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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leon de Mattis, July 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels defined communism in the following manner : ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.’ (The German Ideology, 1845) Communism as the real movement, this can by no means be interpreted to mean that communism can be witnessed here and now as existing communist relations. Such relations are completely incompatible with capitalist society. Communism as the real movement has to mean, rather, that it can be deduced from the “the premises now in existence”, from really existing class struggle. And since class struggle has changed – indeed the whole world has changed – the revolutionary perspective necessarily has to look different today. We must honestly ask ourselves what sort of revolution can be imagined from how the world is today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the desperate struggles in France

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

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

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

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

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

Illegal struggles in France

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fordism and its French specificity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The illegitimacy of wage demands

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeanne Neton and Peter Åström, August 2010

What is at stake?

The ‘indignados’ in Greece

Real democracy and the rise of a new bureaucracy

No flags but the Greek flag

The general strikes

The contradictory dynamics of the movement

What was it all about?

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

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

The present nature of the capitalist relation

The new centrality of the wage demands; their illegitimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploitation: a game that abolishes its rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The swerve: definition, examples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our wager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is our wager.

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

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

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

The seizure of the elements of capital. Appropriation or communisation

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

The embroilment of communisation and socialisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The revolution will not be won in a straight line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communisation and socialisation do not form a contradiction

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

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

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

B.L. June 2009

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

Taken from the website of the 2009 communist summercamp.

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

The right tools for the job: subsumption or reproduction?

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

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

Cycles of valorisation and devalorisation

The importance of absolute and relative surplus value for capitalist accumulation

Problems with the periodisation: its schematicity and scope

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

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

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

Crisis has become a household word and the attack on the value of labour power an everyday reality. Such an attack had already been stamped on capitalism’s genetic code by the restructuring of the ’70s–’80s, but the crisis of restructured capitalism gave it an enormous impetus. From struggles of waged workers anxiously demanding to remain such and mobilisations of pensioners defending their survival, to the outburst of rage of the ‘feral class’ in developed countries, to violent workers’ riots in the South-East Asian global factory, and all the way through to the Arab Spring and its aftermath, hard evidence of the continuing conflictuality of social reality forces even the most unrepentant end-of-history sopranos to refresh their repertoire. Admittedly, not everything bathes in perfection. But it would seem that there is good news too: nobody has to worry about where this world is going, it is a one-way street, just keep on going. Some changes in management personnel are graciously offered, the persons reciting the ‘no alternative’ mantra can always be renewed and even bear the socialist flavour. Of course, the remnants of a once optimistic citizenism keep formulating ‘proposals’ – ever less far-reaching, ever more restrained – begging capitalism to mend its ways, but nobody seems to take these noble souls seriously enough, since they dispose of no high-placed interlocutor with a receptive ear. Still, there are struggles, outbursts, riots, serving as a reminder that class struggle is always there and that capital, today no less than yesterday, is a ‘moving contradiction’. Hand in hand with it, the critical theory of its demise is being produced: history in the making is also the making of theory.

Communisation is no longer being perceived as an exotic beast, and it even tends at times to become a fashionable word. Present-day struggles highlight the end of the classical workers’ movement, together with its ambition to take the supposedly good-by-nature core of the economy away from voracious capitalist predators and run it itself. It is almost obvious that the world of our days, matter and soul alike, is the world actually produced by and for capital; that, therefore, workers and their products would have never existed as such if capital had not called them into existence in the first place; that working people’s demands have nowadays become asystemic or, in other words, a scandal akin to high treason; that proletarians are forced to defend their condition against capital but, in this struggle, actions that hurt capital are also actions that tend to call into question the proletarian condition; that communism cannot possibly be conceived as a program to be realised, but only as the historical product of proletariat’s struggle against capital and, at the same token, against its own class belonging; etc., etc. All this is reassuringly easy to show, almost worryingly so in fact.

Logical obviousness is not the stuff reality is made of. The extreme segmentation of the proletariat in restructured capitalism can easily blur the distinction of who fights for what, and it is only a meagre consolation that the ultimate outcome cannot but be capital’s victory or destruction. On another score, we are no longer in the presence of a central confrontation between capital and labour amidst pre-capitalist or proto-capitalist social strata which might support or not support either of the protagonists. The whole of society has been taken over and reproduced by capital, and this means, among other things, that various middle strata, salaried or otherwise, cannot but be directly involved. In the really globalised world of restructured capitalism unification is only achieved by the construction of differences whose interrelation is conducive to the desired unifying result – targets being adapted or reset as the actual configuration of forces takes form. Zoning among regions of the world and within each region and each country seems much less stable than what, at some point in time, appeared as a well arranged fractalisation of the world, with its inevitable glue of authoritarianism and slaughter. In a context of protracted crisis, proletarians strive for survival and various middle strata strive to avoid proletarianisation and marginalisation, while the internecine strife of various capitals tends to indefinitely hesitate between two ‘pure’ but equally impossible outcomes: maintaining the instant global mobility of capital while at the same time postponing the massive devalorisation needed for any sort of fresh start; falling back into the warm embrace of states or blocs of states ready to decisively weigh, via bombers, tanks, secret services and all the paraphernalia, on the ever-renewed game of the appropriation of globally produced surplus value. The ‘normality’ of restructured capitalism was pointing towards an unimpeded global fluidity of capital and a repressive management of national spaces through states whose only really national element would be the ideology of their repression of the internal enemy. Its crisis is pointing to the practical difficulty of achieving a moving equilibrium: wide masses produced by both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ capitalism as surplus population are showing no particular enthusiasm to disappear from the face of the earth, through a downward spiral of misery, just because capitalism tells them to oblige; numerous middle strata, from Egypt to the United States, are objecting to their squeezing by dominant capitals, being sometimes ready even to hit the streets; and, most importantly, in proletarian struggles the weakening or absence of mediation mechanisms is made manifest and the only dilemma posed seems to be outright confrontation or unconditional surrender.

The core of the capitalist powerhouse is exploitation of one class by another and, in this process, their reproduction as a class of exploiters and a class of exploited and the reproduction of the whole of capital’s society. Every cycle of struggles constructs the content of revolution adequate to a historically produced class configuration, and also of the counter-revolution corresponding to it. A victorious counter-revolution concluding a cycle of struggles is also a restructuring in view of a new cycle of accumulation: there is no such thing as a set of ‘objective conditions’ getting ‘ripe’ and pronouncing a verdict which would just have to wait a bit for the formality of its execution. The stuff reality is made of is class struggle, but not in a supposedly pure form: if any ‘purity’ is to exist at all, it will have to be historically produced by this very class struggle, in ways that constitute a breach from the routine cycle of capital’s reproduction. There is no linear development from present struggles to revolution, but present struggles, even through their limits and impossibilities, are the only anchor of the theory of communisation. The second issue of Sic is decisively focused on a critical appraisal of struggles of varying geographical locations and content; a discussion of communist measures may serve as a theoretical counterpoint; looking into the concept of conjuncture will deal with the necessary leap away from the internal causality chain of capital’s reproduction.

Sic is an international theoretical project, not a homogeneous group. Differences of opinion are welcome and eagerly put to discussion: they should come as no surprise. However, a common ground does exist, and it does differentiate Sic from other currents. For example, a transhistorical and teleological understanding of class struggle, which turns its back on any periodization of its content, will not be at home here; the conception of ever recurring proletarian assaults, identical to each other and with no actual history in between, belongs to those ready to interpret the possibly good one just like the others, with the only difference that it was successful instead of unsuccessful; the ‘proposal’ (whom to?) of models of society which would be ‘better’ than the existing one is none of our preoccupations; the faith in the demarcation and extension of a communist terrain, in a communist rodent diving into the capitalist cheese and gradually eating it away, is not ours.

Other than that, Sic is an open project. Openness is of course no panacea, and a helpful mutual explanation and understanding is not a specialty of the society we all are part of. A few months ago, the members of the French theoretical group Théorie Communiste (TC) decided to withdraw from Sic. This development was particularly important, as the theoretical elaboration produced by TC had been the cornerstone for Sic’s constitution. However, life goes on, and the proof of the pudding is certainly in the eating: the ability of Sic to host a creative collective functioning and theoretical elaboration will be the only decisive criterion for the future of the project (apart from any more general developments, needless to say). Withdrawal from the table neither disproves the pudding nor absolves anyone of past and present sins. As history will not care to give any verdict on the matter, suffice it to say that we wish a constructive continuation to both TC and Sic.

T.H.

From Sweden to Turkey: The uneven dynamics of the era of riots

Blaumachen

The social explosion in Turkey makes it imperative to examine more closely what is happening, what is being produced, what the new limits produced in the period we call the era of riots are and how these limits will be overcome. The combination of the events in Sweden and Turkey, their temporal encounter, confirms the existence of two dynamics of class struggle, which develop each with its own relative autonomy. We cannot overlook the fact that the anticipated encounter between these practices is not likely to be harmonious and that it will raise the issue of how two historically produced "subjects", which in their current activity have no common horizon, relate to each other. The issue, however, from the perspective of the revolution, is how, on the basis of this anticipated encounter, the necessary overcoming of these subjects is produced, how their struggle is transformed into taking communist measures against capital, i.e. into a questioning of all social roles that constitute society, into communisation.

There is also a third dynamic: the revindicative movements for the wage that take place mainly in the periphery, which has been incorporated into an internationalised accumulation by historical neoliberalism, namely in China and Southeast Asia. The encounter of this dynamic with the other two is not evident yet. There is also a fourth dynamic which concerns the development of the contradictions in Latin American countries, which have managed to integrate resistance to neoliberalism into the state (Chile is a notable exception; the movement of the socially constructed category of “the youth” falls more under the dynamics of the riots). This fourth dynamic is currently even more independent, although it may become specifically relevant to us in Greece in the future. Below we discuss the first two of these four dynamics.

On the one hand we have the riots of the “excluded”; on the other, from 2011 on, there has been a succession of riots whose most important element, in terms of composition, is that the so-called “middle strata” are involved, and their "democratic" discourse is constitutive for the movements produced. The riots of the excluded appear in countries which are high in the capitalist hierarchy. On the other hand, the riots that are dominated by the democratic horizon, which is politically constitutive for the middle strata and formative for the movements of the “squares”, take place mainly in countries in the second zone and the so called “emerging economies”. The fact that a country which does not belong in these zones, Spain, is part of this grouping suggests that the crisis affirms the undermining of this stratification, which had already taken place over the course of this cycle of accumulation (from the crisis of the 70s up to about 2008). These dynamics have not yet come into play in the very core (USA-Germany). The Occupy Wall Street movement, although it gave its name to the second dynamic, only marginally fits in it: it was an activists’ movement (Blockupy in Germany was of the same sort), not a mass movement, such as the movements in Spain, Greece, or the "Arab Spring" and the current movement in Turkey.

Those who are radically excluded from the official circuit of surplus-value production (this is their way of being integrated into capitalist society: inclusion by exclusion) do not articulate any (political) discourse, their only language is looting and destructions. They do not demand anything because for them it is already given that demanding is meaningless (otherwise they would have had demands), they already know that the state is not going to bring about their integration, but it will try to manage them as a surplus population. As the crisis / restructuring which has unfolded since 2008 further scraps “social expenditure”, it is clear to them that this management becomes more and more repressive. In fact, they asphyxiate in a “prison without bars” (when you cannot afford to leave your neighborhood and you are constantly cornered by the police, you are imprisoned). Within this “prison”, community relations cannot offer salvation from everyday misery and to an extent they enter the parallel exchange economy, petty crime, i.e. informal institutions which reproduce a cruel, oppressive hierarchy (not to mention the position of women). So by attacking their prison, by attacking all state institutions that define them as prisoners for life, they challenge, in their revolt, their social roles within that “prison” they find themselves in.

The middle strata rebel because they are collapsing middle strata (Greece, Spain) or because they are not allowed to constitute themselves as such (Arab Spring) or because they are much more repressed and economically squeezed compared to the pre-crisis period (Turkey), something that involves not only their lower-than-what-it-"should"-be income, but also all other social relations, the commodification and enclosure of public spaces, gender, politics or politics-and-religion, which in the case of Arab countries are aspects of the same thing, race etc. The question of the middle strata is an open theoretical question. Their very definition is fluid: The traditional definition of the middle strata included categories of small (property) owners of means of production and traditional individual professions (doctors, lawyers etc.). Today, however, how can one define the middle strata? This social stratification is largely present within the waged and self-employed (i.e. employees who contribute part of their wage to the social security system) and it is based on one’s position within the production process, their income, access to credit etc. And subsequently, the masses of impoverished unemployed, the de facto poor youth and the precarious workers, push down the “status” of what can be called middle strata, and reduce their political influence within the state.

