We ask ourselves: What is the possibility of a communist movement in the times we are now living, in the epoch of real subsumption?¹⁾

It seems that both Dissident 3 and this issue of riff-raff represent a common effort to answer this question. But as we will soon see, a common effort does not necessarily lead to the production of similar conclusions; because as soon as the attendant questions are to be answered – of where we are today and how we “ended up here” – the two journals can only move apart in very different directions.

The editors of the latest issue of Dissident (for the sake of simplicity we call them “Dissident”), take as their point of departure the understanding that the “subjectivities” that emerge in the struggle between capital and labour belong logically to this mode of production. From this, they then draw the conclusion that these subjectivities must, by necessity, be incapable of the non-capitalist and non-dialectical praxis which communisation, as “leaving this world”, would imply. The theoretical apparatus has been taken from Marcel²⁾ with only slight modifications. Communisation (the abolishing of capital) is here not understood as class struggle. The latter is only seen as the dynamic of the capitalist relation, as its force of life and never as its Golgotha walk. This could be summed up as: the forces that belong to this world can never put an end to it.

The capitalist dialectic weighs heavily upon the dominated subjects, but is, according to Dissident, “not as rigid as that it does not let in experiences and acts that are not abiding to this reality” because “capital’s hegemony is not complete” (p. 8). And to see examples of such acts it is said to be enough “to spend an average day in an average workplace”.

It is thus suggested that it is in the workplaces, i.e. the sphere where capitalist domination is the most manifest, where these examples can be seen, examples of “experiences and acts that are not abiding to this reality”. Moreover, we are told that these acts are “attempts to escape”. But what exactly is one escaping from, from the reality by which one is not dominated? Already one needs to scratch one’s head hard, but the oddities don’t stop here; it is soon added that these attempts to escape signify no “lack or weakness of the system – on the contrary”, since “in the worst case [they involve] a strengthening of the capital logic”. So these “experiences and acts that are not abiding to this reality” are apparently affecting this very reality and are (“in the worst case”) strengthening the logic which is, again, said not to be governing them. If we have followed the argument carefully there would thus be a feedback, a dialectical connection of some sort, between the “non-dialectic” and the capital–labour dialectic. This can only be taken to mean that un-worldly acts intervene in the world, which, in its turn, is plugging up some of the holes through which this un-worldly had once somehow leaked out. How this is to avoid “giving oneself up to idealism” (p. 13) now seems even more peculiar. Nota bene: Here it isn't capital which is likened to an un-wordly force which is obliged to descend to the material world and transform it, in order to make it adequate to the needs of valorisation.³⁾ With Dissident it is on the contrary real people, proletarians, who, despite the fact that they are standing in the middle of capitalist society here and now, somehow manage to come in contact with The Other Side.

Presumably, this theoretical development into entanglement cannot be interpreted as anything but the consequence of having been forced to retreat on a few previous points (that is compared to what Marcel wrote in 2005), while attempting to hold the old system intact. In this text they have, for instance, retreated from the worst alternativist speculations regarding the possibilities of “creating communist enclaves” (p. 12). Now they say that “one has to avoid a far too spatial interpretation of the outside (to consider capital and communism as physical rooms with a wall between them which has to be torn down)…” “Communist relations are simply not possible within the totality of capitalism, why their becoming possible is rendering capital impossible.” (p. 14)⁴⁾ However, despite the fact that the outside can no longer perform the role of an actuality and, by capital, unpolluted outside, they are still clinging to a theoretical apparatus which, to borrow an expression from Dissident, “is leaking in all directions”.

A one-sided focus on the “liberation” of the working class (or: of the class struggle’s putative capacity of producing communism) impedes an effective analysis of the possibilities for leaving the world in which we are living. Therefore, instead of constructing the communist potential of class struggle we need to be conscious of its limitations and, in a wider sense, its counter-revolutionary functions. (p. 7)

We have seen that the methods that have been explored by generations of revolutionaries … have had as a common feature to be impasses, or worse: ways to increase domination. … On the contrary, the world is more capitalist than ever. All the spheres in society are now more or less integrated within the logic of value. (p. 6)

These assertions could have been taken from “Communism of attack and communism of withdrawal” and it was this very scepticism towards the communist potential of class struggle that induced its author to take refuge outside. In 2005 the outside was regarded as the rescue since it stood free from and didn’t reproduce the capital relation. Three years later, as we just saw, even this outside has fallen back into the capitalist cogs and become a part of its dynamic, “a strengthening of the capital logic”, if only “in the worst case”. They still place their hopes in the outside because it is seen as just as reactionary as class struggle only sometimes, when this concerns “sporadic attempts and isolated events”, that is when the outside doesn’t become generalised.

Let’s put the outside aside and dwell a while upon the question of why the world has indeed become more capitalist. Here Dissident is right concerning one thing: that class struggle has all along been at the centre of this development. This insight goes beyond the vulgar objectivist Marxism which conceives of capital as something separate from class struggle, as an external force that, like a gang of bandits on the rampage, tries to lay its grubby hands upon the products of the workers. As this happens, the workers need to hold their own and to defend themselves by means of a class struggle that mitigates the ravages of the capitalists and restrains their desperate strive for profits. According to this view the relation between capital and labour is a tug-of-war where one of the sides can be strengthened at expense of the other’s and where the possible outcome becomes a question of relative strengths. On this point, Dissident has drawn the same conclusion as riff-raff, that the pole of labour can never be anything without its opposite pole capital, i.e. that both of them form a unity, from which follows the understanding that an affirmation of labour does not mean the suppression of capital.

This was something we saw an example of in Russia, after the proletariat's seizure of power in 1917. Even though the structure of property was shaken at its very foundations, the proletarian dictatorship never led to the destruction of capital because as soon as the private capitalists were gone, it fell upon the party of the workers, i.e. the Bolsheviks, to resume production, which became reorganised under state control. Henceforth, the main task of the party was to make sure that an increased surplus product was exacted from the workers and that the peasants became proletarianisied into this working class. We could also take Swedish social democracy as an example: gradually, the great organisational gains and their growing importance to the whole of society made it into a force which came to influence social progress. Over time, the social democratic leadership became aware of the fact that labour can’t be strengthened at the expense of capital; with great power there must come great responsibility and thus the workers’ movement should make sure that business prospered, the profits of which would indirectly also benefit the workers. In this spirit great social projects such as the construction of a public system of child care, which facilitated the entrance of women into wage labour, were to be worked out in the interests of the workers as well as the industry. In this way, sphere after sphere became “integrated within the logic of value”, with the help from the workers’ movement.

Dissident, who wish to see a radical break with capitalism, are of course not happy with this, which is reasonable. But why get annoyed at “wrong methods” or class struggle as such? In my view it is perfectly natural that class struggle in all its forms to this day has contributed to labour's increased subsumption under capital. Still, to give an explanation why, it seems necessary to paraphrase some central parts of the first book of Capital. Only later can we return to Dissident’s problematic.

Some opening points:

• We are living in a society subjected to the capitalist mode of production.
• The driving principle of the capitalist mode of production is continuous valorisation, money that begets more money.
• Valorisation is possible only through the extraction of surplus-value by the squeezing out of surplus labour from the workers.
• This surplus-value production does not “lead to” but is in itself exploitation and class contradiction.

Thus we arrived at exploitation as the central concept.

The capitalist wouldn’t be a capitalist if he didn’t have to continually turn his sum of money into a larger sum of money, as this is the very concept of capital. The worker, in his turn, would no longer be a worker if he and his offspring could not be reproduced and continually return to be exploited. Marx calls this process, in which capital and labour are incessantly thrown to face one another, simple reproduction. When the produced surplus-value grows, that is, turned into additional capital, it is extended reproduction.

We also know from Capital that there is a limited number of ways of extracting surplus-value. You can make a labourer work more by working longer days or to toil harder by working more intensively under otherwise unaltered conditions of work. This is called absolute surplus-value production. The other way, which is a bit more mystical, is the relative surplus-value production. In this case the capitalist increases the productivity of labour and does with the same amount of hired labour produce more commodities. In this way an equally large sum of produced value is embodied in a greater amount of use-values. But to produce surplus-value is not about manufacturing more products; the secret lies elsewhere: The only way in which the capitalist can appropriate surplus-labour from the proletariat through an increased productivity of labour is by cheapening the reproduction of the workers. Thus, when the increased productivity of labour leads to cheaper consumer goods, living, electricity etc., it becomes possible for the capitalist to pay a wage that matches this lower cost.

The living standard of the worker may remain at the same level, but since the length of the working day is exactly the same, the worker is now producing for the capitalist (i.e. without compensation) during a greater part of the working day than previously and is in a shorter period of time producing a value that corresponds to the sum of money he needs to buy the necessary means of existence, which he receives in the form of a wage. This is also exploitation, if exploitation is being defined as equal to surplus-value production, since the capitalist is appropriating a larger amount of surplus-labour, something which the single worker doesn’t necessarily have to experience as being exploited harder.⁵⁾ Finally, a capitalist can accumulate surplus-value faster if he manages to shorten the necessary interruption which is the process of circulation: the realisation of the produced surplus-value through the sale of the produced values as well as the purchase of new means of production and new labour power. Marx calls this process of renewal the turnover of capital. However, in the sphere of circulation no new value is produced; a shorter turnover-time only makes it possible to more quickly restart a new process of exploitation.

Surplus-value production, that is exploitation, always means the increase of the surplus-labour (that is surplus-value creating time) in relation to necessary labour, either the working day is being increased in an absolute sense or that the necessary labour gets diminished, to give room for surplus-labour during this for capital freed-up time. The table below contains examples of three working days: first a working day that we take as a starting point and then two variants of how exploitation can be conceived to be increased. The numbers represent labour time in hours.

In example IIa as well as in IIb the capitalist has won two hours of surplus-labour generating labour time by two different means. In the first case by absolute surplus-value production and in the other case by relative surplus-value production. (In example IIb it is implied that the workers’ means of existence have grown cheaper.)

Without the continuous use of either of these methods, capital would not be reproduced in an extended scale, that is to say, no surplus-value would be transformed into additional capital and under such conditions the mode of production would not survive. The capitalist would cease to be a capitalist and the demand for labour power would disappear. However, it should be kept in mind that the mode of production never breaks down automatically at the first crisis of valorisation. In the ever-recurring financial crises accumulated wealth becomes devalorised, destroyed completely at a massive scale and a strong suspicion spreads everywhere among the capitalists as to the possibilities of to continue making money from capitalist production. But while some capitals go under, others manage to survive and are able to expand further. Thus, in every crisis the centralisation of capital increases, something which can lay the basis for a new cycle of accumulation. But a recovery from the slump and a new upswing is entirely dependent upon that capital's ability to feel the smell of new profits, i.e. to discover new methods to increase the exploitation of labour-power. These failing to appear, the destruction of capital continues and the mode of production enters into a chronic state of crisis. Thus, the mode of production insists that exploitation must deepen, either one way or the other, otherwise it means the end of capitalism.

