Sic is also the overcoming – in continuity and rupture – of the journal Meeting (four issues in French between September 2004 and June 2008) which set up an international meeting in the summer of 2008. Out of this gathering the project emerged as a truly international publication meant to explore the problematic of communisation within the conjuncture of the crisis that broke out in 2008. None of the participants in Sic consider their taking part as exclusive or permanent, and Sic may obviously embrace external theoretical contributions.

There will be an English language edition of the journal that will be the international publication, along with a French edition, and all texts will be found on a website in corresponding languages. In Greece and in Sweden, our comrades in Blaumachen and Riff-Raff will, apart from circulating their own texts published in Sic, incorporate translations of Sic texts in their own reviews and may publish specific editions of certain texts. This last option is encouraged in any other country or language.

Communisation
In the course of the revolutionary struggle, the abolition of the division of labour, of the State, of exchange, of any kind of property ; the extension of a situation in which everything is freely available as the unification of human activity, that is to say the abolition of classes, of both public and private spheres - these are all “measures” for the abolition of capital, imposed by the very needs of the struggle against the capitalist class. The revolution is communisation ; communism is not its project or result.

One does not abolish capital for communism but by communism, or more specifically, by its production. Indeed communist measures must be differentiated from communism ; they are not embryos of communism, rather they are its production. Communisation is not a period of transition, but rather, it is revolution itself which is the communist production of communism. The struggle against capital is what differentiates communist measures and communism. The content of the revolutionary activity is always the mediation of the abolition of capital by the proletariat in its relation to capital : this activity is not one branch of an alternative in competition with the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, but its internal contradiction and its overcoming.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, a whole historical period entered into crisis and came to an end - i.e. the period in which the revolution was conceived in different ways, both theoretically and practically, as the affirmation of the proletariat, its elevation to the position of ruling class, the liberation of labour, and the institution of a period of transition. The concept of communisation appeared in the midst of this crisis.

During the crisis, the critique of all the mediations of the existence of the proletariat within the capitalist mode of production (mass party, union, parliamentarism), of organisational forms such as the party-form or the vanguard, of ideologies such as leninism, of practices such as militantism along with all its variations - all this appeared irrelevant if revolution was no longer to be affirmation of the class – whether it be the workers’ autonomy or the generalisation of workers’ councils. It is the proletariat’s struggle as a class which has become the problem within itself, i.e. which is its own limit. That is the way the class struggle signals and produces the revolution as communisation in the form of its overcoming.

Since then, within the contradictory course of the capitalist mode of production, the affirmation of the proletariat and the liberation of labour have lost all meaning and content. There is no longer a worker’s identity facing capital and confirmed by it. This is the revolutionary dynamic of the present struggles which display the active denial of the proletarian condition against capital, even within ephemeral, limited bursts of self-management or self-organisation. The proletariat’s struggle against capital contains its contradiction with its own nature as class of capital.

The abolition of capital, i.e. the revolution and the production of communism, is immediately the abolition of all classes and therefore of the proletariat. This occurs through the communisation of society, which is abolished as a community separated from its elements. Proletarians abolish capital by the production of a community immediate to its elements ; they transform their relations into immediate relations between individuals. Relations between singular individuals that are no longer the embodiment of a social category, including the supposedly natural categories of the social sexes of woman and man. Revolutionary practice is the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-transformation.

A problematic
This minimal approach of communisation constitutes neither a definition, nor a platform, but exposes a problematic.
The problematic of a theory – here the theory of revolution as communisation – does not limit itself to a list of themes or objects conceived by theory ; neither is it the synthesis of all the elements which are thought. It is the content of theory, its way of thinking, with regards to all possible productions of this theory.

• The analysis of the current crisis and of the class struggles intrinsic to it
• The historicity of revolution and communism
• The periodisation of the capitalist mode of production and the question of the restructuring of the mode of production after the crisis at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s
• The analysis of the gender relation within the problematic of the present class struggle and communisation
• The definition of communism as goal but also as movement abolishing the present state of things
• A theory of the abolition of capital as a theory of the production of communism
• The reworking of the theory of value-form (to the extent that the revolution is not the affirmation of the proletariat and the liberation of labour)
• The illegitimacy of wage-demands and others in the present class struggle

By definition no list of subjects coming under a problematic can be exhaustive.

An activity
No theory contents itself with saying “this is what is happening,” “it speaks for itself”. When theory says, “it is so” or “this is how it is” – in a word, Sic – it is a specific intellectual construction. Abstract and critical in relation to the immediacy of the struggles : this is the relative autonomy of theoretical production.

In the present period, to identify and promote the activities, which, in the proletariat’s struggle as a class, are the calling into question of its class existence, means that it is this critical relation that changes. It is no longer an exteriority, it is a moment of these activities, it is invested in them. It is a critical relation not vis-à-vis the class-struggle and immediate experience, but in this immediate experience.

If acting as a class has become the very limit of class-action, if this becomes, in the contradiction of the current moment, the most banal course of struggles, then immediate struggles produce within themselves an internal distance, both practically and in their own discourse. This distance is the communising perspective as concrete, objective theoretical articulation of both the experience of struggles as productive of theory and of theory in its abstract and critical formulation, such as it is produced and exists here, and whose dissemination is becoming a practical, primordial activity.

The aim of this journal is to carry the key concept of this theory, communisation, in its becoming-social. This task is the activity of partisans of communisation, engaged in class-struggles, with the conflicts that traverse them. In the present moment, theory, as a totality of concrete activities (writing, journals, meetings, dissemination in many forms, etc.) is itself directly becoming an objective determination.

One thing is now certain: in the capitalist world, our situation can only get worse. All that was previously taken for granted in the form of “social benefits” has been, once again, put into question. However, this transformation is not the result of poor economic management, of the excessive greed of bosses, or a lack of regulation of international finance. It is simply the inevitable outcome of the global evolution of capitalism.

Wages, job opportunities, pensions, public services and welfare benefits have all been affected by this evolution, each of them in their own way. What was conceded yesterday is taken away today, and tomorrow there will be even less. The process is the same everywhere: new reforms take up the offensive at the exact point where the previous reforms had stopped. This dynamic is never reversed, even when we move from “economic crisis” back to prosperity. Beginning in the aftermath of the great crisis of the 1970s, the same dynamic continued even after the return to growth in the 1990s and 2000s. It thus becomes difficult to imagine things getting better, even in the quite improbable hypothesis of an “end of the crisis” after the financial shock of 2008.

Nevertheless, faced with this rapid transformation of worldwide capitalism, the response, on the left of the Left, has been appallingly weak. Most are content with denouncing the extreme neoliberalism of bosses and politicians. They seem to think that it’s possible to defend the social benefits of the previous period, and even to extend them a bit more, if only we could go back to the capitalism of yesteryear, that of the period just after the Second World War. Their proposals for the future recall the main points of the program of the Resistance, adopted in 1944.1 It is as if it were still necessary to fight Nazism, as if governments were willing to make concessions in order to assure victory — as if there has ever been a backwards motion in history. In this way they forget everything that constitutes the capitalist social relation in its present dynamic.

Why does crisis and the restructuring of capitalism — that is to say, the way it has changed in the last 40 years — render impossible any return to the prior conditions of struggle? And what can be deduced from this fact for today’s struggles?

To answer these questions, we must take a brief theoretical detour. Profit is not just one element of capitalist society among many. It is the major engine, the reason for anything to exist at all in the social world. Profit is not something that can be grafted on top of human activities, taking away the product of labour for some parasitical capitalist. It is the source of all activities, none of which could exist without it. Or, if we prefer, these human activities would exist in such a different manner that they would bear no resemblance to those we presently observe.

The point is not to form a moral judgement on this state of affairs but rather to understand all its consequences. It is not a matter of profit being systematically favoured at the expense of what is useful, good, or beneficial to society (such as health, culture, etc.). It is “utility” itself that cannot exist without profit. Nothing that isn’t profitable can be useful in capitalism. Or, in other words, everything that is useful can only be useful as long as it offers opportunities for making profit. To say, for example, that “health is not a commodity,” is simply an absurdity, without any basis in the reality of a capitalist world. It is only because health is profitable (on the one hand, because generally speaking it maintains a functional working population, and on the other hand, more specifically, because it is source of profit for some) that it is an economic sector. And it is only because it really is an economic sector, and thus a “commodity”, that there is enough to pay the doctors, to make machines for analysing the human body, and to build hospitals. Without that there would obviously be nothing at all.

To make a profit, it is necessary that the value contained in the commodity increases: that the value of what is produced be more than the value spent (in raw materials, machines, buildings, transport, etc.) in order to produce it. Now, what is used to produce has the same value as what is produced if we don’t add something to it. That thing which is added is human activity, intelligence, strength, physiological energy spent to assemble and transform distinct objects into an object qualitatively different from what we had at the beginning. This activity must show itself in a particular form in order that it can be bought, and hence be incorporated into the final value. This is human activity under a particular form — the form of labour — a form that can be purchased by capital.

But this shows that capitalism is not sharing but exploitation, that the value at which labour is bought is lower than the value which labour produces. It is not possible to redistribute all the value produced and return it to labour, because value only exists in this dissociation between labour and its product, and so permits the unequal allocation of this product. It is really the existence of this dissociation between human activity and social wealth that makes possible the “appropriation” of such wealth.

The “value” of things is not a natural creation, but a social one. Also, contrary to what some would want us to believe, it is not a neutral creation that exists only for convenience. There are a lot of other possible means, just as convenient, to produce what could be considered in a given society as indispensable to the lives of human beings. Value makes itself necessary only because it becomes an instrument of domination. It permits, in the present mode of production, the capturing of the lower classes’ activity for the benefit of the upper classes. The very existence of value — and of what appears in history as its permanent representative, i.e. money — is only a necessity as long as it measures what must be taken from the former and given to the latter. Prior to capitalism, value and money were not at the centre of production itself, but they were already the signs of the power of some and the weakness of others. Treasures, palace ornaments and the rich decorations of churches were the signs of the social power of the nobles, the caliphs, or the ecclesiastical authorities. From the beginning of class society, money and value have been the symbols of domination. They became the supreme instruments for it in capitalism. Hence, no equality can come from the use of a means whose very existence is based on inequality. As long as there will be money, there will be rich and poor, powerful and dominated, masters and slaves.

Given that the search for profit requires that the cost of production be as low as possible, and that what has already been produced or is used in order to produce (machines, building, infrastructure) can only transfer their own value, the only variable that can be adjusted is the value of labour power. This value must be lowered to its minimum. But, at the same time, only labour can generate value. Capitalism resolves this insoluble problem by lowering the value of labour power only relatively to the total value produced, while increasing the value of labour power and the quantity of labour absolutely. This is made possible by rising productivity, the rationalization of labour, and technical and scientific innovations. But it is then necessary to make production grow in enormous proportions, to the detriment of much else (natural spaces, for example). Nevertheless, such growth never exists in a continuous manner and the reversal of this tendency is the cause of the present situation.

The period from the Second World War to the beginning of the ’70s was actually a very specific period for worldwide capitalism. It is necessary to understand clearly the characteristics of this period, to understand why it has disappeared, and why — contrary to the hopes of unions and liberals — it will never return.

After the Second World War, destruction caused by war, and losses of value during the long depression that had preceded it, created a situation favourable to what economists call “growth.” This growth is nothing less than a contradictory race to decrease the relative value of labour power while its absolute value increases. The political connections imposed by the antinazi alliance during the war allowed for a form of power-sharing both at a worldwide level (Eastern and Western blocs) and at the social level within Western countries (recognition of a certain legitimacy of struggles, allowing unions and left parties to represent the interests of labour). The “Fordist compromise”2 prevailed at the time. It consisted in establishing, through increasing wages, a rising “standard of living” in exchange for an enormous growth in productivity and evermore arduous work. The value of the labour power employed, spread out over a greater number of workers, was increasing in absolute terms, but the total value of everything produced increased a lot more due to the growth of productivity. The sale of all these commodities – the basis of what was called at that time “consumer society” – permitted the surplus value which appeared in production, the source of capitalist profit, to be transformed into additional capital that was reinvested in order to continually expand production. Yet this expansion contains an internal limit: at a certain point there is too much capital to valorise in relation to what it is necessary to produce and sell in order to maintain a profit. In actuality a dynamic equilibrium was maintained for more than two decades, up to the middle of the 1960s when a progressive decline set in, leading to the so-called “oil crisis” of the 1970s.

Some quick remarks about that period. Firstly, “prosperity” was reserved for Western Europe, North America and Japan, and even within these privileged areas some parts of the proletariat were excluded from its benefits, including intensively exploited and under-paid immigrants. Secondly, Western prosperity could not mask the fact that what was given to the proletariat was due to its character as the dominated pole in the capitalist social relation. Increases in purchasing power were accompanied by the massive selling of poor-quality standardized commodities. The expression that appeared at that time, “consumer society”, is unfortunate since it was just as much a “producer society”. The above mentioned general growth of total value necessitated putting into circulation an always greater number of commodities. While the lowering of every commodity’s value, made possible by mass production, permitted a lowering of the relative value of labour-power (less work was necessary in order to provide indispensable products for the worker’s survival). Everyday “alienation”, a topic many times analysed and criticised during that period, was nothing more than a consequence of the imperatives of the circulation of value.

The once-fashionable concept of alienation has faded from present-day vocabulary. Literally speaking, alienation is the way in which our own world seems extraneous to us (alien, a word derived from Latin, denotes radical otherness; an alienated person is someone who is not themselves anymore). “Producing for production” is the byword under which capitalist alienation appears to us. Material production seems to have no other goal but itself. But what capitalism produces before everything else is social relations of exploitation and domination. If it appears as material production without a goal, it is because capitalism transposes relations between individuals into relations between things. The absurdity of producing for production, and of this apparent power of things over people, is nothing more than an inverted image of the rationality of the domination of a class over another – that is to say, of the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalist class. The ultimate goal of capitalism is not profit or “producing for production”, it is to preserve the domination of a group of human beings over another group of human beings. And it is in order to secure this domination that profit and “producing for production” are imposed as imperatives on everyone.3

With the changes that have taken place since the 1980s, alienation stayed but “prosperity” flew away. The crisis of 1973 made the decline of the previous dynamic obvious. Capitalism was no longer able to concede the same level of wage increases without impinging on the rate of profit. Meanwhile the proletariat no longer settled for what capitalists had given it so far. The ’60s and ’70s were a period of a developing far-reaching protest, which criticised labour and working conditions as well as various other aspects of capitalist society. Compromise was rejected in its most essential element: the tradeoff between a rising standard of living and the total submission of the proletariat in production and consumption. Contesting established mediations of the workers’ movement, such as unions or official communist parties, had the same meaning: the role assigned to the working class by the “Fordist compromise” was called into question.

Capitalism had therefore to liquidate the essential of what made it what it was in the previous period. There were two, basically identical, reasons for this: the fall in the rate of profit and the growth of social protest. Crisis and restructuring served this very purpose, against a social and political background of a conservative and repressive “neoliberal” wave portrayed by politicians like Thatcher or Reagan. But “neoliberalism” was not the cause of the restructuring: on the contrary, it was the restructuring, essential for the continuation of capitalist exploitation, that was accompanied by this ideological decorum. In some off-beat countries like France, it was “socialists” who had to obey the capitalist injunction.4

Now that restructuring is advanced, all its components appear clearly. The objective was to lower the total cost of labour, and, for this purpose, to find outside of the Western countries a cheap workforce not burdened by the long history of the workers’ movement. A few “ workshop countries”, like Hong Kong or Taiwan, became the precursors. The development of finance and the transformation of money – which, since 1971, is no more based on gold – provided the necessary mechanism5 for the development of a globally integrated capitalism: some areas dedicated to manufacturing, some other areas more orientated to consumption and/or advanced manufacturing, still others abandoned because after all they became superfluous as far as the imperatives of the circulation of value were concerned. This global zoning was quickly developed, up to to the point of being nowadays fractally reproduced in all parts of the world. Impoverished suburbs (or inner-cities) in the core are the image of countries peripheral to worldwide flows: a human overflow that profit does not know what to do with, and that must be penned in and kept under surveillance. Worldwide competition has imposed on the western proletariat a relative fall of those benefits that had resulted from the previous historic compromise. And since there is no perspective of improvement, it is police and repressive discourse which constitute the State’s response to lost hopes.

The very existence of this global zoning shows that it is impossible to force on newly industrialised countries, like India or China, the pattern valid for the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe. A rather mechanistic reasoning perceives the transformations that affected the working class of Western countries one or two centuries ago as repeating themselves, in an accelerated manner, in these countries. Initially over-exploited and immiserated, this class, through its struggle for higher wages, attained a level of prosperity triggering the virtuous growth cycle which is sustained by the expansion of a domestic market. Such an evolution would however be hardly desirable for existing capital in developing countries (given the limits already reached, it would undoubtedly entail nothing more than irreparable ecological disaster). Moreover, it seems to be, at least in present-day conditions, squarely impossible. The development of the West – which, lets not forget, was helped by the plundering of colonies – cannot be repeated in an identical form in an economy which is from the very start globally integrated. The Chinese or Indian domestic market, even in spectacular expansion, cannot possibly absorb all the growth of these countries, which are in desperate need of Western outlets and even of Western wealth, as their assets are denominated in US or European debt. To put it on a more theoretical level, it is the entire mass of globally accumulated value (not just that of these countries) which must find a corresponding profit in world production. The limit of what has been attained in the 1970s is always there. The capital to be valorised is too massive for the dynamic equilibrium of the three post-War decades to be reinstated, and this is equally true for newly industrialised countries and for Western countries. The restructuring of capitalism following the crisis of the 1970s has principally meant that capital found another way to valorise itself, through lowering the cost of labour, and we are still at this point.

Such an evolution had unavoidably an extremely important impact on class struggles in Western countries. During the period preceding the crisis of the 1970s and the restructuring, the proletariat’s struggle had a double meaning, no doubt contradictory but ultimately based nonetheless on the same premise. On the one hand, the struggle could pursue immediate objectives, such as an improvement of working conditions, an increase in wages, and social justice. On the other hand, the struggle also had as a result, and sometimes as an objective, the reinforcement of the class of labour relatively to the class of capital, and even, tendentially, the overturning of the bourgeoisie. These two aspects were conflictual, and the antagonisms between the proponents of “reform” and the proponents of “revolution” were permanent. Ultimately, however, the struggle as such could mean either of them. The struggle for immediate advantages and the struggle for future communism were articulated together around the idea that victory could only come through a reinforcement of the working class and its combativity. Needless to say, the debates cutting across the working class were as many divisions between proponents of revolution or reform, of parties, unions or workers’ councils, etc. – that is to say, between leninists, leftists, anarchists, etc. But they shared an experience of struggle where the proletarian class, without being unanimous or even united (which it never has been), was nonetheless a visible social reality in which all workers could easily recognise themselves and with which they could identify themselves.

What about now? If the debate between “reform” and “revolution” has simply disappeared since thirty years, it is because the social basis that gave it meaning has been pulverised. The form which gave a subjective existence to the working class for a century and a half — i.e. the workers’ movement — has collapsed. Parties, unions and left-wing associations are now “citizen” or “democratic” parties, etc., with an ideology borrowed from the French Revolution, that is from the period preceding the workers’ movement. It is however obvious that neither the proletariat nor capitalism have disappeared. So what is missing?

At first sight we could of course say that it is the possible sense of victory which has been modified. Without at all idealising previous periods, nor under-estimating retreats, we could say that since the beginning of capitalism, the working class has staged struggles that have translated into real transformations in its relation to capital: on the one hand, through what was concretely achieved — regulation of the working day, wages, etc. — and, on the other hand, through the very organisation of the workers’ movement into parties and unions. Any struggle and any partial victory could take the form of the reinforcement of the proletariat, whereas every defeat could appear as a temporary retreat before the next offensive. It is true that this reinforcement was at the same time a weakening. Partial victories and the institutionalisation of the unions’ role were factors tending to make the communist perspective increasingly more distant. As years went by, this perspective became evermore remote and hypothetical.6 Yet the general framework of struggles — notwithstanding all their limits — was the reinforcement of workers against employers.

Today however, and almost for thirty years now, struggles are exclusively defensive. Every victory is just putting off the announcement of defeat. For the first time in two centuries, the existing dynamic points only towards a weakening of the class of labour. Today’s emblematic case of a victorious workers’ struggle is Cellatex — the radical struggle for redundancy payments when employment is eliminated. Victory means in such a case the end of everything that made the struggle possible – being workers of the same firm, now closed – and no longer the beginning of something new.

