Attack/Withdrawal - Marcel

In this issue of riff-raff two texts are being published, carelessly brought together here under the honourable name ‘the critique’, both using the text ‘The Communism of Attack and the Communism of Withdrawal’ as a starting point for their respective understanding of communism and class struggle. Since the text in question will be followed up by a critical continuation, this text should be understood not only as an answer to the critique, but also as a teaser for a coming publication, Party and Exteriority, a publication that, being a critical continuation of ‘The Communism of Attack and the Communism of Withdrawal’, also will be a rejoinder to the critique aimed at that text.

In spite of this, we have to begin by admitting that the critique indisputably reveals a fundamental error in ‘The Communism of Attack and the Communism of Withdrawal’, when it touches upon it’s misunderstanding of the relation between the conceptual and the concrete. To be more exact: it is the discussion about the relation between essence (Wesen) and appearance (Erscheinung) that is problematic. In the text, the two are portrayed as being identical, which means that the text can be criticised, because it misunderstands Marx’ critique of the political economy. Therefore, to start with we are compelled to point out that it is completely erroneous to speak of an identification of essence and appearance. This position in the text leads to certain fundamental errors and therefore needs to be revised.

The aim of this text is not to account for the critique’s limit(ation)s, but rather to outline the basic themes that Party and Exteriority will develop. These themes, however, will implicitly work as a rejoinder to the critique aimed at ‘The Communism of Attack and the Communism of Withdrawal’. This means that we need to raise a reservation here and point out that this text, by its forward-aiming function, is more postulating than arguing.

Capital

1. Since we, in Hegelian terms, postulate that the essence of capitalist production is accumulation of value, this means that the essence in question includes its own opposite, that is, its non-essence; what Hegel calls show (der Schein), as an opposite. Consequently, the struggle of the working class against the capitalist production process is an element incorporated in the production’s own essentiality as its defined negativity, since the show of accumulation is class struggle. Accumulation is accumulation of value, the production of surplus value, and the negative offshoot of accumulation is class struggle, since intensive and extensive accumulation is in itself class struggle; extraction of value is based upon exploitation. Exploitation is contradiction.

2. Labour under the regime of capitalism must be non-capital; in other words, the use-value of capital, its value-producing use-value, and this inasmuch as the worker is valueless, because she must be incorporated in the production process as a productive use-value to be able to contribute to the production process of surplus value. In this incorporation, which happens through wage labour as an instance, she becomes the production process’ subjective factor, the variable making surplus-value production/valorisation (Verwertung) possible. If labour is non-capital, this means that capital itself is non-labour. As a result of this, there exists a contradiction between capital and labour, but this contradiction is defining capitalism, since it establishes the foundation upon which both capitalism’s positivity (capital), as well as its negativity, its opposite (labour) rests: the capitalist process of production and circulation as a total process. It is the contradictory and reciprocal relation between labour and capital – the class struggle – that is the dialectic process positing capital as a totality. The class struggle, and consequently, the accumulation of capital – being class struggle in a negative way – is the motor, the ground, of capital. Since the ground is the immanence of the essence, the ground of capital moulds with its essence, i.e. the surplus-value producing / valorisation process (Verwertungsprozess). It is a process that forces the two main classes into a fundamental hostility, a basic contradiction between buyers and sellers of labour. Hence, the ground is the objective necessity, the process founding capital’s subjective functions: proletarians and capitalists.

3. The worker and the capitalist are subjective functions, structured and posited by the objectivity – surplus-value production/valorisation (Verwertung) – forming the essence of capitalist production. Through the development of capital into that which Hegel calls reciprocity, the worker becomes an agent, i.e. the subject positing and consequently reproducing capital, and the capitalist, through his buying force, becomes the subjective function that incorporates the worker in this relation. The dynamics between the classes, the class struggle, is therefore a derivate of the fact that the accumulation of value is the relation, the stasis, regulating labour and capital as subjective functions, beings-for-themselves, in the objective process which is their ground. Since the essence, according to Hegel, is the ground, accumulation of value is the ground upon which both labour and capital rests; accumulation of value is logically more primordial [ursprungligare] in relation to the two antithetic poles – labour and capital – of capital’s main contradiction, and consequently of accumulation of value in itself. A contradiction that, following the accumulation’s logical originality [ursprunglighet], precedes both labour and capital, as well as their respective beings-for-themselves: individual workers and capitalists.

