Autonomy and Organization

“The theoretical knowledge of the fact that capitalism will collapse because of its contradictions, does not commit us to maintain that the real collapse will be an automatic process, independent of men; without men, there is not even an economy”
P. Mattick

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The word crisis is now on everyone's lips, a crisis which beyond its phenomenological element, the financial aspect, is in reality a general crisis of the current capitalist structures.

That is, it invests aspects linked to the production and geographical dimension of capital itself, which are reflected in the time and space of life (see Generalization of precariousness and metropolitan dimension on www.connessioni-connessioni.blogspot.com).

The crisis has accelerated the mechanisms of a flexible accumulation that, in order to survive, must increase the margins of exploitation of the workforce; contractual precariousness and productive flexibility are today an inseparable pair. This brings with it continuous metamorphoses on the spatial level, or rather the geographical dimension of capitalism, represented today by the metropolis, the new landscape of the planet.

The modification of space in general, and urbanization in particular, is a fundamental aspect of capitalism, through which surplus capital can be absorbed. Crises of overproduction accelerate these processes. A large portion of the total global labor force is employed in the construction and maintenance of the built environment. The process of urban development sets in motion large amounts of capital, usually mobilized in the form of long-term loans. Investments fueled by credit often become the epicenter of a crisis.

The current landscape is therefore shaped by a perpetual tension between centralizing economic pressures, on the one hand, and potentially higher profits that can be realized through decentralization and dispersion, on the other. The outcomes of this tension depend on the obstacles to movement in the spatial dimension, on the intensity of agglomeration economies and in the temporal dimension on the current flexible accumulation. In this sense the binomial generalization of precariousness/metropolitan dimension, within the current contexts of crisis, becomes inseparable1 .

The dominant thought's presentation of this crisis by emphasizing the financial dimension is not only linked to an irrational drive that the system itself possesses, but there is an ideological clash, which tends to deny the systemic element of the crisis and therefore the historical dimension of capitalism itself. All crises have the financial aspect as their phenomenological moment, but are in reality caused by precise productive mechanisms. Furthermore, the crisis, both on the level of widespread perception, but also with respect to its deeper analytical aspects, allows us to consider capitalism as a historical system with specific crisis mechanisms that tends to collapse.

On this basis, the eternal debate about social reforms and revolution becomes strikingly topical again2 , where if there is no objective necessity for revolution, there cannot be even the subjective disposition to do it. It is therefore not enough to oppose reformism, one must necessarily deny, for a revolutionary hypothesis, its practicality, demonstrating that the internal contradictions of the capitalist system contain within it the viruses of destruction.

Defining the crisis, within a more general dynamic of the limits of capitalism itself, does not make revolutionary will superfluous.

The will to overthrow capitalism is not enough in itself, indeed in the initial phases of capitalism such a will could not even arise. Two aspects must be considered dialectically: the objective elements of disharmony and crisis of capitalism itself and the subjective revolutionary elements, these elements influence each other, merging within the dynamics of the class struggle. It is not a question of waiting until the objective conditions are given and then, only then, let the subjective conditions act. This would be a mechanical anti-dialectical conception, which polarizes the elements, incapable of revealing the dynamics of the process.

The Dynamics of the Crisis

Capitalist exchange M–C–M' (with M' > M) can present itself in three ways: as commercial capital with which goods are bought cheaply to resell them more expensively in an exchange at non-equivalent values (what one gains, the other loses): M < M < M'; as industrial capital with which means of production and labour power are bought to produce goods which are then sold at a value higher than the value advanced for the addition of the surplus value obtained through the exploitation of wage labour: M=M...Production...M'=M'; finally as financial capital, with which money is lent to receive it back at maturity, without even needing to transit through the goods, increased by interest, so that the exchange is again at non-equivalent values: M < M'. As can be seen, only industrial capital respects the rule of equivalence of exchanges, which means that both parties involved gain because new wealth is created, while in commercial and financial capital you just exchange existing wealth3 . This makes us understand that if profitability falls in the productive sectors, capital migrates to the financial sectors where greater profits can be made, but this movement fuels the speculative bubble and ultimately the financial crisis. So the origin of the financial crisis is found in the productive sphere.4

The enormous mass of capital placed within finance is the emblem of a descending and not ascending cycle of the current phase of the capitalist system.