These two dynamics, the riots of the excluded and the mass public space occupations movements, in which these fluid middle strata play a major role, intersected with each other in February 2012 in Greece (but in this case the middle strata were already collapsing). This intersection was the result of the particularities of Greece. One cannot ignore that before “Syntagma 2011”, “December 2008” had taken place. The December 2008 riots, as the student riots in Chile and Canada, are inscribed within the range of practices varying between these two dynamics. In these riots the “youth” emerges as a socially constructed subject consisting of men and women who find all the doors closed, who are not going to climb the ladder of social mobility, but at the same time they do not find themselves structurally excluded like the "troublemakers" of Stockholm and England.

The questions posed by the contemporisation of the era of riots, taking place in Sweden and Turkey, are important:

A) Will the state be able to build the consent of the proletariat in the countries of the first zone to a management that turns against the excluded? This tendency appears to be produced as the almost inevitable response to the contemporisation of this dynamic by the events in Sweden (the emergence of the EDL as well as the increase of the political influence of the UKIP in England are directly linked to this issue, an emergence that could not take place following the 2011 riots which were much more white). The riots in Sweden update the crisis of the integration of the proletariat into the process of surplus-value production as a crisis of immigration. The issue of a new type of fascism, orientated towards the creation of a “European identity” and thus with an intrinsically racist content, is on the agenda.

B) What is the internal dynamic of the absorption of the “middle strata” into the proletariat, not only as a situation but also as an activity? Is there a chance that the practices of the “commune”, of those who defend themselves in the squares and try to rescue their class belonging, meet with the destructive practices of the excluded? To date, the only such indications are the conflictive encounter in March 2006 in France during the anti-CPE movement, an event that is already outdated and took place before the crisis, and the 12th of February 2012 events in Greece, an encounter that was nevertheless immersed in the confrontation around the “memorandum” and could not endure following the defeat of its specific demand. What can be the outcome of the “democratic movements” which, at least to date, cannot be incorporated into the state? These movements exhibit a certain “communitarianism”. The latter’s starting point is the defence of state property (nothing is “common”, whatever is not private is state property) which is to be used according to its definition, namely as an element that underpins the reproduction of labour power. The squares or the parks are spaces of “free” time. The fact that unemployment has been significantly increased by the crisis/ restructuring allows for a significant number of people to be continuously present in such spaces during the movement. The fact that whoever has a job joins after work is not surprising; in the evening and at night many more people are present. What is important is that a “common life in the occupation” is produced. The “life in the occupation” is certainly an image from the future that surpasses the horizon of the movement. However, it cannot be substantialised as a generalised practice to the extent that the movement does not really question the structure that supports the distinction between public and private space, namely, in the last instance, the totality of capitalist relations. The “community of struggle”, the “communist gestures” should not be underestimated because in their generalisation they are the positive horizon, but in the stage where we find ourselves today we are obliged to look for: on the one hand what hampers the movement and does not permit an effort to generalise these elements, and on the other hand which elements of its content are at the same time the causes of its ending. Participants in these movements, contrary to the riots of the excluded, consider it very important to territorialise their presence (something not unrelated to the significance of the rent form that the surplus-value produced in modern capitalism acquires; exploitation has a defining role in the form of class struggle). By “occupying” they claim the right of their material existence as a subject facing the state, which they believed to be “attentive” to their needs. It is not least important that the commune is being defended against the police mostly by a young, male and poor part of the proletariat, which is experienced in fighting the cops (the distinction of this role appeared in Turkey as well, although to a lesser extent compared to Egypt). Demands are being necessarily sought, so that something more concrete than “democracy” can be brought to the assumed negotiation table (which participants cannot accept does not exist anymore, continuously calling the government to acknowledge its existence). This process, due to the government’s refusal to negotiate anything, naturally ends up in the government itself being questioned. Since the composition of the movement is dominated by the middle strata, it necessarily demands the stepping down of the government, and such a demand, given the absence of a “party of the working class”, implies that it is to be replaced by another government (one that would be able to support the existence and reproduction of the quality of life that they believe they deserve). This endogenous tendency does not find itself in contradiction with the communitarian characteristics of the occupations, which are nevertheless undermined as constitutive and formative elements of the movement when the political objective concretises itself. Egypt and Tunisia have illustrated that, indeed, the fall of the government marks the end of these movements. In reality though, what initially appeared as a victory proved to be a defeat, as new police states have been established and the restructuring advances as normal, with the scrapping of benefits, increases in food prices etc. However, the movements in Egypt and Tunisia were not able to stand on their feet again, as their initial goal that corresponded to their unity was achieved. Turkey, the next landmark in this dynamic, which despite its differences belongs to the same schema, as a social movement has to face another aspect of the situation. The government’s political power is larger compared to Egypt and Tunisia. The unity of the movement is based on the transformation of the state into a police state over the last years. The question is: can the middle strata be absorbed into the proletariat, as an activity that questions capital, if these movements do not end with their political victory (namely their actual defeat)? Their defeat, which passes through their political victory, necessarily brings existing divisions to the surface. Part of the movement tries to continue the revolt, which however ceases to have popular support (namely inter-class support, given that class is a relation not a category). Without the mass participation of the excluded and the poor, how can this process of revolt continue? Is that possible?

The movement in Turkey is still going on while this text is being written. Its particularity, added to the fact that it is an event of global significance, determines the point where we find ourselves. Here is where we are: in a revolt that broke out in yet another police state. A revolt with little chance of “victory” on the ground of its content and of such importance for precisely that reason.

The practices of the “commune” that have as their necessary horizon a better management of the bourgeois state, an horizon that in the end is called into question, encounter the revolts of the excluded in the fact that the latter ones do not even have the horizon of a “victory”. The outcome of this encounter, that will be decided among other things by the interaction between the practices of the commune and the practices of everyday survival by those structurally excluded from the official circuit of surplus-value production, will decide to a large extent the outcome of the class struggle in the era of riots.

Communisation is not a prophecy. It is not the declaration of some future or other. Communisation is nothing but a certain perspective on the class struggles taking place right now. The task is to conceive, starting from those struggles but proceeding beyond their limits and their contradictions, what a communist revolution could be today.

Thinking a communist horizon requires us to begin from the class relation as it is, that is, as it has been transformed by the period of restructuring; and to understand why that which was in the past the bearer of a communist vision cannot today play the same role, in any case in the same way.1

Up until the end of the 70s the proletariat were seen as the dominated class which, in order to bring about communism, only had to become dominant. Of course, there were many ways of conceiving that, and those various conceptions were often antagonistic towards each other. There were also approaches which wanted to break with this dominant conception, while all the same having to position themselves in relation to it.2 And in the end that way of looking at things could not be overcome, not because the ideas of the epoch were universally mistaken but simply because the reality of the times—the affirmation of a proletariat which was socially more and more strong—was obvious to everyone.

The debates which opposed revolution to reform, the immediacy of communism to the transitional period (which could precede or follow the victory of the proletariat) all belong to this shared paradigm. But it is just that which is put into question, dynamically, in the current moment.3

The disappearance of a strong affirmation of the class and the erosion of the workers’ movement is the symptom of a major turning-point in the class struggle. Class-belonging no longer seems to be the basis of a shared identity or of a possible power, but seems rather, on the contrary, to be an element that is foreign to everyone’s life: the hostile embodiment of the dominating power of capital.4

Certain theories have concluded that the notion of class struggle no longer works to characterise the revolt in today’s world. The persistence of capitalist social relations and of all their determinations (value, for starters) is however the sign that the classes have certainly not disappeared. The theory of communisation does not, therefore, abandon the theory of classes, but thinks it in the era of the collapse of the workers’ movement. To give an overview one could say that communisation advances three essential ideas: first, the immediacy of communism (that is, the absence of any period of transition at all;) second, communism as means and end of struggle; and, lastly, the destruction of the class relation and therefore of the proletariat by the proletariat itself. It is on this last point that one has to place the emphasis in order to understand how the theory of communisation links an element of the current class struggles (the end of the affirmation of the proletariat and the decline of workers’ identity) to a conception of the revolution (the destruction of the class relation by the proletariat.) This vision, which is a little paradoxical, nevertheless turns out to be extremely fruitful if one wants to seek out within the current struggles that which, starting from now, could be the harbinger of the destruction of capitalist social relations. The revolution is the destruction of the class relation, which is immediately also the destruction of the proletariat—which is to say that the revolution is the activity of a proletariat in the course of its own self-abolition. And we can already observe, in today’s class struggles, situations in which a proletariat which is striving to defend its condition is paradoxically driven to attack it. In this way the class struggle appears in its fundamental ambiguity, a reflection of nothing other than a contradiction internal to the capitalist social forms themselves: the class struggle can just as well be the recapitulation of class relations as their destruction. So—it is by linking these two ideas (that there are aspects of the current class struggle which drive workers to attack their own condition; and the vision of revolution as proletarian action consisting in proletarian self-destruction) that the theory of communisation proposes to think communism.

The role of theory is not to reveal to struggles what they ‘are’ in their heart of hearts.5 The point is not to go about trying to ‘raise consciousness’. Thinking revolution and communism is not a magic formula which would transform the current struggles into something they are not. The task is to manage, to link theoretically, current struggles with the possible production of communism, while understanding that this is something that is at stake within struggles, and not a matter only for the future. Without the thinking of revolution, the horizon of struggles is necessarily that of capital. In the course of an ambivalent class struggle, which is at the same time the renewal and the putting into question of the class relation, the absence of a revolutionary horizon obviously contributes to the first pole, to the renewal of the class relation. This is reflected, in the struggle, in the persistence of mediations which express this renewal (union hierarchies, the media, spokespeople and negotiations, amongst others) or, when those mediations have given way in the face of the intensity of the struggle, by their decisive re-emergence at the moment of the return to normality.

Working out a theory of revolution and of communism is therefore an activity carried out on the basis of struggles and for the sake of those struggles. The success of such an activity is obviously not in any degree guaranteed. The generalisation of a contemporary theory of revolution—that is to say its existence beyond a restricted circle of theoreticians and militants—will not take place unless it is adequate enough to what, within struggles, might express the breakdown of the class relation. To the extent that this theory involves taking a stand within the matters at hand, it is necessarily a wager. A rational one, since it involves the production of a certain understanding of struggles by the struggles themselves; but a wager, nevertheless.

Communism as a process, not an alternative world

Communism is no more a prophecy than communisation is. The possibility of speaking about communism is at stake within current struggles. That is why it is indispensable to seek out what, within them, could be the harbinger of communism—rather than dreaming about a state far off in the future which humanity might one day be able to attain. Or, to put it differently: what is essential for the reconstruction of a communist horizon is above all the discovery of the ways in which communism might be able to emerge from the present situation—rather than describing what communism might be as a worked-out form of organisation.6

But speaking of communism in the present must not lead us into an error that has a certain currency nowadays, that of taking ourselves to be able to find, here and there in the interstices of capital’s society, communism in gestation or even already part-realised. Communism cannot exist by itself in the current world, neither as an existential or a political choice nor as a way of life.7

One must, therefore, think communism in the present tense, but not as a present state of things. That is what the theory of communisation lets us do. In communisation, the production of communism and communism itself run together. Communisation is a struggle against capital by communism, that is to say that for it communism appears simultaneously as the means and the end. That is why a vision of the production of communism is for it at the same time a vision of communism itself, but a communism grasped through the prism of its production. We can not respond to the question ‘what is communism’? by describing its supposed completed form but only by evoking the forms in which it could be produced.

That said, the theory of communisation does encounter certain difficulties. Since communism is the means of communisation, it is necessary that in a certain fashion it be brought into play from the beginning of the process; but at the same time we’re maintaining that communisation is a process within which communism is produced in the course of period which unfolds over time, and which takes time.

This question was resolved in the traditional Marxist conception by the notion of the ‘period of transition’. The social form that was to be produced in the course of the revolution, and as its ultimate result, was not to be directly communism but an intermediary stage, socialism. Communisation breaks with the notion of the period of transition because communism is a means of the struggle itself. So for it communism is necessarily immediate, even if it remains only partial.

Communisation therefore takes on certain seemingly-paradoxical forms: simultaneously immediate and extended in time, simultaneously total and partial and so on. To be able to think communism, it is necessary to find an answer to these questions.

The notion of a communist measure

It is at this point that the notion of a ‘communist measure’—an elementary form of the production of communism—comes in.

The production of communism is nothing but the multiplication and the generalisation of communist measures taken at this or that point in the course of the confrontation with capital; measures whose objective is precisely to make of the enactment of communism a means of struggle.

Communism may not be immediate, but within the communist measure it seems to be so. Within the communist measure there are not any stages. There, communism is already in play—even if it cannot be thought of as completely realised. The communist measure makes the gap between the immediacy of communism and the time that is required for its realisation disappear, without in the same moment abolishing the necessity of this time. And this conception lets us avoid thinking about communisation itself as an intermediary period between the present and a communist future.

The term ‘measure’ should not lead us into error.8 A communist measure is not a prescription, a law, or an order. It does not install any rule which everyone would have to submit to. It does not decree a general and impersonal norm. The communist measure, by definition, implies from the first moment those who carry it out. And it is not a declaration of intentions, either, or in any case it could not only be that. The communist measure is a deed. Getting off on the sound of your own voice proclaiming the abolition of value, of social class or of capitalism is not a communist measure. Sharing out resources seized from the enemy, or producing in common whatever the struggle against capital needs—that could be.