4. Capital is objectified – reified – labour, both useful and abstract. Therefore, to exist it needs its own opposite, a subjective power source; it needs both the worker as producer, and living labour as productive labour. In other words, it needs a subject of surplus-value production/valorisation (Verwertungssubjekt). The constitution of labour-power as the value-producing subject takes place within capital when labour-power, as capital’s use-value in the production process, objectifies social relations, that is, produces value according to its function as the common substance of all commodities. Separation’s founding of labour as capital’s subjective source, its Quelle, of surplus value means that living labour is given four possible forms: productive and unproductive labour, necessary labour and surplus labour. The relation of value as a temporal measure divides labour into necessary labour and surplus labour, since the logic of productive labour means extraction of surplus value through the imposition of surplus labour. Labour qua non-capital becomes an exteriority in relation to capital qua non-labour, but it is capital’s positing of labour as its own negation that makes it appear productive, as a negative offshoot of capital. Work, as living labour, as pure subjectivity, understood outside or independent of its form and function as labour-power, therefore is outside of capital, but at the same time included in the relation, accumulation of value, that logically precedes both capital and labour. It is included because this included exteriority is not able to live or act outside of the relations of capital, or even capable of constituting itself as living labour outside of capital. Therefore, labour is the centre of the production of value and can not be understood as an exteriority in relation to capitalism, since its function as productive and unproductive labour, i.e. surplus-value producing/valorising labour, is given by capital itself. And all work being performed today is productive and/or unproductive; in other words, capitalistic. Labour, consequently, is an interior exteriority [inre utsida] of capital.

5. The formal subsumption is capital’s primordial strategy of subsuming and appropriating labour as non-capital, as proletariat. This subsumption maintains the conditions of life which makes capital into a totality, since it negates human beings’ non-mediated relation to the means of production. This negation is private property. Living labour, lebendige Arbeit, is incorporated in a totality, in the relation of capital, as an exteriority of capital. The formal subsumption therefore creates wage workers, but only with the real subsumption does the production method attain its peculiarly capitalistic characteristics. The constitution of the real subsumption of work makes capitalism a capitalist mode of production, in other words: a society. The positing of labour as non-capital, and the production process’ metamorphosis into a value-producing process becomes real – specifically capitalist – when capital thoroughly has revolutionised ‘[t]he technical and social conditions of the process, and consequently the very mode of production [so that] the productiveness of labour can be increased. By that means alone can the value of labour-power be made to sink, and the portion of the working-day necessary for the reproduction of that value, be shortened.’1

This means that the generalised transition from a strategy of absolute surplus value (the prolonging of the workday and therefore of surplus labour) to a strategy of relative surplus value (extraction of surplus value through the intensification of the pace of production), re-shapes the very materiality of the production process. I.e. the forces of production are being formed by the conditions of production into contributing to increased extortion. The formal subsumption first and foremost means an agrarian revolution, while the real subsumption leads to the annihilation of manufacture by the development of large-scale industrialisation. Consequently, the transition to and the development of the real subsumption of work must necessarily be seen as a periodical process [periodiseras] if one wants to understand it historically-real and not simply analytically-logically.

6. The real subsumption of labour incorporates the worker in the capitalist totality in a more complex way than the formal subsumption does, because more and more of her (the worker’s) existence, both within and outside of production, is being subordinated to capital. In the manufacture, even the capitalist one, it was the worker who used the tools; in the industry, in the factory, the worker is an appendage to the machinery. This is because, as Marx puts it, capital’s inversion of the dichotomy between subject and object had not yet become a concrete reality under the formal subsumption. However, it is not only the productive capacity of the worker that incorporates her in the capitalist materiality, but her consumption as well. Productive consumption contributes to the containment of the working class in capitalism, because capital’s positing of the necessity of labour as necessary labour takes place through the fabrication of needs, by way of consumption’s satisfaction of these needs. The circular relations of production and circulation, as Bruno Gulli points out, constitutes a system of needs and utility which maintain the worker in her capacity as worker. The worker works, she enters the production, to receive the means necessary to satisfy the needs produced by (among other things) the circulation of use-values on the market. The concept of need thus is the missing link, the vanishing mediator, between circulation and production; it is the connecting element that forges together circulation and production, while at the same time it is being established by them. The positing of needs by production and circulation causes more and more commodities to be included in the cost of necessary reproduction. This is because the accelerated production of commodities demands an increased consumption as a response. The fact that more and more workers around the world own cars, mobile phones, and TVs can therefore not be analysed as meaning that the working class is less exploited now than before. However, it does not automatically lead to the opposite conclusion. The reduction of commodity prices (including the price of labour-power) caused by the forces of production induces capital to make the consuming workers more wealthy, by way of an impoverishment of value. The value of labour-power is being reduced through the increased productivity of labour and, parallel to this value-impoverishment, more and more of the worker’s consumption becomes productive for capital. The real subsumption of capital thus enables an increased and cheapened mass production, by way of the specifically capitalist mode of production’s compulsion to develop and revolutionise the productive forces. A production of cheap commodities that, relatively, expands the fond of labour. In other words, the real subsumption of labour-power immediately contributes to that more and more of the consumption functions productively for capital, since a constantly increasing amount of commodities becomes useful, i.e. function as use-values, for the keeping of labour-power as necessary labour and thus as a productively consuming agent.