Also the proletariat, which capital constantly faces, has to be reproduced within capitalist society, but this is nothing that happens automatically. True, the capitalist “gives” the worker a wage, i.e. he pays for a fraction of the value which the latter actually produces, but it is far from certain that this wage – everywhere and every time – is sufficient for the purchase of the means of existence. Likewise, it is not infrequently the case that the work becomes so taxing, both for the body and the mind, that the workers begin to break down too rapidly, ultimately becoming unsuitable for exploitation. The proletarian struggle to establish a minimum means of existence as well as securing “decent” working conditions consequently safeguards the reproduction of the capitalist relation in that the workers are trying to keep their heads above the surface.

Through this exploitation and class struggle the capitalist mode of production advances day after day, year after year, century after century. Could class struggle have taken us somewhere else? Yes, maybe! But only if it has actually put an end to capital altogether. Since the capital relation has, after all, survived the continuously present, everyday class struggle as well as a number of important proletarian insurrections and revolutionary attempts, in short since it is apparently present here today, then it has to be said that subsumption (more on this below) is by necessity more deepened today and this can’t be blamed on wrong “methods” in the class struggle, not even social democracy. Why then is this so by necessity? Well, this can be derived directly from what was just said about the methods of producing surplus-value.

Let us imagine the capitalist relation as a car having a front and a back-wheel drive, that is, with a driving pair of wheels in the front and one in back. The car drives along an uphill slope that is the whole time getting steeper. Both pairs of wheels don’t need to propel the vehicle all the time, but if the propelling force of one of them would be discontinued then the other pair of wheels immediately has to compensate for this, in order for the car not to stop. (Capital accumulation can't afford to stop very long.)

In the tenth chapter of Capital I Marx portrays how the working day in 19th century Britain got increasingly longer and how horrible the conditions became for the workers working in mines, bleach-works, bakeries and so on. Men and women, youth and small children of an age as little as seven or eight worked day and night under horrible conditions for 12, 13, 14, 15 hours. This development ran into its natural limits. The average length of life plunged sharply and whole regions became depopulated. What took place was a ruthless exploitation of workers and the capitalist State would have never survived unless this hadn’t been restricted, which in the end happened through a gradual tightening up of the factory laws governing the labour time and limiting child labour. At every enlargement of rules and regulations the factory owners protested forcefully and maintained that this would mean the end of their profits, but apparently this didn’t happen; the working day became limited but there was another way of making profits: relative surplus-value.

As said above, relative surplus-value production is dependent on the reproduction of labour power being made cheaper. This takes place through the process of real subsumption, which means that capital, with science in its service, revolutionises the labour process and adapts it so as to make it more adequate to the process of valorisation, to the concept of capital. Furthermore, this generates a series of revolutions in capitalist society as a whole.

Every method which puts a drag on any one of capitalism’s wheels pushes capital into revolutionising the mode of production, in order to produce surplus-value in another way irrespective of who is the one doing it. It may be factory inspectors, a well-organised trade-union’s movement, or struggling local workers’ collectives. The mode of production has an objective law of motion: the production of absolute and relative surplus-value through the appropriation of surplus-labour. That is why subsumption is something which has to be deepened in course of time, as long as capitalism subsists. If we want to be engaged in theory we ought to bear this in mind.

Of course, the situation of the workers in Europe at the end of the 1960s differed sharply compared to what was just said of the 19th century, though it is still possible to draw a parallel between the two. Post war Europe experienced a tremendous capitalist accumulation, and even in spite of, or rather thanks to, an ever-stronger workers’ movement. Regardless of whether this movement arrived to power through elections and massive unionisation from below, as was the case in Sweden, or if it took the form of smaller but more significant trade-unions, such as the CGT in France, class struggle took place according to a very predictable pattern: the workers’ organisations obtained annual wage-increases but accepted, in general, capital’s despotism in the workplaces. As labour power was expensive, the firms were spurred on to make large, new investments in modern means of production in order to make the best use of their workers. The high wages also benefited national capital as purchasing power and the workers could now buy their “own” products such as household appliances, cars and so on. The years of prosperity rested primarily on two things:

1. The consumption of mass-produced commodities by the workers, which greatly lowered their cost of reproduction, i.e. a decrease in necessary labour. This decrease occurred because less effective proto-capitalist production could be replaced, even in spite of the fact that more products came to be consumed by the workers.
2. The resolution of all industrial disputes in the form of wage increases. In this way, the field was left open for the capitalists to carry through transformations which reduced workers’ control of the labour process, increased the pace of work, and among other things, also opened up overtime and night-work. It was of great importance that these capitalists could count on the loyalty of the trade-unions, using them to help persuade the workers into submitting to such drastic transformations.

This order or regime of regulation functioned well for a few decades but towards the end of the sixties a wave of struggles suddenly broke out and this whole relation would be turned over. Everywhere workers revolted against the monotonous and heavy pace of work in the workplaces. This time it was a revolt directed just as much against the trades unions and the workers’ parties that defended the development which had led to this. Here in Sweden this revolt expressed itself in the form of a wave of wildcat strikes which started in harbour of Gothenburg and then in the state owned mines in the north in late 1969.⁶⁾ At the same time in Northern Italy, militant workers started to, one could say deliberately, demand wage increases that far exceeded the productivity gains in the firms, and so they came to wage a struggle directed right against the firms’ profits.⁷⁾ The revolt broke out, not because the proletarians had finally managed to see through the “betrayals” of the unions and of the workers’ parties (the fact that they had accepted an increased productivity in exchange for reasonable compensation, the “plan” as the operaist theorists called it), it was because of the material fact that the conditions at the assembly lines had become intolerable. That is why, this time, the obedience of the workers couldn’t be bought in exchange for a bit more money in the pay envelope. In this situation, capital did what it had to do: It chased out the vermin and replaced the workers with industrial robots. The unemployment that followed increased competition between workers over the jobs that were left. Everywhere, not just in Italy, capital cracked the red strongholds, broke the workers’ collectives and started its search for cheap obedient labour power on other continents. The old relationship had become antiquated; it was founded principally on a national accumulation and a capital co-existing with a workers’ identity, a framework which had become a prison, for the workers as well as for accumulation.

What is Dissident’s view on these matters? Did the proletarians use “wrong methods” in 1968–1973 as they rebelled against the capitalism of their time, against their own concrete living conditions, when the result meant the end of twenty golden years of prosperity and a global restructuring of the mode of production as well as a deepened subsumption. Do perhaps the editors of Dissident intend to suggest that Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri and others were reactionary as they rejoiced over the fact that their struggle had bore fruit?

It is completely true that we to this day have not witnessed the dissolution of the capital relation due to its internal contradiction. What we have seen, however, and several times even, is the real destruction of a whole series of distinct forms of capitalist production / exploitation. Every time the capital relation has been seriously challenged the alternative has been between destruction or restructuring, and every time the latter has become reality, the internal contradictions could never be suppressed, which therefore every time leads it towards a new future crisis for the mode of production.

Marcel and Dissident have apparently grown tired of the repeated promises by class struggle and now they don't want to give it any more chances. They choose, instead, to bet their money on something new and untried, but they avoid the question as to why no previous movement has thus far ever discovered this method and put it to use.

The “revolutionaries”, that is, those who wish to “leave the world”, do, according to Dissident, have to wage a dual struggle: on the one hand against capital and on the other hand against labour. Once again we’ve arrived at the split personality of the workers,⁸⁾ in which they are torn between wanting to belong (“to demand their own submission”, p. 9) and wanting to leave this world. With the right method in use, the “projectial”, the one where all representatives have been pushed aside, they should hopefully choose the latter alternative, instead of not abiding to any class struggle where one would have to fight as a worker and thus might risk to – God forbid! – deepen the subsumption.

For my own part there is no contradiction between saying that the proletariat, at a certain point in time, is driven to apply communist measures in its struggle against capital and that this may be a class struggle which puts an end to class struggle. On the contrary, we believe this to be the only materialist comprehension of communisation, that it isn’t despite the proletariat and capital – determined by the capitalist mode of production – but exactly because of the situation within capitalism that, during the current period, communisation may become real.⁹⁾ That it tries to fulfil its needs within capitalist society is no “voluntary submission” (p. 9) and every communist perspective is based upon the assumption that society at one point can’t manage to reproduce itself, that is, that it cannot fulfil the needs of the suppressed and at the same time uphold the economic system. Contrary to what Dissident says with the struggles for bread and butter as a starting point, the proletariat (and indeed no one else, not the “people” or the “revolutionaries”), in defending its own reproduction as persons with physical and mental needs, can be led to challenge its own miserable conditions of living. The weapon which is then directed at the class enemy, capital, which is defining its situation, becomes the abolition of oneself as a class. This event is no act of leaving, withdrawal or suicide but nothing other than a frontal assault on the capitalist relations of production and their State; it is communism as a movement which along a path of ashes abolishes the existing conditions.

The idea that communism would “arrive from the future”, beyond the contradiction between classes, instead of being produced by class struggles bursting forth from within the present, is a thought that sits ill with the perspective of communisation, which, of course, is about the production of communism. Such an idea was perhaps tempting to have in a time which didn’t show any signs of immediate communisation¹⁰⁾ but only of class affirmation, a time in which – in sharp contrast with ours – socialism was visible on the horizon.¹¹⁾ This idea could also work as ideology in the hands of the counter-revolution: the glorious goal for which the workers, during the period of transition, had to sacrifice themselves, a Garden of Eden looming in a distant future. One day, it would open up its gates, but only after heavy industry would stand finished and a new man had been born, a pure and innocent being that would know of no class struggles and hence would be worthy of entering passively into this paradise… Communisation, on the other hand, won’t be enslaved by the future. As a perspective of communism where the present is the point of departure, we are instead speaking of an active conflictual process with concrete characteristics. By the way, communism is not at all alien to this world, since it is the negation of all the conditions that maintain this mode of production. In fact, it is essentially bound to this world, as this world’s critique, because we can only speak of communism in negative terms, that it is not property, division of labour, commodity production etc. From this point of view, one could also say that even communism itself – or what we know of communism – comes to an end, as soon as it, through its communisation, has broken down the State and all the classes in society. For what can our theory really say about something which lies beyond capital as this theory is founded on the contradictory existence of the capitalist mode of production, that it is something materially apparent which we can experience, as opposed to a mythological transhistorical philosophy?

In the seventies, parts of the left dusted off the young Marx and made Feuerbachian models over a lost human species being, its wandering throughout the epochs, and the final homecoming in the arms of the communist community. Dissident is, in its turn, leaning on more modern philosophers and turning inside out and back to front most of the arguments that they find. One could ask oneself, though, if they have really advanced beyond these predecessors, if progress here means to no longer see the originally true but the un-worldly true, the immaculate, as the solution to the worldly sufferings. And where will the next step take us, as the layout of the most recent issue bears in fact a close resemblance to the Watchtower?

