haven't done such a good job of explaining the need for workers to take charge of their own struggles.

As I explained on another thread, the same thing happened to me. After spending some years arguing for an anti-union position from inside the union, I was asked if I wanted to be the union rep. It was at this point that I decided the time had come to publicly resign from the union. After this people were a bit clearer that I really was against the union, but for the workers' struggle.

Aw shucks ALF maybe someday I won't be suckered into such leftist traps....
or maybe its becuase we think that shop stewards have agency and aren't going to be corrupted by the massive unchecked power that being a shop steward entails. I mean we are talking pretty low level stuff here, I think there is a hell of a lot of a difference between a union position where you stay on the shop floor and work next to your comrades who elected you out of respect for your views and commitment to the struggle, and some pork chopper milking the checkoff to draw a fat paycheck.

What happened? Did they react the way you'd hoped?

At the time I produced a statement explaining why I was leaving the union (the NUT). I don't think it was that well understood, probably I would phrase it differently now. Some time later at the school we had the first round of UNISON strikes. The NUT told its members to cross the picket lines. I spoke (unofficially of course) at a UNISON meeting stressing the need for a common meeting to discuss the situation. I produced a leaflet on the day of the strike, and for both of the above, I was hauled in front of the head teacher and threatened with disciplinary action. I think this probably made my position clearer.

I now work at a sixth form college. I wrote up the intervention I made during the recent UNISON action in a different thread on libcom, I don't know whether you've seen it. I'll see if I can find the link.

You can read Alf's account here:

http://en.internationalism.org/wr/294_unison

Surely this is an argument for industrial unions, rather than a vindication of the "left communist" position. And anyway, you can't be disciplined for refusing to cross a picketline. :?

Well, the main charge against me was that I spoke to the UNISON workers during my teaching time, which was technically correct because I spoke at the meeting in a corner of the library while I and another teacher were in charge of a small group of pupils at the other end. The head teacher also muttered that what I was doing by handing out leaflets at the school gates was secondary picketing, but I don't think that would have stuck.

I don't see how what I did proves the industrial union position. I was arguing for a general assembly of all workers, not trying to set up a permanent industrial union.

Well regardless that assembly would have happened in an A-S union or the IWW with an industrial union strategy. Besides if every time an issue tha affects everyone comes up and they hold an assembly to make decsisions, regardless of whether or not they have all the props like membership cards, dues and a bank account that sounds a lot like a union to me.

It's also something the CNT-S push for in most disputes.

Thats CNT-E you anglo-liginuacentricsumthin

I'm not familiar with anglo forms of pasta. What is this liginua? Does it go better with red or white meat?

Well, whatever its palatable properties I'm certainly not centred around it.

Don't jump out of the bowl you were baked in, Rathcoole pleb!

C*nt - I'm 'from' New Mossley not Rathcoole. Yeah I know, way better - least I'm workin class and not from the 'posh' end of town

if there were a number of workers in a workplace or locality strongly in favour of organising through assemblies, they should obviously try to stay grouped together in some way, before, during and after the struggle. But they would only be a minority and it would be a real mistake to pretend to represent the workers or be their 'union', their unity.

Sorry if this elicited confusion. I was pointing out that I had not seen anyone supporting the union side take cognizance of the fact that not being a tool (of the union or in general) would have to rest on winning the respect of one's co-workers as a militant outside an elected position. This would preclude the idea that the only way to be a militant worker is to be in or a part of the union. It is typical leftism that thinks the way to win respect and trust and be "in the struggle" is to join an apparatus (Labor Party, unions, Democratic Party, etc.)

Clearly, EW gets it, but frankly, if, if, there is a situation in which accepting an elected union position is viable (and I can only imagine even that as a tactical maneuver, which does not change the character of the unions as institutions protecting labor as capital) it is predicated on real independence from the union among the workers and could only last as long as the situation which made it a choice. Even that is not without its risks and I am genrally of the opinion that its the union that changes us, not vice versa.

Chris

I also think redtwister makes a good argument. I'm not a shop steward myself and I don't see the need to be one either at the moment (or in a near or distant future), but that does not imply that we could never use such means to achieve our goals. For instance there is a bakery in Sweden which has had quite a successful usage of the union, however the problem is that they have had to fight the central union every step of the way. In that light it might seem as though they are making it unnecessarily difficult for themselves, but who are we to judge them? Their struggles are essentially self-organised, they use several non-unionist methods and work heavily with informal workplace organisation. Same thing with the anarcosyndicalist union, some people use it as a means to get a space for communication between workers in a workplace, and recently there have been several blockades in the south of Sweden in solidarity with workers that have been fired, mainly because they are increasing in militance (due to the self-organisation of wage-workers within and without the SAC) and restructuring the entire organisation. They have even the use of non-unionist methods (informal workplace organising) proclaimed in their program (probably making them quite unique in the world).

Thus, the situation in Sweden makes it really hard to keep up some strict principles to follow, since militance does not seem to be very dependent on the exact structure of the struggle, but instead on the militancy of wage-workers. Which is a tautology, I know, but a tautology which displays the absurdity of extremely strict principles (as those of the ICC) in relation to everyday class struggle.

Keeping an open mind in these issues also makes it easier for us to contact other workers in the same situation, by contacting them, learning from them, and without coming down on them from above. There are probably quite good reasons for the way a specific collective have organised in a certain manner.

Essentially: The militance of wage-workers is dependent on the militance of wage-workers. And furthering this militance is not done by principles, but by militance and solidarity...

This is a reply to something from a while ago, not cp_shwarma's last post...

CP_shwarma said:
“I think this is ultimately the wrong way to pose the question. It is not the question of whether or not to become a shop steward. Even if you do not become a union rep you are involved in class struggle, and if you become a union rep you are involved in class struggle. Thus the question must be posed in another manner: how do we radicalise class struggle?”

I think this is a novel starting point. How we radicalize class struggle is indeed the issue. Sometimes this might mean being in and sometimes out of a union or position in the union. However, it begs the question of the relationship of the unions to capital, their constitution within capitalist society.

CP_shwarma said:
“And the answer to this question is not handed down by some "revolutionary principles", as the ICC assumes, but rather through the involvement and direct intervention in dirty class struggle. The fact of the matter is that all class struggle is capitalist, every workers' struggle, be it anti-unionist or unionist is ultimately the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labour. The fetter that class struggle (ie. capital) produces for itself is the crisis which class struggle (ie. capital) overcomes. Marx puts it nicely in the third volume of Capital: "Crises are always momentary, violent solutions of the given contradictions, violent eruptions which temporarily reassembles balance." Capital (class struggle) produces its own limitations (Schranke) and is thus thrown into crisis: momentarily and temporarily. It is capital's immanent movement which produces the crisis and its overcoming.”

I cannot agree with the central point of this. If class struggle merely reproduces the relation between labor and capital and crisis is always overcome, is guaranteed, then effectively the circle is closed, there is no flaw in our cage. The implications of this are evident below.

CP_shwarma said:
“For these reasons there can never be a dogmatic or principal answer to the question of how to radicalise class struggle, it must be found in the dirty and unclean involvement in the class' capitalist struggles. No "revolutionary principle" will ever change that.”

I do not know about this fascination with “dirty” and “unclean”, it is odd to me. The only situations I have ever found healthy and hygienic were the struggles I was involved in, where the filth, the ethical compromises, the handing over of our dignity one small piece at a time, the theft of our energy and capacity for joy, of everyday life and its misery was overcome, if only for a while. Maybe the idea is that one feels pure and clean by staying out of the unions on principle. It is a little odd as a way to put it, but maybe it is because it is language I associate with trade unionists baiting people who do not see the unions as “our” institutions, which IMO they are not.