Capitalism, instead of earning and accumulating little by producing a lot and making people consume a lot, earns and accumulates enormously by producing little and satisfying social consumption poorly. The contradiction between the development of productive forces and capitalist production relations is therefore destined to increase in line with the trend. Marx had already recognized that the system of wage labor is, at bottom, a system of slavery, and a slavery that becomes increasingly harsh as the social productive forces of labor develop, whether the worker is paid better or worse. This interpretation goes well beyond the mere question of income, identifying instead a contradiction directly inherent within the very mechanism of the capitalist production model.

This irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism does not resolve the problem of the transformation of capitalism itself. Behind the clash between productive forces and production relations necessarily hides the action of the proletariat against exploitation, an action without which there would be no transformation and break with capitalism. The proletariat is not a mythological class but rather a conservative class, which in spite of itself in moments of action tends to overcome the old social forms. The proletariat is not defined with income parameters, but within the sphere of capitalist production relations. The criterion with which we define the proletariat is by taking to the extreme the juridical criterion of ownership of the means of production and even more so that of ownership of the finished product. This definition absolutizes the clash, on the level of theoretical explanation, around two precise classes. In the empirical dimension there is a range of social forces that make up these two macro social classes, however it is necessary to know how to use the Marxian method of isolation, that is the construction of a model that outlines only the fundamental aspects of capitalist relations and their laws, to identify the overall dynamics of capitalism itself. Furthermore, the current capitalist dynamics, caused by flexible accumulation, isolate the proletariat even more as a class opposed to the whole of society as a whole. This characteristic takes on greater importance today due to the extension of its dimensions and the process of proletarianization.

The crisis should not be read within “fatalistic” schemes. Even imagining a crisis of capitalism that owes nothing to the action of the proletariat, we would automatically have no transformative element. Poverty and oppression can generate revolts, but they will not necessarily start a possible revolution. However, we must consider the prolongation of the crisis over time.

If we consider short timescales compared to the crisis, we can deduce that impoverishment and the process of pauperization do not induce revolutionary tendencies in the first instance, even if they fuel mechanisms of social insecurity.

If we analyse the continuation of the crisis, we can see the direct criticism on the objective level of all the theories that saw the inevitability of reform policies or absolute integration of the proletariat.

“Ideological conformity depends on conditions of well-being; it cannot exist by itself. But unless any theoretical reasoning is completely worthless, insofar as it allows us to predict things, it indicates not only a cessation of the well-being produced by capitalism, but the end of capitalism itself. If class consciousness depends on misery, there can be no doubt that the misery awaiting the population of the world will go beyond all experience of the matter so far, and will eventually overwhelm the privileged minorities of the advanced capitalist nations, who still believe themselves immune from the consequences of their activities. Since there are no “economic solutions” to the contradictions of capitalism, its destructive aspects are assuming an ever more violent character; internally, through an ever more intense production of waste; externally, by sowing destruction in those territories where the population refuses to submit to the demands of foreign capital for profit, which would spell their final ruin. As general misery increases, even particular situations of “opulence” will vanish, and the benefits of growing productivity will be dissipated in a fierce competition for the declining profits of world production” (P. Mattick, The Limits of Integration)

New Social Relationships

The resistance of the proletariat necessarily has as its objective that of fixing the price of labor power at the level of its value, that is, at its cost of reproduction. However, unlike that of other commodities, the cost of reproduction of labor power is not determined solely by technical considerations, but also by the balance of power between the classes. By acting collectively on this balance of power, the proletariat tends not only to limit surplus value, but also to reappropriate part of its activity. This reappropriation is synonymous with the development of social relations antagonistic to capitalist social relations.

It is important to note that these are social relations and not production relations. The latter are those that are established between classes in social production. In the capitalist mode of production, the relations between the proletariat and the capitalist class are characterized by the separation of the producers from the means of production, by the production of exchange values ​​according to the law of value. Social relations, on the other hand, are constituted by the set of relations that are established between men who live in society. In addition to production relations, they therefore also include family, legal, political relations, the relations of proletarians among themselves and with the direct or indirect agents of capital (managers, trade union and political bureaucrats, policemen, priests, etc.). It is precisely within the contradiction inherent in production relations that the development of new social relations occurs. Capitalist relations of production tend first of all to provoke the submission of the proletariat to capital, but they also give rise to social relations that call capitalism into question for the tendential reappropriation of the activity of the proletariat.

This proletarian reappropriation is not, however, linked to productive activity itself or to the redesigning of spaces, because this would imply the disappearance of capitalism itself and this cannot happen locally or partially.