And this is not all. The transformations of work during these last thirty years, under the pressure of massive unemployment, have modified the worker’s relation to work, hence the relation of the proletariat to itself. Employment is less and less the point of reference it had been in the post-war period (something that also gave to the critique of work the content of a radical critique of capitalist society as such). People no more occupy a post for life. No career development can be taken for granted. The worker is supposed to “evolve”, to get training, to change the place of work and job. Precarity is becoming the rule. Unemployment is no more a negation of work but just one of its moments: a passage that all workers will have to cross repeatedly in their lifetime. For many work has become a partial and temporary complement of unemployment. Within firms, there is a proliferation of workers’ statuses and conditions. Externalisation of tasks, subcontracting and the use of temping agencies are fragmenting and dividing workers into multiple categories. The result is that it becomes difficult to wage a struggle, as the very unity of those supposed to struggle together is problematic from the start – contrary to what held for the period preceding the 1970s, when this unity was more or less given (independently of the divisions which would inevitably appear later). The unity of those in struggle is now constructed by the struggle itself as an indispensable means for achieving its goals. This unity is never given beforehand, and, even if temporarily attained, it is always subjected to the probability of division that already existed in the previous period.

The struggle becomes therefore more difficult, but there is also another, even more important difference: it will not produce the same results. Precisely because unity is not given before the struggle itself, it is not included in its official goals. A certain idea of improvement of the workers’ condition, or more generally of the proletarian condition, no longer forms a part of the struggle’s horizon. Or else it only enters the horizon of defensive struggles, whose failure is known beforehand (as in the case of struggles over pensions). As for victorious struggles, they are victorious only insofar as they pursue an immediate and partial goal, an individual goal one might say. In capitalism we can no longer achieve any collective improvement of our situation, but only an individual one, which cannot take the form of a defence of the living condition of workers as such, and therefore can only be transitory. Moreover, the end of the struggle, whether by victory or defeat, marks the end of the unity constructed in the course of the struggle, and thus the impossibility to continue or resume it. By contrast, the previous period gave rise to a sense of progress which seemed to make the “capitalisation” of struggles possible, that is a gradual piling up of the victorious results of past struggles. This was probably an illusion, but it counted nonetheless in what people could think of their own struggles and its possible consequences.7

In a certain sense, we could say that now any class struggle meets its limit in the fact that it is the action of a class that no longer finds, in its relation to capital, what seemed to have constituted in the past its rationale and its force — the fact of collectively embodying labour. This relation of to one’s own proletarian being, a relation ultimately external to one’s work, affects the way in which one can struggle and obtain victory through struggle. Whatever we win is a loss relative to the very conditions of the struggle. And whatever we lose is a loss too. This de facto situation seems unshakeable. It would be wrong to believe that the proletariat’s unity should be established as a prerequisite, before the struggle, in order to have an effective proletarian action. Unity exists only provisionally and only in the course of the struggle and among those struggling, without the need for any reference to the common belonging to a social class. “Class consciousness” is not something definite that could be recreated through political propaganda, since it has never existed other than relatively to a specific configuration of the capitalist social relation. This relation has changed, and so has consciousness. We must admit it.

We must all the more admit it since this new configuration obliges us to review our conceptions of communism and revolution and critically grasp what they had been during the previous period. Indeed, when the proletarian identity was confirmed by the relation of the proletariat to capital the massively imposed conception of radical change – largely shared by reformists as well as revolutionaries, by anarchists as well as marxists – was that of a victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, after a mobilisation of the forces of the class of labour using various methods (trade-union action and organisation, electoral conquest of power, action of the vanguard party, self-organisation of the proletariat, etc.). Let it be said once more that this vision offered a perspective for both reform and revolution and permitted them, notwithstanding their confrontation, to place their quarrel on a common background. This is why the revolutionary and the traditional reformist perspective disappeared together from the terrain of official politics. Those who speak of reform today, anywhere from the right to the extreme left of the political spectrum, refer only to a reform in the management of capitalism, and not to a reform leading to a break with capitalism. This latter reference remained in the program of the socialist parties up until the 1970s, under an undoubtedly ideological form it is true, but one whose existence was nonetheless revealing. Since then, this perspective has simply been forgotten.

At present we can understand that the reformist as well as the revolutionary perspective were at an impasse, because they were comprehending communist revolution as the victory of a class over another class, not as the simultaneous disappearance of classes. From whence stemmed the traditional idea of a transition period during which the proletariat, once victorious, assumes the management of society for an intermediate period. Historically this has practically translated into the establishment of a Soviet-style State capitalism where the bourgeoisie had been replaced by a class of bureaucrats linked to the communist party, and the working class remained in fact exploited and forced to provide the required excess of value. It is however to be noted that this idea of a transition period was more widespread than the one, strictly marxist, of a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. In various forms, reformists (who counted on the conquest of power through the ballot box) and even anarcho-syndicalists (who envisioned a conquest of power through union structures) were not strangers to this line of thought. For them too, it was the triumph of the proletariat – either democratically, through State bodies, for reformists, or through struggle, with their own (union) organisations, for anarcho-syndicalists – which would give it the time to transform society by means of its domination. And it was dissidents from both the anarchist and the marxist camp who gradually elaborated a theory of the immediacy of revolution and communism. On the basis of their theoretical explorations in that time, and with the hindsight of the recent transformation of capitalism, we are now in a position to understand that communism can only be the simultaneous disappearance of social classes, not a triumph, even transitional, of one over another.

The present period gives us a new conception of revolution and communism that originates in these dissident critical currents of the earlier workers’ movement, and that capitalism’s evolution shows to be adequate to today’s proletarian struggles. Everyday proletarian experience poses class belonging as an external constraint, therefore the struggle to defend one’s condition tends to be confounded with the struggle against one’s condition. More and more often in the struggles, we can discern practices and contents which can be comprehended in this way. These are not necessarily radical or spectacular declarations. They are just as much practices of escape; struggles where unions are criticised and booed without any attempt to replace them with something else, because one knows that there is nothing to put in their place; wage demands transforming into the destruction of the means of production (Algeria, Bangladesh); struggles where one does not demand the preservation of employment but rather redundancy payments (Cellatex and all its sequels); struggles where one does not demand anything, but simply revolts against everything that constitutes one’s conditions of existence (the “riots” in French banlieues in 2005), etc.

Little by little, what emerges in these struggles is a calling into question, through the struggle, of the role assigned to us by capital. The unemployed of some grouping, the workers of some factory, the inhabitants of some district, may organise themselves as unemployed, workers or inhabitants, but very quickly this identity must be overcome for the struggle to continue. What is common, what can be described as unity, stems from the struggle itself, not from our identity within capitalism. In Argentina, in Greece, in Guadeloupe, everywhere, the defence of a particular condition was perceived as utterly insufficient, because no particular condition can any more identify itself with a general condition. Even the fact of being “precarious” cannot constitute a central element of the struggle, one in which everybody would be able to recognise themselves. There is no “status” of precarious workers to be recognised or defended, because being a precarious worker – whether involuntarily, or by choice, or by a combination of both – is not a social category, but rather one of the realities which contributes to the production of class belonging as an external constraint.

If a communist revolution is today possible, it can only be born in this particular context in which on the one hand being a proletarian is experienced as external to oneself, while on the other hand the existence of capitalism requires that one is forced to sell one’s labour power and thus, whatever the form of this sale, one cannot be anything else but a proletarian. Such a situation easily leads to the false idea that it is somewhere else, in a more or less alternative way of life, that we can create communism. It is not by chance that a minority, which is starting to become significant in Western countries, falls eagerly in this trap and imagines opposing and fighting capitalism by this method. However, the capitalist social relation is the totalising dynamic of our world and there is nothing that can escape it as easily as they imagine.

The overcoming of all existing conditions can only come from a phase of intense and insurrectionist struggle during which the forms of struggle and the forms of future life will take flesh in one and the same process, the latter being nothing else than the former. This phase, and its specific activity, is what we propose to call by the name of communisation.

Communisation does not yet exist, but the whole present phase of struggles, as mentioned above, permits us to talk about communisation in the present. In Argentina, during the struggle that followed the riots of 2001, the determining factors of the proletariat as class of this society were shaken : property, exchange, division of labour, relations between men and women… The crisis was then limited to that country, so the struggle never passed the frontiers. Yet communisation can only exist in a dynamic of endless enlargement. If it stops it will fade out, at least momentarily. However, the perspectives of capitalism since the financial crisis of 2008 – perspectives which are very gloomy for it at a global level – permit us to think that next time the collapse of money will not restrict itself to Argentina. The point is not to say that the starting point will necessarily be a crisis of money, but rather to consider that in the present state of affairs various starting points are possible and that an imminent severe monetary crisis is undoubtedly one of them.

In our opinion, communisation will be the moment when struggle will make possible, as a means for its continuation, the immediate production of communism. By communism we mean a collective organisation that has got rid of all the mediations which, at present, serve society by linking individuals among them : money, the state, value, classes, etc. The only function of these mediations is to make exploitation possible. While they are imposed on everybody, they benefit only a few. Communism will thus be the moment when individuals will link together directly, without their inter-individual relations being superimposed by categories to which everyone owes obedience.

It goes without saying that this individual will not be the one we know now, that of capital’s society, but a different individual produced by a life taking different forms. To be clear, we should recall that the human individual is not an untouchable reality deriving from “human nature”, but a social product, and that every period in history has produced its own type of individual. The individual of capital is that which is determined by the share of social wealth it receives. This determination is subservient to the relation between the two large classes of the capitalist mode of production: the proletariat and the capitalist class. The relation between these classes comes first, the individual is produced by way of consequence — contrary to the all-too-frequent belief that classes are groupings of pre-existing individuals. The abolition of classes will thus be the abolition of the determinations that make the individual of capital what it is, i.e. one that enjoys individually and egoistically a share of the social wealth produced in common. Naturally, this is not the only difference between capitalism and communism — wealth created under communism will be qualitatively different from whatever capitalism is capable of creating. Communism is not a mode of production, in that social relations are not determined in it by the form of the process of producing the necessities of life, but it is rather communist social relations that determine the way in which these necessities are produced.

We don’t know, we cannot know, and therefore we do not seek to concretely describe, what communism will be like. We only know how it will be in the negative, through the abolition of capitalist social forms. Communism is a world without money, without value, without the state, without social classes, without domination and without hierarchy – which requires the overcoming of the old forms of domination integrated in the very functioning of capitalism, such as patriarchy, and also the joint overcoming of both the male and the female condition. It is obvious too that any form of communitarian, ethnic, racial or other division is equally impossible in communism, which is global from the very start.

If we cannot foresee and decide how the concrete forms of communism will be, the reason is that social relations do not arise fully fledged from a unique brain, however brilliant, but can only be the result of a massive and generalised social practice. It is this practice that we call communisation. Communisation is not an aim, it is not a project. It is nothing else than a path. But in communism the goal is the path, the means is the end. Revolution is precisely the moment when one gets out of the categories of the capitalist mode of production. This exit is already prefigured in present struggles but doesn’t really exist in them, insofar as only a massive exit that destroys everything in its passage is an exit.

We can be sure that communisation will be chaotic. Class society will not die without defending itself in multiple ways. History has shown that the savagery of a state that tries to defend its power is limitless – the most atrocious and inhuman acts since the dawn of humanity have been committed by states. It is only within this match to the death and its imperatives that the limitless ingenuity set free by the participation of all in the process of their liberation will find the resources to fight capitalism and create communism in a single movement. The revolutionary practices of abolishing value, money, exchange and all commodity relations in the war against capital, are decisive weapons for the integration – through measures of communisation – of the major part of the excluded, the middle classes and the peasant masses, in short for creating, within the struggle, the unity which does not exist anymore in the proletariat.

It is obvious too that the forward thrust represented by the creation of communism will fade away if it is interrupted. Any form of capitalisation of the “achievements of revolution”, any form of socialism, any form of “transition”, perceived as an intermediate phase before communism, as a “pause”, will be counter-revolution, produced not by the enemies of revolution but by revolution itself. Dying capitalism will try to lean on this counter-revolution. As for the overcoming of patriarchy, it will be a major disruption dividing the camp of the revolutionaries themselves, because the aim pursued will certainly not be an “equality” between men and women, but rather the radical abolition of social distinctions based on sex. For all these reasons, communisation will appear as a “revolution within revolution”.

An adequate form of organisation of this revolution will only be provided by the multiplicity of communising measures, taken anywhere by any kind of people, which, if they constitute an adequate response to a given situation, will generalise of their own accord, without anybody knowing who conceived them and who transmitted them. Communisation will not be democratic, because democracy, including of the “direct” type, is a form corresponding to just one type of relation between what is individual and what is collective – precisely the type pushed by capital to an extreme and rejected by communism. Communising measures will not be taken by any organ, any form of representation of anyone, or any mediating structure. They will be taken by all those who, at a precise moment, take the initiative to search for a solution, adequate in their eyes, to a problem of the struggle. And the problems of the struggle are also problems of life: how to eat, where to stay, how to share with everybody else, how to fight against capital, etc. Debates do exist, divergences do exist, internal strife does exist — communisation is also revolution within the revolution. There is no organ to decide on disputed matters. It is the situation that will decide; and it is history that will know, post festum, who was right.

This conclusion might appear quite abrupt; but there is no other way to create a world.

Leon de Mattis, July 2011

• 1The 1944 program of the French resistance was an accord between Gaullist and Communist members of the resistance that put in place the principle features of French post-war welfare capitalism. Translators note.
• 2Henry Ford, the great American industrialist, defended between WWI and WWII the idea that it is necessary to increase wages and productivity in order to simultaneously develop production and the market that could absorb products.
• 3Even on capitalists themselves, who do not control the rules that put them in control.
• 4In France in 1981 François Mitterand, a liberal and “socialist” politician, was elected as President. He had to give up most of his social campaign promises in 1983 to follow a strictly “neoliberal” economic policy. Translator’s note.
• 5Financial capitalism is not at all a parasitical growth on productive capitalism, contrary to what leftist common sense would have us believe. It is rather indispensable to the existence of productive capitalism itself. The formidable development of finance since the 1970s, has, along with other factors, made the global and instantaneous circulation of capital possible. It is a necessary instrument of the global integration of cycles of production and consumption.
• 6Some libertarians or council communists were for that matter more than happy to denounce the betrayal of union representatives. But such a “betrayal” was in line with the institutionalisation of the workers’ movement, implied in the proletariat’s affirmation of its power. Union representatives were traitors to the extent that they accepted to take on a specific role in order to reinforce their own power; but they did not create this role themselves. To content oneself with denouncing this “betrayal” is not enough, to the extent that it could imply that other -more honest- representatives could have done otherwise.
• 7Class struggles in newly industrialised countries such as China, India, Bangladesh or Cambodia can be different, because the struggles that take place there, for example wage struggles, can bring about victories with far-reaching impacts. However, in a capitalism that is globally integrated, this impact is never big enough to really transform the characteristics of the capitalist social relation. These struggles are not a replay of the struggles that took place in Europe at the beginning of capitalism, if only because they can no longer be in line with the revolutionary perspective of the years between 1840 and 1970.

Communisation is not any kind of peaceful experimentation with new ways of life, but the revolutionary answer by the proletariat to an acute social crisis. The text below offers a few observations on this connection in the light of the current crisis.1

The class struggle between capital and the proletariat takes place all the time and forms the whole of our existence. In most cases it takes relatively peaceful forms, but throughout history it has given rise to numerous revolutionary movements which have threatened the existence of the mode of production. These movements have always originated in a refusal of unendurable proletarian living conditions, but it is not simply that an ‘excessive’ exploitation regularly calls capitalism into question. Often it is rather a ‘too lenient’ treatment of the working class which is the immediate cause behind social unrest. We can take Greece as an example, where the very poor finances of the State (caused, according to the bourgeoisie’s representatives, by too generous conditions for many groups of workers) in the end had to be remedied by the blood-letting of the working class. Exploitation and surplus value production are two terms for the same thing, and since the capital relation lives from producing surplus value, i.e. from exploiting workers, the class contradiction necessarily belongs to its most inner essence. Never can it escape from this contradiction, no matter how much the mode of production manages to mutate. Therefore, the threat that this relation will explode from the inside lurks behind every serious crisis.

Serious crises, such as the one we have been experiencing since 2008, break out in situations where the capitalist class fails to guarantee sufficiently high surplus value production under bearable conditions for the producers of this surplus value (that which in bourgeois jargon is called combining growth with social considerations). The most abstract definition of a crisis for the capitalist mode of production is that its reproduction is being threatened, that is to say the continued reproduction of the antagonist classes. It is on the concrete level, however, that we can see the crisis develop before our eyes: banks and companies that are threatened with bankruptcy and workers who are losing their jobs, are evicted from their homes, or are subjected to wage cuts, reduced pensions, poorer healthcare and so on. When single capitals or groups of proletarians get into straits, the State can intervene in order to ward off an emergency, by bailing out companies or handing out a little extra money to the municipalities and thereby maintaining a certain level of service. But there are never any miracle cures. In such instances, the State indebts itself, and sooner or later the budget has to be balanced, which means that in the end it is the proletariat which has to pay for it. The only mercy that the capitalist class can offer the proletarians of a country in crisis is some form of installment plan (a mortgage on future exploitation), or they can let the proletarians of another country pay a part of the bill. An example of the former is how Iceland was instructed to compensate Britain and the Netherlands for their losses connected with the collapse of Icesave : 2.8 billion euros plus interest over a period of thirty years. An example of the latter is the Swedish government’s vigorous pressure within the EU and the IMF in 2009 in order to prevent a devaluation of the Latvian currency, which would have been devastating for the Swedish banks that had lent out enormous sums to the Baltic countries. The latters’ brutal austerity packages were probably completely necessary in order to save the Swedish banking system from collapse, something which explains the extremely tough demands by Sweden and the EU.2 Acute measures such as emergency loans for the auto industry or nationalisations of mortgage companies do not, however, solve the underlying problem behind the crisis, which is a crisis of investment or rather a crisis of accumulation, i.e. a crisis of exploitation.3 Order insists that exploitation be deepened.

In the autumn of 2008 we witnessed how the capitalist states coordinated themselves on a world scale (from Washington to Beijing, from Frankfurt to Stockholm) in order to confront the financial crisis, but still they are far from mastering the situation. We’ve gone from a situation where the banks were at the brink of bankruptcy to one in which whole countries are threatened by insolvency. The public debt crisis is not over yet and if the situation worsens – for instance as a result of renewed struggles in Spain or in other deeply indebted countries, or as a consequence of higher oil prices – this could very well produce a domino effect like the one that the banks were facing in the autumn of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. The international community is already holding a number of countries above water (Iceland, Latvia, Greece, Hungary, Ukraine, Ireland…) and the question is how many more it is able to hold up.

The strength of the capitalist class is – apart from economic compulsion – its State apparatuses and its ability to work together in order to save the capitalist world system. This new spirit of class solidarity within the capitalist class has its basis in global production chains and in the dependence of all countries on a functioning world market. But at the same time, this is its weakness, because a local crisis can today, faster than ever, send a shock wave through-out the capitalist nerve system.

A global crisis of exploitation does not automatically lead to revolution, although the revolution is unthinkable without such a crisis. At the same time, a communist revolution today is one of the most difficult and dangerous things one can imagine, in that it would mean a confrontation with all the State apparatuses of the world. The alternatives must thus be extraordinarily grim for it to be a reality at all. To make the revolution is not to sacrifice oneself to an ideal but to try to reach a solution to immediate pressing needs.

Riff-raff is part of the communisation current. We maintain that the only revolutionary perspective today is that of communisation, that the communist revolution of today necessarily has to take the form of communisation. As a revolutionary practice this is characterised by the proletariat, in its struggle with capital, immediately taking on the task of abolishing its own conditions of life, i.e. all that which determines the proletariat as a class: property, exchange, work, the State, etc. Such a revolution passes neither through the conquering of political power nor the appropriation of the means of production, not even as a necessary step on the way. On the contrary, the revolutionary process is characterised by that process in which politics and the economy, the value form as a social mediation between individuals, is abolished and replaced by communism. The proletariat thus does not raise itself to become the dominant class, but abolishes itself along with all other classes in the course of the struggle against capital. Communisation does not fall from the sky, nor does it ‘arrive from the future’; it is a qualitative leap and a rupture with the form of class struggle that takes place every day (struggles over the wage, working conditions, etc). It breaks out the moment when the proletarians are forced to take communist measures against the class enemy: methods with which capital can be destroyed.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels defined communism in the following manner : ‘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.’ (The German Ideology, 1845) Communism as the real movement, this can by no means be interpreted to mean that communism can be witnessed here and now as existing communist relations. Such relations are completely incompatible with capitalist society. Communism as the real movement has to mean, rather, that it can be deduced from the “the premises now in existence”, from really existing class struggle. And since class struggle has changed – indeed the whole world has changed – the revolutionary perspective necessarily has to look different today. We must honestly ask ourselves what sort of revolution can be imagined from how the world is today.