7. The critique of the industrial system is progressive and forward-aiming. Even though it is a critique of the capitalist production’s actuality as a large-scale industrial production and as a social factory, it is not a reactionary passion for bygone or dying modes of production. Rather, it attempts to depict the specifically capitalist nature of the production process. The social relations of capitalism are not exterior to the industrial mass production, even though they do not coincide with it, or become identical to it. Marx stresses how capitalism’s division of labour denotes its production, but at the same time he maintains that this characteristic does not spring from technological necessities or social coincidences. It is the function of the industrial production process, as a value-producing process, which gauges its technology, making it work in a capitalist manner, but at the same time it is by way of capital the industrial system is able to develop. The abstract determinations of capital thus make up the elementary problematic of capitalism, but these abstract categories determine the forms of the concrete and purely factual making/depiction [framställandet] of the production.

8. Commodity fetishism hides the fact that commodities are exchangeable only because they are all posited as exchange-values. The fetishism mystifies the substance of capital, i.e. abstract social labour (value) and the determined social relation which founds labour as being abstract, that is, makes it substantial. Commodity fetishism makes the sociality of the worker, the relations between workers, appear as relations between things, between use-values. Fetishism thus leads to the reification of the social relations which forces [bestämmer] the worker to work, and of the fact positing products as exchange-values: exchange. However, the illusory relations of fetishism constitute an objective process which inverts human subjectivity, which qualifies human consciousness to a reified and partial cognition. The producers, whose private labours together make up a social total labour, comes into social contact with each other through the mutual exchange of products of labour. The appearance [framträdelse] of capitalism therefore actually appears [framträder] as being reified, and thus necessarily hides the inner, true, essence of capital. Capital, understood as an actuality, thus is a causal relation between things, where money makes up the foundation for its form of communion [samvaro]. Money becomes the substance, the source of both cause and effect in a communion where the reciprocal character of every connection is being mediated through exchange-value. Fetishism’s reification of production appears as though it, in Marxian words, achieves a concrete reality only through the industrial system, but not because of any kind of technological determinism but because this transition to industrial production also is a development of the real subsumption of work. A transition meaning that production becomes specifically capitalist.

9. Production of commodities is production for others, because the commodity is a founding contradictory relation. The quality of a commodity is its use-value; the commodity’s usability and utility. Use-value, as the quality of a commodity, can be compared to Hegel’s discussion, in the Logic, about the first form of being (Sein), since it is quality which determines Sein into Da-sein. The quality of a being [ett vara] gauges it into a specific commodity [en vara]; it posits it into becoming a specific being [varande]. Quantity is therefore in a sense quality’s slave, because the actual exchange makes the form of value reconnect to the useful dimension of the commodity, since its exchangeability is based upon its utility for others. Utility for others specifies the use-value as social use-value. Exchange-value makes the natural being of a commodity into a social being, a use-value utilised by others. To the owner, the use-value of a commodity is only a means for exchange: a non-use-value. For this reason, Marx distinguishes the term use-value as natürliche Dasein, natural being, from use-value as a social utility, i.e. utility for others. Use-value, in its capacity of natural being, is a relation of likeness [likhetsförhållande]; it is the use-value’s natural likeness to itself, but since the commodity makes this use-value exchangeable through the use-value’s unlikeness to itself, i.e. as exchange-value, the natural likeness of the use-value is made to function as use-value for others. The inner likeness, the incomparable uniqueness of things, their differentia, is being differentiated into an outer, levelled likeness that differs out by the rate of labour accumulated in them. The species-differences of things become the grade-differences of commodities.