:: April 2010

The dissidents and I both experience a need to define a new problematic based on the present situation. For me this situation is the class relation/contradiction as it is historically determined and as it expresses itself today. The dissidents, for their part, seem to reduce this situation to a pure “conceptual-logical” dimension that necessarily is not historically determined; for them communisation is “untimely”, “transhistorical”, something “invariant”, etc. I understand the present moment as a specific expression of the class contradiction such as it has arisen from the capitalist restructuring, which took place between the 1970s and the 1990s, and the end of the previous cycle of struggles, and with that the death of programmatism. To take an example, the blog Hacceitas, with its post “On the Messiah of communism” (February 2007), touches upon this new problematic as it considers “the symptom of all the deaths”: “the death of the workers’ movement, the death of the grand narratives, the death of subjectivity”. But instead of trying to ground one’s theoretical perspective on the new forms of class struggle, the possibilities of overcoming that are produced by these and the limits reached in the actual social struggle, one is to turn to a “worldliness beyond” which – due to its claims of “otherness” – is “impossible to narrow down with the theoretical tools of the present day”. Even though I wouldn’t articulate the problem in the same way – for me this description seems more post-modern than post-mortem – I sense the same vertigo in the face of the unknown. However, at the end of the day I’m pretty sure that it is all about the struggles of this world, that the proletariat as a class is a negation as an internal moment of what is negated, and that this supersession – revolution as communisation – is a development of the contradiction. The dissidents on their part see nothing in the contradictory class relation that indicates a supersession of the relation. According to them capitalism in itself, as an antagonistic mode of production, as a class society, is not a historically transitory, relative mode of production. Its contingent collapse therefore must be caused by something else, i.e. something other than class struggle. The door is opened when “actual proletarians” withdraw from their functions as “labour-for-itself” and “depict themselves as a party” (Marcel, “Attack/Withdrawal”). It seems to me that the dissidents, faced with the counter-revolution of the restructuring and the defeat of the proletariat’s struggles after 1968, adopt a perspective for action similar to that which Marx described in his “18th Brumaire”: to seek “to achieve [one’s] salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffer shipwreck.” According to the dissidents the individual breaks away from the iron fist of capitalist society and establishes “another way to live and exist” (Dissident No. 3).

But who is this individual, and what is society? Why does he at one time “smirk self-importantly … intent on business” and, at another is “timid and holds back” (Capital vol. I)? Why does he at one time appear as capitalist and at another as proletarian?

In capitalist society the relations are inverted – the social relations between individuals are made into social relations between things. “The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket” (Grundrisse), i.e. in his possession of money. As Marx said, what at first seems to be a paradox is that the epoch which produces the standpoint of the “isolated individual” (Grundrisse) – such as it appears in political economy and in our spontaneous everyday way of thinking – is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social relations. Here, the individuals are subjected to social production, which exists “outside of them as their fate” (Grundrisse). This historically determined individual freedom is at the same time “the most complete subjugation of individuality under social conditions which assume the form of objective powers, even of overpowering objects – of things independent of the relations among individuals themselves” (Grundrisse). However, these “overpowering objects” are produced by the individuals, but are out of their control and so establish “a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from” them (The German ideology). Capital is a “sensuous–super-sensuous thing” (Capital I) and individuals are “ruled by abstractions” (Grundrisse). The individual is dependent upon the entire world for the satisfaction of his needs, today far more so than in 1846. It is precisely because capitalism as class society determines its individual members as specific members, as “average individuals”, that class assumes an “independent existence as against the individuals”; their individual development is determined by their class-belonging and they are “subsumed” under this belonging (The German ideology). It is, as Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, “impossible for the individuals of a class etc. to overcome [these external relations] en masse without destroying them”. Under very specific circumstances, the individual may arrive on top of these external relations, “but the mass of those under their rule cannot, since their mere existence expresses subordination, the necessary subordination of the mass of individuals”.

What distinguishes labouring individuals in the capitalist mode of production from those in other, earlier modes of production? How can the class relation be reproduced despite the workers being exploited and only reluctantly exchanging their commodity, their labour-power, for the capitalist’s money?

In the capitalist mode of production the working class is “a class dependent on wages” (Capital I). The producers of the surplus-product in this mode of production are free labourers compared to, for instance, the labouring masses in feudalism, the slaves in ancient Greece and so on. They are also free of the means to produce their means of subsistence. In capitalism “the 'free' worker … makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage” (Capital I). Even though the value of total labour-power equals the price of this total, the price and value of labour-power varies in every country, region, city and so on, even on the level of the individual workers, something it necessarily has to. But “be his payment high or low”, the worker is exploited qua worker. Certain groups of workers, workers at certain firms and in certain countries, regions etc. may occasionally, and/or over time, receive a wage above the average price of labour-power. The wage is not only the price for a minimum of the physical reproduction of labour-power, but contains “historical” and “moral” parts. The level of means of subsistence that enter into the value of labour-power is calculated by value and not number, and it therefore oscillates with the productive-force of labour. The capitalist process of reproduction “takes good care to prevent the workers, those instruments of production who are possessed of consciousness, from running away, by constantly removing their product from one pole to the other, to the opposite pole of capital” (Capital I). Thus, the wage-worker, with all his socially compelling freedom, is tied to the capitalist with “invisible threads”. “A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow it to be loosened somewhat” (Capital I).

It goes without saying, then, that the room to move for the individual worker differs from man to man, from firm to firm, from country to country. In as much as one manages to establish for oneself an existence where the wage covers more than the absolute minimum of physical survival one may, as an exception, be able to chose to deny oneself some of the specific standard of living determining one’s specific value of labour-power: one could live in confined quarters, choose a vegetarian diet, travel by bus – the list of banal examples could be extended to the point of boredom. But once we speak of the working-class this room to move is absent, apart from the occasional fluctuations in the value of total labour-power. Even though your daily dollar in a Chinese sweatshop may fill a bowl of rice or two, the possibility there to withdraw and secure your mere physical existence is utterly limited. If despite this, however, as a computer engineer, an oil rig worker or suchlike, in a Western country, by denying some of your material standard of living and due to being creditworthy, you buy a piece of land, and the climate is favourable and so on, you may, once again as an exception, be able to establish at least by appearance a non-capitalist existence. It would certainly not be communism, even though you would cease to be dependent on a wage.

The capitalist process of production does not merely produce commodities, surplus-value, trash and repetitive strain injury. Considered as a process of reproduction it produces and reproduces “in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour” (Capital I). If one considers bourgeois society as a whole, “the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations” (Grundrisse). Capital presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. It is not by chance that they get in contact with each other – they carry all of their economic relations with them together with the commodity they aim to exchange, and since it is a relation of production, subsumption, and so on, the worker belongs to the capitalist even before he sells his labour-power. In the course of its own process this “economic relation” reproduces the separation of the conditions of labour from the workers and thus “reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited” (Capital I). By posing the relation of production in this formal way, it appears as the “tautology” that Marcel presented in his “Communism of attack, and communism of withdrawal”, in riff-raff No. 7 (2005).

The conclusion, however and once again, of Marx’s critique of political economy is that capitalism, being a contradictory mode of production, is historically determined and transitory; its extinction is implicit in its concept, even though to become an “empirical reality” a social revolution is a precondition, but one that can’t be mathematically predicted or entered in an agenda. On the one hand it reproduces itself through its contradictions, but on the other hand relations of production and forms of intercourse develop “so many mines to explode it” (Grundrisse) – by a communist revolution which abolishes the “external conditions”, what will hardly be some “quiet metamorphosis”. If this were not the case, capitalism would not be a historically determined and transitory mode of production, and our attempts to explode it would be “quixotic”. In his Preface of 1859 Marx is even more prophetic: “The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation”. And as he stressed in his “Postface” to the second issue of Capital I, dialectics in its “rational form … includes in its positive understanding what exists as a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction…”

At the same time as the capital relation reproduces itself and its preconditions, it is a “contradiction-in-process” in that it strives to reduce its only source of surplus-value – value-creating labour – to a minimum, and thus its laws of motion at the level of the system tend to undermine its own foundation. “The real barrier to capitalist production is capital itself.” (Capital III) The capital relation as process of accumulation is its own obituary. The tendency of the profit rate to fall is exploitation, thus class struggle. Even though it won’t tell us when capitalism is going to be abolished, on its specific level of abstraction, it is an indication of the capital relation as a “contradiction-in-process”. The extinction of the capitalist mode of production is implicit in its concept, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.³⁾

If you consider communisation a logical concept, the thought is rather classical: you think that you may find a form of “anti-economic logic” in the refusal of work and similar tendencies, and that this logic postulates a community that is alien to capital… Hence, you stake your money on what seems to be able to alienate itself from capital and its determinations. – Gracchus

The dissidents’ problematic is founded on the idea that, when capital has subjugated the whole of society, it becomes an infinite and tautological circular movement, one which is dynamic merely within its static organism. That which forms a part of, and is determined by, the capital relation can then only belong to and move, more or less anxiously and rebelliously within this relation. The capital relation defines its poles, i.e. its classes; their opposition is only valid within the relation, and they mutually condition each-other. For the dissidents, the dialectic of the capitalist mode of production as a totality becomes more of a causal interaction between the poles of the relation, what they call a “dichotomous logic”. By presenting the relation as a “tautology” accumulation disappears as a historical development. For them, the relation is not a contradictory whole, even less any “reciprocal implication”, but a “binary relation” (Marcel, “Attack/withdrawal”), which always closes its circle and starts again once more. Therefore, they argue, there is no “immanent result” of the contradiction which “tends to undermine it”; it has as its only result “the perpetuation of its dialectical conditions”. Instead, the possibility to overcome this formal logic is said to lie in “actual proletarians’ attempts to detach themselves from their function as labour-for-itself…”⁴⁾ In Dissident No. 3 we can read things such as the following:

When the oppositional politics shifts into such an uncontrollable, anti-political practice, then parts of the class – because the proletariat is always stratified and differentiated – act against their interest in working as a function within the totality of the production process. Such a disinterest in functioning as the subjectivity of capital establishes a dualism, an incapacity on the part of capital of integrating labour with its dialectic by posing it as not-capital. At such a moment labour has partly lost its function as use-value for capital, partly it avoids the production of subjectivity and of needs that arise from the double nature of labour and the commodity. The individual private labourers now function as externalities to capital and labour. They no longer stand in a necessary or dialectical relation to the social nature of total labour. The worker has freed himself from the dialectic of capital by refusing to perform his function within the totality; he puts himself in a non-dialectical relation to capital. – “The diachrony of Communism: Exits and efforts to escape”

Without doubt, the dissidents are fond of Robinsonades. The apparent individualism of bourgeois society and the – at the first appearance – binary nature of the relation fit their logical argument like a glove. But this seemingly simple relation rests upon an equality that is “already disturbed” in that both poles stand in a determinate economic relation to each-other: a relation of exploitation. One has the impression that the argument of the dissidents rests on a a naïve comprehension of the logic of capital – and the logic of Capital. They comprehend this as a simple relation, one with formal-logical determinations, as opposed to the contradiction-in-process which determines the classes that form part of it, as reciprocal implication, whose single components, the “actual proletarians” in this case, are determined twice – as a class under capital, as an individual under the class. (Of course, also the capitalist is determined by his class belonging.)