It is always hazardous to speak of the future, but the risks are smaller when we are discussing the near future. Let us therefore sketch out the following scenario: the crisis has deepened and enormous quantities of capital have been lost. The capitalist class desperately has to increase exploitation in order to restart accumulation anew. The proletariat is resisting and after a while the situation arises, somewhere, where none of the classes can yield, which leads to enormous disturbances in society. The wage loss due to strikes and unemployment along with a currency crisis then creates an acute need for all sorts of provisions at the same time as one can no longer pay for these. The movement thus enters a new phase, when the proletarians stop paying the rent, electricity, water, and start to break into warehouses, occupy farm lands and so on, in short when they take what they need. Now, these encroachments on property rights are not the appropriation of the means of production and of existence; these do not pass over to the workers to become their property. Instead they cease to be property – they become communised. In the struggle against capital, the proletarians are strengthened and united by making themselves independent of working for money; class unity appears thus in the process of the dissolution of classes – in communisation. To concretely abolish themselves as proletarians is going to be the most difficult thing in the world, but is at the same time the ultimate weapon in the class struggle. With its communising measures the proletariat combats efficiently the class enemy by destroying all the conditions which constantly recreate the proletariat as a class. In the end, the proletariat can only fend off capital by negating itself as a value-creating class and at the same time – in one and the same process – producing completely new lives that are incompatible with the reproduction of capital.

Since the communisation process is characterised by the abolition of all social classes, including the proletariat, it leads – if it is completed – to an end of class struggle. It would be a big mistake, however, to imagine this process as one of gradually diminishing class antagonism, concurrently with communist relations pushing aside the capitalist ones. Communisation is a rupture with the everyday class struggle in that it is no longer any kind of defence of labour. Still, it is from the beginning to the end a class practice. (From having struggled to exist one now struggles for not having to exist.) Communisation is thus not an alternative way of life; it won’t be a social experiment of free individuals. Communisation is on the whole not a free choice but again an immediate need in a certain situation, a task which the proletarians impose on themselves, compelled by material conditions, when their situation has become unbearable and incompatible with the accumulation of capital. It is only the struggle with capital which can drive the proletariat to the point where it is compelled to smash the State, abolish capital and itself, in order to escape from its situation. Communisation should thus not be seen as a strategy or a method that can be chosen in an abundance of others, as if the proletariat had been standing in front of a smörgåsbord of possible revolutionary solutions. When we speak of revolution it is instead as material necessity, and the object of theory is to define this necessity: the conditions for the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. Only an analysis of the existing contradictory relation, of the conditions of its reproduction and of its non-reproduction, as well as a careful and detailed analysis of the ‘empirical’ class struggles that we witness and take part in today, can contribute to this being anything but a pious hope or pure speculation.

There are those who maintain that communism is necessary now: ‘To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.’ This you can read in The Coming Insurrection, a book which has attracted much attention recently. This is not theory, however, but rhetoric and propaganda. It is a call for action, just like the authors’ previous book Call. What is assumed here (if not explicitly) is that the objective conditions of the revolution are ready, or rather overripe, and that now only a subjective condition is needed which can smash ‘a dying social system [that] has no other justification to its arbitrary nature but its absurd determination – its senile determination – to simply linger on…’ (Call, p. 4.) We do not conceive of the revolution as the coincidence of objective and subjective conditions. Revolution, communisation, is actually not a necessity here and now, for we can still not witness it. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be necessary tomorrow! It is easy to become impatient when one sees where the world is heading, and we may all feel trapped inside an ‘absurd determinism’. The law of determinacy is inexorable however; never can we act in a way which makes ourselves independent from this determinism. But as a part of determinism, as necessarily determined by class antagonism, we can act in accordance with what we are – against what we have been – and as a class abolish all classes, when we are one day brought face to face with this awful task.
Peter Åström, March 2011

A reply to critics
The above text was discussed at the editorial meeting of Sic in July 2011, in which it was subjected to various criticisms.

The main criticism was that, in its attempt to respond to various voluntarist views, the text goes too far in the opposite direction and puts a too strong emphasis on the proletarians being compelled to act in a certain way. Communisation, it was argued, cannot be understood as a last resort solution imposed on the proletarians.
Another point of criticism put forward was that the text lacks a positive dimension, that it grasps only the negative side of the revolutionary process and thus neglects that communisation is a production of new relations between individuals replacing capitalist social relations.

To respond to the first point, I must agree that the text can give the impression of saying that the revolution is a mechanical process when it so strongly emphasises that communisation won’t be a free choice and that we will instead be compelled by the material conditions at hand. In my conception, however, the will and the acting is not absent in the revolutionary process but that is something which is only implied in the text. When I say that we are ourselves a ‘part of determinism’ and that we are ‘necessarily determined by class antagonism’ I mean that

• we do have a part to play, that we are in fact determining the course of events by acting, but that
• we cannot act independently from the determinacy of the class contradiction, i.e. the material conditions.

Making the revolution is not a free choice because we can only act within a certain framework, within the context of a general crisis (also produced by class struggle). Communisation is the revolutionary answer of our time to such a crisis. The text does not deal with the various counter-revolutionary answers that will also be presented and all the “struggles within the struggle against capital” that we can expect (see B.L., ‘The suspended step of communisation’). The proletarians will never be compelled to produce communism because of material impoverishment alone. In the face of deteriorating conditions, however, we can assume a re-emergence of the communist movement that will take the form of concrete actions and projects made up of individuals with minds and wants. These individuals (our future selves?) could then take on the task of abolishing capital/producing communism. I’m not saying that we should sit and do nothing until then but it isn’t enough to state that capitalism ‘obviously’ needs to be destroyed and then just do it. As Marx said: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances…’ (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852).

The second criticism I find harder to understand. The text focuses on the need to attack and negate the capitalist categories but it also states clearly that the class enemy can only be defeated by ‘producing completely new lives that are incompatible with the reproduction of capital’. What those lives might be is not developed in the text, simply because I don’t know. All I know is that it is going to be a bloody mess.

• 1This text was first published in riff-raff no. 9, 2011.
• 2Only after the height of the storm had passed did the Swedish finance minister dare to speak directly : ‘This I have never said so clearly before, but the truth is that Sweden was in very, very big trouble in 2009, virtually over the edge’ – Anders Borg, January 19, 2011.
• 3Cf. Screamin’ Alice, ‘The breakdown of a relationship ? Reflections on the crisis’, October 2008 http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/15.

I. The restructuring of capital and the present form of the capital relation
The historical development of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital under real subsumption has led, today, to the period of crisis of the increasingly, and at an ever accelerated rate, internationalised capital relation. The current form of the capital relation and its crisis have been produced by the restructuring that followed the 1973 crisis. The main points of the analysis of the current capital relation are : a) The capital relation has been restructured at all levels. The restructuring was the “response” to the fall in the rate of profit after 1964 (first in the US). This was at the same time a counter-revolution, that is, a counter-attack by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Its results were the end of the workers’ movement, the end of national and regional constraints in both the circulation of capital and the reproduction of the working class, and the end of state capitalism. b) An essential element of the restructuring was the accelerated internationalisation of capital since 1989. c) After 1982, more and more capital has been “invested” in the financial sphere.

Restructured capitalism has integrated the attack against the value of labour power as a functional, structural and permanent feature. The process of the current period (after 1973) can never be completed.

Capital is not an opposition, but a contradiction of classes. The working class is not an autonomous subject, independent from the production of value. The characteristics of the restructuring are at the same time the cycle of struggles inside and against restructured capitalism (a cycle that now has produced struggles occurring mainly outside the value production process in the “West”, food riots in poor states and wild strikes in Asia). Regarding the present, we can speak of struggles related to the challenged reproduction of the proletariat being questioned by the restructuring itself. The fact that the struggles of the current cycle (restructuring) do not constitute a political project is a structural feature of the historical process that defines the content of the coming revolution of our period. The current focal point is a point of crisis in the reproduction of the capital relation (financial crisis turning into debt crisis, which turns into currency crisis or state sovereignty crisis, etc…). Capital is obliged today to impose the second phase of the restructuring that started in the 1980s.

a. The contradiction of the restructuring: A solution to the “1973 crisis” and the bearer of the current crisis.
The restructuring is a never ending process because its end would be a contradiction in its own terms itself: capital without proletariat. It is a process of the “liquidation of the working class”. The trend of this phase of real subsumption is the transformation of the working class from a collective subject which deals with the capitalist class into a sum of individualised proletarians, everyone of whom is related individually to capital, without the intervention of a worker identity and workers’ organisations that would make of the working class a recognised “social partner”, which is accepted to participate at the table of collective bargaining. It is a process of continuous fragmentation of the working class, which over time, has expelled a big part of the proletariat from the value production process. Further, this process has no end as the end point would be the production of surplus value without variable capital, it would be capital without the proletariat. This process is expressed as a continuous need of the already restructured capital to keep restructuring itself.

The contradictory nature of this process leads some fractions of capital and of the proletarian movement to conceptualise the whole present period as a crisis of Keynesianism, something related to the conceptualisation of revolution as a development of the revindicative class struggles and of the recomposition of the class as a class for itself. What made Keynesianism successful was at the same time its limit that produced the crisis of the late 1960s.The wage-productivity link set the wage demand as the central issue of class struggle. Another aspect of the same process was the tendency of the organic composition of capital to increase (which is also a fetishised expression of class struggle within real subsumption). The development of these trends, on which the accumulation of capital was based in the years following the Second World War, eventually led to the wave of struggles of “1968” and the “crisis of 1973”. Capital then had to be restructured in order to increase the rate of exploitation and to reduce, or at least delay, the inevitable impact of the increasing organic composition on the rate of profit. “Keynesian” features of accumulation had to be modified, and this modification was the content of the restructuring at its beginning. A prominent aspect of restructuring as it evolved was the decomposition of the up to then officially accepted workers movement (of course, “accepted” following the historical production of class struggle).

b. Dynamics and limits of the current model of accumulation: the main dimensions of the restructuring.
The restructuring was certainly successful. The rise in the rate of exploitation of labour worldwide was the result of the attack against the working class in the developed countries and of the advancing internationalisation of capital, namely the intensive exploitation of labour power in (or coming from) the less developed states. Savings in constant capital were achieved through the generalisation of just-in-time production and the degradation of the rigid fordist assembly line. In this new period of real subsumption, every aspect of the capital relation has been transformed, and this transformation is manifested in the development of the current cycle of struggles: struggles by the unemployed, struggles in the education industry, the anti-globalisation movement, the direct action movement, struggles over wages in the centers of accumulation in the East, struggles against the expropriation of common lands in Asia. These struggles are not a result of the restructuring, but rather an integral part of it and ultimately are the restructuring of class struggle itself. The restructuring, as a deepening of real subsumption and an acceleration of the internationalisation of capital, has moved the epicentre of conflict to the field of the reproduction of the capital relation. The content of the successful restructuring was also responsible for the course of the model of accumulation it produced towards the current crisis.

The first dimension of the restructuring has been the increasing decomposition of solid sections of the proletariat which had formed the massive labour movement of the Keynesian era. This dimension has been achieved through: a) the unceasing transformation of the technical composition of capital through information and communication technologies, which allowed the disintegration of the vertically structured production process, and therefore the dissolution of the ‘mass worker’; b) the unceasing transformation of the labour process, which allowed the gradual imposition of negotiating labour power at an individual level and thus an individualised control over employees by bosses; c) the increasing number of reproductive activities moved away from the state to the private capitalist sphere, i.e. the reduction of indirect wage, something that resulted in a large increase in the number of women in the ranks of wage-labourers, and d) the increasing importance of repression in the social reproduction of capital.

Point c) has transformed the gender relation to a large extent and eroded the nuclear family, and has therefore unsettled the internal hierarchies and balances within the proletariat. This element has changed significantly the inter-individual relations within the proletariat. The position of the bearer of the reproductive social role (which mostly applies to women, but not exclusively at the present moment) has become even worse in the period of the restructuring of capital. Within the dialectics of “letting women to become workers and at the same time forcing women to become workers” the most important is the second aspect. As the nuclear family erodes more and more, the burden on women is duplicated. More and more they tend to possess a reproductive and a productive role at the same time. The restructuring has increased the questioning of women’s reproductive role and made the identification of the destruction of gender relations with the destruction of exploitation inevitable. This dynamic is the historical production of the limits of all kinds of feminism, which, despite the fact that they are right to criticise the capitalist gender relations, as long as they remain feminist and do not overcome themselves (an overcoming that can be produced as rupture within the struggles), are unable to really address the gender issue in its totality.

The second dimension of the restructuring has been the ever increasing internationalisation of capital. Up to 1989, the internationalisation (the proportion of international trade to overall trade), had to do mainly with the relocation of production from developed to “developing” states of the western part of the planet and the states of East Asia, except China (and flows of migrant workers to the ex-centers of production). Then, with the end of state capitalism, the process of internationalisation systematically expanded to the former “Eastern bloc” and China. This process is inextricably linked to the development of financial capital, which is the branch of capital that defines the internationalisation processes and monitors the level of profitability, in order for capital to be circulated and invested in the assumingly most profitable way. It is reasonable then that the development and restructuring of this sector of capital, together with fluctuating exchange rates and a huge increase in circulating money, have enabled more and more fractions of the capitalist class to make profits through financial speculation.

Both these features of the restructuring (fragmentation of the working class at all levels and internationalisation through the development of financial capital) have allowed capital to overcome the great crisis of the 1970s. Both were also key elements of the accumulation process which led to the present crisis:

The transformation of the labour process and the rapid changes in the technical composition of capital have led to a relative (and eventually absolute) decline in wages in the developed countries. The advancing integration of the reproduction of the working class into capital has led to an increased demand for services on the part of the proletariat (health, education, etc.), which could not be met efficiently by capital because of the inherent limits of productivity in the service sector. Only in this sense can one say that a distance is created between “social needs” and capitalist development.

The imposition of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) resulted in an influx of low-cost labour from non-developed countries to developed ones. The result of this was an accelerated creation of a surplus population (“surplus” from the perspective of capital) across the planet. At the same time, this surplus population has been forced to reproduce itself through the informal economy. Thus, “Third World” areas emerged in the metropolitan centers of the “First World”, and Western-like development zones emerged in “developing countries”. The global squeezing of the middle strata of the proletariat and the exclusion of those who belong to the lower ones, however, are increasingly turning cities into spaces of explosive contradictions.

Already by the mid-1990s, it was obvious that the features responsible for the dynamism of accumulation undermined it at the same time. In 1997, the crisis in Asia extended to Russia through disruptions in the oil market and then led to the collapse of Long Term Capital Management (the first collapse of a colossal fund). The crisis in Southeastern Asia showed that the rate of exploitation in these centers of accumulation was no longer high enough for the expanded reproduction of global capital to take place and accelerated the massive transfer of production facilities to China. The dotcom crash was the ostensibly final attempt of massive investment in the expectation of sustaining profitability through savings in constant capital. After 2001, what gradually became the case was that the reproduction of the working class was only possible by supplementing the decreasing wage with loans. An important part of the proletarians, in order to maintain their former level of reproduction, have been individually indebted to banks, whilst the future of their collective reproduction was also found mortgaged by pension funds (which are “institutional investors”) being led into heavy financial games (CDSs). Wage ceased to be the only measure of the level of reproduction of the working class, i.e. the latter tended to get disconnected from the wage.

c. Too big to fail is also too big to move on: The reproduction crisis of total social capital and its effort to impose the second phase of the restructuring
Capital, through its mobility and its continuous effort to optimise the valorisation process with complex measurements and calculating models, tries desperately to avoid, as far as possible, negotiating with the proletariat over the price of labour power. Labour power is now seen just as an expense and is not considered as a factor of growth through, for example, the expansion of the market. In an increasingly globalised capitalism, each national or regional fraction of the proletariat tends to be viewed as part of the global proletariat, absolutely interchangeable with any other part. The very existence of the proletariat is seen as an unavoidable evil. Since capital is nothing but value in motion and its expanded reproduction depends on surplus value that can be extracted only from the exploitation of labour, this tendency is an impasse, now defined as surplus proletarian population at a global level. Capital tends to reduce the price of labour power, a trend that points to the homogenisation of this price internationally (of course the necessary zoning of capital acts also as a strong counter-tendency that is going to, at the least, retard this process). Productivity tends to be fully decoupled from wages and valorisation of capital tends to be disconnected from the reproduction of the proletariat, but, on the other hand, through the deepening of real subsumption, capital tends to become the unique horizon of this reproduction. Capital gets rid of labour but at the same time labour power can only be reproduced within capital. The explosion of this contradiction in the crisis of the current phase of restructuring produces the need for a new (second) phase of the restructuring of capital and shapes the dialectics between limits and dynamics of the current class struggle.

The solution to this situation (from the viewpoint of capital) defines the beginning of a new attack against the proletariat. If this crisis is temporarily resolved, it will be remembered as the first step towards the second phase of the restructuring of contemporary capitalism (assuming that the first phase of the restructuring was the period from the late 70s to the present). The financial crisis will soon take the form of a crisis of national sovereignty, and in this development a tendency of a “Capitalist International” being autonomised is prefigured. The national state, as a basic reproductive mechanism of capital, is in severe crisis. Its results point to the crystallisation of new forms of international mechanisms that will take full control of the flows of migrant labour power in an effort of a new division of labour. These mechanisms will also try to manage the already existing but now accelerated process of the changing relation between absolute and relative surplus value extraction, which is necessary for capital. Furthermore, an effort will be made to impose on the majority of the proletariat a perpetual rotation between unemployment and precarious employment as well as the generalisation of informal labour, as well as to coordinate the transition to a repression based reproduction of the overabundant proletariat. This process will be an effort to accelerate the globalisation and more importantly its zoning, not only in terms of international trade but mainly in terms of a controlled circulation of labor power. By the imposition of the current new austerity measures (a deepening of the restructuring), which is at stake in the current class struggle in Europe, the international circuit of a rapidly circulating capital can continue to exist in this form as far as it can be supplied by national and/or sub-national zones, where more and more repression will be required for the reproduction of capital. More and more capital will be transferred to the financial sector ; more and more capital will be concentrated in this form ; more and more speculation will be produced. The production process will be sidestepped in order for the – necessary today, but considerably painful – depreciation of financial capital to be postponed or take place smoothly. The situation that will possibly be created by this development is far from stable, as it is ultimately based heavily on the extraction of absolute surplus value, which has also absolute limits. It will be more local-crisis-based than the current phase and will eventually lead to a more intense global crisis than the current one.

On the other hand, there is a possibility that the current crisis, in its development, can lead to severe inter-capitalist conflicts which may even result in the collapse of international trade and an effort to return to national currencies and protectionism. For such an important transformation to take place, a massive devaluation of capital is necessary, meaning elimination of a large part of financial capital.

Through this set of measures, which seems to be more or less on the agenda for most European countries, Greece is the first stop in the capitalist strategy of imposing the second phase of the restructuring. The fact that a minority of the precarious proletariat revolted during December 2008 makes the selected space and time for the beginning of a worldwide attack very risky. The risk manifested itself directly in the protests of May 5, 2010, which were an indication that the attempt to impose the second phase of the restructuring is likely to be conflictive and could lead to rebellion.

d. The crisis of the wage relation
The current crisis is an existential crisis of labour, normally manifested as a crisis of the labour contract. The “crisis of the labour contract” will become an overall crisis of waged labour through the structural tendency of wage demands to be delegitimised. The continuous reduction in wages, the generalisation of precariousness and the creation of a part of the proletariat that is constantly expelled from the value production process define the scope of defensive demands. This fact, coupled with a decrease in the percentage of the available workforce mobilised by capital, defines the content of the crisis of the wage relation as a crisis of reproduction of the proletariat, therefore a crisis of reproduction of the capital relation.

The effort to impose the second phase of the restructuring is in fact a declaration of war by global capital against the global proletariat, starting from Europe. This is “war by other means”, less intensive than a conventional war, but with better targeting potential. This “war by other means” will put into question the very role of wage labour as a means of reproduction of the global proletariat. Obviously, this process will advance, and will be expressed, in different ways in each country according to its position in the global capitalist hierarchy. However, the convergence of the “war conditions” (thus of class struggle) globally is very important.

In the Keynesian era of capitalist accumulation, public expenditure included the cost of reproducing labour power, i.e. health care, pensions and benefits, education, repression. In restructured capitalism the strategy became the reduction in public expenditure through the privatisation of several public related sectors. Actually, and mainly due to an aging population, but also to the slower imposition of the restructuring in Europe (something related to capitalist zoning), and the growth of insurance/financial capital in U.S., total (government and private) expenditure for health care and pensions increased in all developed countries (The Economist, June 29, 2010). Today, amidst a public debt crisis, all these costs except for repression are delegitimised. There is a constant reduction in indirect wage, and thus the valorisation of capital tends to be disconnected from the reproduction of the proletariat.

The public space in the cities, which is the spatial expression of the worker-citizen’s freedom, tends to disappear because it is considered dangerous in terms of facilitating sudden outbreaks of unrest. The exclusion of the youth from the labour market defines them as a dangerous social category (and as the crisis deepens, this applies to teenagers, as well). Specifically in Greece, such fears are growing within the bourgeoisie : “Also, the government is now aware of the fact that the antisystemic cycles, especially amongst young people, tend to be extended well beyond the limits of the Exarcheia district. A lot of young people are willing to be engaged and participate in highly aggressive groups” (To Vima, daily newspaper, June 27, 2010).