10. Use-value is the correlation of exchange-value; it is an attribute that depends on exchange-value and not the ‘good’ side of the commodity. Just as exchange-value functions potentially, that is, only in a relation of exchange, use-value is a determination which is realised only in the social use and consumption of the commodity, in contrast to a natural use and consumption where utility is not only a utility for others. Both use-value and exchange-value are social factors stemming from things’ being as commodities on a market. Use-value is a commodity’s determined function as utility.

Commodity fetishism’s reification of human relations does not stem from the use-value of the commodity, from its useful function, nor from the fact that it contains a certain amount of labour time. Its mystifying power comes from the commodity-form itself. That is, from the commodity-form of the product, from its twofold function as use- and exchange-value. Use-value, as a part of the determinant of the commodity, contributes to commodity fetishism by appearing as absolute utility, emanating from the thing itself. Use-value thus hides the fact that concepts such as utility and usage are social qualities, relations that can not be reduced to something only existing in a thing. Use-value, as the absolute utility of the commodity, the commodity’s absolute disposition towards the satisfaction of human needs, is a reified quality attributed to a commodity, a quality rising from commodity fetishism’s reification of social relations. The dimensions of use-value and exchange-value of a commodity thus contribute to the establishment of an absolute conception of utility and expediency, and a transhistorical notion of the social conditions specific to the capitalist system, i.e. exchange. Consequently, the critique of the commodity-form can not stop at exchange-value; it must also be a critique of the social function of use-value, as absolute utility and as utility for others. The critique of the commodity-form therefore must coincide with a critique of the material sociality which transforms human beings into wage workers, and with the worker’s resistance towards the socially useful character of his private labour.

Gemeinwesen

1. The essence’s first form, the reflection, is a positing reflection; it posits its opposite, its show (Schein). The class struggle is the show (Schein) of the essence, i.e. the non-essence included in the accumulation of value as accumulation’s own negation. If we start from the factuality – accumulation of value – regulating labour as non-capital and capital as non-labour, this necessarily leads to the fact that neither capital nor labour is active or reactive in their opposition against each other. If we stipulate that the proletariat is active, forcing capital into action, or the opposite, i.e. that the capitalist class forces labour into counter-attack (in other words, that the proletariat is reactive), the same problematic arises, since we disregard the relation which makes it possible to postulate the contradiction and think of any of the antinomies as being active. This relation is the accumulation of value, that is, class struggle. Thus, we arrive too late if we apprehend labour and capital as two determinants existing beforehand, as if their ways of existence alongside each other presupposes the relation positing them as antinomies. An analysis starting from either of the two poles, posited by the relation between them, necessarily results in a position claiming that one of the poles establishes the contradiction. But in reality, the contradiction is the foundation founding the respective identities of capital and labour as something already existing as labour and capital. The class struggle, the accumulation of value, thus logically happens before the being of the worker and the being of the capitalist, in the moment capital is being founded as a synchrony, as a totality. The class struggle thrusts people into classes, into conflict, since the totality of capital potentialises and teleologises their existence. The relation between labour and capital is the relation of capital, and therefore it creates capital and labour respectively. The contradiction presupposes the antinomian polar opposites, and this means that the question of one of the poles being primary in the contradictory relation, of it having a function resembling Aristotle’s unmoved mover, an active and constituting force, becomes a completely metaphysical and therefore a completely empty claim.

2. The working class, labour-for-itself, acts for capital in the production, as a part of capital, but this opportunity to act, the living function of labour, makes the working class able to function in a hostile way towards capital, even under the real subsumption. The working class is within and against capital. This against gives the class autonomy in relation to capital, since its subjectivity, its function as non-capital, never drains the working class through labour. But the autonomy is being posited by the working class’s function as non-capital, and therefore stands in a necessary, inner relation to capital. The exteriority is internal. However, this does not hinder the exterior relation between labour and capital from establishing an outside, a political composition where labour is able to point its struggle and its demands at capital. Still, the class struggle aimed at capital in a negative and critical way will remain dependent on the existence of capital as a pole (not necessarily as class, as personification), because its autonomy is posited logically by the relation preceding the poles: accumulation of value. For all that, labour’s logical dependence on capital does not deny the reality or antagonism of the conflict; it only means that the class struggle, from the side of the working class, in its capacity as a struggle of interest for its function as labour-for-itself, is unable to overcome the conflict.