It becomes rather absurd when the dissidents use terms such as “private labourers” to indicate the refusal of work by individual workers, for “private labourers” is more of a formal criterion to designate capitalist free labour/ wage labour as the necessary pre-condition of capital as such (see above), something which Marx contrasts with work under earlier modes of production, such as “the rural patriarchal system of production” and “communal labour in its spontaneously evolved form as we find it among all civilised nations at the dawn of their history” (see A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

In the same way it is problematic to interpret how communism is empirically possible already at the abstract level of commodity exchange, which includes the exchange between the seller and the buyer of labour power, where, plain and simple, it appears as if the labourer = not-capital, and capital = not-labour, which is a formal determination within Marx’s systematic dialectical exposition. This “equals to” implies that they are each-others equivalents. As the exchangers of their respective commodities the worker and the capitalist, the “owner of money”, are “equal in the eyes of the law”, the former as the seller of his labour-power, the latter as the buyer of this labour-power. Both of them exchange their commodities, and in both instances no violation is made of the principles of the free market exchange. But, as Marx said, ”[b]etween equal rights, force decides“ (Capital I). As if the entire problem was some kind of direct formal logic, the dissidents maintain that if labour withdrew from its role, capital would loose the only use-value that is able to valorise it – and voilà, the latter is made “obsolete”. A simple, symmetrical logic, a binary relation from which one factor is withdrawn and the relation as such ceases to exist, if and only if… In the pure categories from the analysis of commodities ”[d]efinite historical conditions“ are involved – an investigation of these conditions, however, “would have been foreign to the analysis of commodities” (Capital I), as Marx notified us. The dissidents seem to believe that this relation as such exists empirically. They too abstract from the determinate historical preconditions, but not like Marx – due to the mode of presentation of the critique, or due to the systematically dialectical structure of Capital⁵⁾ – but absolutely, once and for all. With their starting-point in the purest abstractions they travel, by way of “ever more advanced approximations” (Gracchus), towards a concrete understanding, towards the empirical level, which by then may be expressed in class composition analyses and in workers’ inquiries.

In company with Harry Cleaver the dissidents completely ignore the mediations and transitions between the Marxian categories and the location in Marx’s systematic dialectical presentation from which the cited terms and passages are picked, such as in general the relation between the logical and the empirical. However, communisation doesn’t play itself out on paper, and class-struggle is not a “Möbius strip” in which you are led forward only to return exactly to where you’ve begun. The refusal of an individual actor or his withdrawal does not in itself undermine the capitalist system as a historical mode of production, by always and all the time, in every single case, invalidating the logical concept of capital.

The dissidents seem to make use of the Cartesian “symmetrical product” when putting forward this so called binary relation. If A = B, then the relation is made obsolete if either of the factors is removed. And of course it never crosses their minds that the capitalist would ever abdicate. Thus, it is through the refusal of work, by refusing to play one’s role as a worker etc. that the “actual” workers abolish the concept of capital, and with that the relation as such, in each and every case. In the world of discourse perhaps, but capitalism can’t be talked away. Social phenomena are abolished by social processes. It is neither enough nor possible to “withdraw”, to turn one’s back on, and one’s head from, capital or labour, muttering a few trite and angry phrases about it.

But if we raise our heads and try to see the shit as it appears before our eyes – for example in “an average day”, at “an average workplace” (Dissident No. 3) or, why not read a little further in Marx’s magnum opus⁶⁾ – it will then be brutally clear that the class relation is asymmetrical in that it is always labour that is subsumed under capital. All semblance of equivalence vanishes as soon as we understand how logic is practically determined.⁷⁾

The “particular workers”, or the “private labours”, of the individualist discourse of the dissidents let themselves loose from total labour, but in reality they are “spontaneous developed branches of the social division of labour, and are in a situation of all-round dependence on each other” (Capital I). The understanding of the productive workers that is expressed in this discourse is, as Marx told us (twice at that), “from the standpoint of the simple labour process, … by no means sufficient to cover the capitalist process of production” (Capital I). Once the capitalist process of production adopts its character of co-operation, the concepts of productive labour and productive worker are necessarily extended and transformed. With the introduction of automatic machinery it becomes “sufficient for him to be an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate functions” (Capital I), to be sentenced to this “misfortune”. In the developed capitalist production process the worker stands beside this process instead of being its main character. In this way capital posits “the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary” (Grundrisse). It is this that makes capital a contradiction-in-process (a moving contradiction), by trying to reduce necessary labour to a minimum at the same time as labour time is its only source and measure. This is the “necessary tendency of capital” and at the same time what conceptually makes it a historically transitory mode of production. “Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production” (Grundrisse).

Every particular historical mode of production has its own specific “laws of population”; so also the capitalist one, needless to say. Rudely simplified, as the working class produces by its own labour a growing capital, it simultaneously produces “the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing” (Capital I). This is both a fundamental moment and the result of the general law of capitalist accumulation. With the continuous process of accumulation the relation between constant and variable capital is altered such that the increase in constant capital equals the proportional decrease in variable capital. “It [the demand for labour] falls relative to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases” (Capital I). An ever growing accumulation is not only necessary for employing more workers, but even to employ the old workers. Capital puts to work only that labour which will produce surplus-value, and this is what capital’s entire logic and organism is based upon. This relative surplus-population, the labour reserve, is the property of capital in such a way that their lack of employment is a lack relative to the valorisation imperative of capital accumulation. And the free worker’s freedom from the possession of the means to exist, except from selling his labour-power, is a freedom relative to the capitalist means of production, as the property of the capitalist.

The tendency to reduce variable vis-à-vis constant capital, manifested in the pushing aside of the worker from, and his subsumption under, constant capital in the form of machinery, makes the immediate labour process more and more inessential for the capitalist process of production. With the subsumption of science and the “general intellect”, it is increasingly the total productive force of the workers that valorises capital. To this tendency “the extraordinary increase in the productivity of large-scale industry, accompanied as it is by both a more intensive and a more extensive exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production, permits a larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively. Hence it is possible to reproduce the ancient domestic slaves, on a constantly extending scale, under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc.” (Capital I), who are even more exposed to the temperamental demand for labour-power by capital.

I have tried to show with the above that the dissidents, as it seems to me, choose to build parts of their argument on the logical possibility of communisation using terms we recognise from Marx's (conceptual) analysis of simple reproduction and also the simple labour-process, mainly from the first chapter of Capital I and Contribution to critique of political economy, and from the rougher manuscripts of his Grundrisse; it is obvious that they are quite text-bound in following the Swedish selection of the latter.⁸⁾ At this, the most abstract level of analysis, capital and labour as a class relation is not yet apparent; rather, in these “pure abstractions” the commodity producers enter into relation with each other to exchange their commodities, exchange-value for use-value and vice versa. According to this Marxian formal determination of the act of exchange the individuals, as subjects of exchange, their relation is “that of equality” (Grundrisse). But even if “already the simple forms of exchange value and of money latently contain the opposition between labour and capital” (Grundrisse), it is impossible to understand the capital relation as a class contradiction from this “simple determination”. I am led to believe that the dissidents read the logical, possible end of the capital relation qua class contradiction into certain Marxian passages, such as, for example, this one from the Grundrisse:

In order to become capital, it itself presupposes labour as not-capital as against capital; hence it presupposes the establishment at another point of the contradiction it is supposed to overcome. If, then, in the original relation itself, the object and the product of the worker's exchange – as product of mere exchange, it can be no other – were not use value, subsistence, satisfaction of direct needs, withdrawal from circulation of the equivalent put into it in order to be destroyed by consumption – then labour would confront capital not as labour, not as not-capital, but as capital. But capital, too, cannot confront capital if capital does not confront labour, since capital is only capital as not-labour; in this contradictory relation. Thus the concept and the relation of capital itself would be destroyed.⁹⁾

In this passage Marx polemicises against the idea of “bourgeois 'philanthropy’” that the workers can liberate themselves from their situation by saving their “money in a properly ascetic manner”. Marx replies that if money no longer functions as capital, as “not-labour”, “the concept and the relation of capital itself would be destroyed”. It may seem obvious that here, Marx gives these hypocrite apologists a sarcastic slap in the face. But after the dissidents’ new reading his words are transformed into a weapon, a veritable revolutionary strategy, a “theory for practice” (since the dissidents love to agitate), in which the worker, or “not-capital”, as producer and consumer, lifts himself out of “the general circulation” and in this way “annihilates” his opposite, capital, or “not-labour”. Thus it seems as easy to make a revolution as it is to regret your last buy in the supermarket.

At the most banal level workers struggle as workers, individually and together. Sometimes to make one's existence a little better, but most often to stop it from getting worse, sometimes just because of sheer boredom and because one wants a good laugh at the expense of the boss, a union official, or a work-mate. Kämpa tillsammans! (“Struggle together!”) in Sweden has, in a concrete and personal way, ever since the group was formed, done a commendable job in trying to portray this everyday resistance. Their concrete application of the “militant inquiry” has many times been valuable and great inspiration. Indeed, I would say that this everyday struggle by the “obstinate yet elastic natural barrier” (Capital I) may be understood as the banal precondition for all struggle, since it expresses what it is to be a proletarian in this society. I see and engage in the same things; what makes us different is how we understand what we see and do.

For the dissidents of today this permanent tension and dynamic in capitalism is communisation – “a simple matter”, something that occurs “all the time”; in each and every case a sphere is opened up that no longer obeys the logic of the capitalist totality: “It may be riots, occupations and refusal of work, just as it may be linguistic, intellectual and poetical escape routes” (Dissident No. 3). They place their hopes in a termite-like undermining of capitalism by “faceless resistance”.¹⁰⁾ (Such a “going beyond the framework of what exists” makes me think of the “general strike” of revolutionary syndicalism that is supposed to make the capitalist system collapse by the workers refusing to work en masse.) This banal and pragmatic communisation is said to appear when the undermining and refusal of individual workers, or “private labour”, “tend to block labour's determination as productive labour” (Gracchus). They say that the individual worker is “capable of resisting his productive determination” (ibid.), and that it is when such “attempts to break loose” spread and achieve “simultaneity” that the capital relation is drained of blood and can be left behind, like a carcass on the steppes of history. According to this understanding, the limits of communisation are merely quantitative – temporally, spatially, and in terms of the number of participants. By way of precaution they add: “… at least on their workplace”; “Admittedly, this all happened within the framework of the actual workplace, we did not get any further…”; “… unfortunately within the reproduction of a specific institution” (a temp work agency); etc (see Kim Müller). For them the limits are not to be superseded by a qualitative break at a certain moment of a struggle.