CP_shwarma said:
“If there is a union strike, why should a communist reject it? If there is a wage increase due to a militant union, why should a communist reject it? We can never find communism in class struggle anyway, we have to find it in the abolition of class struggle (ie. the abolition of the relationship of capital).“

I could answer that one should reject union strikes because most of the ones called by the union are used to disorganize and exhaust the workers, or to simply allow the union to get a better bargaining position. The struggle, for them, is only a means to put pressure on capital.

But of course, since class struggle merely reproduces capital, is a logic of capital, then of course the unions will do this and we should not oppose it. What is the point? However, I find this oddly quietistic. It actually acts to silence the idea of critique.

This idea that communism is the abolition of class struggle is true insofar as communism is the abolition not merely of the capitalist class, but of the working class and in fact of all social classes. And as with every statement like this, one has to wonder: if communism is not posited in the struggle against capital simultaneously from within the capital-labor relation, that is, if class is not a kind of cut or gap that is irreducible and that opens a potential for its overcoming, its abolition, then where is communism posited?

CP_shwarma said:
“Camatte is interesting in some aspects, but his main flaw is abandoning the proletariat as the origin of a communist movement. But this origin is by no means "already there" (somewhere beneath all the "dirty", unionist struggles that are fought by the proletariat), which the concept of revolutionary principles implies. The communist movement must be created, it must be built on the everyday struggles of the working class, but not as a Trotskyist transcroissance (overgrowth) of current struggles, but rather as a dismantling of the relationship which makes us proletarian and the production of communist, non-mercantile, relations.”

Why would Cammatte not abandon the notion of the proletariat as origin of the communist movement? If there is no connection between the fact that labor under capital is propertyless, that it is absolutely alienated from the means and products of its own activity, that its activity is purchased as purely abstract labor (mere capacity to work), that this is the first form of labor which is free in Marx’s double sense, and as such is a class with radical chains, then it strikes me that what we have is an implicit voluntarism, that communism becomes the activity of communists introducing from outside the communist “impulse” since it has no existence within the fact that capital is constituted by, is nothing but, alienated labor in Marx’s specifically antagonistic sense. This is of course the echoes of Althusser (For Marx, pp. 99-105 or so are quite explicit with this, among other places), but also explains not only Althusser’s Maoism (his entire notion of contradiction is taken, albeit translated into French scholastic language, whole cloth from Mao), but also the difference between this and Trotskyism. It is, IMO, an odd mix of Mao and councilism, but I have to say I can see in this idea of withdrawal the Chinese building of a steel mill in every back yard. It seems to me that Bordiga’s essay “Seize Power or Seize the Factory?” is appropriate here.

CP_shwarma said:
“Class struggle does not contain a dynamic (except that it is capital, ie. a dynamic movement in the reproduction of capitalist social relations). It is impossible to split class struggle into two separate movements: capitalist and revolutionary. Essentially self-organised struggles and union-organised struggles are both trade-unionist in their essence.”

This idea strikes me as wholly odd. The class struggle is certainly not two separate moments. Its movement is that of labor in and against capital in the same movement, not as “in” or “against.” However, it does not preclude this critique of self-organization, as Open Marxism shares the same notion that workers’ self-activity, i.e. an activity which is not for capital, but which takes place initially within and through its relation to capital, is the movement of labor against capital and it contains the element of withdrawal, the construction of relations outside and against capital.

But this is where Bordiga comes into the problem: “The factory will be conquered by the working class - and not only by the workforce employed in it, which would be too weak and non-communist - only after the working class as a whole has seized political power. Unless it has done so, the Royal Guards, military police, etc. - in other words, the mechanism of force and oppression that the bourgeoisie has at its disposal, its political power apparatus -will see to it that all illusions are dispelled.”

The key line is that the workers merely taking over the factory is non-communist. We are then obliged to ask “Why is this so?”

CP_shwarma said:
“Equating self-organised with revolutionary, as left-commies do, is actually impossible to comprehend, if you by revolution mean the destruction of class society (including the proletariat). There are no evidence whatsoever that self-organised struggles are revolutionary, quite the contrary.”

Théorie Communiste has produced several quite good critiques of this moralist approach, eg. Normative history and the communist essence of the proletariat or Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution....”

First, I would note that the title of the second essay would seem to cause problems for the line of this argument: “Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution”. It is not titled, “Self-organisation is the reproduction of Capital” and the article itself attempts to think through the problem presented of how one gets from self-organization of the struggle to moving beyond, to the abolition of the proletariat itself.

CP_shwarma said:
“However, the proletariat is not identified with capital, but it is capital's constant negation. Therefore the affirmation of the proletariat reproduces the relationship which poses the proletariat as capital's negation. This negation is however not opposed to the relationship of capital between not-capital (proletariat) and capital. For this we need the positive organising of the negation of the negation: communisation. And this can be accomplished in a unionist struggle, when the unionist struggle breaks its shell, as well as in a non-unionist struggle, when the non-unionist struggle breaks its shell. The time for moralism and identity-political blind-folds is over, it's time for struggle!”

To the first sentence, the only adequate response is: Why? On what basis?

The second question then is: What do you mean by proletariat? The proletariat is not related to labor, since the capital-labor relation is one in which capital is the subject and since it is a closed loop without a proper contradiction, that is, without a limit or gap, a smooth, striated surface to use Deleuzional terms. From where does this proletariat arise? It would seem that this logic creates an unbridgeable divide between labor and proletariat, as proletariat has nothing to do with labor. That is to say, the proletariat becomes a figure generated by an ethical or political voluntarism based on a notion of communism that has no basis in the capital-labor relation, a revolutionary immaculate conception.

CP_Shwarma said:
“This excellent text shows that the dicotomy between unionism and non-unionism is essentially false: http://www.troublemakershandbook.org/Text/Shopfloor%20Tactics/Krehbiel%20The%20Quota.htm

While being union reps, they show how they self-organized a prevention of an increase in productivity.”

What this text shows is something specific: that union reps, esp. in a period of intensified class struggle like 1968, when this was written, do not have to act as mini managers. But the story itself is very interesting: it is written by a non-official/non-rep about the workers self-organizing did and the presence of the union is very small and does not extend beyond the rep, Ed, who is also on a line. It is also clearly a struggle over control of the speed of the labor process, but it is also clearly limited.

I would say that anyone reading that piece, should also read Martin Glaberman and the now-available online Workplace Papers by Sojourner Truth Organization at http://www.sojournertruth.net/main.html, who were far more involved in workplace activity than any of the Trots or councilists were in the 1960’s and 70’s and who had a strong presence in several very large factories in Chicago. Now, back the point…

This may be interesting, but it does not have much to do with unions. The union is barely present. In fact, the activity of the workers took place without union initiative and more or less passive support. This is certainly not a common experience in unions, even then.

The question of the relation of unions to capital remains in effect untouched by this example. It is a non-example.

Unions institutionalize the activity taken at the point of production by workers themselves, in order to get better working conditions, wages, benefits, etc. It formalizes the relation between workers and capitalists, captured in most instances in the legal/contractual relation (i.e. a form of the property relation) so that the union can refer to the state to enforce those contractual relations. The unions have always been the form of organization of labor within capital, predicated on, not a threat to, the wage form, value, etc.

Unlike the decadence theorists, I don’t see unions as having fundamentally changed. Rather, capital’s attitude towards unions has changed through experience, and only to some degree, as unions, as much as they are forms of organization native to capital, still represent an impediment to the free flow of capital. Any and all challenges to capital determining wages, benefits (if any), working conditions, speed and organization of the labor process, etc. exposes the antagonistic side of the relation between labor and capital and will never sit well with the capitalist class as a whole.