A class struggle that does not move beyond, that does not overcome the dialectic which unites labour and capital in a contradiction, thus only deepens the relation establishing labour’s identity, in other words, the otherness of labour, the contradiction against and the unlikeness to capital, by forcing capital into yet another cycle of crisis. And the crisis is the life-cycle of capital. Consequently, a class struggle trapped within the interest struggle of variable capital, i.e. the interest struggle of the working class, mediated or not, is by itself unable to overcome the contradiction between labour and capital. This is because politics is dependent on capital, since the technical composition which fabricates it encloses the political composition of the class in a dialectic that only transforms the political and the technical in a very dialectic interplay, but never tends to revoke it. The restraint of capital is capital itself. A class struggle that never wants to break up, only to keep fighting, will never be able to annihilate capital.

3. Since capital is class struggle, i.e. the contradiction and foundation positing labour and capital in a binary relation, no immanent result that tends to dissolve it exists in the main antagonism – the conflict between the working class and the capitalist class as beings-for-themselves. The only result existing internally in the conflict between these two poles (labour and capital) is the permanent establishment of its own dialectical terms, of labour as labour and capital as capital. The possibility of overcoming the dichotomous logic between labour and capital thus lies, not in the non-identity of labour and capital qua the identity of labour, i.e. in the main antagonism between labour and capital, but in the attempts of actual proletarians to emancipate themselves from their function as labour-for-itself; in other words, in their doubling of the class struggle, their attempts to aim the struggle against capital and work. This doubling, the ordering of factual proletarians of themselves as non-being, means that proletarians within and as a part of the class struggle depict themselves as a party by decentring themselves as a subjective capacity. This decentring is an externalisation of the working class’ function as a subject-for-itself, as workers, i.e. as the being-for-itself of labour. The potential for communism is therefore placed within the non-potentiality of capitalism, in the process where the proletariat makes itself impossible as labour-for-itself, as a class, in the struggle against the capitalist class, i.e. capital-for-itself.

Consequently, communism is not a question of the potentiality of the proletariat, but of the impotence of capital and proletariat, the working class’ nullification [intande] of itself as an agent of surplus-value production. From this follows that communism, in an adequate and logical sense, is a question of neither power nor subjectivity, but rather of desubjectification, of non-potentiality, because in the attempts by labour to separate itself from its function as non-capital, as labour, dimensions of externalisation and excommunication open up.

4. Externalisation is attack. Attack is interference, intervention, but conceptually this results in passivity, in other words, in a fabrication of the unfastening of relations from the capitalist praxis’ assimilation. By this, one should not understand passivity as inactivity but as a blocking, as nullification [intande] of the functions one is made to perform. The blocking is a no, but the no does not spring from the no-saying of the negation, not from labour’s negation of capital, which is its positing of itself as non-capital, as a subjective capacity. The blocking is beyond the negation, since it is not an affirmation of the own through the negation of the other/alien [främmande], since such a reciprocal event is nothing but the dialectic relation positing labour and capital as antinomies. The nullification [Intandet] is the attempt to make the relation, the dialectic, between the poles impossible, and thereby to annihilate the foundation upon which the poles rest. However, the nullification [intandet] is only a tendency, a tendency that has to be ascertained theoretically and manufactured [framställas] practically through the production of revolutionaries.

5. Externalisation is the struggle of the class against the structures which determine the class into struggling as a class. Externalisation means attempting to articulate interests as something else than class interests. However, it is not freedom or subjectivity that forces the class to act against its class interests – often the class interests of the working class makes the class act against them. Crises can force an externalisation of the proletariat. Therefore, to be produced, the externalisation demands objective as well as subjective circumstances, but the proletariat has to, so to speak, tread out of these circumstances through a contemporaneous process of desubjectification and deobjectification. The fundamental aspect of the working class’ process of breaking out from the totality positing it as a class is that it no longer functions as a class in the system of production determining it as such. The working class stops being a class in the same moment when it, in its struggle against capital, no longer defends its own special interests as a function as labour-for-itself, as a class. Externalisation thus means an attempt to give autonomy to politics, to release the political from the technical. This, the making-independent of politics, is politics own revocation into anti-politics.