II. Current struggles of the global proletariat
The content of the revolution that is born in each historical period, including that of the current period of restructuring which, by its very nature, can never be consummately restructured, is prefigured in the day-to-day proletarian struggles. This is because struggles are a constitutive element of capitalist relations ; they are the conflict between the poles of the contradiction that continually transforms the contradiction itself (exploitation) Revolution can only be produced from this contradiction, that is, revolution as the radical transformation of capital or its abolition : the overcoming of exploitation. The present day relation of exploitation produces the struggles of a fragmented proletariat, whose reproduction is increasingly precarious. These are the struggles of a proletariat adequate to restructured capitalism.
The day-to-day revindicative struggles in the current historical period are considerably different from struggles in previous historical periods. Proletarian demands do not constitute a revolutionary programme anymore, as was the case until the beginning of the restructuring, during “the period of ‘68”. This is not due to a “subjective weakness” or “lack of consciousness” on the part of the working class.

The current structure of the capital relation is manifested in the fact that the proletariat, in its struggles, faces, even in the few cases where its demands are met, the reality of capital, as it is today: restructuring and intensified internationalisation, precariousness, no worker identity, no common interests, difficulty in the reproduction of life, repression. The fact that proletarian struggles, regardless of their level of militancy, cannot reverse this course and lead to a new type of Keynesian regulation is not a sign of weakness, but a key content of the current structure of the capital relation. The consequence of the above is the production, within the day-to-day struggles, of practices that go beyond their revindicative framework, practices that in the course of the struggle over immediate demands, question demanding itself. Such practices are ruptures produced within important class struggles (i.e. the struggle against CPE in France in 2006, the general strike in the Caribbean in 2009, protests against layoffs in 2009, the student movement in the US in 2009-10, riots in immigration detention centers in Italy in autumn 2009, food riots in Algeria, South Africa, Egypt in recent years, the wage demands riots in Bangladesh, China or Malaysia, land expropriation riots in China) and/or struggles without demands (such as in November 2005 in France and in December 2008 in Greece, spontaneous riots in China). Looking into global class struggle one can see that practices such as those mentioned above are multiplied. In the current cycle of struggles revolution is produced as the overcoming of the limits of this cycle. From the dynamics produced by the multiplication of “ruptures within revindicative struggles”, the working class is being recomposed, not as a class for itself, but as a class against capital and thus against itself as well.

III. Communisation as the historical product of the capital-labour contradiction
Today, we are situated in a period of crisis of restructured capitalism. We are at the point where the struggles over the wage in the centers of accumulation in Asia spread rapidly and the proletariat in the developed capitalist countries is staggering as it is being attacked by the bourgeoisie through the process of imposing the second phase of the restructuring. Developments in the class struggle front in different areas of conflict are always interconnected in a logical-historical way. Today, struggles around reproduction in the developed centers are associated by a feedback process to struggles over wage in the primary centers of accumulation, i.e. the most important aspect of the current zoning of global capital, known as ChinAmerica, tends to be destabilised. This contradictory process of crisis will bring even greater conflicts between proletarians excluded from the production process (already excluded and continues, due to the crisis), proletarians who precariously remain in the production process, and capital, and inter-capitalist conflicts too. The already existing questioning of the proletarian identity will take the form of a direct conflict against capital and there will be (inside the proletarian movement) new attempts to politicise and delimit struggles within capitalist reality. The movement of overcoming capitalist society will find its limits within itself. The limits are the practices of organising a new, alternative society (i.e. a new type of organisation of society based specifically on relations of production) outside or against capital.

A significant feature of the present period is that the capital relation produces repression as a necessity for its reproduction. There lie the power and the limits of the current class struggle. The tendency of social reproduction to take the form of repression creates unavoidably a distance between the poles of the capital relation. The content of the conflict is necessarily related to repression, namely to the most important aspect of the reproduction of a more and more overabundant proletariat. In this conflict, the proletariat will always face its very existence as capital. The power of the struggles will be at the same time their limits. All ideologies and practices of the (proletarian) vanguard, all ideologies and political (proletarian) practices will converge in the anti-repression approach, which creates the possibility of the emergence of another, possibly final, form of reformism of this period.

The most radical and at the same time reformist expression of class struggle today will be direct action practices. Direct action practices that emerged as a radical break within the anti-globalisation movement provided the chance for the identity of the militant proletarian-individual – who belongs to the more and more precarious and/or unemployed proletariat – to become important. Direct action practices manifest themselves in many forms (radical unionism, citizens’ movements, armed struggle), which vary considerably and in most cases coexist in a conflictive way, and are also produced directly, without mediations, by the contemporary contradictory existence of the proletariat.

Direct action today expresses the overcoming of class identities and the production of the individualistic identity of the militant, based on the moral attitude of the potentially defeated struggling proletarian – something quite reasonable, since what is at stake in struggles within restructured capitalism is only the deceleration of the attack carried out by capital. Even “victories” do not create euphoria to anyone. Current reality tends to take the form of widespread repression. This produces the identity of the militant who struggles against all forms of repression, which in fact are the manifestations of the reproduction of the exploitation relation. Radical trade unionism is necessarily orientated towards offering protection against layoffs and ensuring compensations, since demanding significant wage increases is meaningless today (the cases in the centers of accumulation in eastern Asia provide a meaningful exception, since the wage is well below what in developed capitalist states is considered as level of workers’ reproduction). Local citizens’ movements are orientated towards protecting a freedom of movement and communication, against the effort of the state to ghettoise/militarise metropolitan space, and through such actions maintaining the indirect wage (the main ideology of these fractions of the movement is de-growth ideology). These two tendencies will converge in the near future as the crisis develops. The deepening of the crisis will lead to “self reduction practices” and clashes with repression forces in neighborhoods. This is the point of convergence between local movements and radical unionism, the point of convergence between struggles in the production process and those outside it. The self-proclaimed “armed struggle” is orientated towards the alleged punishment of fractions of the bourgeoisie, something like a self-invited protection from over-exploitation. This manifestation of direct action promotes a specific strategy of a military confrontation between small groupings and the State that leads to an absolute impasse.

Those involved in the direct action movement reflect the questioning of the contradictory proletarian situation in their supposed not belonging to the (“passive” and / or “reformist” in their words) class. In this way, what is expressed in their struggles is the marginal point of this period, the point that proletariat has become overabundant. The most assertive parts of the movement call themselves revolutionaries when there is no revolution yet and they find shelter in the concept of “consciousness” (the discourse about the need for the consciousness of the individual to be “changed fundamentally”) in order to avoid this contradiction. They build immediate (comradely) relations in their struggles while they make an ideology out of these relations – namely “revolution now” – ignoring the fact that communism is not a local issue or an issue for a small group of people. They more or less tend to face workers who still have a (relatively) stable job as “privileged”, or even as “the real working class with its petit-bourgeois consciousness”. They also tend to think of themselves as individuals who do not belong organically to the class because they are precarious or unemployed. The other side of the same coin is that radical unionist fractions tend to face precarious workers as the social subject that must unite as a “class for itself”, and comprehend their actions as efforts towards this class unity.

The overcoming will be produced from the current limits. The questioning of the proletarian condition by the direct action practices (which is manifested as a contradiction, of course) prefigures its overcoming inside the proletarian struggle itself: the future abolition of the proletariat as a class. This is why the practices of the direct action movement are adopted in the ruptures which emerge inside current struggles; this is why the practices of direct action were adopted and overcome by the rioters on December 2008. Of course the current struggles are still inside the limits of the current cycle, but the specific production of this limit (demand to continue to exist, without putting into question the production relations) prefigures the dynamics of its overcoming. The only way class struggle can overcome itself is the production of multiple rupture practices in the development of the unavoidably reformist struggles. The multiplication of rupture practices will be produced within these struggles. These practices will necessarily advance the struggles, which will necessarily be struggles for the reproduction of life against capital. Any effort to “unify” the different struggles of fractions of the proletariat in the common struggle that would support the supposed common interests of the class (any effort for the class unity) is a manifestation of the general limit of the current dynamics of class struggle. The only generalisation that can be produced is a generalisation of practices which will put any possible stabilising of a “proletarian success” into question. These practices (struggles inside the struggles), through their diversity and the intense conflicts that they will produce inside the struggles, will exacerbate the crisis which proletarian reproduction is already in, and will simultaneously question the proletarian condition for the whole of the proletariat, i.e. the existence of capitalist society itself.

On the desperate struggles in France

After a short wave at the beginning of the century, instances of proletarians taking their bosses hostage or threatening to blow up their factories reappeared in 2009, and have since become something of a trend. We can now count as many as twenty cases since the beginning of 2010.

What took place at Siemens is quite representative of the context in which such struggles emerge. In September 2009, the management of this metallurgical engineering company announced 470 redundancies at the Montbrisson site and the outright closure of the Saint-Chamond site. In keeping with an agreement signed on February 12 the trade-unions prepared a counter-proposal to save jobs, but the negotiations came to nothing. ‘The management no longer listens,’ one employee noted. The workers then organised demonstrations, blocked the motorways, and went on strike at the Montbrisson site, but these efforts were fruitless. Then on Monday March 1 2010, the employees at the site of Saint-Chamond took two of the group’s executives hostage in order to force the resumption of negotiations. The employees announced the actions were ‘mandated by all of the staff’, in response to ‘the blockage of all negotiations’. Reached by telephone the executives taken hostage described their situation in the following manner: ‘[The employees] have let us know that we are going to be held as long as there is no progress in negotiations, especially over the increase in compensation beyond the legal minimum for those who have been discharged.’ After being locked up for one night they were released and the following day an agreement with management was reached. It confirmed the closure of one of the sites, reduced the number of jobs to be cut and accepted an increase in compensation from 35,000 to 45,000 euros.

Cases of threats to blow up factories have also been repeated in 2010, following the example of New Fabris the year before, a struggle which enabled the employees to receive a compensation over the legal minimum of 12,000 euros. This method was used in 2010 at Sodimatex, an automotive equipment manufacturer, and the same month also at the Brodard Graphique printing house and at Poly Implant Prothèse, a manufacturer of breast implants, where on April 12 2010 the employees threatened to set the premises on fire. Eric Mariaccia, a representative of the CFDT union, stated the following: ‘We have made Molotov cocktails and placed highly flammable products at the site’s entrance.’ The workers also spilled several thousand prostheses in front of the site and set fire to tyres.

Even though the usage of such methods seems unthinkable in other Western countries, in France they are considered acceptable by a large proportion of the population.^[1] Abroad, such occurrences are regarded as an expression of a ‘certain French mentality’ and a tradition of revolt that can be traced as far back as the revolution of 1789. If the stupidity of such a view is obvious, the reasons behind such a specificity cannot be explained without both a study of the concrete cases – the most recent ones as well as those before – and also an analysis of the development of the mediations between the classes that were established in France after the end of the Second World War.

The questions that we seek to respond to by going through these moments are: Why do these forms of illegal struggles reappear today? why in France? and why only in the context of a redundancy plan?

Illegal struggles in France

While cases of bossnapping or physical violence against employers can be traced back to the Popular Front of 1936, they are very unusual in the boom years from the end of the Second World War to the years immediately preceding May 1968. In the few examples that do occur in this period, such as at Peugeot Sochaux in 1961 (the employer manhandled), or in 1967 (bossnapping), we do not find any that are due to the closure of a factory. These forms of action were taken with a view to obtaining better working conditions and wage increases.^[2]

In May 1968 we see the first appearance of a wave of bossnappings (there are no less than eleven cases from the 14th to the 20th) and they also mark the beginning of the 1970s. But as the economic situation in France was still relatively sound, at least until the oil shock of 1973, bossnappings were then still primarily used in order to obtain higher wages. In 1971 at the Egelec-Somarel factory, the employees detained two bosses in the factory and kept them there for 24 hours with the aim of increasing their wages by 50 cents an hour. At Flixecourt, in the Somme, the employees held captive the personnel director and four executives to achieve wage increases and retirement at 60 years. In the company Le Joint Français, in Saint Brieux, three managers were held for 24 hours. The workers demanded a wage increase of 40 cents an hour and a thirteenth month. The actions by Maoist groups implanted in the factories in this period also favoured the choice of this type of action as they were sometimes carried out only by these groups. (In 1972 a boss at Renault was held hostage by members of the Gauche Prolétarienne.) What is certain is that these actions are difficult to compare with the ‘desperate struggles’ that appeared in the steel industry at the end of the same decade.^[3]

It is only in the 1970s, when mass unemployment became a reality throughout the country, that bossnappings became a form of action specific to struggles around factory closures. In this period very violent struggles broke out. They often persisted for a long time, gathered a large number of workers in whole regions, and were supported by actions of solidarity from further afield.

At the end of the 1970s a European agreement on the restructuring of the steel industry threatened hundreds of jobs in the region of Lorraine. In this context, in January 1979, at a factory in the city of Longwy, 300 of the 1,800 employees took the manager and two executives hostage at the time of a meeting deciding on layoffs. When the police intervened to free the manager, the steel workers responded by attacking the city’s police station. Their struggle went on for five months, making use of a variety of means of action (strike, free radio, destruction of material…) and mobilising throughout the whole region. After this the workers obtained, among other things, an early retirement at fifty years with 84 to 90 per cent of the salary.^[4]

At Pointe de Givet on 9 July 1982, workers held the manager hostage for 48 hours to protest against the closure of the factory at Chiers in Vireux, in the Ardennes. The workers’ struggle lasted for almost two years, in conjunction with a struggle against a nuclear facility in the region. Violent clashes with the police took place every month (involving Molotov cocktails, and even gunshots) as well as violent actions: the burning down of the managers’ mansion, occupation of banks, the public treasury looted. After many years of struggle the workers obtained a ‘historical’ severance package that allowed some to keep their salaries for ten years.^[5]

After 1982, for almost twenty years bossnappings and threats of destroying workplaces were almost nonexistent. This explains the great surprise that the actions taken by the workers at Cellatex and Moulinex caused in the early 2000s.

In July 2000, the closure of the Cellatex factory in Givet (the Ardennes) inaugurated the return of violent social conflicts. After the company went into liquidation the workers occupied the factory. Negotiations were then held with the state. When on 17 July the prefect of the Ardennes region announced his offer of economic compensation the reaction was violent: during the evening, the workers poured 5,000 litres of sulphuric acid into the nearby river, and within the building there was still 47,000 litres that they threatened to use at any moment. The offer that was proposed to them was 2,500 francs instead of 1,500 (the legal minimum). Shortly before midnight the prefecture announced that there would be a new meeting for negotiations and asked that the workers cease their actions. In the end the workers obtained a compensation of 80,000 francs, far above the legal minimum (on average one year of minimum wage).^[6]

On 19 November 2001, after two months of occupying the factory (which was to be closed permanently with more than 1,100 layoffs), the workers at Cormelle, one of the sites of the company Moulinex, took extraordinary measures to attract attention to their situation. Since 11 September a banner had been hung on the factory wall saying ‘No to the closure – money or boom’. Now the workers tried to prove that they were not joking. They set fire to a small storage building and started to carry up gas cylinders and cans of sulphuric acid to the roof. Fire-fighters arrived but were at first prevented from entering. A group of female workers holding on to the entry gates started to shout ‘It is burning firemen, it is Moulinex that is burning!’ One of them continued: ‘We warned you, it is exactly two months we have been waiting for something concrete. They easily find money for private clinics. But for us, nothing. After thirty years in this place we earn 6,500 francs and they fire us with 50,000 francs. It is out of the question.’ The police chief then appealed to the workers: ‘Do not burn your factory. Negotiations are underway in Paris. Please be reasonable people.’ A man shouted back: ‘If Paris doesn’t contribute a thing we will in a flash turn to the weapon of sabotage. They will listen to us, the news never speaks of us.’ The next day a new offer was given to the union representatives containing much higher compensation: 80,000 francs for everyone. In the following week an agreement was signed by the major unions. In contrast to Cellatex, the economic compensation varies between 30,000 and 80,000 francs according to seniority.^[7]

However, it is really only in 2009, with the crisis, that we see the reappearance of a veritable wave of bossnappings: 6 cases in March–April 2009, then another 4 cases in June–July 2009. It must be said that the restructuring and plant closures have increased since late 2008. Thus, according to a group in the Ministry of Finance assigned to analysing the crisis, there were between 1 January 2009 and September of the same year 1,662 severance plans in France, compared to 1,049 during the whole of 2008 and 957 in 2007.^[8] In 2010, the bossnappings resumed in January. There was one case that month, 3 in February, more than 4 in March, 4 in April, plus three threats to blow up factories, three bossnappings in May and one in June. The majority of these actions took place in subcontracting firms, and many belong to foreign groups, in which case it is difficult to find an interlocutor. They are all due to redundancy plans or restructuring and take place in areas where the possibilities of finding employment are bleak.

These bossnappings rarely last for more than one night. However, they always lead to a return to negotiations, whatever the final result might be. In general, at the end of the negotiations, the jobs that have been threatened are not saved, but the compensations offered a lot higher than that prescribed by law. The employees at Continental, who, apart from taking their boss hostage also looted the town hall, gained 50,000 euros after their struggle, something which convinced others to make use of their methods. The announcement that this sum was being paid was followed by new bossnappings. The media plays an important role in these conflicts. Often it is the workers who contact them as soon as they have taken a boss hostage, and they express their grievances to them, while management remains silent on the subject. The support of public opinion then forces the state to intervene publicly, and it is often this which forces the representatives of the foreign groups to sit down at the bargaining table.

The cases in which there have been threats to blow up factories have also proved themselves effective, after the example of New Fabris in 2009. On 12 July 2009, the employees at this company, which is specialised in the melting of aluminium for the auto industry and a subcontractor for Renault and PSA, installed gas cylinders at the site and made their intentions very clear: ‘We will blow up everything if we are not granted a plan of compensation of 30,000 euros above the legal minimum.’ Compared to the workers at Rencast, who were in the same situation and destroyed pieces destined for Renault by throwing them into a furnace, the workers at New Fabris threatened to move up a gear. Even though they did not execute this threat, the 366 workers got a severance bonus of 12,000 euros, net, in addition to statutory compensation.

On the other hand, in the context of redundancy plans, attempts of workers to self-manage production have been almost nonexistent. The media has often mentioned the Phillips factory in Dreux, where the employees restarted production ‘under workers’ control’ after learning about the closure of their site, where they produced flat panel displays. However, the TV sets produced in this way were never intended for sale, but to be stored in a warehouse under lock and key for ‘use as bargaining chips’.^[9] Ten days later, the management intervened with bailiffs and threatened with dismissals. The workers then returned the tvs and that was the end of this experiment in ‘self-management’.^[10]

Among those companies affected by violent actions in 2010, there are several sub-contractors for the auto industry (Proma France, Sodimatex, EAK), but also two metallurgical companies (Akers, Siemens); a manufacturer of elevators (Renolift-Meyzieu), of pneumatic utilities for BTP and the industry (Sullair-Europe); a manufacturer of breast implants (Poly Implant Prothèse); a factory of enamelled copper wire (Usine Essex); an industrial bakery (New Society bread); an industrial maintenance company (Isotherma); and a manufacturer of telescopic handlers (Bobcat). Increasingly however the service sector is also affected. This year, to refer only to cases that have appeared in the media, bossnappings have taken place at a surveillance company (Vigimark Surveillance); a bank (Caisse d’Epargne); 4 hospitals (Cochin, Emile-Roux, Henri-Mondor and Foix-Jean Rostand); 2 printing houses (Brodard Graphique and Hélio-Corbeil); and a furniture store (Pier Import). Yvan Lesniak, CEO at Circle Printers, even claims to have been kidnapped seven times in all. This is how he describes the atmosphere that reigned when he tried to announce a lay-off plan: ‘When you during a conflict start to see crosses, coffins, gallows, your portrait hanging from a tree, when a price has been set on your head together with the word “Wanted” and a photo, and you still have to go into the building, you know that you run a risk.’ Even-though the bosses are in general not maltreated, the hostility they are facing is often palpable: ‘They have thrown rotten tomatoes in my face, eggs, I have been spat upon, prevented from sleeping. […] I had to ask for permission to go to the toilet, I’ve been insulted, I came to a place of hatred, of aggressive people.’^[11] Some employers have come to be accompanied by bailiffs during the negotiation meetings, and anti-kidnapping training courses are organised for them by the GIGN (National Gendarmerie Intervention Group)… Yet the majority of the bossnappings and threats to blow up the factory are spontaneous and organised by the workers on the shop-floor. For example, a representative from the CGT union at Caterpillar, Pierre Piccarreta, who played the role of media spokesperson at the beginning of the struggle, was not aware that a bossnapping had begun, and was only informed of it as he was hosting a meeting at another factory. The FO union secretary of the factory said that ‘In any case, during the whole conflict, it was the shop-floor who directed us, who made the decisions.’^[12] For Jean-Claude Ducatte, the founder of the consultancy Epsy and a specialist in business strategy, it is clear that ‘in 9 conflicts out of 10, the unions run behind the employees who let their anger explode.’^[13] And as the grassroots unionists participate in these illegal actions they are clearly dissociating themselves from the line followed by the central trade union. For instance Xavier Mathieu, a CGT delegate at Continental, appeared a lot in the media during the conflict and publicly dismissed Bernard Thibault, the CGT’s general secretary, as ‘riff-raff’ and a ‘parasite’. It must be said that the central unions, whether they are the CGT, CFDT or FO, want to focus on defending jobs rather than the demands for increased compensation and declare that they do not approve of means of action such as bossnappings and threats to blow up plants, even though they do not condemn them in public. During the conflict at New Fabris, Marise Dumas (CGT) declared on the radio station Europe 1: ‘I understand that the employees believe that it is the only way to let themselves be heard. Mostly these are means of action that I would not advise to employees because they lead into dead ends.’