However, unions, predicated on a certain positive relationship with the state and with capital, i.e. the possibility to have regularized contractual relations, once recognized by the state, means that unions will also play a regulative role in the labor process. In the face of massive labor unrest, the unions will play the role of containing, if not outright undermining, struggles so that they do not call into question capital itself.

This means that unions can respond with a great deal of flexibility in this containment, from a certain kind of radicalism, though it rarely goes beyond the workplace or company or industry (industry wide struggles and cross-industry united struggles are rather uncommon, to say the least) to almost openly being reactionary and capital’s spokesman to the workers, as in the U.S. in the last 45 years (or more explicitly the policy of containment and anti-communism and collusion with the CIA and dictatorships by the AFL-CIO’s unions in Latin America, and Asia.)

As such, unions are anti-communist and to that extent are anti-working class. That is, while they can certainly play a positive role in resolving social struggles that stay within the limits of capital for better wages, benefits, etc., their limit is reached when struggles threaten capital. There is nothing historically to indicate otherwise, even Spain (though that is undoubtedly the only real defense of radical unionism available since the IWW never had to operate in a situation which threatened to really go beyond capital.)

Of course, the other issue posed is whether or not the revolution is about taking over the means of production or taking political power. I hope at this late date that we all agree that either notion of revolution which does not involve the transformation of social relations as itself the revolutionary process, is radically false. If we take the model of Social-democracy and Bolshevism, or even Left Communism, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism and Councilism, this aspect is not dealt with properly until after WWII. One is merely the seizure of the state, the other is… well, what? Have we ever seen a situation where establishing collectives or attempting to “socialize production” has not been crushed without ever having taken hold? Clearly, we have seen the taking of power without the transformation of social relations, and we have seen many a struggle which has involved the taking over of (some of) the workplaces without the capturing of political power. All of these have ended in defeat.

The question between anarchism and councilism versus left communism is the problem of whether or not the proletariat needs to establish its political power as part of the struggle for communism. From the view where this is not necessary, where the revolution is the seizure of the means of production, the organization of a federation of councils, etc. there is not necessarily an antagonism to unions. There may be, but since in essence the struggle for social power happens at the point of production (or maybe production and “community”, whatever that means in capitalist society), it seems less so. On the other hand, the left communist still sees the point as working class political power, not in the form of seizing the state or in creating a new state, but in the sense of centralized, systematic assault on all bourgeois social relations: value, market, money, exchange, etc. That it involves a certain centralization, that involves the organizing and deployment of violence, that it is essentially political power is certainly there, and at the same time, insofar as it involves overcoming the social relations which give rise to separate spheres, such as economic, political, ideological, private, public, domestic, religious, etc., it involves the end of this separation and therefore of the state and even the political as such.

The latter is likely to have a much less sanguine view of unions, IMO, since communism is not at the point of production, but the negation of the economic, the political, the wage-form, etc. and anything which defends those separations and social forms, the constituted forms of capital generated by the relation between labor and capital, is going to be seen as anti-proletarian/anti-communist. Seize the factories or seize political power?

There are other divides (unionism and (anarcho-)syndicalism will generally tend, for example, towards democratism because unions have to accept the lowest common denominator to “represent” the workers, while left communists and (some) anarchists will generally be opposed to democratism or the fetishizing of democracy as a principle), but they are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Chris

First of, I would like to address the misconception of my standpoint. The fact that labor-capital is a dialectic makes it reciprocal, class struggle is the dialectic of capital, it is not something that is "put into" the dialectic of capital. For a good and very exhaustive study on the historical dialectic of capital I would refer you to Beverly Silvers excellent piece of work Forces of Labor, which essentially shows that the dialectic of capital is conflict, ie. antagonism between classes, ie. class struggle. That is the basic starting point, the relationship of capital (accumulation of value) is class struggle.

Furthermore, in consequence with this, we find that the different classes are constituted in and through this process (accumulation of value), ie. accumulation of value is logically precedent to the fact of classes, while the existence of classes refounds this logical precedent. In this dialectic we find that labor is not-capital and capital is not-labor, and the way this dialectic (accumulation of value) works is by joining the two, the dialectic is a reciprocal causality. The subjective agent of labor are the propertyless: the proletariat. Thus the proletariat is only a proletariat inasmuch it is a carrier (Träger to use Marx's word) of labourpower. In the struggle between classes there is indeed a gap, there is a non-identity between labour and capital (and their respective subjective existences). But this gap is inherent in the very dialectic which closes the gap. Thus the closing of the gap is dependent on the gap and the gap is dependent on the closing of the gap. The dialectic is semi-closed, because it is certainly true that if it was entirely closed it would be an eternal existence. Now that it is semi-closed we can still state that capital is eternal if we do not break this ground, if we do not abolish the gap and the closing of the gap, if we do not abolish the entire foundation which class power (both proletarian and capitalist) is based on: the dialectic between labour and capital.

In the TC-text which I referred to, there are several passages which would agree with me, for instance Roland Simon poses that if the proletariat does not lift the anchor from self-organised struggle it will still be a proletariat and if they do not begin the communisation of our relations, they will win or more often lose as a proletariat, ie. as a Träger of labour power.

There is a problem of posing revolutionary principles, since they are rigid and do not very well correspond to a reality which is ever-changing. That is the main problem of them, the second problem is the ideological "ought to" which is implicit in the concept of revolutionary principle. I do not pose an "ought to", it is mere moralism and not struggle. There is no change accomplished by saying with a grumpy voice "oh, the workers used a union, buhu", the only change accomplished is by self-organisation of our own struggles (and the overcoming of self-organisation). Thus there is no defaitism or attentism in my standpoint, it is on the contrary the reappropriation of Marx's proclamation in Wage Labour and Capital that the workers should abolish the wage system. However it is a non-normative reappropriation. I consider the fact that the working class struggle is a wage struggle, it is a struggle over immediate demands, and when there is no immediate demand for communisation measures, we are stuck with the "dirty" wage struggle and I need to fight it since I'm a proletarian.

What I have come to realise (after several years of discussing the problem) is that I find no meaning in constantly beating other people up (symbolically) for things they do or have done, but without abandoning a practice which aims to abolish the foundation on which these doings are based. Thus my non-normative approach contains two aspects:
1. A non-moralist approach, I do not go on a crusade because people "ought to" do this or "ought to" do that. That is mere Leninism and its Kantian concept of liberty.
2. A practice aimed at overcoming limitations. Since every struggle is limited, it has quite concrete limitations, every meaningful insurrectional practice will consist of attempts to overcome these limitations, not by saying "you ought to".

This is indeed a bigger break with representation than the council communists were able to accomplish, their representative practices were found in the fact of their "ought". It is (perhaps paradoxical to some) also a break with union representation, I would never use a union for any long-term strategy, simply because it has no meaning, it has no societal meaning. However I could use a union for certain practices aimed at overcoming limitations, and I see no problem with that, we take whatever means we are able to.

The usage of the word "dirty" is in contrast with the principalistic and moralistic approach of "clean" battles. Of course we feel a certain freedom from the imposition of labour (what redtwister calls "dirty", however it is not the same "dirty" which I discuss) when we fight capital. The "fascination" with the dirty is merely a consideration of the actual existence of our lives, the real struggles, instead of moralist principles. The main thesis is that against the "revolutionary" Jesuite, the acknowledgement that it is not through abstinence, but through struggle, that we can abolish capital. That is why I am involved in circulating my own and other's experiences in an upcoming national paper for class struggle in its actuality (and not in principles). Theory can only bring us a bit, the actual changing of the world takes place in our lives, ie. the personal is political.

Good points cph_shawarma, though i think the issue of the nature of the labour-capital dialetic is somewhat superflous to this topic. I can see where you are coming from and i like your point about the need to destroy the "gap", that this has to be a some what conscious decision, albeit a conciousness/potentiality that arises from the actual dialetic of struggle itself, rather than just the unfolding of a historical programme that would deliver us to communism if it wasn't for various contanimations (unions, leftists, and various reformists). Therefore it's not enough to denounce these various "renegades" and "deformities" but rather to push beyond them, to affirm aswell as negate.