A communist measure is a collective measure, undertaken in a specific situation with the ways and means which the communist measure selects for itself. The forms of collective decision making which result in communist measures vary according to the measures: some imply a large number of people, others very many fewer; some suppose the existence of means of coordination, others do not; some are the result of long collective discussions, of whatever sort (general assemblies, various sorts of collective, discussions in more or less diffuse groups) while others might be more spontaneous… What guarantees that the communist measure is not an authoritarian or hierarchical one is its content, and not the formal character of the decision which gave rise to it.

The communist measure is an example of the way the production of communism is organised. It is not direct democracy or self-organisation.9

Such a measure does not necessarily have authors, or in any case identifiable ones: communist measures which generalise can very well have been undertaken simultaneously, here and there, since they are, simply enough, possible solutions to a problem which poses itself everywhere, that is to say, generally. Their origin thus rapidly becomes impossible to locate. Any body which arrogates to itself the power to prescribe communist measures for others, by that very act, instantly negates, the possibility that it can undertake a communist measure.

A communist measure is not, all by itself, communism. Communism is not achieved by one solitary measure, nor indeed by a single series of measures. But then again communism is nothing but the effect of a huge number of communist measures—the onset of which characterises the period of communisation—which fold themselves into each other and which ultimately succeed in giving to the overall organisation of the world an altogether different quality. There is not necessarily any kind of continuity; it is perfectly reasonable to anticipate both advances and disordering retreats before a tipping-point is reached when the rupture has become so profound that class society no longer possesses the means to keep itself going. Communism and class society are mutually exclusive. Before the tipping-point, communist measures are by their essence ephemeral: they exist only within the space of the struggle, and are snuffed out if they do not generalise themselves.10 They are simply moments when overcoming is possible but not yet secured. The production of communism is not necessarily a story told all at once. One can perfectly well imagine that one day a communising dynamic will unleash itself, violently recomposing communist measures taken in the course of particularly radical and extended struggles, and that nevertheless this dynamic will be defeated. And that it will be reborn, later and elsewhere, and conclude by destroying class society.

Generalisation does not mean uniformity. There are many ways for a communist measure to extend itself. It can of course be a question of rallying to some or other existing communist initiative (dedicated to production in common or to coordination…) just as it can be of a adoption, sometimes in an adapted form, of measures already put into practice elsewhere. Equally, the communist measure can easily install itself within practices, experiences, and solidarities which pre-exist it—while being at the same time a creative rupture with these inheritances in virtue of the potentiality which the generalisation of the production of communism can bring into being.11

It is important to understand the process whereby a communist measure generalises. If the communist measure generalises itself, it is because in a given situation it corresponds to whatever the situation demands, and it is thus one of the forms (perhaps not the only possible one) which respond to the necessities imposed by the situation (intense struggle against capital). The moment of communisation is a situation of chaotic confrontation during which the proletarians undertake an incalculable number of initiatives in order to be able to carry out their struggle. If some of these initiatives extend themselves, it is because they correspond to a need which exceeds the different particular configurations of the confrontation underway. Choosing amongst the measures which generalise and the others takes place under the burden of a social relation in the course of collapsing under the blows of its own contradictions. And it is only at that level, the level of generalisation, that one can speak of measures ‘imposed by the very necessities of the struggle’,12 or indeed of the revolution as ‘immediate necessity in a given situation’ undertaken by proletarians ‘constrained by their material conditions’.13 It is in this respect that the theory of communisation is not deterministic and allows us to understand the production of communism as an activity.14

Communist measures and the production of communism

The communist measure is the positive aspect of a communism which theoretically we are only able to grasp negatively. Communism is the annihilation of all currently existing forms of domination and exploitation. Communism defines itself as a series of abolitions: abolition of value, of classes, of gender and race dominations and so on. Said otherwise, if it is true that our attempts to describe communism are restricted to weak definitions (we know what it is that communism abolishes, but we do not know what it will concretely resemble) we have however a positive vision of its production: the communist measure.

The communist character of a measure derives from its capacity to reinforce the struggle against capital while all the while being the expression of its negation. It is, therefore, a definite and concrete way of putting into play the overcoming of exchange, money, value, the State, hierarchy, and race, class and gender distinctions—and so on. This list is presented in no particular order of priority because of the singular capacity of a communist measure to attack everything which makes up capitalist social relations. We know that communism is the overcoming of exchange, value and money; but we do not know how a world without exchange, value or money could function. We know that communism is the abolition of classes, but we do not know how a classless univeralism could function. A communist measure does not answer such questions in an overarching or global way, but tries instead to respond to them where they develop, and in the framework of the necessity of struggle.

Thanks to the communist measure, we understand that communism is not something which is all that foreign to us. Communism rests, to a very significant extent, on very simple things many of which are already able to exist: sharing, co-operation, the absence of socially-distributed roles and functions, and immediate and direct social relations, for instance. However, something which exists on a secondary basis does not have the same significance, qualitatively speaking, as that which exists in its generality (one thinks for example of value, and of the way in which its nature was changed by the emergence of the capitalist mode of production). That is why the concept of generalisation is essential. No content is communist in itself (even if, on the other hand, some can very well be anti-communist in themselves). The very same measure could be or could not be communist, according to its context: it is not communist if it remains isolated, but becomes so if it generalises. It is for that reason that it is necessary to understand that an isolated communist measure is not a communist measure, even if it is true that no communist measure is able to break all by itself its isolation; that cannot take place except by the enacting of other communist measures by other collectives.

Generalisation cannot by any means be the only guarantee of the communist character of a measure. A measure which does not generalise by one means or another, or anyway which does not resonate with other measures underway, cannot be communist. But at the same time it is of course perfectly possible that measures which are not communist at all generalise. One should obviously exclude, here, everything which is an initiative of the capitalist enemy, in the form of laws, prescriptions, orders or coercive state control. But on the side of the revolution itself the various contradictions, which result from the complex segmentation of the proletariat (the unity created in the struggle is always problematic and it can never be taken for granted) and from the often confused and contradictory setting for any particular struggle, can engender counter-revolutionary dynamics which have, nevertheless, the form of the revolution, that is, the form of measures which generalise.15 To repeat oneself: no communist measure is communist in itself, and the communist character of a measure derives solely from its overall relationship with the struggle of which it is a part. Some measures long retain, during the chaotic and non-normative process of the insurrection, an ambiguous character. Equally, others which may have been communist at a certain moment can very well become counter-revolutionary in response to the deepening of certain problematics which emerge in proportion to the disintegration of the capitalist social relation. That is how the revolution within the revolution can reveal itself: by open combat between measures that are communist and those which are no longer.

Communist measures and insurrection cannot be separated. Communist measures are absolutely opposed to whatever, within the class struggle, enables the integration of the proletariat as a class belonging to capital. Such measures break with legality, with mediating institutions and with habitual, admissible forms of conflict. You can count on the State to react with the violence and the cruelty which is customary to it. Communist measures are a confrontation with the forces of repression, and in this case too victory can be won only by a dynamic of rapid generalisation.

So there is necessarily a limit point with the generalisation of communist measures, a quickly-achieved tipping point at which the objective of the struggle can no longer be the amelioration or the preservation of a certain condition within capital, but must instead become the destruction of the entirety of the capitalist world—which becomes in this moment, definitively, the enemy.16 From that point onwards, amongst all the things which are necessary for the production of communism, there is confrontation with State forces vowed to the defence of the old world—then the total destruction of all state structures.

Communist measures and activity

No-one consciously constructs communism in its totality. But communist measures are not undertaken unwittingly: the choice to have recourse to them within a struggle necessarily involves an awareness that they contribute to the destruction of capitalist social relations, and that this destruction will come to be one of the objectives of the struggle. It is the case, of course, that there is no separation between the necessities of the struggle and the construction of communism. Communism is realised on the occasion of the struggle, and within its context. But the choice of a communist measure, considered in isolation, does not impose itself because the struggle has left no other way forward than to undertake it: communism is not what is left over when one can no longer do anything else.

Communism is produced: that means that it is not the effect of a pure act of will, nor the mere consequence of circumstances which make any other outcome impossible. Every communist measure is the effect of a particular will. This will does not at all need to take as its object the creation of communism in its most general sense, but only in its immediate aspect, local and useful for the struggle. So the universal adoption of the communist idea as a kind of general, abstract principle to be realised is not a necessary precondition for the concrete production of communism. On the other hand, the social activity of the production of communism has its own consciousness; that is to say that in a period of communisation, when communist measures are linking up and becoming widespread, the overall pattern of what is being established becomes obvious to everyone.

There are, of course, ‘conditions’ for the production of communism. There is a struggle, which is class struggle, expressing both the breakdown of the capitalist class relation and the possibility of its regeneration. At the same time included in the negation of capital’s fundamental social forms (a negation which those very forms ceaselessly put into play), is the vision of the possibility of its own overcoming. The activity of the production of communism must nevertheless understand itself as an activity, that is as something which is not induced mechanically by its preconditions. There is no necessity within the struggle which imposes the production of communism, leaving no other option.

What makes it possible to make communism effective is activity. At the level of the single communist measure, this activity is necessarily encountered as will, consciousness, project (collective will, of course). But the generalisation of communist measures exceeds all will, because even while each measure taken individually is an action, the overall set of communist measures is beyond the grasp of the will of those who undertake them. The more the activity intensifies, and the more it consists in the production of diverse and multivalent measures, the higher the probability will be that these measures will fulfill the necessities of the global production of communism.

What is more, since this activity really is an activity, it changes the conditions within which it develops. That is: the more that communism is produced, the more it increases the potential for its own production. That is all that is meant by the concept of a communising dynamic. The first communist measures which generalise themselves demonstrate through their generalisation itself that they can be means of struggle; but at the same time they open up possible routes towards the overcoming of the specificity and of the constrains of the struggle itself. Measures which undertake the sharing-out of resources seized from the enemy open the way towards measures which undertake the satisfaction of needs by communist means.17 Measures involving local co-operation open the way towards co-operation on a larger scales.

This indicates the great strategic importance of the first communist measures.18 If they succeed in providing an adequate and prompt response to the problems which arise in a particular struggle, and if for that reason they are able to generalise, then a dynamic can be unleashed which makes of their expansion the motor of their ever-greater expansion. The role of communist theory, which devotes itself not to legislating what must be done but to making it possible to name what was done (that is, the undertaking of communist measures) is therefore considerable.

The big mistake would be to imagine any sort of mode of struggle as a ‘communist measure’. Communist measures indisputably presuppose a depth and an extension of the class struggle beyond the ordinary extent achieved by the common run of struggles. Communist measures therefore only receive their significance within the framework of a communising dynamic which rapidly draws them beyond their timid beginnings.

By definition it is impossible to construct a model for the communist measure. But one can nevertheless offer a few hypotheses, so long as one properly understands their function. The point is not to realise a prophecy, but to clarify our current theoretical understanding of communism. Hypotheses concerning communist measures derive directly from the manner in which the current epoch enables us to conceive of communism. All conceptions of this sort are, like the era which has given birth to them, eminently mortal and destined to be overcome.

Likely to be communist, then, are measures taken, here or there, in order to seize means which can be used to satisfy the immediate needs of a struggle. Likely to be communist also are measures which participate in the insurrection without reproducing the forms, the schemas of the enemy. Likely to be communist are measures which aim to avoid the reproduction within the struggle of the divisions within the proletariat which result from its current atomisation. Likely to be communist are measures which try to eliminate the dominations of gender and of race. Likely to be communist are measures which aim to co-ordinate without hierarchy. Likely to be communist are measures which tend to strip from themselves, one way or another, all ideology which could lead to the re-establishment of classes. Likely to be communist are measures which eradicate all tendencies towards the recreation of communities which treat each other like strangers or enemies.