According to the dissidents' understanding, these attempts by individual proletarians to break loose dig “underground tunnels” which, once connected to other “holed rooms”, form rhizomes (a term they have borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari that stands for “uncontrollable compositions”). What is important is that they “negate the existing relations' way of functioning, and how they manage to exist in community with other communisising events” (Dissident No. 3). Another image they borrow is Ernst Jünger's “gardens” that represent “sanctuaries where the logic of the present is unable to establish itself”; these can “move outside of the totality, at the same time as they, at present, are only visible through it – they can be understood only through their relations to the reality which they, by their mere existence, negate” (Ibid.).

The dissidents set up the following criterion for when an act is communising:

The revolutionary in an act can only be measured from the relation of the action to the capitalist abstractions, its potential of coming into being… – Marcel, “Communism of attack, and communism of withdrawal”

But the criterion here set up is impossible, since no phenomenon and no action is anything in itself. All action appears in a context, and it is this context in its totality that determines the action: to steal at work, or in a supermarket, is not communisation in itself, whether it logically omits the logic of capital or not. To play or sleep at work may be both fun and needed, but it isn't communisation in itself, not even if it turns out to have an injurous effect on output or other business ratios of the work process.

Whether the measures taken by proletarians are to begin communisation, out of necessity rather than from the careful choice of form or method of struggle, will be fully determined by the dynamic and context of the struggle. Its character will shift during the process until the communising measures have driven the dynamic to the point of no return, where a fall back within the limits of class existence becomes impossible.

However, even if it is not communisation in each and every case of refusal by the individual worker, the fact remains that revolution as communisation will have to start somewhere and by someone. This “someone” can never exist in the singular, though. As a social process it is impossible to, as in mechanics or gene research, isolate the act that is the trigger, or the initiating individual. Communisation knows no Rosa Parks (and the civil rights movement didn't either). Every workplace struggle, group of workers, or the vast majority of the workforce at a workplace or in a region, comes up against the limits of the struggle, sooner, and not later. The possibility of overcoming this limit does not depend on the workers in struggle themselves, but on the context in which the struggle is waged being pulled into the actions of the workers in struggle, and on these actions being spread and deepened. Communisation will then be a practical answer to the (social) crisis of the class relation. The surrounding society will be pulled into the struggle, which will be transformed qualitatively, when for example the factory gates are opened for the workers to get out and for the proletarians in the region to enter both the plant and the struggle. In this way the struggle spreads and the abyss opened up by the struggle will be both wider and deeper the more it is filled by proletarians in struggle. However, it is not obvious at this point that it is communisation. Whether the process initiated by a specific struggle is to change into communisation depends on how the context transforms, how the struggle against capital evolves, as well as the struggle within the struggle against capital. A fast spreading in space and time is required, as well as a qualitative transformation. It may be ridiculous to stress that no act is communisation in itself, but not even a single struggle is communisation. Communisation is not the emancipation of labour, not to “let loose the barrier of capital, labour, from what makes labour labour”, as we are told in Dissident No. 3. Workers struggle as workers, and at a certain moment when a specific limit is overcome an abyss opens up where the next step must be to establish other, immediate relations between the proletarians in struggle, in their process of decomposition by taking communist measures. But, if they are unable to take this step into the abyss, then the struggle will be violently thrown back within the former limits and die soon enough. Its death will be the more brutal the wider the abyss has been. The counter-revolution will grow from the soil of the character of the struggle and its limits, just like the communist measures taken. Many of the measures of communisation will be such fundamental matters as how to get hold of and prepare food, a scenario which is far more likely than the dough-war Kim Müller cites as signs of everyday communisation.

In a thread about communisation on the Swedish Internet community Socialism.nu, Hank from Kämpa tillsammans! poses the question: ”[Are] any struggles today at all … communising or not?“, and in an intervention a few days later he gives the answer that there are “tendencies to communisation today, and not just in bigger uprisings such as those in Algeria [referred to by TC in their text on self-organisation and communisation, discussed by Hank and the Kim Müller blog], but in the daily class-struggle”. Instead of developing this point in his intervention he refers to the Kim Müller blog and the post “We wanted to play football” which persists in arguing that “many of the everyday struggles aren't about the wage or working hours, but about work itself”. In this “seemingly meaningless micro-struggle” the matter is rather the will “to be oneself”, a will that is expressed in “the daily inability to adjust to one's class situation”. This is why his workmates wanted “to play football”, “to throw dough at each other”, “to play”. They were not interested in “being protesting, disobedient or striking workers” affirming their role. They wanted to get “beyond [their] class situation and a way to do that was to act as if [they] had already done so”.

Two souls, alas, do dwell within his breast; The one is ever parting from the other. – Faust

The people behind Kämpa tillsammans! asserted that because they “were both revolutionaries and workers” – a difference they consciously “affirmed” – a distance was produced between their being on the one hand labour-power, “the commodity that produces the tautology of capital”, and on the other “revolutionaries”, a qualification that made it possible for them to “abandon the role as proletarian, as labour-power”. But, they admit: “Our problem was that we always remained within capital. What we wanted was to get 'outside' of capitalism” (Marcel, “Communism of withdrawal, and communism of attack”).

As we have seen, the dissidents understand communisation as when “actual proletarians struggle against capital by resisting the efforts to incorporate them in their class, and avoid capital's efforts to incorporate the demands that are raised as an objective result of the struggle…” At such a moment “this struggling part of the proletariat does not function as a proletariat … but as an outside to capital's process of reproduction” (Dissident No. 3) – they “depict themselves as a party” (Marcel, “Attack/Withdrawal”), as ”Gemeinwesen“. In “Attack/Withdrawal”, by Marcel, their party-theory is formulated as follows:

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

According to their logical concept, the “fabrication of 'loosening' relations” lead to “passivity” (a new version of Lenin's “revolutionary defeatism”?), a “blockage” and so on, that is already “beyond the negation” in that it “annihilate[s] the foundation on which the poles rest”. Theoretically, this can be “ascertained” and practically produced “through the production of revolutionaries” (Attack/Withdrawal).¹¹⁾

It is by “excommunicating” themselves from the community of capital that the revolutionaries can establish not-capitalist (or not-anymore-capitalist) enclaves, as outsides to the capitalist totality. These Jüngerian “gardens” will become the resort for the communists, or rather the ex-communists¹²⁾ who, in their gardens, seem to lead a life similar to the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, in their spaces in between the worlds, with no influence whatsoever on the universe or the life of men. For what effect does it have to excommunicate oneself, to turn one's back on the capitalist process of production, when capital itself throws out (or excommunicates) its workers by wholesale and retail?

At best, the perspective of our dissidents is one-sided – since individuals act, feel, experience and so on, although not isolated from society – but it neglects the social determination of the individual, and overestimates the “actual” proletarian's room to move and possibility to “leave this world”. It also overestimates the instinct of self-preservation and self-valorisation of the capital relation at the same time as it underestimates the ability of the proletarian class as a class to abolish itself and its opposite, capital and capitalist society, and also the ability of the class relation to disarm the “small and hidden attacks” of the termites.

But don't get me wrong. It's neither the practical efforts nor the will to live “differently” that is wrong, even though the approach and the self-image is indeed very limited. However, we all do what we can to survive the day, to keep alienation at bay so to speak. But the “politics is to will” of Olof Palme (former Prime minister of Sweden, now residing six feet under the most remote Intermundia), is after all not anywhere near enough. As a strategic perspective, and actual endeavour, it is in the end futile and impotent, as only a communist revolution can make it a reality. As immediate endeavour it can't exist today other than as an alternative lifestyle within the present state of things. As the expression of the disappearance of workers' identity however, it vegetates in the borderland between the proletarian condition and the establishment of new social relations. The revolutionaries, according to the dissidents and many in the ultra-left, seem to be the Minotaur of communism, half revolutionary, half labour-power; the one is ever parting from the other.

However, what seem to me the most interesting aspects of this perspective are the questions of why it seems to be an expression of the struggle in our time, and what it can contribute when it comes to the theoretical understanding of our present moment. It seems to me that the dissidents feel that class belonging has become an external constraint rather than something to affirm and emancipate,¹³⁾ and for me that might very well be a characteristic of the present cycle of struggles. However, from this they draw the conclusion that individual exodus may be an opportunity – and one which is immediately attractive. Our dissidents seem to build their programme by extrapolating from their own experienced situation, or at least how they have interpreted that situation.¹⁴⁾ But this voluntarism of theirs, just like all voluntarism, is impossible in all imaginable [possible] ways. As I have tried to say with this text the room to move for the individual is utterly determined by the classes and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Inevitably, this politics of will falls over into a thinly veiled moralism, and thus an elitism, since it is impossible to realise on a capitalist basis.

I've tried to show that it is all about class-belonging and struggle, and the possibility of superseding this class struggle in, by and on the basis of the same, by taking communising measures in the brutal chaos in the crisis of the exploitation relation, when the proletarian class abolishes its opposite and master, capital and the capitalist class, and thereby itself.

According to the dissidents we shall “try to see capitalism for what it is… [and] avoid seeing communism where there is no communism” (Dissident No. 3). According to J. Kellstadt, in his/her discussion about the paradox of anti-activism, we “shouldn't pretend that we're liberated when we're not, which could only turn us into a priggish aristocracy of the 'authentic' and 'un-alienated'”.¹⁵⁾ To pretend is to play, but play is not in itself communisation.

Since, for the dissidents, communisation is something going on all the time, in everyday micro-struggles and in individual withdrawals, they have consequently made a shift in problematic from when and why communisation is a practical problem for us at this particular moment, from it being about measures which the proletariat has to take when it reaches the limits of its class struggle, to ask instead: ”[W]hat stops communisation?“, in what ways is “this withdrawal [stopped] from becoming total?” (Gracchus). The Haecceitas blog maintains explicitly that the question of “the outside, as emptyness, as negation, as annulment [is] utopian in the best meaning of the word: a permanent possibility”.

The preliminary answer that they come up with, a permanent feature in the reasoning of the dissidents, is the “consumption with money” – “Money is used against (the tendencies to) communisation” (Gracchus) – and when money doesn't work, ”[i]f money and gadgets can't incorporate the workers they have to be defeated by force“ (Gracchus). But communisation isn't stopped by “money and gadgets”; the workers receive a wage in exchange for their labour-power, their ability to valorise capital. The “golden chains” ain't no bling-bling.