The grassroots unionists, if they do not want to be completely overtaken, are thus obliged to take a critical stance towards their representatives. It has to be said that they have a very hard time proving their legitimacy as in the private sector they have got only 5.2 % of the employees as members. The structures that in other countries allow for this level of conflict to be avoided have limited effectiveness in France, and the basis for this French exception has to be sought in the way the Fordist model developed here after the Second World War.

Fordism and its French specificity

Fordism is a form of the relation of exploitation which has its origin in a greater integration of the reproduction of labour power into the reproduction of capital. This modality rests mainly on the extraction of relative surplus-value, which cannot come about without affecting workers’ consumption. In order to reduce the reproduction cost of the class, and thus the part of necessary labour in relation to surplus labour, the cost of commodities that enter into this reproduction must be decreased, which is accomplished through mass production of these commodities, something made possible by a substantial increase in productivity. Workers can then buy more products, as their costs have been greatly reduced, and an increase in their real wages is made possible even though the share of wages in relation to added value decreases. Moreover, at a time when international competition is limited, the increase in wages has an immediate positive effect on domestic demand, benefiting companies in the same countries, that seek to sell the mass of new products on the market. Wage demands then assume a functional role in the accumulation of capital within a national area.

At this point, such claims can be satisfied by the capitalist class, provided they do not question the new working conditions necessary for a constant increase in productivity. Similarly, the constant revolutions in the labour process can be accepted by workers since their wages rise. Here, collective agreements play a major role in establishing these conditions at a national level.

In the United States collective agreements appear in the interwar period. An important year was 1935 when the Wagner Act was enacted. This law officially recognised the existence and activity of labour unions and forbade employers from harassing workers because of their union membership or their participation in collective action. In subsequent years a number of important gains were made in wages and working conditions. Then a new wave of struggles swept over the country once again after the end of the Second World War with massive strikes in 1945–6. The capitalist class responded to this by pushing through new legislation in 1947 – the Taft-Hartley Act – which curbed the power of the unions. Collective agreements then developed into a more and more centralised and planned form, in step with exigencies of productivity and profitability. The employers were ensured that strikes wouldn’t threaten transformations of the labour process, including transformations that implied an intensification of labour. At the same time general wage guidelines were established for periods long enough to plan future investments – a necessary condition for a steady increase in productivity. Unlike the previous period, before the spreading of collective agreements, in which real wages increased during periods of downturn in accumulation (due to consumer goods deflation), the real wage was now able to move in the same direction as accumulation.^[14]

In Sweden, a few years before and just after the Second World War, new institutional relations appeared that promoted the establishment of central collective agreements. Under the threat of state intervention in labour disputes, which were fierce during the 1920s, LO, the major Swedish trade union confederation, and SAF, the confederation of Swedish enterprises, struck between them a series of agreements, of which the most famous is the Saltsjöbaden Agreement of 1938. This created a unique model of understanding between capital and labour, characterised by very few conflicts, with continuous wage increases for workers and productivity gains for industry. The stability of this relation rested on the fact that employers could count on the centralised union confederation to constrain local wage negotiations so that they did not threaten the profitability of the enterprises, on the basis of a trade union discipline imposed from top to bottom.

By comparison with the Swedish example, where the unions are highly centralised and organise a vast majority of workers, thus being in a position of strength to negotiate agreements covering all workers, the French unions seem to have been in an unfavourable situation in the period after the Second World War. Highly politicised and in competition with each other, they had few members and were relatively poorly represented in firms. Unions and employers were unable to agree on definite procedures for negotiations, so demands by workers could be met only after intense struggles (struggles which sometimes led to the adoption of illegal actions), and as the balance of forces shifted the conflicts could easily reappear. Gains were won by workers after strong grassroots mobilisation, and this constitutes a major specificity of class struggle in France (which does not mean that these gains were greater than those obtained peacefully in other countries). Although collective agreements existed, they initially concerned only the firms signing them and were not extended to the branch level. The failure of the unions to extend these agreements on a national level also explains another peculiarity of the French case: the important role that the state would play in generalising these gains. In 1950, the law of February 11th on collective agreements would give the Minister of Labour the authority to extend the terms from a collective agreement to other branches.^[15] Practically all French firms then fell under a collective agreement irrespective of their activity and size, thus providing French workers with fairly homogeneous conditions. It was also the state that would introduce a guaranteed minimum wage, the SMIG, in 1950, unlike the Scandinavian countries where a floor was guaranteed de facto by the unions without state intervention. Thus in France the state played a central role in ensuring a steady rise in wages and the homogenisation of its effects.

It should be noted that in France too, during this period, claims revolved mainly around the issue of wages. And even when they were accompanied by other demands on working conditions, it was meeting those concerning the wage that allowed for the conflicts to end.^[16]

We have seen that the way class struggle developed during Fordism in France did not exclude a certain form of conflict that sometimes, although rarely, went as far as the use of illegal forms of action, as we showed in the previous section. The use of kidnapping can then be understood as a continuation of how disputes over wages were conducted in France. This type of action thus remains in the repertoire of collective action of the class, even if it loses its marginal character only with the crisis of Fordism.

The crisis of Fordism and the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production

From the mid-1960s onwards, the production of surplus value in its relative form was more and more hampered by its own contradictions. The enormous productivity gains achieved by the introduction of assembly line work were increasingly difficult to match; the extension of mechanisation required ever-increasing investments in fixed capital, implying the need for continued expansion of markets while the risks of depreciation of fixed capital increased. The Taylorised labour process itself ran into technical problems that showed themselves more and more clearly. The intensification of labour and extreme fragmentation of tasks appeared to have a series of negative effects such as difficulties in maintaining a regular pace of work. Nervous exhaustion led to an increase in defective products, accidents and absenteeism. The latter required management to hire excess labour-power to step in where there were gaps since stoppages and delays on the assembly line had repercussions for the whole production process.^[17] More importantly, as the working conditions deteriorated, the presence of a large number of workers gathered in one factory encouraged mounting class struggle at the point of production. After the great waves of struggle of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a restructuring of the organisation of work became necessary to break these workers’ strongholds.

But the restructuring would involve a revolution of the whole capital-

labour relation. In order to overcome the constraints on accumulation that appeared during the crisis of Fordism, the restructuring aimed at eliminating everything which had then become an obstacle to the smooth functioning of the valorisation of capital. It not only dismantled the large factories and work units by the introduction of subcontracting, of a flexible labour market, temporary and part-time jobs – this goes hand in hand with the feminisation of the labour market – which grew at a spectacular rate,^[18] but the very connection between productivity gains and wage increases disappeared. This disconnection resulted from the globalisation of the valorisation of capital and an enormous extension of the international division of labour.^[19]

The illegitimacy of wage demands

From the moment when the valorisation of capital takes place on a global level, the virtuous circle of wage increases and an increase in demand at the national level disappears. ‘Since the coherence of the Fordist mode of regulation lay in the relationship between productivity and distribution in a national context’, in restructured capitalism, the ‘production and distribution of economic value are becoming detached from the territory of origin.’^[20] ‘Because the interests of multinationals no longer coincide with those of their country of origin, collective bargaining ceases to be the pivotal element in the system of national macro-economic regulation.^[21]

The same factors that enable companies in a country like France to move production to countries where labour power is cheaper, imply a strong downward pressure on the wages of workers in the centre, and simultaneously allows an increasing inflow of cheap goods in these countries. The freeze on nominal wages is then partially offset by the fall in cost of the means of subsistence. The share of imported goods in workers’ consumption thus becomes more and more important and the wage level has less and less influence on the demand for domestically produced goods. From now on the wage becomes a simple cost that needs to be reduced to a minimum. When this happens any claim for overall wage increases addressed to capital at the national level becomes impossible to meet, as this would call into question the competitiveness of businesses. Since, in contrast to the Fordist era, such an agreement cannot be made locally and then extended to the rest of the sector, it becomes difficult for a single company to grant a wage increase without losing its competitiveness on the market. The workers who fight for such a wage increase cannot ignore the fact that in so doing the chances increase that the company will relocate or go bankrupt.

The struggles against factory closures are an exception to this rule. In such cases workers no longer have anything to lose, and they can lay claim to a deferred salary in the form of severance pay, without having to worry about the future health of their business. Employees who had been working at firms where bossnappings and other illegal actions would later take place had often initially accepted worsened working conditions and sometimes wage-cuts in the hope that it would prevent the closure of the firm.^[22] But when this closure becomes inevitable the anger at having consented to so much for nothing in return, and the knowledge that one no longer has anything to lose, translate into desperate forms of struggle in which it is clear that the future health of the company is no longer of concern, and that all the promises of retraining will not replace the one thing that remains tangible: hard currency. These struggles have shown themselves to be successful, since the employees concerned receive benefits far beyond those stipulated by law. Thus, according to Christine Ducros and Jean-Yves Guérin, the employees who resort to such forms of action receive on average four times as much in additional compensation as those who do not. Here, the fractional character of the struggles is not a sign of their inherent weakness but rather what allows them to be successful, because a generalisation would make them unacceptable to the capitalist class.

The conflicts which arose during these struggles, between the grass-roots and the central trade unions, are no repetition of the old opposition between workers who defended their autonomy and trade unions who sought to mediate their interests with the interests of the capitalist class. What the workers want is in fact a resumption of negotiations, and this is also the aim of the grassroots unions who cannot have any role when the employers refuse all negotiations. Taking such illegal forms of action then becomes the only realistic way to resume negotiations. The central trade unions are for their part forced to consider the long term perspectives of employment for the workforce as a whole, but employees who are facing the closure of their work place don’t give a damn about the long term.

There is however just a tiny minority that has resorted to such actions, and although the cases that we discuss here may seem relatively numerous in that they do not occur in other countries, we cannot overlook all the factory closures where these forms of action were never taken. Moreover, even as these forms of action can be described as radical, there is nothing radical in itself in what they demand. And the sums that they have obtained, which seem important only in comparison with the meagre compensation stipulated by law, cannot delay indefinitely a return to the joys of the labour market (but who would hire someone known to have kidnapped his former boss?).

What is interesting in these struggles is thus not the fact that they would constitute the seeds of a new workers’ movement, but rather that they indicate what present-day struggles are confronting in restructured capitalism. Faced with the news that their factory is to be closed down, the workers have not sought to re-initiate production under self-management. Far from considering their workplace as something they would want to reappropriate, they have taken it as a target. Their class belonging no longer forms the basis of a workers’ identity on which one could build a new society. The proletarians cannot escape their class belonging, but in their struggles they experience it as a wall that stands in front of them. Going beyond this limit would mean abolishing oneself as a class while at the same time abolishing all other classes: communisation.

Jeanne Neton and Peter Åström, August 2010

What is at stake?

The ‘indignados’ in Greece

Real democracy and the rise of a new bureaucracy

No flags but the Greek flag

The general strikes

The contradictory dynamics of the movement

What was it all about?

Communisation and communism are things of the future, but we should speak about them in the present – that is the wager of this review. Communisation is prefigured in the present struggles every time the proletariat comes up against its own existence as a class, in its action as a class against capital – i.e. within the relation of exploitation and in the very course of those struggles. Every time that the very existence of the proletariat is produced as something alien to it, as an objective constraint which is externalised in the very existence of capital, and which it confronts in its struggles as a class.

In the course of revolutionary struggle, the abolition of the state, of exchange, of the division of labour, of any kind of property, the extension of free-giving as the unification of human activity – in a word, the abolition of classes – are ‘measures’ that abolish capital, imposed by the very necessities of struggle against the capitalist class. Revolution is communisation; it does not have communism as a project and result, but as its very content. It is the content of the revolution to come that struggles announce – in this cycle of struggles – each time that the very fact of acting as a class appears as an external constraint, a limit to overcome.

The present nature of the capitalist relation

The new centrality of the wage demands; their illegitimacy

Proletarians only find in capital, in their relation to themselves, the divisions of wage labour and exchange. No organisational or political form, no demands, can any longer overcome these divisions. In the very dynamic of capitalist development, demands present themselves as a transaction adequate to the transformation of the relations of exploitation; their legitimacy is founded on the necessary link between transformations of the production process and the conditions of reproduction. The restructuring that determines the form of the capital-labour relation in the present cycle of struggles has swept this necessity away, removing the legitimacy of demands, which was itself founded by the previous cycle. Demands no longer construct a capital relation that would include the ability of the proletariat to find in itself its own basis, its own constitution, its own reality: that is, the reproduction of capital in its historical modalities had been continually confirmed on the basis of a worker identity, but is no longer. The proletariat recognises capital as its reason-for-being, its own existence confronting itself, as the sole necessity of its existence. The proletariat now sees its existence as a class, objectified in the reproduction of capital, as something alien, something it has to put into question.

Now there is a structural entanglement between, on the one hand, being in contradiction with capital (including demands), and on the other hand, putting oneself into question as a class – which is nothing but one’s relation to capital. For the capitalist class, strikes with wage demands are no longer legitimate as it had been in the internal, conflictual and merely national process of accumulation known as ‘Fordism’.

This entanglement between demands on the one hand and putting oneself into question on the other is a characteristic of this cycle of struggles, which is summarised in the fact that class belonging is a general limit of this cycle. One can find this entanglement in a specific manner even in the demand par excellence – wage demands. Demands do not disappear; we have to pay attention to their changing meaning.

With the crisis of the ‘Fordist regime of accumulation’ and its overcoming in the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production during the 70s and 80s, slowly, in the relation between capital and proletariat, wage demands become illegitimate and even ‘outside the system’. In addition to being an essentially conflictual issue, ‘sharing the wealth’ has become taboo.

There is a mistake to avoid, which would be to consider this attack on wages as a linear constant of capitalism getting worse: if capital is value in process and exploitation of work its very definition, the relation between capital and labour, in the whole process of reproduction, is always historically specific. In the previous phase of the capitalist mode of production, exploitation produced its own conditions of realisation – these conditions were at that time optimal from the point of view of the valorisation of capital. That included everything that made the reproduction of the proletariat a determinant of the reproduction of capital itself: public services, the turnover of accumulation in national arenas, creeping inflation ‘erasing’ the indexing of wages, ‘sharing of productivity gains’. From all that, we get a legitimate reconstruction and recognition of the proletariat in the capitalist mode of production as a national interlocutor (both socially and politically), from the point of view of capital. We can only wager on the dynamics of wage struggles (or any other kind of struggles) by thinking that anything can come of them. Wage struggles, as with the others, belong to historical structures in which they are defined, simultaneously with their actors, and from there, the possibility or trajectories of their dynamics.

In restructured capitalism, the reproduction of labour power was subjected to a dual disconnection. One the one hand, disconnection between valorisation of capital and reproduction of labour power and, on the other, disconnection between consumption and wage as income.

The first disconnection appears, first of all, as a geographical zoning of the capitalist mode of production – capitalist hypercenters grouping together the higher functions in the hierarchy of business organisation (finance, high technology, research centers, etc.); secondary zones with activities requiring intermediate technologies, encompassing logistics and commercial distribution, ill-defined zones with peripheral areas devoted to assembly activities, often outsourced; last, crisis zones and ‘social dustbins’ in which a whole informal economy involving legal or illegal products prospers. Although the valorisation of capital is unified through this zoning, the same is not true for the reproduction of labour power. Reproduction occurs in different ways in each of these zones. In the first world: high-wage strata where social risks are privatised intermeshed with fractions of the labour force where certain aspects of Fordism have been preserved and others, increasingly numerous, subjected to a new ‘compromise’. In the second world: regulation through low wages, imposed by strong internal migratory pressure and precarious employment, islands of more or less stable international subcontracting, little or no guarantee for social risks and labour migrations. In the third world: humanitarian aid, all kinds of illicit trade, agricultural survival, regulation by all various mafias and wars on a more or less restricted scale, but also by the revival of local and ethnic solidarities. The disjunction between the unified global valorisation of capital and the reproduction of labour power adequate for that valorisation is total. Between the two, the strictly equivalent reciprocal relationship between mass production and the modalities of reproduction of labour power, which used to define Fordism, has disappeared.

Zoning is a functional determination of capital: sustaining the expansion of the global markets and the planetary extension of available workforce, despite the rupture between the two, outside all necessary relation on the same predetermined area of reproduction (it is for this reason that zoning must be a mise en abimes: at every scale, from the world to the neighbourhood, this three-fold division is reproduced).

The break in a necessary relation between the valorisation of capital and the reproduction of labour-power ruptures the regional or even national delimitation of areas of coherent reproduction. The disjunction produces intertwining and its infinite reproduction. The regions defined as ‘intermediate’ are the most interesting, because it is precisely there that contact is at its most intense. What it’s about is the separation on the one hand of reproduction and circulation of capital, and on the other hand of reproduction and circulation of labour-power.

For the second disconnection: consumption must be stimulated, despite the insufficient growth in wages. Increased levels of indebtedness, supported by policies of low interest-rates, allows ‘household’ expenditure to grow more quickly than income.

In the regime of stock-exchange value, regulation passes through the asset-markets. It is the growth of household riches, accompanied by a growing social inequality, that is the regulator, because it supports the demand that validates the financial rendering of capital. But this growth is not possible without the expansion of credit which increases asset-prices. Tensions in regulation become manifest in financial crises, not through bursts of inflation. The slow progression of the great majority of wage-income, combined with the pressures of deflation on prices exerted by competition between developing countries, restrict the spread of localised inflationary tensions. […] The viability of indebtedness is becoming the focal point of this mode of regulation, whose logic consists in displacing macro-economic risk onto households. […] The entire financial system has adapted [had adapted, one should rather say] to the functioning of an economy in which household debt is the prime source of demand. (Aglietta and Berrebi, Désordre dans le capitalisme mondial, ed. Odile Jacob, pp.56–57, 60, 62).

Such a system of relations between income and consumption can only be founded on huge wage-disparities, and can only reinforce them, but we must not forget that the poor have not been forgotten, as the subprime crisis and the worldwide increase in over-indebtedness have shown. In the succession of financial crises which for the last twenty years or so have regulated the current mode of valorisation of capital, the subprime crisis is the first to have taken as its point of departure not the financial assets that refer to capital investments, but household consumption, and more precisely that of the poorest households. In this respect it is a crisis specifically of the ‘wage’ relation of restructured capitalism.

Caught in the stranglehold of competition that can only reduce prices by reducing wages, in the servitude of debt which has become just as indispensable as income in order to live, the waged have, to cap it all, the chance of being tyrannised at their own cost, since the savings instrumentalised by stock-exchange finance, savings which demand to be repaid without end, are their own.’ (Le Monde diplomatique, March 2008).

About a third of American employees work for companies whose principal shareholder is a pension fund.

The wage-demand currently contains a dynamic that it wasn’t previously able to contain. It is an internal dynamic which comes about as a result of the whole relation between proletariat and capital in the capitalist mode of production such as it has emerged from restructuring and such as it is going into crisis.

The wage is no longer an element of regulation of the whole of capitalism: the reproduction of labour-power is disconnected from the valorisation of capital; income is disconnected from consumption by the massive financial implication of wage-income (debt and pension-funds are becoming a parade towards the exclusion of direct and indirect wage from the mode of regulation); the fragmentation of labour-power is becoming adapted to this regime of wages. Precarity is not only this part of employment that one can stricto sensu qualify as ‘precarious’. Now integrated into every branch, precarity is of course a ‘threat’ to all so-called ‘stable’ jobs. Stable jobs are taking on characteristics of precarity, principally flexibility, mobility, constant availability, subcontracting that makes even the ‘stable’ jobs at small businesses insecure, the way that large companies function according to objectives. The list of symptoms of the plague of precarity affecting formally stable jobs is long.