New communist relations of production cannot appear, even in embryonic form, in capitalist society. Communism implies the collective appropriation by the producers of all the means of production, which is the destruction of capitalist mechanisms. These means in capitalist society are the property of the capitalist class and the whole society is based on the radical separation between producers and means of production. Since it produces goods, capitalism leaves no room, even if limited, for any type of control by the workers either over the means or the results of production, because the law of value does not allow any initiatives other than those that tend to lower the cost of production. It is also true that this law can be broken temporarily or locally (thanks, for example, to a monopoly situation or even to state intervention): but in this case it can only be a question of a levy on the mass of social surplus value. To put it more directly, every attempt at self-management of production ends either in self-exploitation or in participation in the exploitation of others (or even in a combination of both).

The object of reappropriation can only be the proletarians' struggle against exploitation, the only activity that can at least partially escape the domination of capital. This does not imply that every struggle has the effect of freeing the proletariat from the domination of capital.

Without wanting to make it absolute and make it a question of forms, it remains evident that struggles that escape the direction of the agents of capital can exercise greater force against exploitation.

On this aspect we must be clear, since the workers' movement itself and its organizations have cyclically produced, even through generous struggles, an integration of the same within the mechanisms of capital. Having said this, it would be wrong to consider useless the struggles, movements and organizations that arise in periods where there is a social compromise or to consider them useless because they are defeated or reabsorbed by capital. Those same struggles, movements and organizations represent, even if blocked in a certain context, expressions of the proletarian experience when new social relations develop5 .

The proletarian experience gives us a sense of the dialectical relationship that exists between the subjective and the objective elements. It would be short-sighted not to grasp the tension that has moved and moves millions of people to give themselves forms of resistance that also cross the current political/union groupings. We must be able to grasp the function and role of this resistance with respect to objective conditions.

New social relations are expressed through the collective direction of the struggle by those who participate in it, experimenting with new ways of living, which do not limit themselves to extending the margins of autonomy that this society grants to its members, but which deny the dimension of capital itself. This phenomenon is, tendentially subversive because in the long run it is incompatible with the maintenance of capitalist production relations.

These new social relations exercised by the action of reappropriation of the proletariat are not something fixed once and for all. The very persistence of capitalism implies the destruction of the germs of communism as they appear. Only in particularly large and violent struggles that develop within the mechanisms of crisis of capitalism itself, such social relations can consolidate and spread in time and space.

Meanwhile, new relationships develop within localized crises and partial clashes, retreating or disappearing when capitalist normality is re-established. Their development is not uniform and involves both more or less violent and overt explosions and long-lasting underground progress, the construction and destruction of organizations or their integration by capital6 .

Paradigm Shift

The crisis, by amplifying the contradictions in time and space, allows us to seize an opportunity, facilitating the unveiling of new social relationships that can arise and become radicalized precisely as a response to these contradictions. We are facing an important paradigm shift. For many years the issue has been the social redistribution of income, today the problem, if analyzed from a systemic point of view, is social production itself. The extension of the M < M' ratio, its fetishistic dimension, are the sign of its weakness and decline, and therefore the MCM (money-commodity-money) ratio reappears, precisely because it is a central category in capitalism, that is, money in its dual guise: on the one hand it is a means of exchange, but on the other it becomes a commodity itself. This is precisely profit, which originates exclusively from surplus value and therefore the importance of labor-value within the capitalist production relationship, labor-value that is rediscovered by the capitalists themselves. There are also various political attempts to represent this option, from the Anglo-Saxon one of New Labour which becomes Blue Labour, to the bipartisan ones in the USA of Obama and the Tea Party, the first through the green economy, the second with productive autarchy, up to the enlarged centre-left in our country which dreams of a new pact between producers.

These decades have been marked by resistance mechanisms linked to the defense and re-distribution of income, first through wage battles to snatch income, and then later, in a declining phase, for the defense of the old Keynesian compromise as a barrier against neo-liberal mechanisms. The endless discussions and proposals linked to the social wage, to the citizen's income, ultimately revolved around an idea of ​​more equitable social redistribution in a society that moved around the hinges of harmony and progress marked by an impetuous development of financial dynamics. Today, with the crisis, due to the lack of work, to precariousness, to the widespread metropolitan dimension, it is not so much income that becomes central but work and therefore at the same time its possible transformation. Resistance today becomes offensive because it touches elements linked to the generalization of time and space.