I may not understand Shawarma's ideas very well, but they still seem to me to be a restatement of the old 'class for capital' ideas of Camatte, which logically lead to an abandonement of the class struggle and the search for some other way of breaking out of the closed circuit of capital. I agree with Redtwister's comments on this.

For all Shawarma's rather obscure theorising, his 'practical' conclusions seem utterly pragmatic: sometimes unions are OK to use, sometimes not. He even theorises the absence of principles.

Principles, for the working class, are not based on the Kantian categorical imperative, but on the accumulated lessons of the past. They are not outside history: what was once rational becomes irrational in another period and in other historic conditions. Neither are they simply based on negation and 'abstinence'. If the experience of workers' struggles repeated after many decades has shown unions to be a barrier to the struggle, even on the immediate level of self-defence, the same experience has also generated alternative forms of organising which allow the working class to defend itself and to advance towards higher levels of struggle.

The problem is mainly the normative, moralist approach of principles. The fact that the measurement of struggles is fetishised. Can we even measure struggles ("this was good", "this was bad")? Aren't they rather founded on the class struggle as it is? Aren't struggles qualitative, rather than parts of a sum total? There is a fetisch involved in principles, the measurement of struggles in accordance with some grander value. This is ultimately the wrong way of putting the question, since it a) is moralist, b) is based on the bourgeois fetischism of measurement ("we have to measure everything") and c) since it doesn't acknowledge the real struggles of the proletariat and these struggles real limitations.

I do not reject the notion of the union as a legalist and hindering institution, but the actual existence of the union is not done away with by the upholding of principles, but is negated through the radicalised practice of the wage-workers involved in unions. Thus there is a definite problem in posing the abstract critique of unions, it does not help me in my and my comrades' situation. The only thing that will ever destroy the unions (as institutions for labour) is the communist revolution: communisation.

We have to accept that workers participate in unions to advance their interests. I do not moralise over this with some abstract principle, but rather grapple the situation as it currently is and go from there, not putting up a big demarcation line between me and my fellow workers.

I would like to add a reply to redtwister. Of course unions aren't threats to value, exchange etc. But why would self-organised struggle be a threat to value, exchange etc.? This idea seems to me quite absurd, self-organised struggle is in essence trade unionist, we are all trade unionists whether we like it or not. We have to survive within the world of capital as carriers of labour power and that is how our subjectivity is grounded through our position as labour power. The idea that anti-communist = anti-working class reeks of the ideas of potentiality and teleology, the idea that the working class is something other than the carriers of labour power. As though there was a glory in our submission...

And of course the production of communism cannot be the working of class struggle, it can't be the working of the relationship of capital, since class struggle is the relationship of capital. However, with this said, class struggle is what founds our reality, it is the relationship of capital (class struggle) which is our reality. And therefore we have to begin in class struggle, ie. in capitalism. There are no specific forms of class struggle which are "revolutionary". That is what needs to be consciously created by revolutionaries. And self-proclaimed revolutionaries are not revolutionaries, they are often the absolute worst people at getting involved in class struggle and working with reality. Many of the best revolutionaries are those who have never read Marx or Bordiga or Pannekoek, since they have not been indignated with doctrine.

And I would like to question the reason for bringing up the accusation of primitivism again. I have already explained to you that it is not primitivism we are looking for, we are looking for communism. Thus the remark on "Chinese steelmills" seems utterly meaningless...

The fact of the matter is that I have used Bordiga's notion of the party cell in some of my theorising, especially the criticism of trade unionism (in which he follows Lenin) which is implicit in the party cell as a geographic area rather than factory cells (see for instance the afterword to "Forza violenza dittatura della lotta di classe"). Thus your response seems quite unfair, since this was not what I expressed...

The problem I think is that you read me somewhat wrong, please be more specific on where you don't follow.

CP_Shawarma, in lieu of a proper reply:

I may indeed have come across as unfair, but I was attempting to make comments based on how I read your piece, not out of a desire to be uncharitable. If I was incorrect in my assessment, then hopefully your last couple of posts clarified that. I am just sitting down to read them now.

I have been grappling with this and some other stuff from riff raff (I am on my 5th or 6th re-read of Communism of Withdrawal...), and at times I answer what I think you are saying . To be unkind however, the level of abstraction in your argument makes it sometimes difficult, whether necessarily so or not, and to be kind, my jargon and your jargon only partially overlap, and so we have to work through or translate.

Chris

Cp_shawarma wrote:
First of, I would like to address the misconception of my standpoint.

The fact that labor-capital is a dialectic makes it /reciprocal/, class struggle /is/ the dialectic of capital, it is not something that is "put into" the dialectic of capital. For a good and very exhaustive study on the historical dialectic of capital I would refer you to Beverly Silvers excellent piece of work /Forces of Labor/, which essentially shows that the dialectic of capital is conflict, ie. antagonism between classes, ie. class struggle. That is the basic starting point, the relationship of capital (accumulation of value) /is/ class struggle.

Chris:
I have read her book. It is very interesting, although it has the tendency to skip levels of mediation so that while the antagonistic relation between labor and capital, formed on the fact that capital is the constant reproduction of the separation of labor from the means of production, is the basis of all of the forms of capital (value, money, state, etc.), the immediate identity of class struggle and capital strikes me as mistaken. Her basic idea is that capital moves because of immediate class struggles. While this may be empirically true in some instances, there is a lot mediating the expression of the relation between labor and capital. I have suggested elsewhere (I think my notes on class are on the libcom library) that this overly-immediate identification is exactly one of the weaknesses of autonomist Marxism, which runs into problems of how is it possible that in the relative absence of overt class struggle in the last 15 years (except in the less
developed regions), we are still in a situation of crisis?

Cp_shawarma wrote:
Furthermore, in consequence with this, we find that the different classes are constituted in and through this process (accumulation of value), ie. accumulation of value is logically precedent to the fact of classes, while the existence of classes refounds this logical precedent. In this dialectic we find that labor is not-capital and capital is not-labor, and the way this dialectic (accumulation of value) works is by joining the two, the dialectic is a reciprocal causality. The subjective agent of labor are the propertyless: the proletariat. Thus the proletariat is only a proletariat inasmuch it is a carrier (Träger to use Marx's word) of labourpower. In the struggle between classes there is indeed a /gap/, there is a non-identity between labour and capital (and their respective subjective existences). But this /gap/ is inherent in the very dialectic which /closes the gap/. Thus the closing
of the gap is dependent on the gap and the gap is dependent on the closing of the gap. The dialectic is semi-closed, because it is certainly true that if it was entirely closed it would be an eternal existence. Now that it is semi-closed we can still state that capital /is/ eternal if we do not break this ground, if we do not abolish the gap /and/ the closing of the gap, if we do not abolish the entire foundation which class power (both proletarian and capitalist) is based on: the dialectic between labour and capital.

Chris:
But dialectic is exactly not a reciprocal causality. You already pose labor and capital as things, as already-constituted states of being which are joined by accumulation. In this, you ignore the fact that capital is a product of labor, the separation of the producers from the means of producing in which the production of value is predicated on the alienation of labor from itself through the conditions of its employment, i.e. through dead labor. Capital is nothing but labor alienated from itself and turned against itself. There is no joining the two because they are not external to each other. Capital is a form of labor in the mode of being denied, the rule of dead labor over living, not “not labor” over “not capital”. This way of posing the problem reproduces the way that autonomist Marxism poses the problem, except you have the accumulation of value uniting them, where autonomist Marxism poses it as “the imposition of work” “bewitching” or “ensaring” labor in capital’s web. For a very clear example of this, I recommend chapter 4(?) of Auroras of the Zapatistas by the Midnight Notes Collective.