I admit that it might seem strange that the dissidents and I reach such different conclusions on the basis of the problematic I tried to define above, and on the basis of the use of the common term 'communisation'. For me, as I've argued in this text, the supersession of the class contradiction is produced by class-struggle, namely the class-struggle of the proletariat; for the dissidents communism, and its inter-individual relations, has to be established by something other than class-struggle and the proletariat. The “something other” appears according to them when individuals refuse to play their assigned roles as labour-power, each and every time, ever since the capitalist mode of production appeared in the pores of feudal society. (At best; it's hard to really tell the scope of their trans-historicity, and of their utopian permanent possibility.)

When the dissidents want to make the individual acts that annul the logic of capital – wildcat strikes, the refusal of being productive, theft, riots and so on – into (a tendential) communisation, I'd prefer to say that these examples, which I see too (however differently, as it seems), are examples of the everyday character of class-struggle, of being proletarian. The faceless resistance of Kämpa tillsammans! may very well be a quality of struggle more up to date today, after the collapse of programmatism and workers' identity, and the new cycle of struggle. But revolution as communisation is something else, something more, a social crisis and process as the result of the measures proletarians in struggle have to take at a specific moment to overcome the limits they face. Nevertheless, communisation is not a permanent tension that is held back, because if it was, then the very meaning of the concept would be lost. Communisation is a practical problem posed by the proletariat at a certain moment of its class struggle against capital.

In these few lines I've tried to show that, despite their sensitivity to the contradictions of the system today, the dissidents find their way and support among the wrecked goods and body-bags of the collapse of programmatism and the former problematic.

It is as if the communist spectre of the earlier cycles of struggle is haunting their perspective: for Kämpa tillsammans! faceless resistance was maintaining termite-like attacks, gnawing holes in the capitalist system, and their revolutionary receipt was autonomy; for the dissidents of our time the very same termite attacks are communisation. Their model is the same, it has just changed clothes.

With their Cammattian echoes of the past, the dissidents want to “leave this world”; they try to make us believe that, and act themselves as if, they have already done so. At the end of the day, however, it is the capitalist historical determination of social relations that they (and I, and many, many more) feel the urge and need to supersede, abolish, destroy and so on. I am, though, pretty sure that this revolutionary process will be everything but a football match, a latent transition or tea-party (and no “immediatist Potlatch” in the anarchist Hakim Bey sense). As proletariat we will set ourselves the task that we will then be able to solve. But just because you have set the task for yourself, it doesn't mean that it is solved already.

July 2010

Supposing that I would be too subjectivist and TC too objectivist, then it would be impossible to combine these two mistakes and look for an adequate solution half way between them. You never correct an error by adding the symetrically opposed (and symetrically wrong) error, only by finding whatever is logically at fault at the basis of both. You couldn’t balance a partly idealistic-humanist method with a structuralist-logical method, and approach the truth by a sensible combination of the two. – Gilles Dauvé¹⁾

As Dauvé correctly notes, the point is not to discover a middle ground between these two positions, but to supersede their problematic altogether. Because it was the question of history that initially exposed the inherent contradiction between them, it is not surprising that it is history again that reveals the inadequacies of both positions. The disagreements between Troploin and Théorie Communiste emerge from the manner in which they comprehend the relationship between communist theory, the cycle of struggle as a specific moment of the real movement, and the historical moment itself, which essentially means the manner in which they comprehend history itself.

Dauvé argues that while communism has always been a possibility, its form of appearance has nonetheless always been necessarily determined by the material conditions of each historical moment:

In the 19th century, and even at the time of the first world war, the material conditions of communism were still to be created, at least in some countries (France, Italy, Russia, etc.). A communist revolution would first have had to develop productive forces, to put the petite bourgeoisie to work, to generalize industrial labor, with the rule: no work, no food (of course this only applied to those able to work).²⁾

And again:

Whatever the situation may have been 50 or 100 years ago, the present revolutionary movement does not aim to bring about the conditions of communism; these have been fully created by capital. Our objective is the immediate communisation of society.³⁾

Because the real movement is historically contingent, its immediate tasks, methods, and forms of struggle will always vary according to the changing historical conjuncture. Consequently, the historical realization of the real movement is variable. But, as Dauvé argues later, while its forms may vary, its essence does not:

If the ‘being’ of the proletariat theorized by Marx is not just metaphysics, its content is independent of the forms taken by capitalist domination. The tension between the submission to work and the critique of work has been active since the dawn of capitalism. Of course the realization of communism depends on the historical moment, but its deep content remains invariant in 1796 and in 2002.⁴⁾

And just as with the content of the real movement, so too with its theory:

I feel the essential has been laid down in the 1840s. Not everything: the destruction of the State, the critique of the workers' movement, the understanding of revolution as communization, these positions only became clear later, and some only in the past 40 or 50 years or so.⁵⁾

It is as though Dauvé arrived at his theory by cutting up history and haphazardly gluing some of its pieces together: the essential content of the real movement is situated at 1796, the essentials of the theory are situated in the 1840s, and its forms of realization are said to vary according to the historical moment. But of course, and as Dauvé himself recognizes, historical moments supersede themselves by flowing into one another: because the material conditions of 1848 are no longer the material conditions of the present, the real movement has also changed along with its corresponding theoretical articulations. To reconcile the invariance of his theoretical position with a necessarily diachronic conception of history, Dauvé has no choice but to simply redefine subsequent theoretical changes as mere revisions or additions to the essential theory established in the 1840s. Dauvé freezes the communist theory of one historical moment into an absolute and transhistorical communist theory, but admits, as one necessarily must, that each new clarification to the theory only expands the essential. History is abolished.

Once it has been abstracted from history, the theory can only congeal into ideology. The result, as TC remark, is Dauvé work, When Insurrections Die: a fundamentally ahistorical communist theory that serves as a standard of measurement for the judgment of the real movement in past historical moments.⁶⁾ And of course, everything fails because nothing can conform to the normative imperatives demanded by a chimerical theory torn from the fabric of history. TC summarize: “When we say that revolution and communism can only be immediate communization, that doesn’t mean that communism has finally presented itself today as it always really was or as it always should have been.”⁷⁾

Dauvé fractures the theory, the content of the real movement, and the historical moments such that history itself is rendered meaningless. TC avoids this by historicizing communism so that a specific set of communist theories necessarily correspond to a specific cycle of struggle that is itself determined by the historically specific dimensions of the mutually involved structural relationship between capital and labor. This is certainly an advance: in relating a cycle of struggle and its parallel sets of theories to a particular historical moment, TC is able to comprehend the communism of that moment in terms of the material conditions which determine it, and not from the perspective of a purportedly essential position that can hover outside of history and pass normative judgments. But in spite of recognizing that each historical conjuncture determines its own communist theory, in arguing that the form which communism must necessarily assume in our historical moment is that form which necessarily overcomes the dialectic of capital, TC abstracts the theory of their moment as the absolute theory. TC produces a total history where the necessary production of communism, as determined by the current cycle of struggle, is neatly situated as its end.

But communism as the definitive overcoming of the historical dialectic of capital has not yet been produced. A total history of communism cannot be constructed until the actual production of the authoritative form of communism itself. Indeed, even if the communist revolution were to occur within the very near future, the intricate history that TC has established would still be perforce at variance with the total history that will emerge after the communist revolution simply because the vantage point to comprehend that history will only be afforded after that event. In his comments regarding TC, Dauvé critiques the mistaken attempt to produce this kind of a total history: “There is no privileged time or place, no possible vantage point from which the whole meaning of history could at last be revealed to those who master the right theory. TC offers another example of an understandable but misplaced belief in the power of human thought.”⁸⁾

TC’s history, then, precisely because it pretends to a total history that cannot yet be written, is nothing but the justification for their assertion that the relationship between labor and capital has restructured itself to such a state that the resolution of the entire dialectic has become both possible and necessary. For TC, because communism failed previously because it had to fail, the moment when communism becomes possible is by definition the moment when it becomes necessary. Their history is the constructed justification for that necessity.

TC only reconstructs history to prove that communism will be necessarily produced in the present historical moment. One could just as easily restructure history to prove that communism will necessarily not be produced in the present historical moment. Such is the nature of history. For communism, however, the proof of the pudding is not in some constructed genealogy but in its eating.

Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. – G.W.F. Hegel⁹⁾

Because each specific historical moment produces its own specific cycle of struggle and its own specific communist theories, one can only write the communist theory of one’s own time. Communist theory is only a reflective analysis of the current cycle of struggle situated in its historical moment as compared with past cycles of struggles situated in their respective historical moments; since these moments are not discreet points but instead continuous aspects of a unitary movement, communist theory is more specifically the “theoretical expression of a revolutionary process” from a particular historical vantage point.¹⁰⁾

No one can deny that the content and forms of the real movement have changed over time. This is precisely because the material conditions that determine the real movement have themselves changed over time. But this is not to say that each cycle of struggle is wholly independent from those that came before it. Historical moments do not themselves emerge from nowhere, but are instead produced and determined by every preceding historical moment. Because the past is always preserved in the present, there must remain an element of continuity between the various cycles of struggle that compose the real movement and also between the various historical communist theories that comprehend, articulate, develop, and themselves form integral components of that material movement. Dauvé chooses to call this line of continuity the essence or deep content, but mistakenly anchors it to some empirical date abstracted from a history that can by definition only be comprehended in constant process. It is one thing to assert that the history of communism as simultaneously a theory and a real movement possesses an element of continuity; it is quite another to select a specific moment and argue that it was only then that the essential was produced, the totality appeared in embryonic form, and therefore, that subsequent “new” discoveries only serve as further clarifications of the invariantly essential.

Each advance in communist theory neither adds to the essential theory written at some empirically defined point in the past nor represents an absolute break with that past; rather, it determinately negates the past: the totality is not annulled but superseded through its refinement. For instance, the historically determined recognition that communism cannot be, as Marx once famously wrote in the Communist Manifesto, the “centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly,”¹¹⁾ but rather, must be the complete abolition of the state, does not abolish communist theory altogether. It produces a new communist theory determined by new material conditions that represents neither total rupture nor total continuity, but both as dialectical process. The essential is the coherence of the process itself.