• 1The ability to think a communist horizon is one of the things at stake within the struggles themselves. To be convinced of that it should suffice to review the history of the last thirty years, a period during which the question of communism as good as vanished from the radar. This obliteration was not a coincidence; it was the direct consequence of a defeat, of the vanquishing of the contestation that took place in the ’60s and ’70s.
• 2There is been some controversy lately over the question of the novelty or otherwise of the theory of communisation, in which some play has been made of the fact that what is affirmed in that theory can already be found here and there in previous periods. But the question of novelty cannot be posed for each assertion taken separately, but only of the way in which those elements, perhaps already thought or expressed some time before, are brought into relation with one another and linked to the contemporary period.
• 3‘Dynamically’ means that the survival of a few residual traces, not yet totally dissolved, of the old workers’ movement is not a serious objection to the current thesis.
• 4For more details, see ‘What is communisation?’ Sic no. 1, of which this text is a sequel.
• 5The discussion in this text will often revolve around ‘struggles’. This plural, which has a certain currency these days, is one of the things that shows up the end of the period of the proletariat’s affirmation. The struggles are so many different aspects of the class struggle which today it is necessary to attempt to grasp in its full heterogeneity.
• 6We are not going to get into the controversy over whether or not communism could one day be described as ‘finished’ (even only relatively) or if it will never be anything other than the process of its production—for the simple reason that none of that changes a thing. On the one hand it is unavoidable for us to conceive of communism as a stage to be achieved when the destruction of current social relations shall have become definitive; if we did not, we would hardly have any way of differentiating it from an existential choice within capitalism. But on the other hand, in the position we find ourselves in we cannot speak of communism any other way than as a process. There is no doubt that there is an essential difference between the period of the production of communism during the struggle against capital and the period in which capitalism has been destroyed; but we’ve got no theoretical tools to describe the second period other than vague abstractions.
• 7From which follows the critique of alternativism in general. See ‘Reflections concerning the Call’, Meeting no. 2, reproduced in Communization and its Discontents, Ed. Benjamin Noys, Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson
• 8Instead of the expression ‘communist measure’ one could just as well have used ‘communist initiative.
• 9There is no way of determining in advance the way in which communist measures are taken. It is by reference to its content as a communist measure that it is possible to assure oneself that it is not a way in which a domination, a hierarchy or an authority might be reestablished—and not by applying some democratic formalism or other to the decision-making process. And it is not ‘self-‘organisation, either. Self-organisation is certainly, in the current moment, necessary for the existence of struggles when they venture beyond the cramped times and forms of legalised and unionised struggles. But the communist measure is a break with self-organisation, since such a measure involves a passage beyond partial struggles which need to organise themselves around their specific objective.
• 10Generalisation of communist measures corresponds in the first place to the generalisation of the struggles within which they were born and without which they cannot survive.
• 11Such a potentiality expresses itself as much in the multiplication of material possibilities (with the destruction of the State and the seizure of the forces of capital) as in the sphere of representations and of the imaginary—all of which are in practice indivisible.
• 12Sic no. 1, Editorial.
• 13‘Crisis and communisation,’ Peter Åström, Sic no. 1. In the production of the first issue of Sic a debate took place concerning whether or not Åstrom’s article employed formulas that were too deterministic. It is possible to find traces of this debate on pages 38 and 39 of the journal.
• 14This functioning is not specific to the period of communisation. All widespread forms of social activity, that is all those which traverse the social body, operate in the same way—in contrast to the centralising and unifying activity of hierarchical or Stately structures. The practices of contemporary struggles can already in this way extend and generalise themselves, to their own proper extent.
• 15For an uneasy and tormented presentation of these contradictions on the side of the revolution, see the articles of Bernard Lyon (Meeting and Sic no. 1).
• 16As we’ve seen since the beginning of this article, the class struggle is ambivalent. It is simultaneously a struggle within capitalism and a struggle which heralds its destruction, a struggle for the defence of a certain position within capitalism and a struggle against that condition. The proletariat, in its struggle, oscillates between its integration and its disintegration. The communist measure builds towards a break with that ambivalence, and makes of the struggle of the proletariat a struggle against capital as a system; a struggle in the course of which the proletariat bit-by-bit dissolves itself. But it is only when communisation has already become somewhat overt that this dissolution can become obvious. It is not possible really to talk of anticapitalist or revolutionary struggle except from the moment when communism begins to be positively produced.
• 17Needs themselves transformed by the struggle underway.
• 18‘Strategic’ should not be taken to mean that there is a strategy for the extension and the generalisation of communist measures; such a strategy could not exist. ‘Strategic’ means here that the first measures must be as adequate as possible to a given situation, while at the same time being a concrete instance of the use of communism as a means of struggle.

There are no miracles in nature or history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignment of forces of the contestants, that to the lay mind there is much that must appear miraculous. (Lenin, ‘The First Stage of the First Revolution’)¹

… That the revolution succeeded so quickly and—seemingly, at the first superficial glance—so radically, is only due to the fact that, as a result of an extremely unique historical situation, absolutely dissimilar currents, absolutely heterogeneous class interests, absolutely contrary political and social strivings have merged, and in a strikingly ‘harmonious’ manner. (Ibid.)

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure—political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas—also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. (Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch)²

A few citations and a little provocation in their signatures. But the chief provocation is theoretical in nature and defines the object of this text, which is to rework the concept of contradiction.

Genesis of a Concept

Conjuncture and the Unity of the Dynamic of Capital as Contradiction in Process

Conjuncture: A Mechanics of the Crisis of the Self-Presupposition of Capital

Conjuncture: A Necessary Concept

Conjuncture and Event

Revolution: Conjuncture and Ideology

In Conclusion

‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of the hooded rioter. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: The British prime minister David Cameron and the General Secretary Aleka Papariga[1], the Italian foreign secretary Roberto Maroni, Adonis[2] and Takis Fotopoulos, Italian COBAS and German police officers.’

From rioter.info

The Sunday of 12^th February was one of those historical moments when a capitalist society’s contradictions come together in time and space, break out explosively and a new reality is produced. Class struggle renews its dynamic and this new dynamic becomes its new internal limit that it must overcome. What matters is not the event itself (no single event alone matters decisively in terms of the revolution), but its role in the historical process of the (non-)subject’s emergence in the current conjuncture.

Sunday was expected by everyone, in contrast to December 2008. In the past few months the whole of Europe waited for a social explosion appropriate to the situation in Greece. It was regarded as the chronicle of an anticipated death and, after several political manoeuvres, it was announced by the media for Sunday 12^th February (a perfect historical irony)[3] and given the title ‘vote on Memorandum no. 2’. Nobody did anything to stop it, nobody could do anything, despite how much they may have wanted to, as an article from a new ‘bitter friend’ of ‘contemporary Gavroches’[4] shows. This explosion had the characteristics of the transitional period we are in, the ‘era of riots’, and its content was the result of the impasse faced today by the structuring of capital in a world scale, while at the same time intensifying it (Greece is a condensed expression of the acuteness of this impasse).

Every significant event of the class struggle is immersed within the entirety of historically determined contradictions of the present in any capitalist society, and appears always in a specific form, fetishised and multiply mediated[5]. At the moment, in Greece, largely because of its very significant recent political history, this conflict necessarily takes the form of a political conflict (in complete contrast to August 2011 in London, for example, as the era of riots cannot but be concretised in the local-historical specificities of every social formation). The State’s announcement of the coming social explosion (or the first in a ‘chain’ of explosions) was a political one and in this sense it was also its integration as a necessary explosion within the reproduction of capitalist society. This is a disciplinary, repressive integration, in the context of a state of emergency. It is integration ‘by exclusion’. Subsequently, the state, after the return to normality and its victory, was obliged to criminalise certain practices of the ‘hooded protesters’, in order to temporarily manage the inescapable consequences of events. The state’s discourse is totalising, it prohibits any other opinion: Nobody can be (or say that they are) on the side of the ‘hooded rioters’, let alone admit that they are one of them and endeavour to speak publicly about last Sunday’s acts.

‘Resistance against the memorandum’, as the situation was named politely, could not have been without the appearance of the current limit of trade unionism. The 48-hour general strike was indeed monumental, as it revealed in all its majesty the ultimate death of the labour movement: Nobody cared about it, not even those who receive a share of surplus value (real surplus value, capitalist profit), through the racket whose (hereto formally recognised) sideline is to occasionally announce general strikes. Although tertiary union leaders are still exclusively socially legitimised to announce general strikes, they are nowhere to be seen, nonexistent. Promptly informed that unionism is a thing of the past, they are now looking for a new venture (possibly a good, if high risk, investment opportunity might be insurance protection against demonstrations, as newly proposed legislation requires organisers to pay for any damages). That the labour movement can no longer be seen among the forms and practices of a conflict where the existence of a basic wage is itself at stake indicates the extent to which the wage demand is now excluded from capitalist reproduction. At the same time this officially-absent labour character of the proletarian movement is important for the convergence of the impasse of demand struggles with the coming process of abolishing capitalist society. It is a conflictual encounter, a process of historical production.

On Sunday the crowd was massive with an interclass composition both among ‘hooded rioters’ and other protesters. This was manifested in the wide participation in clashes against the police and their almost universal acceptance. Not a single person (not even their trade union) could be found that evening in the square that would defend the police for their role. No ‘peacekeepers’ of the movement could be found this time, as last summer; the only person to defend them was the representative of the party of Order, the would-be prime minister[6]. The police, in general terms, is always the capitalist class in fighting position against the proletariat. In this particular conjuncture, however, it is the material expression of a specific strategy of capital within the Greek social formation: for the second phase of restructuring to be imposed, the Greek state must lose its autonomy, it must now integrate organically within a wider coalition (EU) and be officially demoted in the internal hierarchy, with all that entails for capitalist competition and the fortune of the petit bourgeois strata. Attacking the police is of course a necessary break towards overcoming the limits of ‘dialogue’ with the state, negotiations on the price of labour power or any other ‘right’. In the present moment, however, this could also be an expression of, among other things, the conflict between petit bourgeois strata and the state, which is driving them to the ground. As we have clearly seen in Egypt in 2011, attacking the repressive forces of the state does not necessarily entail questioning the most fundamental capitalist community, the nation[7], or the real gods, money, and property. This is why many former or new ‘indignants’ took part in clashes and in many cases their combative practice was accompanied by their respect for ‘people’s property’ and by calling the police ‘traitors’, ‘German-guards’ or ‘Turks’, who ‘should be with us and not against us’. Even in the midst of clashes, and particularly because of the unprecedented numbers that engaged in them, this Sunday could not but contain the strong ‘national’ and ‘popular’ element inevitably produced throughout the ‘struggle against the memorandum’.

Beyond the interclass participation that was necessary for a mass confrontation with police and the support it received, an important element of this Sunday, about which the state and all the champions of Culture[8] went rabid, was the looting and burning of shops and other buildings. Having appeared on a massive scale in December 2008, this practice now came back, after the cessation prompted by the Marfin incident[9] in May 2010, as the class struggle is a chain reaction constituting its own dynamic. The burning of buildings was also the result of the special political form that class struggle takes in Greece. On one hand the police had to protect the parliament aggressively and push the main mass of demonstrators into adjacent streets; on the other hand the weight of political history does not allow the Greek state to further raise the level of repression and become blatantly dictatorial (banks or tanks) even now that the emergency situation is so serious. Throughout the period of restructured capitalism (in Greece it begins around 1996) the transformation of the police into an army of occupation in the urban environment is the element that has allowed the bourgeois state to remain democratic while severely repressing the active sections of the proletariat. Through the decade of 2000 traditional conflicts with police became impossible, to the extent that police could not be warded off by the dynamic minorities who fought in the streets. Consequently, in the student movement of 2006-07, repelled by police, the young precarious proletariat channelled its rage against Athens buildings, and by 2008 every business owner realised that they had to increase spending on securing their properties from the raids of the dangerous classes. In the beginning of the EU-IMF memorandum period, the encounter of those practices with one of the last bursts of a sort of union movement resulted in the Marfin incident. Social violence was marginalised and repressed by all political formations for about a year. In the interclass movement of the squares, however, the question of violence re-emerged as an internal contradiction of the movement, as the new round of measures was even tougher and ‘the practices of riot’ surrounded the squares, culminating on 28-29 June 2011. It was then becoming evident that growing sections of the population tended to engage in clashes against the police.

The section of the proletariat that torches buildings and loots is a product of the neoliberal period, and particularly of the recent period that led to the crisis. All those who talked of incidents that only involved the social margins of France in November 2005, of ‘thugs who attack Paris student marches’ in March 2006; of a ‘metropolitan insurrection, one of those that occur every now and then but go off like fireworks, while what really matters is the labour movement’ in December 2008, they all found it a little difficult when London exploded in August 2011. This section of the proletariat cannot stop the production process from the inside (at least not yet), so it acts at the level of the circulation of goods and services. The emerging (non-)subject is simultaneously subject and non-subject, because of its historically-defined relation between integration and exclusion from the process of value production. The crucial matter is not the production of a quantitative increase of the lumpen proletariat, but that of an increased lumpenisation of the proletariat – a lumpenisation that does not appear as external in relation to waged labour but as its defining element. Precarity, the constant ‘in-and-out’, produces a (non-)subject of the (non-)excluded, since inclusion increasingly tends to be by exclusion, especially for those who are young. It is a dynamic, a continually regenerated movement. We are not only referring to the radical exclusion from the labour market, but mainly to the exclusion from whatever is regarded as ‘normal’ work, ‘normal’ wage, ‘normal’ living. In an environment that produces surplus populations and violent attacks on the historically defined value of labour power, the much-anticipated ‘subject’ loses the ground beneath its feet. There is no ‘subject’ without a distinctly given ‘objectivity’ that allows it to lead the life of a subject. In the crisis of restructured capitalism the ground (anchoring on the wage relation) is lost together with the oxygen (the ability to demand better living standards). The emerging (non-)subject appears simultaneously as a subject without objectivity and as a condensation of objectivity in the form of its dissolution. Those who are already trapped in the precarity-exclusion continuum invaded a movement that still tends to invoke ‘normal’ employment and a ‘normal’ wage; and the (non-)subject’s invasion was successful, because the movement had already been invaded by capital’s continual bombardment on ‘normal’ employment and the ‘normal’ wage. This whole situation produces destructive practices as a rift in the movement of the proletariat, pushing capital to intensify the repressive aspect of its reproduction as a relation and to keep trying to raise the rate of exploitation further and more violently.