Dialectic is not about causality. There is a reason Marx almost never uses the word causality, but determination. In a totality, there are many determinations, but one is not the cause of the other or vice versa. It is not reciprocal causes, either a la Weber. That misses the point. Social relations of production only exist in the form of economic, legal, and political relations. The antagonistic class relations are always manifest in the economic, political and legal forms. The forms are mutually determining, because they are all forms, modes of existence, of the relation between capital and labor.

I also completely disagree that the accumulation of value precedes classes analytically. It is the exact opposite: it is class relations which exist analytically prior to the political, economic and ideological forms taken by those relations, including the form of value, even though class relations have no existence independently of those forms. The separation of the producer from the means of producing is what leads the possessor of labor power to confront the possessor of money as seller and buyer. As I argued before, you explicitly assume the value-form and thereby fetishize it.

I also do not see how you can get the idea that the proletariat is the “subjective agent of labor”. First of all, the proletariat is no subject if it is an agent. It can only be an agent of labor if that labor is capitalist labor, i.e labor from which it is alienated, its own practice expressed in the form of its own exploitation. One has either “agents” or “subject”. A Subject is self-subsisting and is not an agent of anything. An agent is always an agent of something, and as such is not a Subject. To express it in other terms, an agent does not have dignity, but a subject does. Nor is labor a Subject. There is no positive Subject in capitalist society, only the “automatic subject” of capital, dead labor in the appearance of a subject (and as a real appearance, in capitalist society it is only capital which can be a subject.) The proletariat is only capable of being, is only a Subject, as negation of the conditions of capitalist labor, as the negation of the capital-labor relation and of classes. The true agent is the capitalist, who is a cipher for capital and as soon as he ceases to be an agent for capital, he ceases to be a capitalist. Only when the laborer ceases to be an agent for capital does he or she cease to be a worker.

To say that the proletariat is a proletariat only as long as it is a carrier of labour power is to imply a sociological existence for “the proletariat”. The proletariat only exists from the side of communism, not capital. The proletariat as a class only makes sense from the side of communism, from the negation of capital. From capital, there is only labor, labour power embodied in the activity of individuals working for capital. Such a class is only a class in a sociological sense, a mass of individuals, agents of specifically capitalist labor.

The gap of which I speak is the gap between labor sans properties/property and labor in the form of capital and this dynamic as one of class struggle implies the imposition of work and the resistance to it. Crisis is not merely the means by which capital reproduces itself, it signifies the presence of the antagonistic relation between labor and capital at the heart of the reproduction of capital and its constant possible rupture, the failure to impose the reproduction of capital as a social relation, as form of domination and exploitation. On this we agree, that communism is not the realization of capital's productive potential or of labor, but the abolition of human activity as labor and as such, of classes. This gap cannot be closed except provisionally, by the re-imposition of accumulation. The other possibility of crisis is that it results in the abolition, an absolute rupture or revolution. Communism is the real movement of the class, not something generated by revolutionary will.

Cp_shawarma wrote:
In the TC-text which I referred to, there are several passages which would agree with me, for instance Roland Simon poses that /if/ the proletariat does not lift the anchor from self-organised struggle /it will still be a proletariat/ and if they do not begin the communisation of our relations, they will win or more often lose /as a proletariat/, ie. as a Träger of labour power.

Chris:
I have no problem with the idea that Roland Simon agrees with you. I was teasing you with the title because you posed the problem in an absolute way, which Simon does not in that piece. Nonetheless, you no doubt are more in agreement with TC than I am.

Cp_shawarma wrote:
There is a problem of posing revolutionary principles, since they are rigid and do not very well correspond to a reality which is ever-changing. That is the main problem of them, the second problem is the ideological "ought to" which is implicit in the concept of revolutionary principle. I do not pose an "ought to", it is mere moralism and not struggle. There is no /change/ accomplished by saying with a grumpy voice "oh, the workers used a union, buhu", the only
change accomplished is by /self-organisation/ of our own struggles (and the overcoming of self-organisation). Thus there is no defaitism or attentism in my standpoint, it is on the contrary the reappropriation of Marx's proclamation in /Wage Labour and Capital/ that the workers should
abolish the wage system. However it is a non-normative reappropriation. I consider the fact that the working class struggle /is/ a wage struggle, it is a struggle over immediate demands, and when there is no immediate demand for communisation measures, we are stuck with the "dirty" wage struggle and I need to fight it since I'm a proletarian.

Chris:
In a lot of this we agree. There are as always two questions that come to mind, one of which I posed to you.

1) What of the unions? What is their role within capitalist society? It is not moralizing to say that unions will of necessity become an impediment to workers’ struggles at a certain point. However, up to that point, that is, up to the point where labor constitutes a threat to capital, in many cases the union is not immediately opposed to the workers. However, I have a lot of people who wonder why the unions sold them down the river and I do not need to complain to them about what they, the workers, should or should not have done, to give an explanation of why the activity of the unions was what it was and that it was no mere accident. Aufheben's point that workers need to be active enough to make a critique in practice or a really practical critique. I will come back to that because our differences practically are not that extreme.

2) What is the proper role of communists? Why be a communist?

CP_Shawarma said:
What I have come to realise (after several years of discussing the problem) is that I find no meaning in constantly beating other people up (symbolically) for things they do or have done, /but/ without abandoning a practice which aims to abolish the foundation on which these doings
are based. Thus my non-normative approach contains two aspects:

1. A non-moralist approach, I do not go on a crusade because people "ought to" do this or "ought to" do that. That is mere Leninism and its Kantian concept of liberty.
2. A practice aimed at overcoming limitations. Since every struggle is limited, it has quite concrete limitations, every meaningful insurrectional practice will consist of attempts to overcome these limitations, not by saying "you ought to".

Chris:
I have nothing to disagree with in this, except that it is unfair to Kant. Kant's categorical imperative was that we act in such a way that we recognize human activity in our persons and in all other persons as a purpose and never as a means. It is capital that only recognizes humanity as a resource and not an end.

CP_Shawarma said:
This is indeed a bigger break with representation than the council communists were able to accomplish, their representative practices were found in the fact of their "ought". It is (perhaps paradoxical to some) also a break with union representation, I would never use a union for
any long-term strategy, simply because it has no meaning, it has no societal meaning. However I could use a union for certain practices aimed at overcoming limitations, and I see no problem with that, we take whatever means we are able to.

Chris:
Again, I have no major disagreement, except that the union “strategy” does have a societal implication in that I don't see why communists would be anything but critical of unionism as an ideology. This is not the same thing as a moralistic attitude, it is a critique of it as another ideology, without seeking, as you say, to put another ideology in its place. I admit that I wonder if a kind of anti-unionism does not itself function in the same mode as anti-fascism, that is becomes itself an ideological position. Clarity on the limits of unions within the capital-labor relation is part of a total social critique. I should just as well refuse to critique wage-labor because in this society workers are acting reasonably when they fight to increase their wages. The abolition of wage-labor is still central to the critique of capital. I am not sure why one would exclude unionism from the critique of capital.

CP_Shawarma said:
The usage of the word "dirty" is in contrast with the principalistic and moralistic approach of "clean" battles. Of course we /feel/ a certain freedom from the imposition of labour (what redtwister calls "dirty", however it is not the same "dirty" which I discuss) when we fight capital. The "fascination" with the dirty is merely a consideration of the actual existence of our lives, the real struggles, instead of moralist principles. The main thesis is that /against/ the "revolutionary" Jesuite, the acknowledgement that it is not through abstinence, but through struggle, that we can abolish capital. That is why I am involved in circulating my own and other's experiences in an upcoming national paper for class struggle in its actuality (and not in principles). Theory can only bring us a bit, the actual changing of the world takes place in our lives, ie. the personal is political.