The historical moments determined by the capitalist mode of production are the products of the reciprocal implication of labor and capital. Each of these moments produces its own cycle of struggle and its own reflective constellation of communist theories which together take themselves as the authoritative communism. In and through the material struggle, the latent but always dynamic tension between the two poles in the relationship reaches a point of possible break and the validity of the cycle of struggle and its correlated theories is put to the test. If the struggle results in defeat, what that communism had taken to be authoritative for itself is necessarily self-undermined and the relationship between labor and capital is restructured, producing the material ground for a new historical moment and, by consequence, the necessary appearance of a new communism as the totality of a specific cycle of struggle and its corresponding set of theoretical articulations. In TC’s words, “there is no restructuring of the capitalist mode of production without a workers defeat.”¹²⁾ As the supersession of the previous form, this newer form of reflective communism represents the simultaneous replacement and completion of that previous form because what it takes as authoritative for itself is precisely “that which was necessary to resolve the issues that were self-undermining”¹³⁾ for the previous form of communism. But through the moment of struggle, the defeat of this newer form of communism produces its own self-undermining conditions and accordingly reconstructs the relationship such that the material conditions of the past are superseded into the material conditions of the future, producing yet another historical moment and, by consequence, the necessary appearance of yet another form of communism. The internal motor driving this progression is the class struggle; the unfolding of various appearances of communism is the material education of the real movement; and the movement of this real movement, as the process of loss and reconstitution, as the “path of despair,”¹⁴⁾ is the experience of the real movement.¹⁵⁾

Certainly, contingent reasons may prevent this historical progression from culminating in its resolution. Terry Pinkard explains the logic of this methodology through a simple analogy:

Just as I may fail to complete a certain line of thought for contingent reasons – I may die before I finish it, I may be rendered incapable of completing it, or I may come to find that completing that line of thought is not important to me anymore – a historical progression may for contingent reasons fail to be completed. Contingent failure to complete a line of thought does not, however, show that such and such was not therefore required to complete that line of thought.¹⁶⁾

Moreover, this movement does not imply that the continual emergence and supersession of various appearances of communism at sequential historical moments is but a tragic routine without a definitive end. To begin with, because it, by definition, represents the resolution of the inadequacies of the previous appearances, the communism of the present is automatically a more refined communism. But on a more historical level, it is empirically evident that every restructuring of the relationship between capital and labor develops their dialectic to still higher levels. As a result of the defeat of all prior cycles of struggle, the capitalist mode of production is presently far more advanced than previously: spheres of once autonomous activity are now entirely subsumed under capital; more phenomena have become exchangeable in comparison to previous moments; the cycle of the reproduction of labor power is now wholly integrated into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, surplus-value is extracted far more fluidly, and localized poles of antagonistic accumulation have given way to a more globalized capital. Likewise, the development of the dialectic is simultaneously the development of its contradiction; forms of struggle are far more advanced than previously: workers struggle against the union and the party as aspects of capital, wildcat strikes abound, the council has lost its role as a panacea, and workers’ identity is increasingly ignored or directly assaulted by workers themselves.

If contingent factors for failure are avoided, this process, of which the communism of the present is only a moment, will drive itself towards its own resolution: the conditions for the moment of supersession are implied in its very structure. But the guarantee of this transcendence can only appear with the self-production of the authoritative mode of communism. Each form of communism can produce a narrative, through which the present is recognized as an advance over the past, but the progression “will only be an education if the process can conclude successfully.”¹⁷⁾ Its verification can only be its moment of production: that is, the moment when a specific appearance no longer carries the counter-revolution in its essence.

This produced overcoming, if it arrives, will be the annulment of class struggle as the self-generating force moving the entire dialectic. Itself a product of the dialectic of capital, because class struggle is both that which can either develop the entire dialectic to still higher levels, or that which can point outside of it as its moment of overcoming, communism is necessarily the negation of class struggle. But because class struggle is the immanent mechanism that moves history, its abolition is therefore the abolition of history, or more precisely, the supersession of the pre-history of humanity.

The emergence of Marxist theory is, in Hegelian-Marxist terms, only the “other side” of the emergence of the real proletarian movement; it is both sides together that comprise the concrete totality of the historical process. – Karl Korsch¹⁸⁾

Communist theory is a necessary product of the capitalist mode of production. Just as the dialectic between capital and labor generates the real movement as its projective tension, so too does it necessarily generate a constellation of theories that reflect on this movement in its total context. But as products of the capitalist mode of production the two are unavoidably separated because capital is itself the separation of theory from practice, of material labor from intellectual labor, of reified activities from the whole:

In a non-revolutionary period, revolutionary workers, isolated in their factories, do their best to expose the real nature of capitalism and the institutions which support it (unions, “workers’” parties). They usually do this with little success, which is quite normal. And there are revolutionaries (workers and non-workers) who read and write, who do their best to provide a critique of the whole system. They usually do this with little success, which is also quite normal.¹⁹⁾

The division between material struggle and intellectual struggle is reunited only through the moment of rupture as practical intervention: separations dissolve as isolated practices become simply different aspects of a total practice. In the interim, the task of communist theory, as the collective memory of the proletariat, is to give expression to the real movement as the simultaneous clarification of its tasks. It does this both by practically studying, confronting, and interpreting the present cycle of struggle in comparison with previous moments of the real movement in their historical contexts, and by perpetually working-through itself and the present body of communist theories of which it forms an integral part. In narrating the struggles and theories of the present and the past, the theory of the present attempts to resolve what it, from the perspective afforded by its own vantage point, thinks were the contradictions of those past appearances of communism. In this sense, the communist theory of the present takes for its task the reassurance of the authoritativeness of the present cycle by completing the contradictions of the past.

But because the proof of this authoritativeness arrives only with actualization of practical revolution, it would be futile to attempt a total reconstruction of the past so as to reassure the authoritativeness of the present. There is no point in producing an absolute narrative to justify the present appearance of communism because, while the communist theory of the present may resolve all of the perceived contradictions of a prior appearance, there may be others which exist beyond the perspective of the present. Indeed, some of those very inadequacies may have been preserved in the present moment and can only be revealed when, through practice, the present communism undermines itself. Each inadequacy can only be comprehended in its total inadequacy with the realization of the authoritative mode of communism.

But there is also no point in embarking on the opposite method by reassuring the present communism’s claim to authoritativeness by arguing that communist theory as a process is gradually approaching the essential tasks of a prior historical moment in teasing out the original contradictions of that theory as time moves forward. To do so would be to recast communist theory in the role of a doctor whose only task is to bandage, resuscitate, or supplement that essential appearance of communist theory with the findings and advancements of subsequent historical moments.

Troploin produces a self-conscious ahistoricism while Théorie Communiste produces an unself-conscious historicism.²⁰⁾ As a communist theory of the present, the theory articulated by Théorie Communiste is unselfconscious because its very structure precludes itself from comprehending the possibility of its in-authoritativeness; but their theory is simultaneously historicist because it comprehends communist theory as a dynamic historical process composed of particular moments while recognizing itself as the most current moment of that very process. As a communist theory of the present, the theory articulated by Troploin is self-conscious because its open structure allows itself to comprehend the possibility of its in-authoritativeness; but that same theory is simultaneously ahistoricist because it comprehends communist theory as an invariant program composed of assimilated theoretical contributions from various historical moments.

In contradistinction to both these positions, the theory of our time must be self-consciously historicist. Like Troploin, it must recognize that the proof of its authoritativeness cannot emerge from the theory itself, but will come through the moment of practical intervention; and like Théorie Communiste, it must recognize the coherency of each historical moment as an aspect of a continuous process. This theory does not approach history only to rewrite it in such a way that all previous appearances of communism can be restructured to prove the necessity of the present’s authoritativeness, but neither does it approach history only to pass normative judgment on previous appearances of communism by explaining, in terms of the present, what they should have done in the past to have avoided defeat.

It would seem, however, that a self-consciously historicist communism would be a contradiction in its very terms. On the one hand, because the revolutionaries of every cycle of struggle are prevented from comprehending the contradictions of their own appearance of communism, they are always compelled to struggle with the belief that their communism is necessarily the authoritative communism. TC exemplifies this position for the present cycle:

We think the situation in which we find ourselves: our cycle of struggle carries such a content and such a structure of the confrontation between capital and the proletariat, and for us it is the communist revolution, because for us it is rigorously impossible to envisage other forms and other contents.²¹⁾

But the firm belief in the definitiveness of the present appearance of communism is not a sentiment unique to the present cycle of struggle; it forms a necessary attribute of all previous cycles. In retrospectively discerning the contradictions that undermined every previous form of communism, the communism of the present, by conceptualizing itself as the resolution of those very contradictions, takes itself to be authoritative. Indeed, it was precisely the self-undermining of those previous appearances that produced the grounds for the authoritativeness of the present. Writing in the aftermath of the Spartacist uprising, Rosa Luxemburg penned her last words before her capture and execution the following day:

Where would we be today without those “defeats,” from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism? Today, as we advance into the final battle of the proletarian class war, we stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we cannot do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding.²²⁾

But this revolution had already undermined itself by the time Luxemburg had finished her article: the “final battle” would have to be deferred. Although it is clear that “the failure of a movement is itself an adequate demonstration of its limits,” Luxemburg’s optimistic announcement confirms that these limitations only become apparent after its defeat: the communists of the early twentieth century believed that communism had finally become a possibility, but it was only their failure and the subsequent vantage point afforded by that very failure that allowed the communists of a later historical moment to comprehend that despite the beliefs of those in the twentieth century, communism was in fact not possible at that specific historical conjuncture.²³⁾

This is only a contradiction in thought. Unlike a theory of knowledge, the communists of a specific historical moment can only know if their Notion is adequate to their Object through practical activity. In other words, because communism is a real movement and not a speculative philosophy, the “dispute over the reality or the non-reality” of the authoritativeness of the communism of the present as “separated from the practical struggle can be only an ideological mystery.”²⁴⁾ And, as Marx himself showed, “all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”²⁵⁾ Consequently, because it is only in the material struggle to produce communism that one can comprehend whether the communism of the present is indeed the definitive overcoming of the dialectic, a self-consciously historicist communist theory can simultaneously assert the necessity of the present movement’s authoritativeness while recognizing the possibility of its failure.

In his text on Troploin’s and Théorie communiste’s respective conceptions of history, Xavier Girrard (XG) makes a convincing argument for “the inadequacies of both positions”.¹⁾ Opening with a quote by Gilles Dauvé he assumes the task of going beyond the dilemma between a “self-conscious ahistoricism” (attributed Troploin) and an “unself-conscious historicism” (attributed TC), and it is not the logic that falters when this is to be proved. XG presupposes that there lies something true in both Dauvé’s and TC’s criticisms of each other’s perspective and in his text he develops a new synthesis intended to exceed them both in a “self-conscious historicism”. One has to agree in that our theory needs to be exactly as XG describes here below:

[B]ecause it is only in the material struggle to produce communism that one can comprehend whether the communism of the present is indeed the definitive overcoming of the dialectic, a self-consciously historicist communist theory can simultaneously assert the necessity of the present movement’s authoritativeness while recognizing the possibility of its failure.²⁾

However, there is one big problem and that is the very point of departure, for if it is impossible to balance two symmetrically opposed errors, as Dauvé himself notes, it will certainly be less possible to successfully overcome a problematic which doesn’t even exist. This is the mistake to which XG has fallen victim.