With Sunday’s practices (the practices of riot) these particular sections of the proletariat are becoming, within the reproduction of capitalist society, an aggravating factor for the crisis. The (non-)subject’s role reflects the revolution produced in this cycle of struggles, which is the abolition of all mediations of value, namely of all current social relations, and not the workers seizing power. The horizon of (this period’s) revolution is not the revolutionary programme that awaits the coming of that ‘subject’ which will inevitably have to play the central role. Productive workers, despite their special role, are not produced in this cycle of struggles as a separate revolutionary subject that will lead the process of transformation of capitalist society into a ‘society of labour’; the core concern of the revolution will not be the ‘management of production’. In future, the destructive practices that are emerging today will find their limit in their own reproduction and it will not be possible for them to only involve the destruction of constant capital as a ‘loss’ or as temporary sabotage. In order to continue life within the struggle, practices will be transformed, forced to question the existence of the means of production as means of the production of value. This questioning will not be a monolithic process towards a supposed ‘victory’, but will encompass all the conflicts that will produce, as ruptures, the abolition of the distinction between production and reproduction, that is the abolition of value and with it the abolition of all the social relations of capital. For the moment, within the crisis of restructured capitalism, the (non-)subject is henceforth becoming an active force. It continually reappears and its practices tend to coexist ‘antagonistically’ with revindicative practices, while revindicative practices tend to ‘emulate’ the practices of riot, which unavoidably magnetise them, since ‘social dialogue’ has been abolished.

In September 2011 we wrote about that point in time: ‘What will be important in future events in terms of the crisis and intensification of the class struggle, is the unfolding of the relation between the kind of practices we saw in the UK [August 2011] and those of the “indignants”. This relation becomes particularly important because of the fluidity between these two forming subjects (unemployment has entered the core of the wage relation). The delineation of a new limit (the police, class belonging as an external constraint) leads to a new formation that we are attempting to approach by the notion of “riots”. “Riots” surround the “indignants’” movements, they encroach into them and eventually penetrate them, producing rifts between the practices of those movements (the first manifestation of this fact was 28-29^th June in Greece). The rift’s dialectic is working fervently…’. Sunday was an overcoming, in the sense that the practices have now converged, they have come face to face in action. The encounter of these practices is a result of the dynamic produced by the co-penetration between the ‘indignants’, the ‘proletarianised petit bourgeois’, the civil servants, the youth, the precarious/unemployed. The dialectical movement of these practices is already in process. However, this dialectic will not develop in a vacuum; it is also immersed in the entire dynamic of the class struggle: ‘The four-hundred-euro wage is not related to the cuts in pharmacy profits, or to the benefit cuts in public enterprises and banks, or to pension cuts, or to the opening up of closed trades, or to anything that drives unionists and workers into occupations, demonstrations and long-term strikes. When all of the above have reached the kind of limits they claim, then what precisely could those that have no hope of survival do? The youths in run-down neighbourhoods who frequent the sports clubs owned by untaxed shipping magnates hate the centre of Athens and its pretty lights. The Capital’s young unemployed are desperate and prepared to resist being given the leprosy of the social margins. We talk to them about solidarity. Rubbish. Nobody is ready to make the smallest sacrifice […] so that the twenty-somethings of Greece can get a few Euros more.’[10] These practices belong to fluid and continually reconfigured subjects formed by today’s class struggle. In the context of every crisis where realised profit is not enough to breathe life into the immense mass of past crystallised labour, the more the proletariat is squeezed, it becomes all the more fragmented. In the present conjuncture, however, whose core contains the expulsion of demand struggles from capital’s reproduction, a dynamic which was an integral part of the entire former period, the crisis’ dynamic is now transformed into a dynamic of crisis of the wage relation itself. As the second phase of restructuring is implemented and informal labour becomes the leading tendency of capital’s blind force, it does not seem at all easy for capital to manage the necessary-for-reproduction qualitative distinction between the ‘integrable’ strata of the proletariat and the surplus population. This distinction, the ranking and ordering of labour power, is a structural element of every period of capital, although today the crucial elements are that, firstly, the excluded section tends to become larger and prefigures a time when it will comprise a significant part of the population, and secondly, the distinction between inclusion and exclusion is now entirely contingent.

Any prediction is dangerous, since the condensation of historical time contains an element of unpredictability and the creation of multiple ruptures. The momentous turn towards the ‘national question’ presented as necessary for the reproduction of the current structuring of capital raises the possibility of a left or fascistoid ‘national’ counter-revolution, which of course cannot enjoy the stability (national-socialist integration into the reproduction of capital within the bounds of a national social formation) of the fascisms of the past. This can be produced as necessary when the moment of last resort comes from the vantage point of capital, which is forced to function under a ‘political economy of risk’. The appropriation of riot practices and the continually reproduced state of war in which the proletariat is forced to make any demands, together with the whole squeeze on the working/unemployed population, will all play a role towards adopting practices of the (non-)subject of the (non-)excluded. The only thing certain is that Sunday’s important event is only one of a series, forecast to be dense and keep the nights bright.

blaumachen and friends, February 2012

A multitude of local struggles which had, for the most part, the common aspect of mobilising stable worker fractions threatened or eliminated by the closing down or restructuring of their company or branch, assembled in the struggle against the pension reform. Without any hope of victory and without any illusions, a fraction of the working class, in France autumn 2010, lived again, in an ideal way, the myth of worker’s identity and unity.¹ Workers’ identity, eliminated with the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production in the 1970s and 1980s, was revived in an ideal way as it was no longer the meaning and general content of the present relation to capital. This ‘ideal’ wasn’t nonetheless fortuitous. It fed from local struggles and found an adequate common denominator in the subject of the struggle per se, i.e. retirement, a symbol of workers’ pride.

The uniqueness of this movement lay in the fact that it was the first, since the French movements of 1995, to occur after this phase of the relation of exploitation went into crisis. In this movement, workers’ identity imploded because it had been revived as the fantastical complement to base-unionism. What we will coin under the term ‘base-unionism’ had to acquire some ‘old clothes’ in order to accomplish its own tasks.

Firstly, we will briefly look at the pension reform within the present course of the relations of exploitation which can define this phase of the mode of capitalist production. How could this reform become a general problem? Secondly, we will look at how the various practices, which made the movement into what it was, implicated with one another, that is, as a unity of the movement wherein its totality is defined as a relation between base-unionism and ideal unity of the class. At that point, we will also look at why this movement, despite some of its appearances and the rags it sometimes draped itself, belongs to the present cycle of struggles. At the end, we will aim to show the way in which the struggles of this movement took activism (as yet to be defined) out of balance.

1) The Pension Reform within the Capitalist Mode of Production's Phase of Crisis Opened by the Restructuring of the 1970s

a) Asystematicity of the Demand and Workers' Identity

b) The Struggle Against the Pension Reform and its Content

c) Unity and Segmentation of the Class

2) On Workers' Identity as Base-Unionism's Ideal: Demonstrations, Strikes, GAs and Blockades

a) General Direction of the Movement

b) The 'Inter-Professional' Assemblies

c) The Blockades

d) Base-Unionism

3) Activism as Misunderstanding

a) Generality and Corporatism: activism off on the wrong foot

b) 'Potentiality'

c) A Radicalism which Belongs to the Old Cycle of Struggle and an Idealism which Belongs to the Present Limits

In Conclusion

Like a summer with a thousand Augusts?

'The summer riots of ‘81 were the foretaste of the future for us. One day sooner or later the roof is going to blow off the UK. Faced with an assertion like this most people in pubs, streets, supermarkets or at work tend to nod their heads. The old phlegmatic reassurances that ‘it can’t happen here’ has finally gone – let it be forever.’[1]

This overt optimism, that was the result of the riots that shook Britain in the early 80s, was absent in the aftermath of the August unrest. This time, it was ambivalence, perplexity and critical distance that followed the riots, rather than enthusiasm and hope. Numbness has been the prevalent feeling within activist milieus and militant circles, not to mention the reactions of whatever can be called ‘the Left’ in this country. Reading through many accounts, one gets the impression that the riots were now seen more as a ‘necessary evil’ than a foretaste of the future.

The chaotic and convulsive character of the August unrest, its huge distance from what could be normatively called a proletarian struggle, the impossibility for it to fit in a longed-for movement for working class empowerment, provoked a certain nostalgia for the early 80s. More than a few hurried to belittle the summer riots to something like a social defecation, as compared to the 80s riots that advanced beyond anger and frustration, into affirming a communal spirit and endorsing a political aspiration. This time, rioters fell behind as they are perceived not to have pursued what they could have ideally done, namely seek to lay the first stones for re-creating a strong, autonomous proletarian movement, through self-organisation and class solidarity. It is in the last instance a matter of the consciousness of the proletarian Subject to realise the forever given revolutionary Practice for the best, as Marlowe reminds us:

'Anger is necessary to want to revolt against the system, but this mix of rage and opportunism had no perspective. For me it shows the absolute necessity for a class expression that can provide a context for the development of consciousness, and a focus for collective action. Outside of this, explosions of anger can be dangerously self-defeating.[2]

The Subject’s recent shortcomings are seen as a result of contemporary symptoms of social pathology, such as individualism and consumerism. Looked at from an empirical/normative point of view, the summer riots appear in many respects similar to a number of other historical urban riots. Like many other waves of rioting before them they were sparked by inflammatory police behaviour and were characterised by people’s outraged response; like other riots, they spread rapidly to encompass many individuals and activities with little connection to the initial protest out of which they emerged; like other riots, they did not seek to negotiate specific demands; like other riots, they included violent practices against the state and private property. The problem with such a normative approach is that it poses as its starting point ‘riots’ as an abstract category, whose concrete manifestations are each time a quantitatively varied mixture of practices which are considered typically constitutive of it. As such, riots, rather than being seized as a concrete moment of class struggle, are singled out as a set of practices in the abstract, with its own relative autonomy. Their position within the totality they were removed from is then re-established as a relation to the context they emerge in, which is grasped as essentially exogenous to riot-in-itself. Riots were separated from their objectivity to be reunited with it, but to be reunited only in their separateness. History having been annihilated, what exists in reality appears as a concretisation (realisation) of the eternal abstract. Concrete practices are merely seen as occasional manifestations of Practice as an abstraction. And Practice as such, as an entity, acquires meaning relative to its equally abstract complement, class struggle as in the last instance historyless antithesis between two classes (a face off), an eternal present, a continuum without breaks, but only with ups and downs, successes and failures (history only provides the background colour to this antithesis). Hence the specific determinations of concrete practices are missed as incidental and inessential. The question of communism becomes then an issue of ‘the return of the repressed’ which has been striving to find its way into (class) consciousness.

Taking the position that class struggle is history literally, we mean that classes are bound together in an asymmetrical relation, which is a contradiction that develops, a contradiction in movement, at the core of an effectively – and equivalently moving – structured totality (capitalist society) as it is constituted, reconstituted – in the form of breaks and discontinuities (past revolutions and the counter-revolutions that followed them) – and reproduced as such in each historical period. The fact that the reproduction of the relation of exploitation is contradictory (labour is always necessary and always in excess/the tendency of the rate of profit to fall) poses communism as the real movement that resolves the contradiction through the revolutionary action of the proletariat that abolishes capital and itself. Taken this way, the August unrest was a historically specific event belonging to the totality that has the contradiction between classes at its core, as it exists today (restructured capitalism and its crisis). Even further, it belongs to the present moment – what has been elsewhere called the era of riots[3] – within the unfolding of the crisis of restructured capitalism, as this present moment appears in the specificities of British capitalism, and this in the terms that defined the unrest, namely the composition of the people involved, the variety of their practices (and predominance of some practices over others), their temporal-spatial trajectory, the forms of organisation/coming together of the rioters, their goals and aspirations (or lack of aspirations), their relation to their social surroundings and the rest of the episodes of class struggle in this historical moment. The limit of the unrest was not external to riot-in-itself, but intrinsic to its very nature, the flip side of its dynamic. The August unrest calls for a theorisation of the issues it posed by its emergence and its relation to the rest of the manifestations of class struggle today with regard to the communist revolution produced by the current cycle of struggles. This is what is at stake!