Chris:
Thank you for clarifying. I understand better what you mean, that is a criticism of waiting for struggles to erupt which will somehow stand on a pure ground of class struggle, as if that was ever going to happen. It is only in the messy or “dirty” world of limited, actual struggles that the possibility of going beyond can erupt. We cannot wait for the pure moment to participate in class struggle because that moment never comes. And it is true that as such I would not cross a union picket line, under most conditions. But to imagine an absence of principle is also odd. Why would I not cross a union picket line if the strike was to keep out “illegal immigrants”? The issue is exactly a judgement we make, what we say, what we do, has to do with what we think promotes the abolition of capital, not simply because workers do it or because it might benefit some workers. There is a principle involved. The a-principled politics threatens to collapse into workerism or purely empirical pragmatic politics which is unethical. Refusing moralism is not the same thing as rejecting a differentiation between ethical and unethical acts. Communists are not un-ethical or a-ethical. Not all means correspond to all ends. The problem is whether or not we are open about our standpoint, and whether or not we act as communists. Which as before
requires us to ask whether or not it matters that we are communists and what communists do that is different. Maybe it only matters to us. It does not require that we tell people what they ought to do all the time, but it really does mean differentiating, in an actual struggle, on what is or is not the best course of action and recognizing that sometimes, there is no acceptable course of action for us. I worry that far from viewing communists as active participants, your notion puts us as passive, as putting our shoulder to the plow uncritically. That may not be fair, but I am after all only giving you my impression that that contradicts being a communist.

Revol68 wrote:
Good points cph_shawarma, though i think the issue of the nature of the labour-capital dialetic is somewhat superflous to this topic. I can see where you are coming from and i like your point about the need to destroy the "gap", that this has to be a some what conscious decision, albeit a conciousness/potentiality that arises from the actual dialetic of struggle itself, rather than just the unfolding of a historical programme that would deliver us to communism if it wasn't for various contanimations (unions, leftists, and various reformists). Therefore it's not enough to denounce these various "renegades" and "deformities" but rather to push beyond them, to affirm aswell as negate.

Chris:
Programme and class struggle are not unrelated to the question of why bother being a communist. What is a programme in a communist sense? Is it a series of prescriptive demands? Or is it the body of communist theory that seeks to illuminate and clarify? The historical programme of our class is not some set of points of unity or demands, it is Capital, and the Grundrisse, and Statism and Anarchy, and the programme of the KAPD, and Society of the Spectacle that in their own way each express and clarify some aspect or moment of capital. It is not prescriptive, as
none of those works were, but acts of critique that hoped to help raise consciousness to the level of radicalism of the activity of the proletariat at a given juncture. This is why the most lasting works are those produced around and influenced by mass action and why much of the theory produced in between seems more ephemeral and inconsequential.

CP_shawarma wrote:
The problem is mainly the normative, moralist approach of principles. The fact that the measurement of struggles is fetishised. Can we even measure struggles ("this was good", "this was bad")? Aren't they rather founded on the class struggle as it is? Aren't struggles qualitative,
rather than parts of a sum total? There is a fetisch involved in principles, the measurement of struggles in accordance with some grander /value/. This is ultimately the wrong way of putting the question, since it a) is moralist, b) is based on the bourgeois fetischism of measurement ("we have to measure everything") and c) since it doesn't acknowledge the real struggles of the proletariat and these struggles real limitations.

I do not reject the notion of the union as a legalist and hindering institution, but the actual existence of the union is not done away with by the upholding of principles, but is negated through the radicalised practice of the wage-workers involved in unions. Thus there is a definite problem in posing the abstract critique of unions, it does not help me in my and my comrades' situation. The only thing that will ever destroy the unions (as institutions for labour) is the communist revolution: communisation.

We have to accept that workers participate in unions to advance their interests. I do not moralise over this with some abstract principle, but rather grapple the situation /as it currently is/ and go from there, not putting up a big demarcation line between me and my fellow workers.

Chris:
While the measurement of struggles is fetishistic, if we cannot demarcate between good and bad, then I still say it is an argument that we cannot differentiate between a strike for higher wages and a strike to exclude immigrant workers from a workplace or to keep women from getting access to skilled jobs.

I know this will be seen as unfair, but in the absence of principles, of judgment, how exactly does one operate to take up a political challenge in the midst of a concrete struggle?

And throughout, you have proposed a notion of communism as communisation that is a different principle from Stalinist or Trotskyist or even Councilist notions of communism, and it is a principle that guides your orientation towards concrete struggles, towards social institutions like unions, etc. You are very principled.

CP_shawarma said:
I would like to add a reply to redtwister. Of course unions aren't threats to value, exchange etc. But why would self-organised struggle be a threat to value, exchange etc.? This idea seems to me quite absurd, self-organised struggle is in essence trade unionist, we are all trade unionists whether we like it or not. We have to survive /within/ the world of capital as carriers of labour power and that is how our subjectivity is grounded through our position as labour power. The idea that anti-communist = anti-working class reeks of the ideas of potentiality and teleology, the idea that the working class is something other than the carriers of labour power. As though there was a glory in our submission...

And of course the production of communism cannot be the working of class struggle, it can't be the working of the relationship of capital, since class struggle /is/ the relationship of capital. /However/, with this said, class struggle is what founds our reality, it is the relationship of capital (class struggle) which /is/ our reality. And therefore we have to begin /in/ class struggle, ie. /in/ capitalism. There are no specific forms of class struggle which are "revolutionary". That is what needs to be consciously created by revolutionaries. And self-proclaimed revolutionaries are not revolutionaries, they are often the absolute worst people at getting involved in class struggle and working with reality. Many of the best revolutionaries are those who have never read Marx or Bordiga or Pannekoek, since they have not been indignated with doctrine.

Chris:
As before, I disagree that the idea that the proletariat as a class makes no sense except from communism. You still have not answered my question: if the proletariat is only a class of this society, and if class struggle is only the reproduction of capital, if the relation between class struggle and capital's logic is immediate, then how do we get from capitalism to communism? If the proletariat is only an agent of labour power, and nothing else, from whence the capacity of the proletariat to negate itself and to negate capital?

What you see as a glory in our submission I see as the radical possibility embodied in our specific form of oppression and exploitation, that there is no dialectic of progress that is not a dialectic of negativity, that it is our absolute alienation from the means of production, our radical alienation from our own means of reproducing ourselves that is the root of our potential as a class. Universal dispossession is the root of our radicalism because it means that we have no stake in this society. That is not glorification, that is a theoretical argument that the progress of capital is our progressive dispossession and yet that a class that was not radically dispossessed would lack the essential possibility of communism.

When you say to me that “There are no specific forms of class struggle which are "revolutionary". That is what needs to be consciously created by revolutionaries.” I see a statement with implications. No specific forms of class struggle which are revolutionary in this context has a second meaning to me: no forms of class society are specifically revolutionary. The form of social relations between capital and labor is no more revolutionary than the relation between serf and lord or slave and slavemaster. Communism either is and always was possible as the conscious creation of revolutionaries (but that cannot be because “self-proclaimed revolutionaries are not revolutionaries”) or capital provides the material foundation for capital, but not a specific set of social relations, and therefore one has to argue that communism is possible on the basis only of capital's technical achievements. I admit, I do not see a third, viable reading. That may be my short-sightedness, but I have yet to see you show otherwise. That is where the charge of primtivism comes from and unless I see a viable answer, then is still seems to me to hold up.

Which once again begs the question of what communists are and why bother. After all, self-declared revolutionaries are worthless and yet communism is the conscious creation of these self-same trash. I am the last one to disagree that the Left is often a swamp best ignored, but often is not a blanket condemnation of communists or the necessity of self-conscious communists.