Regarding the critique aimed at Troploin and their ahistoricism, one has to agree fully and we have nothing more to add to it. Concerning TC, the critique would probably have been right had it only been an accurate depiction of their positions. However, and despite his sympathetic attitude, XG reconstructs an inaccurate account of TC’s positions, and it is then this distorted picture of TC which he tries to go beyond. Two examples:

TC abstracts the theory of their moment as the absolute theory. TC produces a total history where the necessary production of communism, as determined by the current cycle of struggle, is neatly situated as its end.³⁾

TC only reconstructs history to prove that communism will be necessarily produced in the present historical moment.⁴⁾

But where does TC say that the present moment, the existing contradiction between proletariat and capital by necessity has to result in a victorious communist revolution? Nowhere. Still, XG is not the first to have interpreted TC’s theory in this way. A member of TC, in our interview published in the previous issue of riff-raff, has already responded to this critique with these words:

[T]here is also a big misunderstanding about the way we present the possibility of communisation: when we say “now the revolution presents itself in this way” we are certainly not saying “finally it presents itself in the way it always should have”, nor are we saying that capital has resolved the problems of the proletarians in their place, because in order to imagine that it would be necessary for those problems to have pre-existed the restructuring and determined the previous period. But e.g. the problem of the impossibility of programmatism posed by the last restructuring was not a problem during the period of programmatism itself, where it was the very course of the revolution, and if capital has resolved the problem of programmatism it should not be forgotten that this happened in a restructuring, that is to say in a counter-revolution, the resolution was produced against the proletarians, and not as a gift from capital. And today the problematic of revolution as communisation raises problems just as redoubtable as those of programmatism, because when it is action as a class which becomes the very limit of class struggle, and you can only make the revolution in and through that action, you have some god-awful problems.⁵⁾

The profound scepticism that many people have for TC is founded on a reading which sees a messianic preaching that the moment of true communism has finally arrived, when they see that TC writes that the revolution as communisation (which is not to be mistaken for the communist revolution in general) is something new which has only become a question as from the current cycle of struggles. For those comrades who are still stuck in the problematic of the ultra-left one of the largest obstacles to the revolution is constantly the integration of the working class with capital through the unions which, according to them, are preventing the class from achieving its autonomy. These still often see social democracy and Leninism as dangerous impasses which the proletariat must make sure to avoid, and so when TC and others are saying that the affirmation of labour is no longer a problem this sounds too good to be true. What they forget then is only that at the same time as the counter-revolutionary force inherent to the self-affirmation of the proletariat has fortunately been swept away by the restructuring, also the revolutionary power basing itself on the class identity of the worker has also gone up in smoke, that which had made possible the revolutionary workers’ autonomy.⁶⁾ So we won’t have to see any future workers’ states that imprisons workers but at the same time we are deprived of the broad workers’ solidarity and organisation, the proletarian class unity which previously constituted a solid base for the struggle against capital. Revolution and counter-revolution in our time will simply appear different and neither of them is going to have the worker’s identity as its life-bringing source. In other words we have witnessed a shift in cycles of struggles and so today we are situated in a completely new arena where the rules of the game have been rewritten. Now if this new situation is going to be more successful, from a communist perspective, than was the 150 years of programmatism, that is something which remains to be seen. At least the future is open, as opposed to what has already been added to the historical archives. The class contradiction of today has no magical configuration which automatically leads to the abolishing of capital. Had that been the case then the whole matter should have already been out of the way.

True, TC maintains that the proletarians now tend to confront their class belonging directly in the majority of today’s struggles. This is indeed a very interesting phenomenon in which we can see how every-day struggles portend the dissolution of the classes. It wasn’t like this before, but when did anybody say that this must imply a certain victory in the class war? Never is anything certain but it is only in the contradiction between capital and the proletariat, the way this contradiction stands today, that we can put our hopes.

For XG, the “capitalist mode of production is presently far more advanced than previously”⁷⁾. Undoubtedly, this is an uncontroversial statement, but a statement which can certainly be called into question, for according to which yardstick is this progress to be measured? If examine the amount of commodities produced as well as the total amount of value, then there has in both cases been a tremendous expansion throughout the history of capitalism. That subsumption has deepened and that “more phenomena have become exchangeable” is undoubtedly true, and looking at the amount of value [värdestorleken] must mean looking at capital according to its own yardstick: the more and larger values the greater the capitalist advance, right? If we consider the following quote by Marx we seem to find such a thought:

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.⁸⁾

If we on the other hand watch capital more closely and see it as the impersonal process it actually is, then we arrive at the basic formula M–C–M´. We recollect that capital and the capital relation can only continue to exist if this process is pursued continuously, i.e. money finding its way to becoming more money. In reality, it is this simple principle which is the essence of capital. To this end it is subjugating the world and models it in its own image. And that the world is changing rapidly and is adopted to facilitate capital reproduction, this is for the undead labour just as much a side-effect as it for the businessman is all the same what sort of things his industry is actually producing.

A specific pole of capital takes a step forward once it has managed to go through its cycle and bring forth M´, but with this it is inexorably brought back to the beginning of the formula, to M. If one million dollars had been invested and after a turn through the production process returned as the same one million, then no progress will have been made; no additional value was produced and the money sum has thus ceased to be capital, for the law of valorisation insists that value grows bigger. However, if one million were to become two and you have a doubling of the wealth, this wouldn’t for capital be less of a progress than if tree, five or even one hundred millions could be realised. For the capitalist it would certainly be a delight being able to collect a hundred millions; he would be able to live a comfortable life in luxury. But capital itself can never rest. A twice as full warehouse is twice as difficult to get rid of. Social total capital stands constantly with the knife against the throat and it doesn’t survive one moment without deepening the exploitation of its opposite the proletariat, irrespective of the amount of surplus-value it had managed to produce the day before.

Regarding present day capitalism XG writes that “surplus-value is extracted far more fluidly, and localized poles of antagonistic accumulation have given way to a more globalized capital.”⁹⁾ It is true that capital, by way of its globalisation, managed to secure profits for a few decades more after it had broken free from the regulated national zones of accumulation, but it is doubtful if today’s restructured capital relation, with its incessant financial crises and chronic unemployment, would be more vigorous in comparison with that dominating the West during the golden years after the Second World War. When neo-liberalism shouted out from the housetops the urgent need to make the labour market more flexible and loosening the chains that held back the free flows of financial capital, then this was something true, but it was only at this moment when all the regulations or rigidities had become a problem for the system itself. Of course, according to certain fanatical bourgeois ideologues these had always been the problem, in fact the only problem, and this dogma is more than two hundred years old. Market fundamentalism replaced Keynesianism, not because it represented a more advanced expression of the power of the capitalists but because it corresponded better to a new historical situation.

So according to XG, capital has become more advanced than previously, but he also says that this has been accompanied by a more advanced and pugnacious proletariat: “forms of struggle are far more advanced than previously…”¹⁰⁾ Here too we need to ask ourselves: according to what yardstick?

If we look just at the general life and working conditions the struggle of the workers doesn’t seem to have led to any improvements worth mentioning ever since globalisation was initiated, at least not in the advanced capitalist countries where we’ve rather seen the opposite trend. From this perspective programmatism actually seemed more advanced: the workers’ movement marched forward and attained an ever greater degree of organisation. More and more votes were won in the parliamentary elections. No-one could turn a blind eye on its growing strength. And with the improvements that it managed to force through the vision of an eventual liberation from the yoke of capital could also be maintained. Today this vision is dead and buried. Nobody can see any such trend in the current development of society. The productivity gains are now accompanied by stagnating wages, increased pressure and rising unemployment.¹¹⁾

But XG seems to be looking for some sort of qualitative aspect in the struggle because he adds the following:

[W]orkers struggle against the union and the party as aspects of capital, wildcat strikes abound, the council has lost its role as a panacea, and workers’ identity is increasingly ignored or directly assaulted by workers themselves.¹²⁾

This cannot be interpreted as if XG would say that the trade-union, the party, the workers’ council etc. at all times is something “bad”. We know from his text that he objects to such a normative view. On the contrary, XG accepts for example the workers’ council as an adequate form of the revolution during a specific cycle of struggles. Despite this we see a certain ultra-left jargon shining through: the old mediations (but he is actually not using this word) are “directly assaulted by workers themselves”, something which is seen as something positive or more “advanced”.

It is true that shell of the trade-union movement which grew up during the previous period along with the workers’ parties today often need to be attacked by the workers. These organisations have, in a country like Sweden, as its major goal to guarantee future investments and thus jobs in the country. No longer are they advancing the positions of the workers as it used to be called. Workers’ politics has been replaced by the need to administer the crisis (i.e. the latent crisis since the beginning of the restructuring) and to spread out its negative effects according to a principle of “solidarity,” by offering a less terrible solution than what is usually recommended by the liberal-conservative parties. This means an inverted reformism with a slow but steady dismantling of labour legislation and welfare institutions built up during the previous period.

But the restructured capitalism and the attacks by the capitalist class over the last thirty years are in no way better for the mode of production than what the Fordist regime once was. It simply became necessary that the latter was to be dismatled as soon as it had become incompatible with the reproduction of the system. Likewise, the counter-attacks by the workers are not more advanced today. If, at present, in order to defend your conditions of living, it often becomes necessary to go out on an unofficial strike or, as we have seen in France, that very radical measures are being taken, such as taking the boss prisoner and threats of massive sabotage of the means of production, then these methods are only necessary in the light of an increased international competition and they are being taken in pure desperation. But the bitter truth is that the number of strikes has gone down steadily according to statistics, including the unofficial ones.

A confrontation with the unions today have however nothing to do with the ultra-left’s critique of the mediations, or that one against the reformism within the workers’ movement has to put forward the self-organisation of the working class. That world has ceased to exist; today’s situation looks radically different. There is no longer any workers’ movement since there is no more workers’ identity and thus no more reformism or revolutionary workers’ autonomy. A struggle coming from the grass roots can emerge spontaneously outside or against the wishes of the local union, but it may also occur that it is the union which takes the initiative. As long as the struggle is over wages and conditions these formalities do not matter very much, for it is not the trade union which needs to be overcome but the trade-unionist content of the struggle, something which necessitates a qualitative leap.

To conclude, although certain “progressive” ideas have here been questioned, there is no point in trying to deny that the capitalist mode of production is in fact developing in time, which would be absurd. The mode of production does indeed have a history where the successive cycles of struggle are not simply breaking with the previous configuration – sometimes with a whole set of institutions – but where the new configuration also bears the marks of what it is replacing. In the process where a new cycle of struggles is on the way to replace the one immediately preceding, sweeping transformations break down the previous supporting structure, but simultaneously a new playing field is opened up with its own particular structure. Thus, history moves forward, the relation of contradiction develops, i.e. the conditions for the exploitation of labour power and the struggle against exploitation. Of what we’ve seen so far the mode of production has pulled through and avoided blowing up from the inside. But this fact proves neither that it is going to survive also in the future nor that it is now, finally, facing being abolished. If the latter is after all to become reality there will be needed that the classes proletariat and capital, at a certain moment, are to confront one-another in a such a way that the outcome will be another than the continued reproduction of the mode of production and the classes: communism.

:: April 2010