Restructuring and the making of the new dangerous classes

The August unrest was defined by the absence not only of immediate demands but also of any prospect for an improvement of conditions of existence. The rioters attacked, in what they are, the proletarian situation now, namely the precarisation of labour power. In the absence of demands and in their concrete practices, namely looting, arson of commercial and public buildings, attacks at the police and police stations, the wish to become an ‘ordinary proletarian’ – a worker with a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work – was made obsolete. This was intrinsically related to the rioters’ specific situation. This situation’s genealogy in the historical development of the class contradiction, its place in the contradiction’s reproduction today, must be sought in the major contradictory dynamics of restructured capitalism and the upsetting its crisis caused to the relation of exploitation.

The restructuring re-defined the relation of exploitation. It aimed at abolishing all that had become an obstacle to the fluidity of the self-presupposition of capital. It upset the constraints in circulation and accumulation and created a new era of increasing rate of profit (roughly in the 90s and the first half of the 2000s). The financialisation of capitalism as a whole was the new architecture, the new design of the mechanism for the equalisation of the rates of profit. The negotiation of the price of labour power ceased to be integrated into the dynamic of accumulation as had been in the previous era (wages-productivity deal). By breaking down all that had become a rigidity in the crisis of the ‘Keynesian period’, capital has been trying to free itself from maintaining the level of reproduction of the proletariat as labour power, which has been increasingly dealt with as a mere cost – the wage demand has become asystemic. At the very core of restructured capitalism lies the disconnection of proletarian reproduction from the valorisation of capital – within a dialectic of immediate integration (real subsumption) and disintegration of the circuits of reproduction of capital and the proletariat[4] – and the precarisation of this reproduction, which against the background of the rising organic composition of social capital and the global real subsumption of society to capital, has made the production of superfluous labour power an intrinsic element of the wage relation in this period.

The restructuring disintegrated traditional working class communities and modes of coming together (material belonging to a community), a process that in Britain went hand in hand with the dismantling of huge parts of the manufacturing industry and working class strongholds tied up with it. The trend was to transform the working class from a collective subject confronting the bourgeoisie into a sum of proletarians, every one of whom is individually related to capital and each other, without the mediation of the practical experience of a common class identity and workers’ organisations that would represent the class as a recognised social partner, accepted to participate at the table of collective bargaining.This process of individualisation of the working class was accompanied by the ideological attack against the identity of being a worker, producing it as an unwanted behavioural identity, while glorifying wealth and private property. The working class ceased to be something to be proud of and became something to be despised. [5] This transformation was carried out through (and reinforced) a huge mutation of wage labour, starting in the ‘80s: transformation of the technical composition of capital and labour processes, shift to services, flexibilisation and intensification of work, individualisation of employment contracts, discontinuity and dispersion of occupational paths and the rise of underpaid, precarious work against the background of enduring unemployment.

This disintegration of the working class did not mean ipso facto a universal impoverishment of the wage earners. Many workers saw their collective bargaining power undermined through the fragmentation of services, privatisation and subcontracting. But a lot of the remaining stable parts of the working class (to a large extent those still unionised) maintained their wages, while for many, mortgage-backed home ownership and consumer credit meant a rise in living standards. At the same time, new waged middle strata emerged that could aspire to claiming a share of the wealth produced by the increasing profitability during the ascending phase of the cycle of accumulation by working hard and flexibly in education-intensive jobs and maintaining easy access to credit. The mobilisation of cheap labour force in the new industrial zones in the ‘developing’ world (globalisation and global division of labour) permitted the increased consumer power not only of the executives, managers and consultants, but even of workers that saw their real wages stagnating or declining. The ideology that accompanied the individualisation of the working class was the glorification of private ownership and individual responsibility for success or failure: ‘anyone can make it if they work hard enough’. All the more, individual workers should invest in their individual labour power, instead of capital (via the state) investing in the working class. But on the wrong end of the stick, employment shifts from traditional working class occupations to deskilled services positions, the erosion of organised labour and the creeping unraveling of welfare into a springboard towards precarious employment have all brought on the pauperisation of significant numbers of proletarians, among whom proletarians from non-white/British ethnic or racial backgrounds were disproportionately represented. For them, economic restructuring has brought erratic employment in low-paid jobs, while for many it has meant a tendency towards economic redundancy and social marginality. The management of unemployment (that came to be presented as the direct consequence of an inherently pre-existing personal ‘unemployability’) through workfare on the one hand has been aiming at pushing the dispossessed to the peripheral sectors of the labour market, thus blurring the boundaries between wage work and the dole while squeezing wages at the same time downwards, and, on the other, had the effect of recreating the market for low-end consumer commodities and by that means also the jobs which, for the most part, the long term structurally unemployed have been expected to aspire to. The polarisation of the class structure has been inherent in the restructuring and the ascending phase of restructured capitalism: redistribution of wealth upwards, sharp divergence of living standards between the lower strata of the proletariat and the redefined middle strata (let alone the bourgeoisie) as well as between different regions of the country and different areas within the same city, intense segmentation and stratification of the proletariat. The influx of women and migrants into the labour market was a significant contributor to this process.

The disintegration of the working class and the pauperisation of the lower proletarian strata went hand in hand with the re-drawing of the social map of the cities and the penalisation of poverty, the making of the contemporary diffuse ghetto, that is the spatial determination of the new dangerous classes. The entire social housing structure was transformed to encourage home ownership (right-to-buy policies and simultaneous drop in the state’s spending on housing).[6] This provided a chance for the more well-off workers to become property owners. At the same time, it was a most important tool for the ghettoisation of the poor and the transformation of many council estates into dilapidated ‘no-go’ areas. With the acceleration of globalisation, ongoing migration, especially from former colonies and Eastern Europe, has brought growing numbers of dispossessed to big cities. The new waves of immigrants were typically channeled into those very neighborhoods where opportunities and resources have been steadily diminishing, since in these areas housing is cheaper. In those areas, they could also more easily gain a foothold in the informal and entrepreneurial sectors of the economy and be supported by compatriots or co-ethnics. This ghettoisation, accompanied by a whole array of ‘social and community services’ / policing, would either render the dispossessed ‘useful’ by steering them onto the track of deskilled employment, or warehouse them in the sink estates[7]. Gentrification accentuated the social and spatial polarisation of the cities, since the land in many inner city areas, especially in London, was too valuable to be left to the poor (in London, gentrification processes started with the regeneration of the traditionally working class Docklands and afro-Caribbean Notting Hill in the 80s, to proliferate in a number of different areas during the 90s and 2000s). It has rapidly transformed these areas and further disintegrated local working class communities. Not only have low-income residents been pushed away or squeezed into dilapidated estates by steep rent increases, but also the number of evictions of shops that used to serve a working class clientele, the policing of those areas to restrict street life, combined with the housing benefit cuts, have reached class cleansing levels[8]. Located at the historically socially mixed and diverse geography of the British cities, these processes shaped the characteristically disperse and diffuse character of the ghetto in Britain.

The trends that replaced welfare with the obligation of workfare and the hypertrophy of the police/surveillance state are two complementary developments. The utility of the punitive apparatus in the era of workfare and precarisation has been on the one hand to bend refractory parts of the working class into the discipline of the new fragmented service wage-labour by increasing the cost of exiting into the informal economy of the street, and on the other to warehouse and control those rendered superfluous by the labour market’s recomposition. The introduction and continuous refinement of disciplinary workfare programmes applied to the unemployed, the indigent, single mothers, disabled and others ‘on benefits’, and the deployment of an extended police and penal net across cities, have been two components of a single apparatus for the management of poverty. At the same time, the traditional business, shopping and entertainment districts and the newly gentrified areas ought to remain glamorous and unspoiled by the undesirable presence of the dangerous classes. Over the last decades, there has been a proliferation of laws, bureaucratic and technological innovations: crime-watch groups and volunteer community police officers; partnerships between the police and other public services (schools, hospitals, social workers, etc.); fast-track judicial processing; stop-and-search operations[9]; video surveillance cameras and computerised mapping of offenses; enlargement and technological modernisation of prisons; multiplication of specialised detention centers[10]. At an ideological level a punitive approach to social behaviours was promoted and new social types emerged: ‘feral youth’, ‘scum’ and ‘yobs’. At an early stage of its development, the punitive management of poverty ended up in a burst of a small wave of rioting in deprived urban areas in the early ‘90s (as in Bristol in 1992), which continued as sporadic incidents of conflict between the dangerous classes and the police over the years (the most eminent incidents were the race riots in Bradford and Leeds in 2001); this very trend was reinforced by these conflicts being managed as aspects of ‘antisocial behaviour’[11].

In the whirlwind of the crisis: lumpenisation of the wage relation

So, the making of the dangerous classes in the diffuse British ghetto, whose modality of reproduction has been that of inclusive exclusion (the transition from labour power to variable capital, or in other words from being a proletarian to being a worker, produced as problematic), has been intrinsic to the disconnection between valorisation and proletarian reproduction in the development of restructured capitalism, as the flip side of an increased profitability and the creation of new middle strata out of the disintegrated traditional working class. The restructuring resulted in an accentuated social polarisation. On the one hand, many enjoyed a significant social mobility, within an all the more flexible and competitive labour market, principally through the remodeled education system, and were able to enjoy relatively good incomes in skilled jobs in the service sector and easy access to credit. On the other, the increasing number of urban poor would mostly make ends meet in a constant move between low-paid crap jobs and the informal economy (various exchange activities, petit criminality, local gangs), vocational training, pay day loans and the shrinking and transformed but still existing welfare system. In this context, further education would maintain a prospect of a more secure survival on wage earning activities, while some could hope to get themselves out of the shithole working hard to find a place in higher education (an aspiration that became more and more distant after the introduction of university tuition fees in 1998 and their increase in 2004).[12] But there is no healthy equilibrium state, no ‘normal’, fully functional condition at the core of capitalist society. The contradictions of restructured capitalism exploded on a global scale in late 2007. To understand the August unrest in its historical specificity we cannot dismiss the turning point that was the burst of the capitalist crisis. The riots last summer were not just the repetition on a larger scale of the pattern of ghetto riots that this country saw during the ‘90s or early 2000s. The capitalist crisis, having started as a housing bubble and a slump in the financial sector in 2008, has been transformed into a global recession and a severe sovereign debt crisis, without any indications of an imminent recovery on the horizon. At a strategic level, the bourgeoisie – with all its internal conflicts – is struggling to preserve the present (highly financialised) mode of global accumulation by accelerating the core dynamics of restructured capitalism itself, aiming at increasing the rate of surplus value. The crisis of overaccumulation, which in abstract terms means that there are at the same time too many workers and too many factories, is concomitantly a crisis of proletarian reproduction. Of course, every capitalist crisis is a crisis in the reproduction of labour power, but the historical novelty of this crisis is that the wage demand had already become asystemic in the preceding period of prosperity. The effort to increase the rate of exploitation, in itself very doubtful whether it can restore the production of adequate surplus value without a massive devalorisation of capital, accelerates all the contradictory dynamics of restructured capitalism, those very dynamics that resulted in the current crisis. The August unrest broke out amid this whirlwind: it was a concrete manifestation in action of the crisis of proletarian reproduction, as epitomised in the specific situation of its protagosists: ‘It is, to be sure, a coincidence that these specific few days have seen at once the riots, the lowering of the US credit rating, and severe turbulence on stock markets. But it is not incidental’.[13]

Against the backdrop of conditions of recession, with a shrinking labour market, workers being made redundant, a steep rise in unemployment, a strenuous casualisation of employment contracts and creeping increase in the prices of basic commodities and (especially in inner London) rents, the transition into the period of the crisis has seen an austerity-led intensification of the attack against the wage.[14] For the new generation coming from the lower strata of the proletariat this is translated into an almost outright denial of future in the most actual terms. Already a year before the riots, the official youth unemployment rate was 20.3%, which is the highest level since records began in 1992 [15]. Over and above, the sharp increase in university tuition fees and the abolition of the EMA in 2010 [16], together with a further scrapping of welfare/social services (youth clubs, community centers and local health services) and the re-imposition of workfare (e.g. mandatory work experience schemes – meaning unpaid work – for one to claim jobseekers allowance), have pushed youngsters from the estates further away from the official labour market, more and more towards the highly hazardous activities of the informal sector.