Instead, it appears that a clause is left out of your statement: self-proclaimed revolutionaries “except us”.

CP_shawarma said:
The fact of the matter is that I have used Bordiga's notion of the party cell in some of my theorising, /especially/ the criticism of trade unionism (in which he follows Lenin) which is implicit in the party cell as a geographic area rather than factory cells (see for instance the
afterword to "Forza violenza dittatura della lotta di classe"). Thus your response seems quite unfair, since this was not what I expressed...

The problem I think is that you read me somewhat wrong, please be more specific on where you don't follow.

Did I miss something? What does Bordiga's cell have to do with my point? I was not discussing a formal organizational concept. Bordiga is of course insistent on the activity of revolutionaries in unions, unlike in parliaments. Did I miss something? My point was on his comment on the content of communism and the necessity of the party as the political condensation of the proletariat for itself. It has little to do with Lenin. But this is maybe just a detour.

I do not think we are likely to find more agreement, nor do I expect you to be satisfied with my points, but I think this has been valuable in clarification of your position. I hope you find enough worth responding to and push this just a little further.

Chris

Well to the first objection I can merely say that class struggle does not equate to overt class struggle, and it is not workers' class struggle which throws capital into crisis, but instead class struggle, ie. the mediator between labor and capital.

No, I do not pose labour and capital a priori. I pose them a posteriori, that is after the fact of accumulation of value. The relationship of capital precedes its separate poles of antagonism, capital and labour. Ie. a posteriori, not a priori. I do not deny the fact that capital is the product of labour, that is one of the sides, the other side of the reciprocity is that labour is the product of capital. Ie. labour is the product of capital, which is the product of labour (=reciprocal causality). Thus, neither capital nor labour can be claimed to be "active" or "reactive" (which is the problematic which "classical" and autonomist Marxism works in). Both are indeed active and reactive, or one could say that class struggle (accumulation of value) is active and that neither capital nor labour is active.

I think you read me completely wrong when you claim that class relations "precede" accumulation of value, since my argument is that class relations are accumulation of value, ie. class relations precede the existence of classes, classes are a posteriori facts to the fact of the relations. And since accumulation of value is the separation of producer from means of production, then accumulation of value (class struggle) is the objectivity which founds the proletarian as well as the capitalist class.

I have never said that the proletariat is a Subject, I have said it is a subjective agent, ie. it is an agent of the labour pole in the dialectic between capital and labour, but as such it acts, thus making it a subject (but not a Subject).

You are correct that the proletariat only makes sense as a negation of capital, but this negation of capital is the negation of capital which is implicit in the dialectic of capital. It is not the negation of the relationship of capital, but the negation of the other pole in the dialectic. For the negation of this relationship, the relationship itself has to be attacked, ie. the relationship which precedes proletariat and capitalists and thus creates proletariat and capitalists. I usually compare this with a love relationship. By putting a man and a woman in the same house you do not have a love relationship, it is the love relationship which makes this man and woman partners. In order to break the relationship it is not enough for one of the partners to simply move out, the relationship itself must be destroyed. Class struggle could be said to be the constant bickering and fighting of these people, but without breaking up. People fight all the time in relationships, but that does not by itself cause a break-up. Communisation is (in relation to value accumulation) the process whereby the break-up is taking place and when we reach communism, no more relationship, the break-up is complete. This break-up will certainly need a range of fights within the relationship, but the character of the revolution is the process of break-up, the process of separation from the relationship, not separation from the antagonist, which is the autonomist idea of autonomy and self-organisation as the opposition of capitalism.

I would like to quote Gilles Dauvé on the "passive" attitude of my communism, it is neither "passive" nor "active", it is in accordance with the fact of my existence as a prole:

Dauvé, Capitalism and Communism (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/ecapcom1.html)

What I mean by class struggle throughout my posts is not the transhistorical notion of "class struggle" between slave and master or capitalist and labourer, but just exactly the historical class struggle which is relevant to our discussion, ie. class struggle as value accumulation. The conscious creation of communisation is of course a product of certain, qualitatively different class struggles, but not struggles with specific organisational forms (which was my point). The lifting of the anchor will only be possible when the anchor is there to lift, thus there is indeed a relation between class struggle (ie. capitalism) and communisation, but not a teleological relation, rather a teleonomical relation, where the development is not because of capital from the start, but rather is created in spite of capital and labour, thus lifting the anchor means struggling against class struggle itself.

Furthermore, I do not use Bordiga's conception of the party cell as an organisational blueprint. I have used his notion of the party cell to conceptualise the character of communisation, thus breaking its formal character from the 20s. The point was that the class as a class is trade unionist, ie. we struggle in accordance with the categories of accumulation of value, the struggle is over immediate demands, such as a less intensive (or more intensive) working day (through slowdowns etc.), more or less in direct or indirect wages (formal wage increases as well as real wage increases through stealing in the workplace for instance). These struggles are trade unionist since they concern the categories of capital: productive/improductive labour, surplus value, profit. The categories of capital are simply class struggle categories, since the imposition of labour is class struggle, since extraction of value and surplus value is class struggle, since geographical and technical movement of capital is class struggle, since slowdowns in factories is class struggle, since wage struggles is class struggle. This is the theoretical defetischisation which Marx accomplished: the posing of the relationship of capital as class struggle. The geographical party cell for me conceptualised the communisation movement as a movement which transcends the trade unionist struggle over immediate demands and becomes a struggle for communist, immediate demands. This can not happen in the context of a factory, but in a context of breaking down the separation of the factory, thus in a geographical context rather than a trade context.

Thanks cph_shawarma (sorry i kept leaving out the "h" btw.)

cph_shawarma said:
"I think you read me completely wrong when you claim that class relations "precede" accumulation of value, since my argument is that class relations are accumulation of value, ie. class relations precede the existence of classes, classes are a posteriori facts to the fact of the relations. And since accumulation of value is the separation of producer from means of production, then accumulation of value (class struggle) is the objectivity which founds the proletarian as well as the capitalist class."

IMO, this still treats value as a thing rather than a form of relation. Value is the mode of existence of the class relation. It is not like there is a class relation [i]and[/1] its form. The form is the way in which the relation exists, in which it is constituted, but this still makes the relation logically, analytically, prior to the value form. Certainly, the accumulation of value is the accumulation of the class relation.

Maybe we are quibbling, but from my eyes, it is the separatio of the producers from the means of producing that constitutes value. Maybe we are saying the same thing, but the passive verb "is" implies a constituted relation rather than the constitution of the relation, on which, if we have a genuine difference, our difference revolves.

On the last note we agree, so again maybe this is a non-argument. Constituted classes are indeed not the same as the class relation. This is why the class relation can appear almost immediately in Capital, but constituted classes only appear much later in the book.

More later, back to work and a smoke too.

Chris

ps - As always thank you for the engaged and engaging discussion!

My entire point is that there is no separation of value and the class relation, but that value is and becomes a class relation in a self-sustaining, pseudo-automatic process (ie. capital under real subsumtion).

Of course I do not pose a completely static relationship, my thought revolves around a static dynamic, class struggle. Why is it static? Because it reproduces its foundation, it is self-sustaining, it does not break its own foundation. Why is it dynamic? Because in the reproduction of its own foundation it is ever-changing. Or as Eleria in Angel said:

Ie. Everything changes to stay the same.

That is where I find the need to use the concept of communisation. Since we have to break the very dynamic which keeps us static.

Cph_shawaram said:
No, I do not pose labour and capital a priori. I pose them a posteriori, that is after the fact of accumulation of value. The relationship of capital precedes its separate poles of antagonism, capital and labour. Ie. a posteriori, not a priori.