The wage-demand has changed its meaning. At the summit of the previous cycle of struggles, the operaists saw in the wage-demand the self-valorisation of the workers and the refusal of work as a triumph of ‘social labour’. This content was only the reversal of the importance of labour and of the working class, such as it was defined and confirmed in this first phase of real subsumption, against capital. It wasn’t only a matter of full employment, but was the location that the reproduction of capital had defined for labour in its own reproduction, which defined the capacity for the proletariat to make this location into a weapon against capital.

Of course, the division of the working day into necessary and surplus labour is still determinative of the class struggle. But now, in the struggle over this division it is paradoxically in that which fundamentally defines the proletariat as a class of this mode of production, and nothing other than this, that the fact of its existence as a class becomes for the proletariat the limit of its own struggle as a class, appears practically and conflictingly, in the very relation to capital that defines it as a class. This is currently the central character of the wage-demand in class struggle. In the most trivial path of wage-demand, the proletariat sees its own existence as a class objectify itself as something which is foreign to it to the extent that the capitalist relation itself places it in its breast as something foreign. With the current crisis, the wage-demand has become a contradictory system: essential and disconnected; flattened as income and central as consumption and financial circulation; unified as global social labour-power, and as the same fragmented and zoned.

The crisis

The current crisis must be historically and specifically characterised in its singularity as a crisis of the wage relation. All crises may be seen merely as the falling rate of profit and the form in which they appear considered merely as phenomenological forms that may be ignored in fundamental analysis for lack of ideas about what to do about them. This would be forgetting that the forms in which they appear are the whole of reality and that the essence (the falling rate of profit) is a concept, a reality of thought. The very concept of crisis is unthinkable without the forms in which it appears, it is produced in them and not a ‘true reality’ hidden behind them.

The current crisis broke out because proletarians could no longer repay their loans. It broke out due to the wage relation itself, which formerly founded the financialisation of the capitalist economy: wage cuts required for ‘value creation’; global competition within the work force. The exploitation of the proletariat on a global scale is the hidden face and the condition for the valorisation and reproduction of this capital, which tends toward an absolute degree of abstraction. What changed in the current period was the breadth of the scope within which this pressure was exerted: the benchmark price has become the minimum global price. This implies a drastic reduction or even disappearance of the admissible profit rate differentials. Searching for maximum profit is not new, but wage standards changed with the end of the parallelism between rising productivity and rising wages, as well as the area of perequation [equalisation] within which this pressure is exerted: financiarisation of capital is above all the workers’ defeat by capital. This wage reduction is necessary not only because attempts to maximize surplus labour are a general structural necessity (and always historically specific) of the capitalist mode of production, but in addition specifically because it is the functional condition, in financialised capital, for non-propagation of inflationist tension in a system of accumulation based on a constant supply of liquidity. This functional necessity was what, with the subprime crisis, reappeared within the historical mode of capital accumulation. Now the wage relation is at the core of the current crisis. The current crisis is the beginning of the phase of reversal of the determinations and dynamic of capitalism as it emerged from the restructuring of the 70s and 80s. What is breaking out and turning into obstacles and vehicles of the tendential fall in the rate of profit is precisely what was the system’s dynamic.

All the contradictions become entwined after 2005, leading to the explosion of the current crisis. First the growth of consumption made possible by the growth of debt whilst wages stagnate or grow only marginally; then the growth in fixed investment of companies made possible by the slightly increasing rate of profit after 2002, itself based on the reduction of wages. At the same time there is over-accumulation of capital and over-production of commodities: over-accumulation because of under-consumption; under-consumption because of over-accumulation. Proletarians never consume a portion of surplus value, as is assumed by theories of under-consumption that oppose the decline or stagnation to the realisation of the increased surplus-value which results from it. The secret resides in the fact that too much of the revenue is transformed into constant capital, resulting in massive augmentation of production, while the rate of profit tendentially falls as does the consumption power of society. Workers’ consumption is blocked in relation to increased production, because too much revenue has been transformed into constant capital (at the end of the day the production of means of production can only be in the service of consumption); too much revenue has been transformed into constant capital because the aim of capitalist production is the maximum production of surplus value and the reduction of workers’ consumption. This reduction then blocks the reproduction of capital. The transformation of additional [an increased] surplus value into additional capital is simultaneously blocked, on the one hand by the weak increase in the rate of exploitation that could result from it, and on the other hand by the already attained reduction of workers’ consumption which can only continue through the acceleration of the transformation of revenue into capital.

It is a crisis of the wage relation: as a capacity for the valorisation of capital; capacity of the reproduction of the working class. In order not to leave aside the forms of appearance and to specifically designate the current crisis, it is necessary to unify the theory of crisis.1 We are faced with a crisis in which the identity of over-accumulation and under-consumption is affirmed, a crisis of the wage relation and of the reciprocal implication between labour and capital, a crisis in which the proletariat finds itself confronted against and within the capitalist mode of production by its own existence and action as a class as a limit to be overcome.

Without using the concept of the ‘final crisis of capitalism’, which is theoretically meaningless, we can still interrogate the nature of this crisis: are we faced with the final crisis of this phase of accumulation? We could permit ourselves to reply no. For this crisis is inscribed in two temporalities each possessing a double character, it can find ‘solutions’ within and through the phase of accumulation.

First double temporality: on the one hand, in relation to the long phase of accumulation, this crisis, because it is a crisis of the wage relation, is structural. On the other hand, it is the crisis of a specific configuration in this phase of its wage relation, a specific configuration that is put in place after the Asian crisis of the end of the 90s (to simplify, the Chinese-American configuration).

Second double temporality: on the one hand this is a crisis of a short-term of this phase of accumulation, that of the period 2001–2007. It is thus a crisis of the disconnection between consumption and revenue (financial crisis). On the other hand it is, in the medium term, the crisis of the 1991–2007 period. This medium term begins with the investment boom of the 90s, which ends with a noticeable fall in the rate of profit between the end of 1997 and mid-2001. This leads us to consider the crisis beginning in 2007 as the result of the 2001 crisis, the purging of which was prevented by the encouragement of household debt. It is still possible to justly consider that we are faced with a unique process that occurs in two stages, the organic link between wages and accumulation in this long term phase of capitalism. The crisis of over-accumulation logically develops (at the same time as the process of accumulation is restarted – its contradictory character has no importance when we speak of the capitalist mode of production, which is in essence contradictory) in relation to the structural characteristics of accumulation during a crisis of under-consumption (itself linked to a period of over-accumulation in Asia).

This entanglement of two double temporalities gives us a structural crisis of this phase of accumulation that we specifically qualify as a crisis of the wage relation. But this structural crisis, because of the short and medium term temporalities in which it develops, offers (very limited) possibilities of restructuring internal to the phase. That which is emerging through the crisis of the wage relation and through the modalities of ‘restructuring’ internal to the long period, is a crisis of the creation of money (crisis of the capitalist mode of production having the specific forms of the phase of accumulation characterised by the financialisation of valorisation and the structural monetary modifications initiated in 1971) which, in the crisis of the wage relation in which it is inscribed, becomes a crisis of value.

In its capitalist core (the crisis of surplus value producing labour) a crisis of value can be for the proletariat a struggle against capital, in which it absorbs, against the capitalist class, a large part of society. It is the process of its abolition in the abolition of exchange that all sorts of marginal strata and the not strictly proletarian poor are compelled to exert.

In the most essential way, the present moment can be defined by the relationship and the interpenetration of the crisis of the wage relation and the illegitimacy of wage demands. This explosive connection is at the core of the present moment.

With the current crisis, in the proletariat’s action, the production of class belonging as an external constraint is under preparation, in its most intimate heart, in the wage relation. Demanding and confronting its own existence as a class as the limit of its action are no longer mutually exclusive. In the current wage struggles (wage struggles in the broad sense of struggles over the wage relation over, on the one hand, wage demands and the terms of deferred wages and, on the other, demands concerning work conditions, precariousness and layoffs), demands as such are more and more likely to be destabilised in the very course of the struggle and to produce the organisational forms that correspond to it, without the latter being challenged. Wage demands now become a fertile terrain where the production of class belonging as an external constraint can emerge.

End of the old formalisation of limits: the end of radical democratism, the end of activism

In this cycle of struggles, essentially, acting as the class is the very limit of class struggle. If, as such, this limit remains, its formalisations are subject to change or may even disappear. The explosive connection brings the end of the alternative, whether in the form of activism (the direct action movement) or radical democratism2 (both of which are historically linked).

Radical democratism formalised the limits of the cycle of struggles precisely by making capital the unbreachable horizon of labour; alternative activism autonomised the dynamic of this cycle, making the challenge to the proletarian condition the premise, the condition, of a critique of capital. For both, ‘another world was possible’ compared with or against today’s world.

As for activism, it is the autonomisation of this cycle, with all the necessary ideololgical reformulations that this implies. Challenging class belonging is something to be done in opposition to capital, not intrinsically to the contradiction which is exploitation. In both cases, another life was possible as an alternative.

The distinctions that can be drawn between activism and radical democratism are ideological and practical distinctions, but not between persons, who can cross the permeable borders between those practices and those ideologies. These potential crossovers depend on three factors.

First of all, the subject is identical between all these practices: the isolated individual as he appears on the surface of the bourgeois society. The current strength of such a subject is a matter of the lack of confirmation of a worker identity within the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. But this strength is not only a matter of a lack, it is equally positive, the internal tension of this cycle of struggles which carries it. For radical democratism, this individual is the citizen for whom capital is an unsurpassable horizon. For the direct action movement, it’s the actualised liberation from the class belonging which becomes both the definition of the class (which is non-sense) and the basis for confrontation with capital (positive against positive, there’s no more contradiction).

Second, although they have their real differences, the capital relation is a formal relation for all these practices. Formal in the sense that the relation does not imply the very definition of the subject, which is related to capital, but only the framework in which this subject evolves, struggles and demands. Form of domination, subjection, control, alienation of this subject. That capital could be reduced to a bunch of plotters, masters of the world or would be posed as a global system of domination and negation of our humanity: we are dealing with the same formalism as with the capitalist relations of production. A formalism, which consists of a hypostasis of the question of the State for both of them: a foundation of the capitalist mode of production or a legitimate summary of the society of citizens.

Third, for both of them, the end of the Cold War, a world politically and economically unified ‘under the leadership of the United States and multinational corporations’, the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’ and of all its political and trade-unionist manifestations is their birth certificate.

We understand that even if we cannot call every tendency at work in the big anti-summit mobilisations (from the end of the 90s to the beginning of the 2000s) by the name of radical-democrats, they march in step and even sometimes interpenetrate (black blocks and Cobas in Genoa in spite of serious disputes; material support and infrastructure provided by the Genoa Social Forum; Inpeg planning the place of the black block in Prague, etc.). If we can think that the direct action and the black block movement in Genoa have reached their zenith of expansion and of expression, it is because the dominant tendency of these demonstrations had to split apart from what could have apeard as their radical wing. Radical democratism is the necessary milieu for the existence of the black block; and if it implies the black block as the other pole of the internal tension of this cycle; the black block conversely is neither, for radical democratism, its milieu nor its necessary enemy. This internal tension was only a transitory phase in the course of the current cycle of struggles.

No other world is possible here and now, neither on the basis of labour confirming capital, nor on the basis of its critique as preamble and condition of the abolition of capital. The current crisis, which is specifically a crisis of the wage relation, made all that obsolete.

In the current situation, radical democratism and the autonomisation of the dynamics of this cycle of struggles – that is to say, putting into question its class belonging as something to realise against capital and not as something intrinsic to the contradiction of exploitation – are about to be overtaken. In both cases another life was possible as an alternative.

The ‘activist milieus’ tempted by the (real) alternative and posing questions relative to communism’ that after Seattle became an important determination of this cycle of struggle are 'exits from history'.

* The end of the big anti-summit demos implies their decline at the same time that their intimate connection with radical democratism appears.
* The success in these milieus of theories of a strategy of withdrawal (withdrawing to hideouts, preparing and organising the mythical cuts in the flows of circulation) has confirmed the definitive shift to the alternative.
* During the riots in Greece, this milieu met its intrinsic limit at the very moment when they could no longer be ‘alternativists’ and ‘activists’.
* The violence, which is about to increase, with which the crisis began to strike the ‘16–25’ year olds is going to ‘disalternativise’ the ‘alternative milieu’ for which the transition from posing questions relative to communism to the struggle against capitalism is going to be reversed.
* More importantly: the general strike and the riots in Guadeloupe and Martinique, the struggles against the layoffs and for the wage everywhere mean that wage demands, exploitation in the most trivial sense, is the terrain on which the proletariat’s putting into question of its own definition as a class is prepared.

A page turns. These milieus and their practices could, at a certain moment, indicate the dynamics of the cycle of struggles and the characteristics of communism as this cycle of struggles produces it (under the condition of a theoretical turn). It’s over.

The disappearance of the direct action movement and of the practices of the black block are a matter of the development of immediate struggles in which the appearance of the class belonging as an external constraint is the very point of these struggles, struggles of the proletariat in its implication vis-a-vis capital, and no longer as autonomisation against capital. The milieus tempted by the alternative are no longer anything to speak of. There is no more room in the middle. The activities of these milieus can be matters of discussion and of manifestations of class struggle, but not in the terms in which they understand and interpret themselves and the debate over communisation with this milieu is no longer for us an internal debate.

The current limits: we are nothing outside of the wage relation: the police, discipline

In restructured capitalism, the reproduction of labour power has been the object of a double disconnection. This (see above) constitutes the wage demand as structurally illegitimate in this period of the capitalist mode of production and not only antagonistically to the maximum valorisation of capital. It is for this reason that the wage demand is certainly becoming the terrain on which is prepared the production of the class belonging as an external constraint and this in its very core: the wage relation by which, for the proletariat, its physical and social existence depends on capital.

The expression of this limit will now be double: we are nothing outside the wage relation; this struggle as a class as limit is the police.

For the first, it is a matter of workers’ violence against the decisions of the capitalist class, violence meant to demand capital’s existence for the sake of the working class. If capital ever fancies to no longer exist for the working class, the latter is no longer anything. In order to exist, the working class claims, against capital, the capitalist relation. We are nothing outside the wage relation, this is the limit within class struggle of struggling as a class. It will be a matter of defending in the most fierce way its conditions of existence, not to make a claim for their management. We could see the development of a rank and file unionism on a very vindictive basis but very unstable and with an episodic existence because it cannot develop itself and stabilise in negotiations. Rank and file unionism, very close to every form of self-management, both of which will express and seek to formalise the fact of struggle as class-as-limit.

For the second: the police indicate that we are nothing outside the wage relation. Of course the police is the force which, in the last instance, is our own existence as a class as limit. If the main result of the process of production is the reproduction between proletariat and capital standing face to face, then the fact that of this faceoff comes ipso facto from the first moment of exchange between capital and labour (purchase and sale of labour power) is not obvious. Everywhere the disciplinarisation of the labour power facing proletarians -- made once again poor as proletarians -- is inscribed in the agenda of the capitalist class. Reproduction of this faceoff between labour power and capital has become a matter of discipline.

Exploitation: a game that abolishes its rule

The illegitimacy of wage demands in a crisis which is specifically a crisis of the wage relation constitutes the contradiction of the present moment. It carries all the putting into question of class belonging as limit of the class struggle itself by the activities, yet to come, of struggle as the activity of the proletariat acting as a class – by which all the practical and theoretical equivocation about class struggle are swept away. The definition of the proletariat and of its contradiction with capital thus come back to the center; that is to say, on the one hand, the identity between what makes the proletariat a class of this mode of production and the revolutionary class, and on the other hand, a contradiction which unwinds through this identity is submitted to its own history as the course of the capitalist mode of production. We call it temporal mediation this relation between the definition of the proletariat as situated in the contradiction and the course of the contradiction defining the ability of the proletariat, from its situation in the contradiction, to abolish the whole relation. The temporal mediation is the structure of this contradiction. Temporal mediation is not fundamentally a question of chronology but of a real unwinding and of the understanding of the contradiction between proletariat and capital. Temporal mediation is the concept critical of any kind of revolutionary nature of the proletariat and of any kind of immediatism of communism, of programmatism and of activism. It’s not only outside of the wage relation that we are nothing but outside of the contradiction of the wage relation, which changes everything, and by which everyting can change.

Spotting, promoting the activities of the swerve is the refounding of the question of communisation in the very core of exploitation and of production of surplus value. These pairs – exploitation/alienation, reciprocal implication / domination, classes/individuals, productive labour / ‘diffuse-valorisation’ – are about to become once again the subject of polemics. Posing the temporal mediation as the dividing line is to suppress the ambiguities between the terms of these antinomies. An underestimation, not to say negligence of the subsumption of labour under capital in the process of exploitation, justifies theoretical immediatism (denunciation) and a certain conception of praxis as intervention.

It is important to hold a strict definition of productive labour in order to understand how it is in the game itself and from the game that the abolition of its rule is happening.

A strict definition of productive labour does not mean that only the productive workers are proletarians. Unproductive workers sell their labour power and are exploited in the same way by their capitalist, for whom their degree of exploitation will determine the share of surplus value that he will appropriate. But it is from the strict definition of productive labour that one can deduce that the proletariat is not limited to productive workers. Indeed, first, it is in the very essence of surplus value to exist as profit, including for productive capitals themselves; second, for this very reason it is the whole of the capitalist class which exploits the whole of the working class, as the proletarian belongs to the capitalist class even before he sells himself to this or that boss. However, the global social work that capital creates by appropriation (social labour does not pre-exist in the proletarian or in the whole class before its appropriation) is not a homogeneous mass without distinctions, mediations, and hierarchy. It is not a meaningful totality in which every moment contains all the determinations of the totality. One shouldn’t skip a central problem: if every proletarian has a formally identical relation to his particular capital, whether he is a productive worker or not, he does not have the same relation to social capital (it is not about consciousness but about objective situations). If there was not, at the center of class struggle, the contradiction represented for the capitalist mode of production and for the proletariat by productive labour, we wouldn’t be able to talk about revolution (it would be something exogenous to the mode of production, at best a utopia, at worst nothing).

It is the very mode according to which labour exists socially, that is, valorisation, which is the contradiction between proletariat and capital. As defined by exploitation, the proletariat is in contradiction with the necessary social existence of its labour as capital, that is to say, autonomised value, which can remain as such only by further valorisation: the decrease of the rate of profit is a contradiction between classes. The proletariat is constantly in contradiction with its own definition as a class: the necessity of its reproduction is something it finds facing it, something represented by capital for which it is constantly necessary and always in excess. The proletariat never finds its confirmation in the reproduction of the social relation of which it is nevertheless a necessary pole. It is the contradiction of productive labour: 'Productive labour is only an abbreviated expression for the whole relation, and the manner in which labour capacity and labour figure in the capitalist production process.’ (Marx, 'Results of the Direct Production Process’, in MECW, volume 34, p. 483).

Communism is the contradictory movement of the capitalist mode of production, the process of its nullity. Its overcoming is included as the very content of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital, and thus as the most immediate forms of class struggle. The class does not exist twice, once as reproducer of capital, fighting within the limits of this reproduction, and again as tension towards communism. Through the falling of the rate of profit, exploitation is a constant process in contradiction with its own reproduction: the movement that is exploitation is a contradiction for the social relations of production; it is the content and the movement. Exploitation is the funny game with always the same winner (because it is subsumption); at the same time, and for the same reason, it is a game in contradiction with its own rule and a tension towards the abolition of this rule. In this sense, class struggle is a game that can bring about the abolition of its rule, because in the falling tendency of the rate of profit, that is to say, with the contradiction of productive labour, we no longer deal with a process of ‘capital alone’ but with class struggle.

Productive workers are not, for all that, revolutionaries by nature and permanently. Classes are not collections of individuals; the proletariat and the capitalist class are the social polarisation of the contradiction, which are the fall of the rate of profit or productive labour, which structures the whole of society. The particular relation of productive work to social capital (compared to any other exploited work) does not stabilise itself as the essence of productive workers. However, in the contradiction of productive labour, which structures the whole of society and polarises into contradictory classes, productive labour has a singular situation. In the blockade of the production of value and surplus value, people who live at the core of the conflict of capital as contradiction-in-process do not only ‘blockade’. In their singular action, which is nothing special, but rather only their commitment to the struggle, the contradiction which structures the whole of society as class struggle returns to itself, to its own condition. It is in that way that the class belonging can fall apart and that, in its struggle, the proletariat begins its self-transformation (it depends on all sorts of circumstances and it does not happen every time productive workers are on strike).

If the proletariat does not limit itself to the class of productive workers (those who produce surplus value), it is the contradiction of productive labour which constructs the proletariat. Productive labour (of surplus value, that is to say, capital) is the living and objective contradiction of this mode of production. It is not a nature bound to persons: the same worker can accomplish the productive tasks (as well as some others which are not productive). The productive character of labour can be defined at the level of the collective worker; the same (temporary) worker can pass, from one week to the next, from a productive work to another which is not. But the relation of the whole proletariat to capital is constructed by the contradictory situation of productive labour in the capitalist mode of production. The question is one of knowledge, always historical and conjunctural – how this essential (constitutive) contradiction constructs, in a given moment, class struggle, knowing that it is in the very nature of the capitalist mode of production that this contradiction does not appear clearly: surplus value becoming by definition profit and capital being value in process.