In the August unrest it was all the contradictions of inclusive exclusion in the form of the ghetto – in the peculiarity of its historical formation in the British context, namely its diffuse character – that exploded: the contradiction between the retreat of welfare and the turn to workfare and the need to warehouse and manage superfluous labour power and control unemployment rates, between a highly flexible labour market with its unrestricted flow of labour power (under the banners of multiculturalism and equal opportunities) and the penal management of poverty, between consumption as a passport to personhood and exclusion from consumption, between regeneration (gentrification) and degradation. And all these contradictions exploded exactly in the face of the radical affirmation, in the unfolding of the crisis, of inclusive exclusion and precarisation. So, the August unrest produced the ghetto as a ghetto-in-crisis, itself a specific instance of the crisis of proletarian reproduction. The crisis of proletarian reproduction is not a crisis of the reproduction only of the proletariat thrown into the social margins. It is a crisis of the reproduction of the proletariat as a whole. It is at the same time a squeeze and increasing insecurity of the more stable workers (as manifested in sporadic industrial disputes over the last years) and a crisis for the middle strata as well. The student movement in late 2010, and the resurgence of rioting in central London that came with it, revealed the crisis in the reproduction of the middle-strata-to-be within the development of the capitalist crisis. The temporal affinity between the student movement and the August unrest, as well as the invasion of students prepared to confront the police and smash windows into the unions’ demonstration in March 2011, made evident that the youth appears as a subject of revolt, to the extent that the crisis affects first and foremost those who enter the labour market, according to the modalities of their entrance[17] (it is the future that is principally blocked by the crisis) The presence of school kids from ‘the slums of London’ within the student movement, however peripheral, created an internal contradiction, which in a few cases was manifested in confrontations between school kids and students or militants. It declared the very content of the movement (defending the right to higher education) an inanity, in that on the basis of its demand it sought to expand beyond the university (expansion was necessary for the struggle to win), but this very expansion (as it appeared in the involvement of school kids) eroded the core demand[18]. This internal dichotomy between students and school kids within the student movement and the latter’s distance in terms of content from the August unrest reflect the differentiated character of the crisis of proletarian reproduction.

If the crisis of the ghetto, as manifested in the August unrest, condenses the crisis of proletarian reproduction par excellence, it is because the dangerous classes represent par excellence what has become universal as a dynamic for the proletariat at large: the worldwide precarisation of labour power (capital’s utopia to do away with labour, which has been a defining element of the reproduction of the class contradiction within restructured capitalism and its crisis). The dangerous classes of the 21st century are not the traditionally defined lumpen-proletariat[19] which, as a permanent fringe of the reserve army of labour, used to live in its own world, and therefore represented from the start an ‘outside’ from the central capitalist relation. The new ‘lumpen-proletariat’ (the new dangerous classes) is encroached by the normality of the wage relation, precisely because the ‘normal’ proletariat is lumpenised. The crisis, on the one hand, causes an abrupt pauperisation of many workers (as is the case in the whole western world), under the burden of increased unemployment/casual employment and debt (loans which they are now unable to repay, which is aggravated by the fact that those who have mortgages cannot always claim benefits to cover their housing costs) or restriction of access to credit. Even more, though, it produces the increased lumpenisation of the proletariat itself – a lumpenisation that does not appear as external in relation to wage labour but as its defining element. Inclusion increasingly tends to be by exclusion, especially for those who are young. It is a dynamic, a continually regenerated movement. It’s not only about the exclusion from the labour market, which may well apply to many, but also about the exclusion from whatever is regarded as ‘normal’ work, ‘normal’ wage, ‘normal’ living.[20]

The crisis of the ghetto as epitomising the crisis of proletarian reproduction par excellence does not mean that the proletariat is becoming the ghetto. The production of the revolution is not a question of absolute immiseration. The crisis of proletarian reproduction is differentiated which means that it is a crisis in the reproduction of each part of the proletariat depending on the modalities of its reproduction, and at the same time a crisis of the stratification within the proletariat. The latter is very important because this stratification is a hugely necessary element of the reproduction of restructured capitalism. Not only has the social ladder been blocked, but everybody is being pushed downwards. This results in each part trying to erect barricades to protect their position on the ladder and prevent their downfall. This is more so for those closer to the top. The crisis in the stratification of the proletariat sharpens all its internal contradictions and conflicts. The wage relation is being more and more lumpenised indeed, but remaining a wage worker and surviving as one is increasingly posed as a pressing matter. In this context, the rioters’ practices in August, as intrinsically bound to their specific situation, were at once – exactly because of the place of this specific situation within the reproduction of the class contradiction – produced as an internal distance, a rift, within the necessarily dominant stake of class struggles today, namely the wage demand (acting as a class).

To be done with the community

What in August was immensely different from the riots back in the 80s was that the latter had an ‘affirmative’ dimension – rioting could be the explosive expression of a movement to end racial discrimination, the ‘sus’ (suspected person) laws, stop and search – i.e. a movement for a certain integration. In 2011 we did not have that; we did not have black communities struggling for integration. The 80s riots could be considered in the context of the beginning of the restructuring and the defeat of the class, Thatcher taking on and defeating the printers or the miners, but this defeat was perhaps not considered inevitable at the time. In contrast, in 2011, there was an a fortiori illegitimacy of any integrative demands. Now, one cannot ‘request’ (even violently) to be treated as an ‘ordinary proletarian’, as this has been swept away by the crisis of restructured capitalism[21]. Together with this horizon, it is the affirmation of the working class community as epicentre of proletarian recomposition that has been made obsolete and was revealed as such.

The working class community has never been a call to unity, but the actual space-time of proletarian reproduction outside (and closely linked to) the workplace (the factory, in its prototype), permeated by relations of solidarity and common class interests. The trajectory of this community in Britain dates back to the powerful local working-class communities usually spreading out from the surroundings of industrial districts. The working-class community has never been a revelation of an essence, but the concretisation of a specific historical existence of the class relation, when class for itself was produced as the overgrowth of class in itself. To that extent, the working class community was segregation as much as it was unity, its cohesion as a specific modality of proletarian reproduction being provided by a central figure, the white male skilled worker initially and the white male mass worker later on – class consciousness was the horizon of the overcoming of segregation/divisions (gender, race, sectors, skilled/unskilled, natives/immigrants, etc.), the horizon of a universal equality, itself produced as impossible in the impossibility of the revolution as the affirmation of the class. With the big waves of migration from the West Indies in the 40s and 50s, and other parts of the Commonwealth in the following years, there was a proliferation of local ethnic minority communities – also including new poor shopkeepers (see the various local shops and markets as places of a communal coming together) – based on shared culture, language, traditions and histories, which would offer a protective social network in the ‘Mother Country’. Such proletarian communities remained significant spaces of reproduction and struggles up to the 80s, which was evident in the role they had both in the black urban riots and the miners’ strike.

Local communities as spaces of concrete everyday relationships have been disintegrated, together with the liquidation of working class identity, by all the dynamics of the restructuring. Less and less can one find the feeling of belonging in a local community, the sense of affiliation, communal relationships and class solidarity, in the (penetrated by gentrification) ghettos, even if this process has been uneven. It is true that white working class communities, and to a large extent black afro-Caribbean communities, have declined at a much faster pace, while communities of other racial/ethnic minorities (e.g. Turkish-Kurdish or Asian ones) have been more resistant to this disintegration. Ethnic networks are an important determinant of the modes of survival for the different fractions of proletarians who come from abroad – allocation of jobs, religion, mafia-run money lending – and this is reflected for example in the composition of the petit-bourgeois elements or local gangs in various neighbourhoods. But even here, local communities do not actually represent unifying spaces of proletarian reproduction and struggles, loci of an affirmative self-identification of proletarians with each other. One could probably say that the new sense of collectivity in the deprived areas is that of a collective experience of disintegration and decline. At the same time, the very notion of ‘the communities’ has been more and more integrated into the political/ideological discourse of the state to refer to managerial/administrative apparatuses – participatory decision making, local job centers and training schemes, cultural groupings, etc. – and electoral sites.

So, in the August unrest, it was not a case of communal proletarian bonds (or bonds of common racial/ethnic origins) providing the background of a proletarian subject in struggle and, in their affirmation, the content of its struggle. We should not be misunderstood; apparently, there were instances of solidarity on a local/communal level during the riots. However, this merely confirms the fact that capital can never fulfill its utopia of transforming all modes of social intercourse to pure relations between commodities. What is significant though is that rioters did not find the raison d’être of their actions in the affirmation of their belonging to a local community, which is also an affirmation of their class belonging. It is indicative that the unrest traveled rapidly from one area to the next, unlike the riots in the ‘80s, when the battles were focused on defending a specific area against the police, which was the defending of the local community, the ‘us’ as the defining element of an affirmative movement against racial discrimination and police repression.

Whenever there was an attempt to affirm a common belonging to a local community during or after the August unrest, it was only against the very content of the unrest itself. The notion of local communities was, on the one hand, part of the repressive language of the state, aiming at addressing the objective unease of the middle classes and petit-bourgeoisie, as well as the discourse of local community leaders and bourgeois or petit-bourgeois elements feeling let down by the short-lived inability of the state’s repressive apparatus to protect property. On the other hand, it was part of the political language of many militants (citizens’ coalitions, leftist and anarchist groups), aiming at blunting the convulsive unfolding of the unrest into a politically meaningful strategy for social change.[22]

This was not a movement

In the August unrest, nothing in the situation of its protagonists was worth defending: neighbourhood, residency, community, ethnicity and race, were all revealed as aspects of capital’s reproduction, which produces these proletarians as actual paupers: their class belonging was made an external constraint, an ever more pressing imperative of discipline, submission and acceptance of mistreatment without any offsetting guarantee of an acceptable survival. The language of the riots was not the positive language of the ‘movement’, social change, demands[23] or politics, but the negative language of vandalism. What happened was a lot of destruction, nothing was built, no plans, no strategies. The unrest was a ‘fuck you all’ to ‘respectable society’. This very dynamic of the unrest, intrinsically bound to the place of the specific situation of its protagonists within the reproduction of the class contradiction, was at the same time its limit, which was revealed in the lack of any perspective for generalisation[24] and was immanent to each one of its practices.

Probation offices, courts and job-centres were attacked as symbols of the penal management of poverty. Expensive cars, restaurants and commercial properties were destroyed because they represent a wealth which is inaccessible. Estate agents saw their windows smashed because they represent unaffordable rents in areas being gentrified. Pawnshops were smashed as ‘the kind of cunts who’ll charge you twenty quid to cash a Housing Benefit cheque’. The indisputable limit of this kind of destructive activity was that it could in no way be an activity of actual negation, that is, a removal of the social relations that in reality sustain what was attacked.

In the shooting dead of Mark Duggan and the attacks against the cops that followed, police were revealed as the last word in the self-presupposition of capital, which for the unrest’s protagonists is the guarantor of their specific modality of reproduction (inclusive exclusion), an enemy in itself, to the extent that the moment of repression is becoming more and more central within the reproduction of the class contradiction (the role of the police itself to prevent the non-rule-abiding reproduction of the proletariat). Exactly because of this specific relation of the dangerous classes with the police state, the targeting of the police as an enemy in itself tended to substitute the moment of repression within the presupposition of capital for the relation of exploitation itself. This makes a point of departure out of what is only a result. In revealing the cops as an enemy in itself, what becomes obscured is the fact that they are only the bourgeoisie in fighting position.

Looting was undoubtedly the predominant practice and the most outrageous scandal in the unrest. With approximately 2,500 shops looted, the scale of looting characteristically makes the August unrest outstanding. In all its manifestations – appropriating high value goods (e.g. electronics and jewelry) mainly for re-sale; looting garment stores, supermarkets and other high street shops for ‘personal’ use; storming bookmakers and pawnshops for money; or appropriating low value stuff such as cigarettes, water and alcohol for sharing among peers in the street – looting was a practical questioning of the terms of inclusive exclusion. In no case were retail shop fronts smashed as a mere symbolic action. People did not want just to ‘send a message’ but to get stuff they needed, or get money in order to buy stuff. Against the backdrop of the absence of demands, rioters directly claimed and re-appropriated means of subsistence which they are excluded from, and this was their main target. Appropriation of goods or money was a transient practical critique of the commodity form, as those proletarians offensively took what they need but are objectively banned from acquiring, and in this respect the act of looting was just as important as the loot.[25]

In the appropriation of goods, rioters momentarily questioned the commodity form but did so only at the level of exchange because this was the scope of their revolt. By definition, their practices could not have questioned the commodity form at the point of its genesis, namely the sphere of production. This could only end up in the affirmation of exchange itself in the very act of reselling appropriated goods or in the appropriation of money, the form of value par excellence. Understanding looting in that way does away with a frustratingly moral discourse that emerged after the riots among militants who are always seeking to water proletarians with class consciousness, a discourse aligned in the last instance with the state’s repressive monologue. Quite a few protested against what was perceived as individualistic behaviour, a symptom of the so-called consumerist degenerations of the class, saying that ‘they have no right to do this, this isn’t how one protests’. As somebody said, of course they had no right to do this and it is for that reason that it was not a protest.[26] This moral critique at its best would excuse the appropriation of low value commodities (stuff that people ‘really need’) but condemn the appropriation of stuff that is considered luxuries or money itself, suggesting that proletarians thrown into social margins should only aspire to goods that correspond to their marginal position. Looting as the practical critique of the commodity form at the level of exchange is not the abolition of the commodity form. For looting for sale to be overcome, the existence of exchange has to be widely questioned in a generalised communising struggle. Insofar as exchange is the only means of reproducing oneself, one can only expect individual consumption and resale to be the prominent aim of the appropriation of goods. This is not fortunate or unfortunate, this is how it is.