Chris:
I did not claim that you said that the class relation is prior to the accumulation of value. I said I disagree with you and that I am arguing that it is the class relation that is prior to the accumulation because the predicate of the form of value, the wage, etc. is the separation of the producers from the means of producing, which forces one person to meet the other as one sans property with nothing to sell but their labor while the other comes as owner and buyer of that now “free” labor. Value, and its accumulation, is the mode of existence, the form, of that relation, and to put the form before the content, to put the mode of existence of the relation before the relation logically is to fetishize the form of the relation into a stable thing, to objectify it. This is a core of our disagreement because for you the relation arises from the structure, whereas for me the structure, the form, arises from the relation. IMO, your way of posing the problem negates any possible understanding of the genesis or constitution of value as a form of relation between people, treating what needs to be explained (the constitution of relations between people in the form of value relations and accumulation) as always-already constituted and giving rise to those relations. This gives the accumulation of value a religious status of an object existing prior to and outside of the human relations which IMO constitute the form. You lose sight that value is a relation between people presented as, really existing as, a relation between things. I suspect that this is key to our differences.

Cph_shawarma said:
I have never said that the proletariat is a Subject, I have said it is a subjective agent, ie. it is an agent of the labour pole in the dialectic between capital and labour, but as such it acts, thus making it a subject (but not a Subject).

You are correct that the proletariat only makes sense as a negation of capital, but this negation of capital is the negation of capital which is implicit in the dialectic of capital. It is not the negation of the relationship of capital, but the negation of the other pole in the dialectic. For the negation of this relationship, the relationship itself has to be attacked, ie. the relationship which precedes proletariat and capitalists and thus creates proletariat and capitalists. I usually compare this with a love relationship. By putting a man and a woman in the same house you do not have a love relationship, it is the love relationship which makes this man and woman partners. In order to break the relationship it is not enough for one of the partners to simply move out, the relationship itself must be destroyed. Class struggle could be said to be the constant bickering and fighting of these people, but without breaking up. People fight all the time in relationships, but that does not by itself cause a break-up. Communisation is (in relation to value accumulation) the process whereby the break-up is taking place and when we reach communism, no more relationship, the break-up is complete. This break-up will certainly need a range of fights within the relationship, but the character of the revolution is the process of break-up, the process of separation from the relationship, not separation from the antagonist, which is the autonomist idea of autonomy and self-organisation as the opposition of capitalism.

Chris:
What do you understand by proletariat? For me, the proletariat is not a sociological category, it is “revolutionary or it is nothing”, that is it is the totality of labor seeking to abolish the conditions of its existence and as such is a collective practice that comes into being only as the determinate negation of the capital-labor relation. I can only conceive of a Subject in this negative sense, as a social practice. I do my best to not talk about “the working class” as if there were some entity out there existing in this society (as such, it would only be the “bad totality” of wage-laborers and would be indeterminate because the active, determinate moment would be capital i.e. the very opposite of a subject.)

So, my question remains: what makes it possible to go from the class struggle to the abolition of the class relation? I still find your posing it as something from outside the class struggle. For me there must be a fundamental non-identity in the relation of labor and capital; that labor is and is not for capital or constitutive of capital. Without this gap, this non-identity, I do not see how we get from the class relation to its abolition except by some externality, which arrives from where? Just as when value and accumulation are posited as prior to the relations between human beings, and so as a structure determining their activity, so you pose communism as outside that activity, as a negation with no connection to that which it negates.

Cph_shawarma:
I would like to quote Gilles Dauvé on the "passive" attitude of my communism, it is neither "passive" nor "active", it is in accordance with the fact of my existence as a prole:

Chris:
I would just like to emphasize that I said seemingly passive. I was wondering how you conceived of the matter, as I do not believe you adopt a passive attitude, since you are clearly working to engage in practical activity that you feel flows from your position, not merely some external activity of what you ought to do separated from your own existence (the classic move of militantism, but the critique of militantism and activism can become that of passivity.) The quote from Dauve I like and agree with and so it is one more thing where I feel we are both clearer and in general accord.

Cph_shawarma said:
What I mean by class struggle throughout my posts is not the transhistorical notion of "class struggle" between slave and master or capitalist and labourer, but just exactly the historical class struggle which is relevant to our discussion, ie. class struggle as value accumulation. The conscious creation of communisation is of course a product of certain, qualitatively different class struggles, but not struggles with specific organisational forms (which was my point). The lifting of the anchor will only be possible when the anchor is there to lift, thus there is indeed a relation between class struggle (ie. capitalism) and communisation, but not a teleological relation, rather a teleonomical relation, where the development is not because of capital from the start, but rather is created in spite of capital and labour, thus lifting the anchor means struggling against class struggle itself.

Chris:
Ok, clearer. However, (of course there is a “however…”) when you say communism is not because of capital but in spite of the relation between capital and labor, you seem to avoid the issue of what makes the proletariat different. Your focus remains solely on the accumulation of value, but where does the possibility of rupture, of the abolition of the class struggle itself arise from, if not from within the class relation as antagonistic? How can the negation of classes come from not-within without being something plucked from the sky? How is it that the historical class struggle does not become a rather empirical treatment of an object/process (accumulation of capital), which is not concerned with the genesis/constitution of the object/process and the genesis/constitution of its abolition?

At issue for me, if the proletariat is within the class relation wholly, what makes it possible for it to get outside of, to abolish? How does one get form here to there? You seem to pose an absolute divide between class struggle and communism, so how do you find a way from here to there? My understanding is predicated upon the ideas below, but we will of course read them differently, so I pose them much as you posed the Dauve quote, as food for thought.

“The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.” (CM, Ch. 2)
“This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” GI, Part 1, Chapter A, Section 5
In particular, the phrase “The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-existence” existence”, but also “The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
“In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.” (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)
“…the proletariat is revolutionary relative to the bourgeoisie because, having itself grown up on the basis of large-scale industry, it strives to strip off from production the capitalist character that the bourgeoisie seeks to perpetuate.” (Critique of the Gotha Program, Part 1)
Cph_shawarma said:
Furthermore, I do not use Bordiga's conception of the party cell as an organisational blueprint. I have used his notion of the party cell to conceptualise the character of communisation, thus breaking its formal character from the 20s. The point was that the class as a class is trade unionist, ie. we struggle in accordance with the categories of accumulation of value, the struggle is over immediate demands, such as a less intensive (or more intensive) working day (through slowdowns etc.), more or less in direct or indirect wages (formal wage increases as well as real wage increases through stealing in the workplace for instance). These struggles are trade unionist since they concern the categories of capital: productive/improductive labour, surplus value, profit. The categories of capital are simply class struggle categories, since the imposition of labour is class struggle, since extraction of value and surplus value is class struggle, since geographical and technical movement of capital is class struggle, since slowdowns in factories is class struggle, since wage struggles is class struggle. This is the theoretical defetischisation which Marx accomplished: the posing of the relationship of capital as class struggle. The geographical party cell for me conceptualised the communisation movement as a movement which transcends the trade unionist struggle over immediate demands and becomes a struggle for communist, immediate demands. This can not happen in the context of a factory, but in a context of breaking down the separation of the factory, thus in a geographical context rather than a trade context.

Chris:
I like this. Thank you, that makes sense and I agree with the notion of cell in this sense, except of course that it seems to beg the question of political power, which I may be introducing unfairly, but that would be one issue I have with communisation, that from the texts in English, it seems to remain within the councilist orbit on the problem of political power. It also seems to merely reproduce Lenin's claim that the working class is only capable of trade union consciousness, which he resolved by introducing the activity of communists from outside, which while you argue that you disagree with it, still seems implicit in the logic of your argument, starting with putting value and its accumulation prior to the class relation.

Chris