If the revolution could start from the factory, it would not remain there; it would begin its proper task when workers leave the factory in order to abolish it; it will face self-management, autonomy and everything that relates to ‘councilism’. This revolution will be the one of the epoch in which the contradiction between classes situates itself at the level of their reciprocal implication and at the level of their reproduction. And ‘the weakest link’ of this contradiction, that is, exploitation, which links classes to one another, is situated in the moments of social reproduction of labour power, precisely where, far from affirming itself, the definition of the proletariat as the class of productive labour always appears (and more and more in the current shape of reproduction) as contingent and random, not only for each proletarian in particular, but structurally for the class as a whole. But if class struggle remains a movement at the level of reproduction, it will not integrate its own raison-d’être, which is production. The currently recurring limit of all riots and ‘insurrections’ is what defines them as minority struggles. Revolution will have to go into the domain of production to abolish it as a specific moment of the relation between people and to abolish, in the same moment, labour in the abolition of wage labour. That is the key role of productive labour and of those who at a specific moment are the direct bearers of the contradiction because they experience it as necessary and superfluous at the same time in their existence for capital. Objectively, they have the capacity to make of this attack a contradiction for capital itself, to turn the contradiction that is exploitation back on itself as well as against themselves as workers. The way through the abolition of exploitation passes through exploitation itself, as capital, the revolution is still also an objective process.

It is in the process of the revolution that the proper definition of the proletariat as a class of productive workers will appear in the act as limited. The definition of the proletariat is no longer a socio-economic category – and the same holds for the capitalist class – but is rather the polarisation, as activities, of the terms of the contradiction (that is exploitation). This is already for each struggle the criterion that permits one to measure how deeply and how far it shows its own causes.

The swerve: definition, examples

From struggles for demands to revolution there can only be a rupture, a qualitative leap, but this rupture is not a miracle, neither is it the simple realisation on the part of the proletariat that there is nothing else to be done other than making the revolution given the failure of everything else. ‘One solution, revolution’ is nonsense symmetrical to that of the revolutionary dynamic of the struggle for demands. This rupture is produced positively by the unfolding of the cycle of struggles which precedes it and, we can say, is still part of it. This rupture is prefigured in the multiplication of swerves inside the class struggle between on the one hand the calling into question by the proletariat of its own existence as a class in its contradiction with capital and on the other the reproduction of capital which is implied by the very fact of being a class. This swerve is the dynamic of this cycle of struggles which exists in an empirically verifiable manner. Two points encapsulate what is essential in the current cycle of struggles:

* The disappearance of a workers’ identity confirmed in the reproduction of capital, i.e. the end of the workers’ movement and the corresponding bankruptcy of self-organisation and autonomy as a revolutionary perspective;
* With the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production the contradiction between classes takes shape at the level of their respective reproduction. In its contradiction with capital the proletariat calls itself into question.

Struggles for demands display characteristics which were unthinkable thirty years ago. During the struggles in France of December 1995, in the struggle of the undocumented, the unemployed, the Liverpool dockers, Cellatex, Alstom, LU, Marks & Spencer, in the Argentinean social uprising, in the Algerian insurrection, in Greece, in Guadeloupe, etc. any given characteristic of the struggle (public service, demand for labour, defence of the means of labour, rejection of off-shoring, of exclusive financial management, factory appropriation, self-organisation, etc.) appeared in the course of the struggle itself as a limit in that this specific characteristic, which the movement often comes up against in the tensions and confrontations internal to its retreat, always comes down to the very fact of being a class and remaining such, which, contrary to the previous period, can no longer be given a positive content as presaging the affirmation of the class.

Most often, these are not earthshaking declarations or ‘radical’ actions but rather all the practices of the proletariat of flight from or rejection of its own condition. In the current strikes over redundancies workers are no longer demanding that their jobs be saved but severance pay. Against capital, labour has no future. These struggles take on an open character, across workplaces, across companies and across sectors, in relation sometimes with the unemployed in the same employment basin; in terms of its scope, the struggle goes on both within and outside the company. Formerly, in the suicidal struggles at Cellatex, in the strike at Vilvoorde and many others, it became strikingly obvious that the proletariat was nothing separate from capital and that it can only remain this nothing (the fact that the proletariat demands to be reunited with capital doesn’t get rid of the chasm which is opened by the struggle, the recognition and the refusal by the proletariat of itself being this chasm). It’s the de-essentialisation of labour which becomes the very activity of the proletariat both a) tragically, in its struggles without immediate perspectives (suicidal struggles) and in self-destructive activities, and b) as demand for this de-essentialisation, as in the struggles of the unemployed and precarious workers in the winter of 1998. When it appeared that autonomy and self-organisation were no longer anything more than the perspective of nothing, as in the case of the Italian transport strike or the workers at Fiat Melfi, it’s at this moment that the dynamic of the cycle is constituted and the conditions for overcoming struggles for demands are put in place on the basis of struggles for demands themselves. The proletariat is confronted with its own definition as a class which becomes autonomous in relation to it, which becomes foreign to it.

Between December 2002 to January 2003, the ACT strike in Angers (computer equipment subsidiary of Bull) was led concurrently by a trade-union alliance and a strike committee which was ‘broadly open and relatively grass-roots.’ Three production lines were temporarily restarted, which however did not prevent the finished products from being burnt. It’s interesting to take another look at the chronology of events. The factory was occupied following the announcement on the 20th of December of the company’s definitive receivership ‘after multiple manoeuvrings and prevarication.’ The factory was occupied but nobody knows to what end. On the 10th of January the strike committee agreed to take on the production of electronic components for an Italian equipment manufacturer. On the 22nd of January, 200 components were delivered and on the 23rd the occupants burned the components that were in inventory. On the 24th, the occupiers were brutally evicted. In the same period, the Moulinex employees who had been made redundant set fire to a factory building, thus inscribing themselves in the dynamic of this cycle of struggles, which makes the existence of the proletariat as a class the limit of its class action. In China and India, there’s no longer any prospect of passing to a vast workers’ movement from the multiplicity of struggles for demands, whatever form they take, affecting all aspects of life and the reproduction of the working class.

Putting unemployment and precarity at the heart of the wage relation; defining clandestinity as the general situation of labour power; posing the social immediacy of the individual as in the direct action movement as the foundation to produce as the basis of the opposition to capital; engaging in suicidal struggles such as that at Cellatex and others in the spring and summer of 2000 (Metaleurop – with some caveats – Adelshoffen, Société Française Industrielle de Contrôle et d’Equipement, Bertrand Faure, Mossley, Bata, Moulinex, Daewoo-Orion, ACT-ex Bull); reducing class unity to an objectivity constituted in capital and in the multiplicity of collectives and waves of temporary workers’ strikes (France 2003, British postal workers) – all of the above define the content of each of these specific struggles as constitutive of the dynamic of the cycle inside and during these struggles. The revolutionary dynamic of the cycle of struggles which consists in the proletariat’s production of its own existence as a class in capital, thus calling itself into question as a class (it no longer has any self-relation), appears in the majority of current struggles; this dynamic has its intrinsic limit in that which defines it as a dynamic: acting as a class.

Class unity can no longer constitute itself on the basis of the wage condition and struggle for demands, as a precondition of its revolutionary activity. The unity of the proletariat can no longer be anything other than the activity in which it abolishes itself by abolishing all that divides it. It is a fraction of the proletariat which, going beyond the character of its struggle as a struggle for demands, will take communising measures and will then initiate the unification of the proletariat which won’t be different from the unification of humanity, i.e. from its creation as the ensemble of relations which individuals establish between themselves in their singularity.

Abolishing capital is also the self-negation of the worker, and not the worker’s self-organisation as such; it is a movement of abolition of companies, of factories, of production, of exchange (in whatever form).

In Argentina, people self-organise like Mosconi’s unemployed, like Bruckman’s workers, slum-residents…, but in this sort of self-organisation people are confronted immediately by that which they are, which in struggle becomes that which has to be overcome. That self-organisation is a general limit to be overcome is revealed in conflicts between self-organised sectors. What appears in these conflicts is that workers, defending their present situation, remain in the categories of the capitalist mode of production that define them. Unification is impossible without being precisely the abolition of self-organisation, without the possibility that the claimant, the Zanon-worker or the squatter can be claimant, Zanon-worker or squatter. Either there is unification, after which there is the abolition even of what is self-organisable, or there is self-organisation, after which unification is a dream which is lost in the conflicts implied by the diversity of situations.

In the defence of its immediate interests, the proletariat is driven to abolish itself because its activity in the ‘recovered factory’ can no longer shut itself into the ‘recovered factory’, neither in the juxtaposition, co-ordination and unity of ‘recovered factories’, nor in anything that is self-organisable.

In France in November 2005, in the banlieues, the rioters didn’t demand anything. The content of the November revolt was the refutation of the causes of the revolt, the rioters attacked their own condition, they made their target everything that produces and defines them. If it was like this, it doesn’t depend on an imaginary radicalism intrinsic to the ‘hooligans of the banlieues’. This depends on the conjunction of two current factors: on the one hand, the particular situation of this fraction of the proletariat, on the other, the fact that, in general, the demand is not what it once was. The rioters reveal and attack the situation of the proletarian at the moment: globally precarised labour power. That which renders immediately null and void, in the very moment in which such a demand could have been articulated, the desire to be an ‘ordinary proletarian’.

This entanglement between raising demands and calling one-selves into question as proletarians, which is characteristic of this cycle of struggles, and which is summarised in class-belonging as the general limit of this cycle, has been brought to its zenith in the November riots by virtue of the particularity of their participants. The demand has disappeared.

That which in this text is termed the swerve tears every single struggle, but the terms of this swerve can equally be considered as things represented in the different struggles in the same phase of the class-struggle (the November riots and the struggle of tram-workers in Marseilles or the sailors of the SNCM at the same time). It’s all a question of scale.

Three months later, in spring 2006, during the struggle against the CPE, everyone knew what could emerge from the retreat of the CPE: at best, if the trade unionist projects had triumphed, a French flexicurity. Who wanted that? Certainly not the majority of the students, precarious workers and school-students who were on the streets. As a movement of demands, this would nonetheless have been the only result. The anti-CPE movement was a movement of demands for which the satisfaction of their demands would have been unacceptable as a movement of demands. As a movement of demands, the student-movement could only understand itself by becoming the general movement of precarious workers, but then either it would have committed suicide in its specificity, or it could only have been forced to be confronted more or less violently by all those who in the November riots had shown that they refused to serve in the ranks of the masses. Making the demand succeed through its expansion sabotaged the demand. Who was able to believe in the link with the November rioters on the basis of permanent contract for all? On the one hand, this link was objectively inscribed in the genetic code of the movement; on the other hand, the very necessity of this link induced an internal love-hate dynamic in the movement, itself also objective. The struggle against the CPE was a movement of demands, the satisfaction of whose demands has become unacceptable for the movement itself as a movement of demands.

The riots in Greece and the general strike in Guadeloupe are the most recent events which characterise this cycle of struggles.

In the Greek riots, the proletariat didn’t demand anything, and didn’t consider itself opposed to capital as the foundation of any alternative, quite simply, through riots that produced class-belonging as an external constraint and the relationship of exploitation as pure and simple coercion, it no longer wants to be what it is.

These riots were a movement of the class rather than a mere agitation by activists (that would itself also be a movement of the class) but it wasn’t a struggle in the heart of the class: production. It is in this way that these riots were able to make the key achievement of producing and aiming towards class-belonging as a constraint, but they could only reach this point by confronting this glass floor of production as their limit. And the ways in which this movement produced this external constraint (aims, the unfolding of the riots, the composition of the rioters…) was intrinsically defined by this limit. This constituted the ambivalence of this movement.

Students without a future, young immigrants, precarious workers, these are all proletarians who live every day the reproduction of capitalist social relations as coercion; coercion is included in this reproduction because they are proletarians, but they experience it every day as separated and aleatory (accidental and non-necessary) in relation to production itself. They struggle at the same time in the moment of coercion as separated, and only experience this separation as an absence in their own struggle against this mode of production.

It is in this way – and only in this way – that this movement produced class-belonging as an exterior constraint. It is in this way that it is situated at the level of this cycle of struggles and is one of its determining historical moments. Attacking institutions and the forms of social reproduction, taken in themselves, is on the one hand what constituted it and was the force which on the other hand expressed its limits.

In Greece it is in this configuration and in the ambiguity that it contains that for the proletarians in struggle, their class-belonging, their own definition as a class in relation to capital, was produced and appeared as an exterior constraint. In their own practice and in their struggle, they called themselves into question as proletarians, but only by separating the moments and the instances of social reproduction in their attacks and their aims. Reproduction and production of capital remained foreign to each other. The result of this oscillation constituted the minority-character of the movement.

Currently, the resolution depends on the overcoming of a constitutive contradiction of class struggle: class-being is for the proletariat the obstacle that its struggle as a class must go beyond / abolish. The riots in Greece posited this obstacle, formalised the contradiction, and didn’t go any further. This was their limit, but the contradiction now exists practically for this cycle of struggles in restructured capitalism and its crisis.

In Guadeloupe, the importance of unemployment of the part of the population that lives from benefits and from an underground economy means that wage-demands are a contradiction in terms. This contradiction structured the course of events between the LKP, which was focused on permanent workers (essentially in public services) but attempted to hold the terms of this contradiction together through multiplication and the infinite diversity of demands, and the absurdity of central wage-demands for the majority of people on the blockades, in the looting, and in the attacks on public buildings. The demand was destabilised in the very course of the struggle; it was called into question, as was its form of organisation, but the specific forms of exploitation of the entire population, inherited from its colonial history, were able to prevent this contradiction from breaking out more violently at the heart of the movement (it is important to note that the only death was that of a trade-unionist killed on a blockade). From this point of view, the production of class-belonging as an exterior constraint was more a sort of schizophrenia than something genuinely produced in the course of struggle, more a sociological phenomenon than something at stake in the struggle. No conflictual recomposition of the class around unemployed and precarious workers arose – rather a parallel existence between waged and unemployed workers, which the LKP, for better or worse, attempted to control. This didn’t prevent wage-demands from being confronted globally by the composition of the demonstrators and to find its limit here.

The wage-demand advanced by the fraction of more or less permanent employees found its limit in the mass of the unemployed and claimants itself, which was brought about in the movement, but that wasn’t simply an external limit: that the two parts weren’t foreigners who found themselves ‘side by side’ by accident. They were brought together by the global purchase of labour-power, in which global labour-power is always already bought, whatever its individual or collective consumption, by capital in general for an income in which wages and other forms of incomes are equalised. Wage-demands are totally modified when nobody ‘owns’ them any more. The worker can no longer break the chain in the liberation of labour, the chain which links together the terms of contradictory reciprocal implication between surplus and necessary labour.

The illegitimacy of wage-demands is also present in this ‘side-by-side’: its double disconnection. Disconnection vis-à-vis both valorisation and capital accumulation, for both of which the wage-demands have lost all internal meaning and dynamism; disconnection between on the one hand the wage, on the other hand income and consumption through credit and all different forms of income and benefits. The very composition of the demonstrators and rioters expresses this double disconnection vividly and actively. What wage-demands can be raised by the mass of long-term unemployed? It would be wrong to analyse anger as desperation. In the course of wage-demands, unemployment is the contradiction between surplus and necessary labour, it is capital as a contradiction-in-process. The wage-relation in its totality is modulated in response to unemployment and ‘atypical’ forms of employment, and this to the limit of the wage-demand itself, its course, its participants and its activities.

The restriction of the wage-demand to the contradiction between surplus and necessary labour is the very composition of the working class in Guadeloupe and in the other French colonies. Here, this structural contradiction is class-composition itself. Starting with the wage, the proletariat’s closest relation to capital, in Guadeloupe, within the wage-demands themselves, a more important phenomenon occurred, namely the production of class-belonging as a limit and exteriority within the struggle as a class.

The swerves in the action of the class (reproducing one-self as a class of this mode of production / calling one-self into question) exist in the unfolding of most conflicts.

We are theoretically the lookouts and advocates of these swerves, which consist in the proletariat’s calling itself into question within its struggle, and practically, we are their agents, when we are directly engaged in these struggles. We exist in this rupture, in this tear in the proletariat’s activity as a class.

The proletariat can only be revolutionary by recognising itself as a class; it recognises itself in every conflict, and all the more in situations in which its existence as a class will be the situation which it will have to confront in the reproduction of capital. We must not be mistaken as to the content of this ‘recognition’. Recognising ourselves as a class will not be a ‘return to ourselves’ but a total extroversion as self-recognition as a category of the capitalist mode of production. What we are as a class is only our immediate relation to capital. This ‘recognition’ will in fact consist in a practical cognition, in conflict, not of the self for itself, but of capital.

Our wager

The swerve activities are present, directly challenging theory and therefore modifying it, fashioning it and these activities are not ‘ours’ in the narrow sense of individual implications.

The question of intervention and the return from theory to practice which is intrinsic to it is only posed when diversity of activity has been made an abstraction: Practice as abstraction. The question of intervention transforms what we do in any given struggle (or what we cannot do), that is to say practices that are always particular into an abstraction of practice constructing the intervention/non-intervention dilemma. The process of abstraction is very tangible and built by empirically observed activities and attitudes: ‘practical awareness’, the capacity to ‘choose’ between struggles, ‘the part of society above society’, the ‘everything concerns me’, the disappearance of capital reproduction in the class struggle, reproduction that is maintained as a framework but not as a definition of the players, the question of strategy and of the revolution as a goal to reach, the individual’s decision as the methodological starting point rather than the existence of a contradictory process or of a swerve expressed by activities; the leap beyond the reproduction of capital in the name of a situation considered fundamentally common but beyond the objective diversities (once more, we find here the temporal mediation, that is to say the proletariat as class of capital and its contradiction with capital as the functioning of the capitalist mode of production).

The core of the critique of intervention as a question resides in the abstraction of practice and the objectification of class struggle which respond to each other. ‘Practice’ as such, as an entity, acquires meaning relatively to its equally abstract complement, class struggle as a situation. Specific practices as such are now merely occasional manifestations of Practice as abstraction. This is the very foundation of the question of intervention, that is to say, of intervention as a question and its comprehension of theory as a ‘weapon’ which directs back to practice. Theory doesn’t need to prove its utility. Theory is included in the self-critical character of struggles, the critical relationship of theory has changed. Theoretical production belongs to a practice which is not ‘ours’ and to a theory which is likewise not ‘ours’.

We are referring to the practice of all those who through their activities create a gap within action as a class and posit it as a limit to be overcome. This is theory in the broad sense, i.e. practical, class struggle reflecting on itself. Theory in a narrow sense is a condensed form of this, that is to say a specific and non-immediate expression, elaboration with its own laws, reasoned expression of this practice. For it, the problem is to give theoretical existence to the communist overcoming in the clearest way possible, and for this we give ourselves the means at our disposal. The existence of this reasoned expression is inherent and indispensable to the very existence of practice and theory in a broad sense. It exists and produces itself in multiple ways, continuously or intermittently. It has no role to the extent that it defines that in relation to which it may be assumed to play a role, it is a moment, to use philosophical terms. Its ‘sanction’ is internal to it and is not really a sanction, nor guarantees it. It is constantly subjected and reworked by what constitutes it and to which it belongs as a moment: theory in a broad sense, practice. It does not individually confer any specific attitude or status to those who practice it because practice is not its object, in which it would need to justify or apply itself. Application of theory exists when, about a struggle, we think we could either take part in it or not. The application, then, is ‘how to take part?’. At the point, theory is removed from its environment, its ecosystem, it will have to be reintroduced: the issue of application of theory, of its sanction and of its role is created by the militant attitude. This issue is only inherent to theory if the decision to act and the conditions of its application have been separated. Then, practice is not necessary but rather a decision and the individual is the subject of this decision.

Theory has become an objective determination of the activities of the swerve. We are leaving the endless reflexive come-and-go between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (the endless logic of the ideology of ‘lessons’ of struggle, coming from struggles and returning to them) and consequently the ‘question of intervention’. To escape from this vicious circle it is necessary to escape from the dialectic of interaction: on the one hand reality influences thought, on the other hand thought influences reality. As long as we have not seized reality by means of ‘concrete human activity’ – that is to say, conversely, consciousness as ‘being conscious’ – we lock ourselves into the debate about consciousness and reality, we fight to give a non-idealist response to the question of idealism par excellence. We are therefore searching for a ‘role’ for theory.