6. The main antagonism between the classes expresses itself explicitly in the falling rate of profit and in surplus-value’s demand for constant increase, i.e. in the immediate connection between the rates of profit and surplus-value on the one hand, and the exploitation of labour on the other – through wage labour’s transformation of living labour into productive labour. Since the class struggle functions as both the stasis and the dynamic of the capitalist totality, capitalism has to be understood periodically [periodiseras] in respect to the regimes of accumulation determining it; therefore, the real subsumption must be understood historically-real as well as analytically-logical. However, we can not enrol communism as the potential or virtual aim of such a historical periodicity. We can not even understand or depict communism as a result of the crisis of capital, in spite of the fact that we must examine communism in relation to the falling rate of profit and capital’s cycle of crisis. Against all forms of teleology, essentialist as well as historical, we raise a teleonomy. We raise communism as an aim, but at the same time we admit that this aim has to be understood in spite of capital and not because of it. In spite of should be understood as a negative form of because and not as a Kantian concept of freedom. By ascertaining capital and therefore the class struggle as problems made to be solved, we can reach a non-teleological and non-essential notion of communism. Communism is not a teleological result of a process that, through its function as class struggle, might lead to communism. Rather, communism is the movement that breaks down the class struggle by the abolition of private property.

7. The reason why communism can not be assumed as an opportunity given by the relation between labour and capital is because this is non-dialectic and all too harmonic. Communism should not be posited before the analysis, as a future reconciliation of labour and capital enrolled as the appropriate result of their relation. Communism has to exist as the problem placed before the class struggle itself, in other words, before the relation forging together labour qua capital and capital qua labour. Communism is non-appropriate, not appropriate, since it is the positive abolition of capital’s telos.

8. Withdrawal is the negation of the negation. The first negation is private property’s Darstellung of accumulation, i.e. class struggle. Autonomy, the working class’ refusal to be drained by labour, happens within this negation; actually, in a sense it is this negation, i.e. it is the only hostility that labour de facto is able to aim at capital: the refusal to keep up work. This refusal, however, is only possible when labour is valuable to capital, since the power of labour-power is the refusal to be labour-power. This means that the class struggle of the workers presuppose the class struggle which logically and historically precedes them, which determines them as workers. A dynamic working class demands a dynamic capital. If it is to be classified as communist, proletarian class struggle has to stop being class struggle; it has to negate the first negation posited by private property. That is, it has to negate class struggle, since this is the relation fabricated by private property. The second negation opens up an exteriority towards capital. It opens up a diachronic way out of the synchronous totality of capital. This diachronic phase of transition is communisation, and communisation is produced through the consolidation of a party.

9. Periods of transition are often characterised by the co-existence of disparate modes of production. The release of the bourgeoisie from feudalism meant the growth of structures not corresponding to or converging with feudalism. This meant that outsides and othernesses not internal to feudalism were created. Surely, these sprang forth from feudalism’s own materiality, but only to overcome it, since it lead to a transition from one mode of production to another. Consequently, communisation must release geography, life and production from capital; it must remove the means of production from the relations of capital, if the proletariat is to be able to coincide with its natural ability to work. This coinciding results in the proletariat’s rejection of its function in the capitalist production, and therefore in the end of its existence as proletariat. The appropriation is a withdrawal. Excommunication consequently has a centre, temporarily and spatially, that has to expand to survive. Withdrawal is therefore partially determined by that which precedes it, that which it escapes, and partially by that new which it produces. The production of the new fabricates externalities to the reality that forces – even as an in spite of – this new reality into existence.

10. The negation of the negation, excommunication, is a positive organisation of the class’ nullification [intande] of itself as a capitalistic subjectivity. This organisation is communisation, i.e. the diachronic transition from capitalism to communism. The transition establishes an outside exterior to capital; an outside turned against that which it, in relation to itself, sees as alien, as capitalistic. If the attack is counter-dialectical, the withdrawal functions as anti-dialectical, since it takes and gives place outside of the assimilating dialectics of capital. Hence, withdrawal becomes an attack from the outside; it takes places outside. This means that in reality, attack and withdrawal can not be understood as independent processes, since they are a conceptual splitting of an actual, unitary process. They are the concepts of the dimensions of destruction and constitution fabricated in the attempts of the working class to break out of itself as a class.

11. The party is the production [framställningen] of the diachronic period of transition, i.e. the communisation that, in order to survive, has to expand at the expense of that which it is alien to: capital. The party, through its function as Gemeinwesen, therefore has to be the solution to the problem posed by class struggle.

• 1Karl Marx, Capital. Volume I, London 1990, p. 432