This paradigm shift necessarily leads us to look more closely at the limits of capital itself and the possibility of class struggle to break this mechanism. Obviously this is an impossible goal to fix in time, but this does not affect the possibility of moving now within the "sphere of necessity" towards that direction. In this sense today the clash in progress, whether suffered or perceived, is that around production, what is produced, how much is produced and who produces, and this takes on immediate importance, within the current phase transition.

This is not a neo-mythology of liberating technology, which has as its mirror element the myth of primitivism and pre-capitalist forms.

But knowing that the wonder of technology that frees man from the burden of work is an ideological falsification that hides the reality of an increasingly despotic and inhuman organization of work, which finds in technology a valid aid, we remain convinced that workers are not against machines, but against those who use machines to make them work. In this sense we reverse the definition of irrationality, often used in a positive light to read the struggles of the proletariat against capitalism and its organization of work, irrationality is typical of this system, even when it implements regulationist and planning policies, because these slow down but do not stop the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The rational dimension is typical of the proletariat in its tension (direct or indirect) within the struggle to arrive at a passage that breaks with the capitalist mode of production. It is undoubted that on the immediate side its strength is expressed not in building but in destroying, to knock down certain obstacles:

“Not only has capitalism long built what is sufficient and more for us as a – technical – base, that is, as a supply of productive forces, so that the great historical problem is not to increase the labor potential but to break the social forms that hinder the good distribution and organization of useful forces and energies, prohibiting exploitation and squandering, but capitalism itself has built too much and lives in the historical antithesis: to destroy or to blow up” (A. Bordiga, Politics and Construction)

It is in this sense that the current crisis becomes, if read within the current capitalist production relations, also a struggle not only for the quantity of production, but for the quality of production, thus directly affecting life.

Autonomy and Organization

Thus, within the dynamics of the crisis, the possibility of putting the revolutionary rupture back at the centre returns (which even if only put on a theoretical level is a cause of embarrassment for the left), which modifies the relationship between autonomy and organisation.

In the last 30 years, neo-liberal mechanisms have pulverized much of what had been the social compromise that started after the 30s and developed after World War II. This pulverized a certain class composition and put in default any collective entity opposed to a new vulgate that celebrated a neo-liberal vision where the end of history was the philosophical justification for the end of the class struggle. In these years, every hypothesis of class autonomy has been marginalized by the objectivity of the phase. Reformist mechanisms, even in their most antagonistic manifestations, seemed to dominate the scene.

It is not interesting to judge reformism (even antagonistic) using abstract moral or ideological canons, but to observe how such forms were and are an expression of a weakness of the proletariat itself, where the only objective of the organizations was aimed at a possible social harmony. Mechanism dictated by a dialectic that linked the subjective limits of the participants of the structures themselves to the objectivity of the current phase. This does not make us say that in the night all cows are black. There are precise subjective responsibilities of certain political currents that have crossed the workers' movement, but to understand the mechanism it is necessary to go beyond the accusation of betrayal.

The accelerated class decomposition has led some to put the “formal” identity organization in first place, as the only possibility to recompose this pulverization. A similar system has been adopted by areas with very different approaches: from centralized structures, to assembly and movement forms. This option inevitably leads to losing or underestimating the autonomous capacity of the proletariat to fight and the very development of new social relations. We end up making the proletariat and its struggles coincide with the organizational forms, thinking of a progressive numerical multiplier mechanism. The absence of an analysis of the crisis and its effects and therefore of the historicity of the capitalist production model has led to an activism inevitably aimed at seeking a harmonization within the current capitalist production relations, now considered immutable. According to this modality, the only level that allows us to see a possible rupture is a growth on the formal organizational level.

However, the relationship between autonomy and organization changes with the changing phases of the class struggle; its oscillation lies within the same contradiction produced by the class struggle itself.

There are formal organizational moments, and each historical phase corresponds, whether we like it or not, to certain organizational forms. In this sense, parties, sects, informal collectives, coordinations, unions are not in themselves pure forms, because they are tied to a close relationship with time and space. If this is true on a general level, there are nevertheless differences between the various forms, not so much with respect to the old distinction between "economic" and "political" (there are political forces that privilege economic aspects just as there are union forces that privilege political aspects), but with respect to the function that these try to have within the dynamics of the class struggle itself. In this sense, we refuse to absolutize the forms, both under the positive and negative profiles. One is always divided into two...