The necessarily theoretical determination of the existence and practice of the proletariat cannot be confused with the simple movement of the reproduction–contradiction of the class in its relation to capital. In relation to this movement, the class is abstracted into a theoretical, intellectual formalisation, which maintains a critical relation to this reproduction. Abstract and critical in regard to the immediacy of these struggles: this is the relative autonomy of theoretical production. No theory can be content to say ‘look what’s happening’, ‘it speaks’.3 When theory says ‘it is so’ or ‘look how it is’ – in a word, sic – it is a specific intellectual construction. In the capitalist mode of production, the reciprocal implication is subsumption (reproduction), through which that we produce as theory in its most formal sense is really a formalisation of the real experience of proletarians, but it is far from being the massive immediate consciousness of this experience, it is the abstraction and critique of this experience.

In the era that is beginning, spotting and promoting the activities of the swerve, being a part of it where we are involved as individuals defined at a certain point of society, nothing more, and not as individuals universally called by the order of ‘Practice’, means that it is the critical relation that changes. It is no longer an exteriority, it is a moment of the activities of the swerve, it is invested in them, that is to say that it is a critical relation not vis-à-vis the class-struggle and immediate experience, but in this immediate experience.

If acting as a class has become the very limit of class-action, if this becomes, in the contradiction of the current moment, the most banal course of struggles, the theorising character of struggles will become their self-critical seizure of themselves. The immediate struggles, practically and in their own discourse, produce unfalteringly, within themselves, an internal distance. This distance is the communising perspective as concrete, objective theoretical articulation of the theorising character of struggles and of theory in its restricted sense, the dissemination of which is becoming practical, primordial activity.

It is the mere becoming of this theory that allows it to be, more and more, the critical theory of ever more theorising struggles. The dissemination of the concept of communisation will be the unification of more and more self-critical struggles and of theoretical production in the formal sense. This dissemination will make polemics possible, and will allow the emergence in struggles of a possible expression of the perspective of overcoming which will not be, as is often the case now, something implicit to be deciphered.

There’s a lot of work to do around the affirmation of a revolutionary theory, around its dissemination, around the constitution of more or less stable nuclei on this base, and around its activities. The becoming-social of the key concept of our theory, communisation, is our business. This work is the task of partisans of communisation, engaged in class-struggles, with the conflicts and swerves that cross them. In the present moment, theory, as a totality of concrete activities (writing, journals, meetings, dissemination in many forms, etc.) is itself directly becoming an objective determination of these activities of the swerve and not a discourse about them.

This is our wager.

• 1In regard to the theory of crisis, Marxism split into two big tendencies. The first uses workers’ under-consumption and the resulting difficulties of surplus value realisation to explain crisis. This is the thesis of under-consumption. The second is based on the tendential fall in the rate of profit, and thus the scarcity of surplus value in relation to the accumulation of capital in which the variable part of capital decreases relative to its constant part. The crisis is a crisis of over-accumulation in relation to the possible valorisation of accumulated capital. We find in Marx things which justify both theses, but also, and this is the most important, which shows the intertwinement of the two
• 2What we describe as radical democratism does not only designate an ideology (‘citizenism’). It is also a praxis whose content consists in the formalisation and fixation of the limits of the current struggles in their specificity. The revolutionary dynamic of this cycle of struggle is at the very same time its intrinsic limit. The class has no longer any confirmation of its existence for itself in the face of capital. This means that the proletariat produces all of what it is, its whole existence in the categories of capital, and this is why it can abolish it. But radical democratism formalises also the whole limit of the struggles of this period: to fix the existence of the class in capital. All of this is very real in class struggle and there is a party of the alternative whose existence becomes the justification of its ideology. For radical democratism, the critique of the capitalist mode of production is limited to the necessity for the proletariat to control its conditions of existence. For this purpose, this social movement finds in the democracy that it calls radical the most general form and content of its existence and its action (management, control). The proletarian is replaced by the citizen and the revolution by the alternative. The movement is vast: from forces which only demand an adjustment, capitalism with a human face, to alternative perspectives which see themselves as breaking with capitalism while remaining in a problematic of control and management.
• 3In French this also contains the resonance of ‘the id speaks’.

“The ultimate point of the reciprocal implication between the classes is that in which the proletariat seizes the means of production. It seizes them, but cannot appropriate them. An appropriation carried out by the proletariat is a contradiction in terms, because it could only be achieved through its own abolition.”

(Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome)

The seizure of the elements of capital. Appropriation or communisation

What is at stake in communisation is the overcoming of a defensive position, in which proletarians fight to maintain their conditions and therefore their reciprocal implication with capital, through a seizure of capital, not in the sense of a socialisation, i.e. a mode of managing the economy, but rather by constituting a community of individuals that are directly its constituents. It is true that societies, i.e. communities dominated and represented by a class, also always constitute the unity of individuals that belong to them, but individuals are only members of societies as average class individuals; singular individuals have no social existence. Communisation is accomplished through seizing the means of subsistence, of communication, of transport and of production in the restricted sense. The communisation of relations, the constitution of a human community / communism, is realized for, in and through the struggle against capital. In this struggle, the seizure of the material means of production cannot be separated from the transformation of proletarians into immediately social individuals: it is one and the same activity, and this identity is brought about by the present form of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital. The radical difference from socialisation is that it is not a matter of changing the property status of the material means of production. In communisation there is no appropriation of goods by any entity whatsoever; no state, commune, or council to represent and dominate proletarians in expropriating capital and thus carry out an appropriation. Changing the property regime entails the constitution of a new form of economy, namely socialism, even if it is called an economy of solidarity. When socialism was really possible, communism was postponed to the end of time, and yet socialism could never be what it claimed to be: the transition to communism. This fact made it finally the counterrevolution adequate to the only real revolution of the period. Communisation doesn’t constitute an economy. It makes use of everything, but has no other aim than itself. Communisation is not the struggle for communism; it is communism that constitutes itself against capital.

The embroilment of communisation and socialisation

If the action of communisation is the outlet of class struggle in the revolutionary crisis, the same act of seizure could be, as we have seen, either communisation or socialisation. Any action of this type can take one or the other form; it all depends on the dynamic and on the context, constantly in transformation. In other words: everything depends on the struggle against capital, which either deepens and extends itself or loses pace and perishes very quickly. Everything also depends on the struggle within the struggle against capital. The constitution of communism is embroiled with the constitution of one last alternative socio-economic capitalist form. Until communisation is completed there will be a permanent tendency for some entity to be constituted which strives to make the seizure of material means into a political and economic socialisation. The persistence of such a brake, able to be utilised by a capitalist counter-revolution, consists in the persistence until the very end of a dimension within the revolutionary movement of the affirmation and liberation of labour, because the revolutionary movement is and remains a movement of the class of labour even in the overcoming of activities as labour. The affirmation remains as long as capital is not yet abolished; this is to say, as long as capital still exists as opposed to the proletariat, even the proletariat on the point of abolishing it, i.e. of abolishing itself. In this context the proletariat retains a positivity, even if this positivity of labour is not reaffirmed by capital anymore; rather it is reactivated in the revolutionary process, as social reproduction becomes a process dependent on the action of proletarians.

Past revolutions show us only too well: “the red flag can be waved against the red flag” until the Freikorps arrive

Capital “will not hesitate” to proclaim once again that labour is the “only productive activity” in order to stop the movement of its abolition and in order to reassert its control over it as soon as it can. This dimension can only be overcome by the victory of communisation, which is the achieved abolition of the capitalist class and the proletariat. The overcoming of the counter-revolution will not always be irenic, it will not always take place “within the movement” and it will not be a true and quicker version of the “withering of the state” which was foreseen in socialism. Any form, whether it be a state form or a para-state form, will always do anything to maintain itself even in the name of its ultimate withering! This sclerosis and perpetuation are not “counter-revolutionary tendencies within the revolution”, but rather The counter-revolution. The capitalist counter-revolution in opposition to the revolution.

Communism doesn’t fight against democracy, but the counter-revolution claims to be democratic

It is in the very name of the abolition of classes that radical democracy will do everything to maintain or restore elective structures, which it claims are necessary to prevent the formation of a new ruling stratum, one self-appointed and uncontrolled. The constitution of communism is embroiled with the constitution of a final form of socialism even if the movement that bore it, the labour movement, has definitively disappeared.

The struggle to “bring to reason” the fractions of the proletariat which are most active in the expropriation of capital will be all the more violent when it presents itself as the defence of the democratic revolution, refusing to let the minority compromise the gains of the majority.

The defence of gains is the possibility of a counter-revolutionary phase

Communisation will never make any gains. All the expropriations that constitute the immediate community will have their character as pure expropriations and wildcat takeovers contested. They will be proclaimed socialisations as soon as the movement decelerates, and a para-state authority is set up in order to defend what at that moment appears as gains and as elements of the formation of a potential new economy. The class recognizes itself as divided and diverse in order to abolish itself. The abolition of the proletariat as the dissolution of other classes implies the internal need of the proletariat for these other classes, to absorb them in dissolving them and, at the same time, the contradiction with them. Communisation lives constantly in the conditions of its own sclerosis. Everything will happen on a geographical plane, a horizontal plane, and not on a sectoral plane differentiating types of activities. Limits will be everywhere, and the generalized embroilment of revolution and counter-revolution will manifest itself in multiple and chaotic conflicts. The proletariat abolishes itself in the human community that it produces. It is the inner and dynamic contradictions within such a process that give content and force to the counter-revolution, because in each one capital can regenerate itself. Because for the class to abolish itself is to overcome its autonomy, wherein the content and force of the capitalist counter-revolution reside.

Extension is the movement of victory; deceleration that of counter-revolution.

Without it being an explicit strategy, capital will struggle to recover social control in two ways. On the one hand, states will fight to re-establish their domination and restore exploitation. On the other hand, capitalist society will continue to maintain itself on the totally ambiguous bases of popular power and self-management. In formal subsumption, workers had long demanded the entire product of labour; this demand will now find a new lease of life and will constitute the ideal content for the reproduction of capitalist relations and a basis for a “solid” resistance against communisation. These factions may fight against each other or align themselves depending on the situation and hence on the development of the movement of communisation. The action of the capitalist class could be as much military as it could consist in social counter-measures and the construction of conflicts based on the capacities of the capitalist mode of production. The revolution itself could push the capitalist mode of production to develop in an unforeseeable manner, from the resurrection of slavery to self-management. But above all the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production will occur in a diffuse way as close as possible to the revolution, reproducing itself in all the moments where communisation is led by its own nature into a sclerosis of the simple organisation of the survival of proletarians, that is, into socialisation. The capitalist class can equally centralise its counter-revolutionary action in the State as it can decentralize the confrontation by regionalising it, dividing the classes into social categories, even ethnicising them, because a situation of crisis is also an inter-capitalist conflict. If, in an inter-capitalist conflict, one of the capitalist sites manages, through the general devalorisation that the crisis entails, to represent a global solution for all capitals, it will represent such a solution for the vanquished as well.

The revolution will not be won in a straight line

Some fractions of the insurgent proletariat will be smashed, others will be “turned back”, rallying to measures for the conservation of survival. Other insurrections will pick up where they leave off. Certain of those turned back or bogged down will resume wildcat expropriations, and the organisation of the struggle by those who struggle and uniquely for the struggle, without representation, without control by anyone in the name of anything, thereby taking up once again the constitution of communism, which is not a goal of the struggle but rather its content. Counter-revolutionary ideologies will be numerous, starting perhaps with that of the survival of the economy: preserving economic mechanisms, not destroying all economic logic, in order to then construct a new economy. The survival of the economy is the survival of exchange, whether this exchange uses money, any kind of voucher or chit, or even simply barter, which can be adorned with the name of mutual aid between workers! The situation where everything is for free and the complete absence of any form of accounting is the axis around which the revolutionary community will construct itself. Only the situation where everything is for free will enable the bringing together of all the social strata which are not directly proletarian and which will collapse in the hyper crisis. Only the situation where everything is for free will integrate/abolish all the individuals who are not directly proletarian, all those “without reserves” (including those whom revolutionary activity will have reduced to this condition), the unemployed, the ruined peasants of the “third world”, the masses of the informal economy. These masses must be dissolved as middle strata, as peasants, in order to break the personal relations of dependence between “bosses” and “employees” as well as the situation of “small independent producers” within the informal economy, by taking concrete communist measures which force all these strata to join the proletariat, that is, to realise their “proletarianisation”…

Proletarians who communise society will have no need of “frontism”. They will not seek out a common program for the victims of capital. If they engage in frontism they are dead, if they remain alone they are also dead. They must confront all the other classes of society as the sole class not able to triumph by remaining what it is. The measures of communisation are the abolition of the proletariat because, in addition to its unification in its abolition, they dissolve the basis of existence of a multitude of intermediate strata (managerial strata of capitalist production and reproduction) which are thereby absorbed into the process of communisation and millions (if not billions) of individuals that are exploited through the product of their labour and not the sale of their labour-power. At the regional level as much as at the global one, communisation will have an action that one could call “humanitarian”, even if this term is currently unpronounceable, because communisation will take charge of all the misery of the world. Human activity as a flux is the only presupposition of its collective, that is to say individual, pursuit, because, as it is self-presupposing, it has no conception of what a product is and can thus give plentifully. The proletariat, acting as a class, dissolves itself as a class through these acts of seizure, because in them it overcomes its “autonomy”.

Democracy and the solidarity economy will be the two big ideological constructions to defeat.

Democracy and the solidarity economy will combine with other systems depending on the time and place. They will combine above all with the ideology of communities that could be very diverse: national, racial, religious. Probably more dangerous: the spontaneous and inevitable constitution of local communities (“we are at home here”). Such communities will be of infinite variations and their ideologies can take on all political hues: conservative, reactionary, democratic, and of course, above all revolutionary – and here the embroilment of revolution and counter-revolution is the rule. For there is no situation that, viewed unilaterally, would be without a way out for capital. It is the action of the proletariat that will prevent capital from producing a superior mode of valorisation for which it can always find the conditions in every crisis and every confrontation with the proletariat, from these three points of view:

• Diversification and segmentation of the proletariat
• Dissolution and absorption of multiple exploited strata outside of a direct subsumption of their labour to capital
• Inter-capitalist conflicts recruiting the proletariat for whom these conflicts have a integrative and reproductive function

All of this provides the counter-revolution with its force and its content, which are in a direct relation with the immediate, empirical necessities of communisation (its dynamic contradictions, or the contradictions of its dynamic).

There is no ideological struggle; the practical struggle is theoretical.

One must not imagine the anti-ideological struggle as distinct from communisation itself. It is through communisation that ideologies are fought, because they are part of what the movement abolishes. The constitution of communism cannot avoid violent confrontations with the counter-revolution, but these “military” aspects do not lead to the constitution of a front. If such a front is constituted the revolution will be lost, at least where the front is situated, and until its dissolution. The revolution will be both geographic and without any fronts: the starting points of communisation will always be local and will undergo immediate and very rapid expansion, like the start of a fire. Even once extinguished these fires will smoulder under self-management and citizen communities. Communism will arise from an immense fight. The process of communisation will indeed be a period of transition, but not at all a calm period of socialist and/or democratic construction between a chaotic revolutionary period and communism. It will itself be the chaos between capital and communism. It is clear that such a prospect, though well-founded, has nothing exciting about it! It is neither “barbarism”, a meaningless term, nor the royal road of the tomorrows that sing!1 This is a perspective that is anchored in the current situation of capital and in struggles – in the current struggle between the proletariat and restructured capital in its crisis. It is a perspective which poses the overcoming of these struggles, not in a straight line, but in a deepening of the crisis of capital currently occurring.

The embroilment of the revolution and counter-revolution implicates all organisation which the movement of class struggle takes on. Any given organisation, any collective, or any other form can be the form taken by organised struggle or else tend towards the representation of this struggle, and develop, in a situation of the crumbling of the state, toward a para-state form. It is not a matter of the opposition between organisation and spontaneity (everything is always spontaneous and organised) but of the opposition between expropriation and appropriation, communisation and socialisation; the latter necessitating that society exists, that is to say that it is something other than “people”, than the “people” of which we shall now speak. In the struggle in 2003 in France we could see proletarians construct between themselves what could be called an inter-subjectivity that was not beholden to the unions, leaving the latter to organise a merely scenic representation of this unity. Nevertheless the struggle did not overcome the general limit of what it was at the time: radical democratism, the political consolidation of the limits of the struggle as a class through proposing solutions to the “problems of capital”, for example the “defence of public services”. This was truly an inter-subjectivity in that (still proletarian) subjects linked together in the face of their object — capital. In Greece in 2008 the riot was fundamentally an inter-subjectivity. In confronting the question of democracy, the inter-subjectivity of the Greek rioters confronted class belonging as an exterior constraint, through the absence of demands, and beyond the foreclosure represented by radical democratism. In the movement of the abolition of capital, the latter (capital) is de-objectified: the subject-object relation is abolished along with the capital-proletariat relation. (We should remember that this abolition is the content of the revolutionary process, communisation, and as long as it is not yet finished there will still be a subject-object relation, even if the subject is in the process of abolishing its object as such; it is in this relation that the abolition is achieved, that is to say that proletarians abolish the capital which makes them proletarian, i.e. pure subjects confronted with the object — capitalist society as a whole). The revolutionary process of de-objectification of capital is thus also a process of the destruction of the separated subjectivity of the proletariat. It is this process which we designate as the self-transformation of proletarians into immediately social individuals. This transformation can never be said to have occurred before it is completed; in this sense it is proletarians that make the revolution all the way to the end, because all the way to the end they abolish the capital that makes them proletarians.

Communisation and socialisation do not form a contradiction

The contradiction remains that between capital and the proletariat. It does not become an internal contradiction within the proletariat. Even if a total opposition between the two perspectives arises, they are embroiled with one another and both implicated in the contradiction capital–proletariat. The struggle of the proletariat against capital becomes the abolition of classes by the expropriation of capital. But this very action, in its opposition to capital, revives the affirmation of labour when it is interrupted by the capitalist class (it is there that the gains exist as we have seen). This provisional affirmation, which is an affirmation of labour by default, advances a social state whose outcome would be a social State, thus a counter-revolutionary form. In this case, the revolutionary movement must oppose itself to that which it itself has just posed. The process of self-transformation into immediately social individuals can, in the struggle against capital and thus the capitalist class, also be a struggle against proletarians defending the proletarian condition. A struggle of communisation against socialisation.

The counter-revolution is constructed on the limits of the revolution

This is what this text has tried to show a little more “concretely”. In the period that saw the revolutionary attempts from 1917 to 1937, the general structure of the capital-proletariat contradiction bore within it the affirmation of the class of labour and thus the construction of socialism. Now the contradiction bears within it the calling into question of class belonging and thus the general structure poses communisation. This structure doesn’t mean that limits don’t still exist, even if the direction of the movement is toward their overcoming. The limit is consubstantial with every revolutionary measure, and this limit is only overcome in the following measure. It is the class character of the movement of communisation which is its limit. This movement is the overcoming of its own limited character, since it is the abolition of classes and thus of the proletariat. The proletarian is the individual deprived of objectivity, whose objectivity is opposed to him in capital. He is reduced to pure subjectivity, he is the free subject, bearer of a labour-power only able to become labour in action after being sold, and then put to work by its capitalist owner. The subject free of everything is bound to objectivity in itself, the fixed capital that subsumes its labour-power, submitting it to incorporation into the labour process. The abolition of capital is the abolition of objectivity in itself through the seizure of material means, and the abolition of the proletarian subject through the production of the immediately social individual. It is what we call the simultaneous de-subjectification and de-obectification produced by the seizure of the social totality, an action that destroys this totality as something distinct from individuals. The distinct totality is the independent society, through its division into classes and its representation by the dominant class. The abolition of classes is the abolition of society. The creation of socialist or even “communist” society is always the maintenance of the independence of the community from its members, which are only social by the mediation of society. Communism is the end of all mediation between individuals and their constantly changing groupings of affinity. But in the revolution there is still mediation by capital since revolutionary activity is the abolition of capital! Communisation, in so far as it is mediated by its own object, always carries the possibility that its mediation autonomizes itself in the constitution of the revolution as a different structure than revolutionary action. This tendency towards institutionalisation of the revolution, and the victory of capital, will continually exist. Communisation is revolution within the revolution, the overcoming of class autonomy, but revolution and counter-revolution are continually face to face. The steps of communisation are those of a tightrope walker.

B.L. June 2009

See the second part of this series: 'Communisation vs Spheres'

Taken from the website of the 2009 communist summercamp.

• 1The tomorrows that sing is a phrase employed by the French communist party and its official poet Louis Aragon to describe their claim on the future.

The right tools for the job: subsumption or reproduction?

Towards a periodisation of the modalities of reproduction of the capitalist class relation

The de-essentialisation of labour: rising organic composition of capital, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (the overaccumulation of capital)

Cycles of valorisation and devalorisation

The importance of absolute and relative surplus value for capitalist accumulation

Problems with the periodisation: its schematicity and scope

First period: external relation between the circuits of reproduction of capital and the proletariat

Second period: the mediated integration of the circuits of reproduction of capital and the proletariat

Third period: a dialectic of immediate integration and disintegration of the circuits of reproduction of capital and the proletariat