Objective/Subjective

The forms of struggle in which the relationship between autonomy and organization manifests itself, even when it wants to be dictated by subjective mechanisms, are inevitably linked to certain objective plans. The same forms are not pure in themselves. Let's think about the relationship between conflict and mutualism, apparently representing two dynamics opposed to each other, they can both be recovered as well as they can play a role in the development of new social relationships. The creation of a soup kitchen or a clinic, if inserted within a precise mechanism of relationship with the element of conflict and therefore of class independence, takes on a role that in a phase of generalization of precariousness and capitalist stagnation, goes well beyond the welfare of the poor, because it is also a product of new social relationships.

Today the trending precariousness-metropolis binomial pulverizes previous models of work organization and the related social stratifications connected to it, creating an apparent mechanism of totalizing individualism. The reality, however, is very different. This phase of capitalism tends on the real level to eliminate differences by creating a socializing element, which when it manifests itself in widespread social precariousness and in the extension of the metropolitan dimension within a general social insecurity, no longer justifies the "conservatism" of the organizational forms of certain social sectors, such as trade union categories. The old political/trade union organizational forms are increasingly inadequate because they are expressions of a past class composition.

Today everyone talks about precariousness and metropolises, but we are still far from having understood the general implications that such a social manifestation entails, because it would put a large part of the organizational mechanisms in default.

When you try to make organized groups survive regardless of the phase you are going through, you create mechanisms in which the transformative drive is absorbed into conservative mechanisms, which not only weaken them, but also deny in many ways their transformative, if not even reformist, content, going so far as to defend reactionary forms. The spinning of the current antagonistic reformism, which not by chance rediscovers words like neo-Keynesianism, protectionism, autarchy or collective state planning, are the emblem of their distance from a revolutionary dimension, centered on the development of new social relations. The generalization of new social relations dictated by subjective and objective mechanisms clashes in the phase we are entering with the old forms of the workers' movement, and this conflict is inevitable. We are not talking about a decisive battle but of a dynamic that will cross the entire current phase that has opened today.

If the objective data is absolutized, every activity is considered useless, but as has been said before, only the action of the proletariat becomes a transformative force, and the proletariat itself is not a mythological being, but a composite whole in which subjective and objective elements interact, where the proletarian experience becomes an essential condition for autonomous action itself. So even if said in a crude way, one should always relativize subjective action, which nevertheless remains essential for the development of the proletarian experience. So it becomes necessary to understand the tension that is exerted on the subjective side. Tension that must necessarily put at the center the direct direction of those who fight, as well as the refusal of social harmony, because there can be no transformation if not within a tendential revolutionary rupture of the current capitalist production relations, in this sense direction, with respect to those directly involved, function, for the development of new social relations and perspective, guided by the critique of political economy and politics as a class dimension, are elements that must necessarily be seen in a dialectical relationship with each other.

The proletarian experience as an affirmative fact is the primary condition for the negation of the proletariat itself, which is the meaning of communism in its fullest form. Therefore, removing the politics of the left and its organizations from ideological abstraction contributes to moving the battlefield from the abstract and universal totality of politics to the concrete totality of class struggle and capitalist social relations.

The Critique of Politics

The development of new social relations directly criticizes political economy, but also produces a critique of politics itself. One must have the ability to grasp the contradictions within the class, failing which one falls back into mediations external to the class itself or into metaphysical locutions such as considering oneself the historical subject of class interests, an element that has distinguished the practice of the revolutionary or reformist left in an identical way.

The entire liturgy of much of what calls itself the left has been and is still being played out on the separation between historical and current class interests: that is, the idea of ​​being able to resolve the problem of the radical transformation of society on the terrain of political power, on the autonomy of political struggle, a project of overthrowing social relations; in this sense, grillini, democrats or Leninists are the same thing.

Beyond the empirical criticism that can be made of this model, which is now more than ever light years away from real social dynamics, it is necessary to focus on the relationship between development and crisis in capitalism to understand the fundamental criticism of such a system.

Capital, as the pivot of the labor-capital relationship, the model of all social relationships, however, tries to hide it, that is, to cancel the class relationship in society and in the political mechanisms of interest representation. There is therefore a relationship between workers and the overall social system, that is, a total capital that absolutizes everything/them.

The limit of the “politicians” lies within this relationship, in trying to represent the conflict without realizing the mechanisms of formation of political representation and the very function of the institutional forms in which power is expressed in bourgeois society, attesting to its fetishistic form.

It is no coincidence that the most elementary form of class independence during a phase of extension of new social relations is the instinctive rejection of parliamentarism and trade unionism itself seen as separate places and times for the affirmation of the autonomy of the proletariat and its capacity for action and transformation, immediately breaking the cages of this presumed totality. They demonstrate with words and deeds that society in its totality is not something that concerns them, since a truly comprehensive society does not exist until the social classes and the institutions that represent them are abolished.

In these specific phases, such manifestations are not linked to anti-politics, but to the critique of politics itself. This does not prevent, in a subsequent phase of harmonization, that the critique of politics returns to being simply anti-politics, the so-called, to put it in a vulgar way, indifference which is passivity and integration.

Apparently the dialectic autonomy-organization seems to stiffen in an incessant repetition, in forms that are not always new, of a process that sees in the capitalist conservation and recovery an inevitable evil, this dynamic exists, but in parallel there exists the development by leaps of a proletarian experience.

The crisis can open contradictions that set in motion new class movements, that can make autonomous instances reappear, if these have the strength to exercise a critique of politics, breaking and escaping from the cycle of ebb and flow that makes the relationship between autonomy and organization oscillate. In this sense, a field of analysis should be opened that seeks the limits of the class struggle directly within the process of expansion-crisis of capital, thus placing the relationship between autonomy and organization within this dynamic.

Autonomy (spontaneity) and organization (formalization) are linked by a precise link: the capitalist necessity and the unfolding of the capitalist process of domination of all social organizations, the so-called total capital. From this perspective, it is not by chance that in the high moments of the class conflict, when the autonomous strength of the proletariat is perceived, all social aggregations enter into crisis, from the family to organized knowledge in schools and universities, as well as bourgeois morality itself or the organizational codes practiced up to now, but it is not equally by chance that then this radical critique, born within the processes of affirmation of the autonomy of the proletariat, degenerates into a partial critique, useful to those who want to draw elements of power from the new management.

Today the problem is not to help the proletariat, for political activism, but to put at the center and participate in these new social relationships when they develop, where dialectical elements exist between the autonomous and organizational dimensions.

For a militant, acting in a struggle committee, in a union, in an association is neither revolutionary nor counter-revolutionary. The problem is to understand one's own function and at the same time to understand the limit of the same structure where one operates, even to deny it when it moves directly against the development of new social relationships. Mythologizing spontaneity, which is the reverse side of the myth of organization above all else, leads to a form of impotence or confusion. It is undeniable that stable structures go against those mechanisms of stiffening and conservation or true integration, as true centers of power. Hegemony and control become the only central axes (in a phase of social harmony these traits become pathological). The only way to try to counteract this degeneration, a battle that becomes even more necessary within an extension of new social relationships, is to keep the relationship between direction, function and perspective at the center. The point is therefore not to have a structure that is artificially thought to be above the class itself, or not to have one, but to develop collective and shared mechanisms that are always under discussion.

What must also be grasped is the relationship that links the apparatus of production to the institutionalization of political forms. The mechanisms of political representation within the system are part and product of capital. Just as "left-wing politics" rediscovers the problem of democracy and representativeness, the proletariat, when it manifests itself in new social relations, opens a critique of democracy starting not from abstract and always partial relations of power, but from the critique of the capitalist mechanisms of expropriation from the will to fight, from the capacity for self-determination and protagonism. It therefore becomes necessary to move from the plane of representation/representation to that of being.

Understanding the forms and contents that the class struggle has assumed up to now through the opening of new social relations is a task that can only be accomplished by calling into question a linear conception of the class struggle and its organizational processes which, for good measure, remains the constant ideology of the left.

Understanding the problem of the preservation of organizations and at the same time that of integration into the mechanisms of the capitalist production system, means already today taking a step forward in the process of autonomous organization of the proletariat, a fundamental condition for a plan of revolutionary rupture. This does not condemn us to inactivism, on the contrary it allows us to understand that in order to act we must understand where we are and where we want to go.

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Connessioni x la lotta di classe
Winter 2011, Bologna

• 1D. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital.
• 2Luxemburg's text, Social Reform or Revolution?, beyond its historical and methodological limitations, still encapsulates the question that divides those on the terrain of political economy and those in the critique of political economy.
• 3G. Gattei, Storia del valore lavoro
• 4G. Carchedi, Dietro e oltre la crisi.
• 5“The proletariat asserts itself as an autonomous class, in the face of the bourgeois class, only when it challenges its power, that is, its mode of production: in other words, exploitation itself. It is its revolutionary behavior that constitutes its being a class. It is not by increasing its economic attributes that the proletariat derives the sense of being class, but by radically denying them in order to establish a new economic order." - C.Lefort, The Proletarian Experience
• 6H. Simon, The New Movement