In the actions that appeared during the unrest, the ‘gang’ offered the elemental organisational form, in all its fluidity and ephemerality, not only in the sense of the participation of gangs strictly speaking, but mainly as informal groupings in the street, stemming from pre-existing direct relationships between peers or schoolmates, usually on the basis of residential proximity or randomly formed in the street to carry out specific actions only to dissolve soon after. But one must not forget that petit-criminality and gang activity have a significant role for many youths in the ghetto to make ends meet. The involvement of actual gangs of youngsters in the riots, although minoritarian,[27] questioned the function of gangs as business organisation, because the diffusion of criminality in the form of attacks against private property was a questioning of gang activity as organised crime. Since the primary purpose of gangs is to make money from selling drugs, riots are the last thing they want. You can’t sell drugs when there’s a riot because there are cops everywhere. For the younger members who make a few tenners a day selling drugs, participation in looting was pretty attractive, while for those higher up, the upheaval and pervasive police presence inhibited true profitable activity, the drug trade. The temporary questioning of the workings of gangs as business organisations was reflected in the fact that for four nights in August, they suspended any ordinary hostilities between each other to focus on common actions. Strict territorial divides preventing young people from slipping into ‘rival areas’ – sometimes defined by postcode – were temporarily forgotten. But, of course, although the involvement of gang members in the unrest created a dichotomy between gang as an affiliation group (everyday relationships of support, micro-identities hostile to the police and ‘the system’ – although heavily mediated by machismo, an aggressive masculinity and many times outright idiocy) and gang as a business organisation, the latter was re-affirmed in the affirmation of exchange as the limit of looting (apparently gang channels were used for the re-sale of appropriated goods), and with the unrest subsiding, a perceived collective strength fell apart back to ‘business as usual’, without leaving any enduring bonds behind.

The ‘us’ of the riots in August was a transient and volatile ‘us’, created in the actions of the proletarians involved, initially defined by the very act of shooting Mark Duggan dead by the police as the culmination of the ongoing experience of military urbanism, only to dissolve thereafter as the shockwaves of the unrest subsided. There was no organisational continuity or prospect of building a movement. By revealing their class belonging as an external constraint, as capital’s horizon, the unrest’s protagonists found themselves in conflict with society itself, which having been really subsumed by capital is only capitalist society. This was the anti-social character of the unrest. They engaged in a convulsive activity which had an end date, and – in the radical absence of politics – plans and strategies, issues of expansion, building links or embracing ‘the people’ were not posed at all. Whoever was prepared to join would be part of an ‘us’ momentarily constituted against ‘them’, the police, the state, the government, the rich, shop owners, society. In the August unrest, the issue of the generalisation of the struggle was posed only in its negative, as a lack of any perspective of generalisation. The issue of the generalisation of the struggle is not posed in terms of the recomposition of the proletarian community, but in terms of the multiplication of rifts within what has become the limit of class struggle, namely acting as a class.

The era of riots

With respect to its practices (its content), the August unrest was the third major instance in a series of events in Europe, the other two being the riots in the French banlieus in 2005 and in Greece in 2008. The particular unfolding of the events in each one of these instances was shaped by the respective position of each state within the global zoning of capitalist accumulation and (clearly interrelated with the latter) its specific history of class struggles, as well as the temporality of the burst and development of the capitalist crisis: in the case of France the crisis was only anticipated while in late 2008 it had just erupted. Both in France and Britain, where the population is much more diverse and there are more profoundly established class and social divides, which means that the crisis of proletarian reproduction is much more differentiated, the ghetto was the undisputed protagonist of the riots. In Greece, on the other hand, a socially quite broader figure of school kids[28] were the ones that pushed the riots forward in coming together with a strong activist milieu (a coming together that made many activists question for a few days their activism and alternativism) and other young precarious proletarians. Only on this ground did the outcasts – recently arrived migrants inhabiting central Athens, hooligans and junkies – find themselves involved in the most scandalous aspects of the events, namely looting and arson. In France, the riots were geographically isolated in the ‘banlieues’ since the dangerous classes are spatially segregated as a result of the preceding social policies and population control strategies in the country (‘HLMs’ and ‘cités’). This maintained a ‘safety’ distance between the rioters and the rest of the population. In Greece, the social composition of the rioters and the social geography of Athens and the rest of big cities made city centers the major terrain of the encounter of subversive actions. Britain’s model of social integration has resulted in a geographically diffuse ghetto, which in the current temporality in the development of the crisis provided the inflammable material for the riots to spread quickly all over London and for the characteristically larger scale of looting compared to both France and Greece. But despite all their respective particularities, or better exactly within these particularities, in all three instances the protagonists of the riots revealed and attacked class belonging as an external constraint in an outburst of destructive activity which sought to negotiate or defend nothing, and this was bound to their specific situation and its place in the modalities of the reproduction of the proletariat in each respective case.

So, as an instance in these series of events, the August unrest finds itself within the era of riots, the present moment that defines the transitional period of the crisis. But this present moment could not be understood, in the way it is particularised in the first zone of capitalist accumulation, without taking into consideration the significance, within it, of the ‘indignados’ or ‘occupy’ movements, as appeared mainly in Spain, Greece and the US. The latter have been constitutionally linked to the pushing downwards/ proletarianisation of the middle strata (or middle-strata-to-be) and as such were defined by inter-classism. This was expressed in their democratic discourse, either in the form of an appeal for real/direct democracy, as was the case in Spain and Greece, or in that of the 99% as in the US. The real democratic discourse in Spain, the direct democratic discourse in Greece or the 99% discourse in the US were an effort to affirm a common belonging (the vast majority of society; the citizen, not the proletarian) in the face of the absence of the ground for the affirmation of class belonging within the objective reproduction of the class contradiction. It sought to affirm the universality of the effects of the crisis as a universal community of struggle. The broadness of this belonging stemmed from and reinforced the inter-class/democratic character and to a large extent posed financial capital and its political functionaries as the opponent ‘class’ (it was the Wall Street in the ‘imperialist’ US or principally foreign financial capital in ‘anti-imperialist’ Greece).

Faced with the generalisation of the crisis of proletarian reproduction and the intensification of the dynamics of the restructuring, protesters could not practically find any way out, any concrete way in which their lives could be different. Engaged in a struggle waged at the level of politics, the ‘indignados’ or the ‘occupiers’ put forward (real/direct) democracy as representing their aspirations for a better life, but which was a mere form in the absence of the content of an alternative way of living and reproducing oneself. In that sense, the democratic discourse of the ‘indignados/occupy’ movements was not the radical democratism of the ‘90s and early 2000s, the radical democratism of the antiglobalisation movement. Now there were no visions for an alternative society, for a capitalism with a human face. The fact that they were waged at the level of politics (their democratism) was the absolute limit of the ‘indignados/occupy’ movements, a limit which in Greece was questioned by proletarian violence during the general strikes and in the US by calls to occupy everything and the invasion of the ports, only to reaffirm itself as the abrupt end of the movement in Greece[29] and the alternativism (unable to materialise itself as such) of the communes in the US, sanctioned in both cases by the police.

In that sense, the ‘indignados/occupy’ movements and the riots are the two aspects of the same crisis of reproduction. Even within the democratism of the former there was little scope for any actually negotiable demands: the voting of the new bailout in Greece was more a ‘call to arms’ rather than a ground for negotiation (nobody really believed that it would be withdrawn), while the multiplicity of micro-demands put forward by activists in the US only reflected the absence of negotiable stakes that could be pursued. Or it would be more accurate to say that it was exactly the crisis of struggling for immediate demands that brought forth (real) democracy and it was the real democratism of the movements that made the search for demands necessary. In the 99% discourse there was an illusory aspiration for an oncoming unity as a result of the universal character of the crisis. The eagerness to expand, to make people join was constitutional for the movement. Even the cops had to be produced as enemies in the development of the movement in the US (maybe with the exception of Oakland where the memories of the murder of Oscar Grand are still fresh), when a few months earlier in London they were presupposed as such. On the other hand, the riots in Britain were produced as the total negation of any positive prospect, either in the form of real democracy or the communes. The August unrest had announced the 99% discourse, expansion as unification, as bankrupt in advance. The intrusion of the riot into the square would have destroyed any illusions of unity under the banner of democracy.[30] But reversely, the August unrest acquires a historical significance only in relation to the ‘indignados/occupy’ movements. Only in this relation was class belonging revealed and attacked as an external constraint, within class struggle today as a totality.

The rioters’ practices in August were produced as an internal distance, a rift, within the necessarily dominant stake of class struggles today, namely acting as a class. This internal distance penetrates all the major current revindicative struggles. We could say that the riot invades the movement. This has been the case in France, Britain, Italy, Spain and most recently Canada (it is important that in all these movements the youth, students or young unemployed, are produced as a subject of revolt, because as we’ve said it is the youth that first and foremost see their future blocked). Riots invade the movements because of the inability of struggles over immediate demands to renew their revindicative dynamic (the case of the student movement in Quebec is very indicative in that respect), and in that sense we are talking about the era of riots. This encounter between the riot and the movement reached a state of paroxysm in the osmosis of practices within an inter-class crowd that appeared in Athens on 12th February, because of the acuteness of the crisis in Greece: in a massive outburst of rioting that followed a 48-hour general strike with minimal participation, ‘those who are already trapped in the precarity-exclusion continuum invaded a movement that still tends to invoke ‘normal’ employment and a ‘normal’ wage; and the (non-)subject’s invasion was successful, because the movement had already been invaded by capital’s continual assault on ‘normal’ employment and the ‘normal’ wage’[31]. This osmosis reproduced the internal distance between practices at another level, between the mass that confronted the police and those who torched buildings and looted. In all the instances of the movement being invaded by the riot, the production of class belonging as an external constraint affirms the police as what tends to become a central moment in the reproduction of the contradiction between classes.

The era of riots is at the same time the dynamic and the limit of class struggle in the current conjuncture, namely the production of class belonging as an external constraint in the face of the inability of class struggle to conclude its class dynamic and produce a renewed position of proletarian power. It is only a transitory phase in the development of this contradiction (the contradiction between classes in the current cycle of struggles) that seeks a resolution. As the crisis progresses, the proletariat struggles for its reproduction as a class and at the same time is confronted with its own reproduction (class belonging) externalised as a constraint in capital, i.e. it struggles at the same time for and against its own reproduction[32]. The generalisation of the struggle is not posed today as class unity (under the wings of a central figure), because for the proletariat being and acting as a class only means being a part of capital and reproducing itself as such (together with the opponent class). There is no ground for a revolutionary affirmation of class belonging, no workers’ identity or proletarian community, and there is nothing to be liberated, no craftsmanship or human nature. In an environment that produces surplus populations and violently attacks the historically defined value of labour power, anchoring on the wage relation is lost together with the ability to demand better living standards. The much-anticipated Subject loses the ground beneath its feet. The ephemeral ‘us’ of the rioters, this transient subject of destructive practices that appears momentarily only to rapidly dissolve, is the impossibility of a permanence of the Subject (the impossibility to imagine the revolution as the result of an “accumulation’ or overgrowth of riots). In the differentiated character of the crisis of proletarian reproduction, the crisis of the stratification of the proletariat, each part is struggling to defend its respective level of reproduction (its position on the social ladder) while they are all pushed downwards. This makes the issue of the generalisation of the struggle an issue of conflictual encounter between different practices. This is revealed in all the cases of riots invading movements. It is what was anticipated in the aforementioned dichotomy within the student movement in 2010, which was very similar to the one that had appeared within the anti-CPE movement in France in 2006. It is what was also prefigured when the encounter between the rioters and the petit-bourgeois poor was posed as conflictual in the August unrest (when shopkeepers – themselves to a large extent exploited by serfdom-like bonds to various ethnic mafias – defended their shops in many times armed), in the absence of a unifying common belonging to a local community.[33]

What seems to be absent from the invasion of the riot into the movement, as it appears in the current conjuncture in the first zone of capitalist accumulation, is the struggle in the workplace. In the movement over pensions in France, where a large number of workers participated, there was no major wave of strikes. The movement’s connection with the workplace was mainly expressed in the form of the blockade (blockades of refineries). Similar was the case in the US, when the occupy movement saw the step forward in blocking ports in the West coast, while during a week of workplace occupations in the public sector in Greece last autumn, occupiers were very careful not to be strikers (nobody was really prepared to lose their wages). The posing of the contradiction between classes in this cycle of struggles at the level of their mutual reproduction is in the present moment unable to cross the barrier of production, namely enter the field which is at the core of this mutual reproduction, as, in the face of the precarisation (lumpenisation) of the wage relation, being a proletarian today is not identified with being a worker and even those who are actually workers do not identify in any positive way with the condition of being a worker. This has in a way been expressed in scattered factory occupations over redundancies and compensations in Europe during the last few years, which as such are a flight from the workplace, from the worker’s condition (itself a moment of the production of class belonging as an external constraint). In the absence of struggles or actions that will put the production of value at stake and their relating to them, those who find themselves reproduced in the modality of inclusive exclusion will be unable to question the dependence of their survival on activities of exchange, as became evident in the August unrest. However, in the practices of blockading, in the invasion of ‘outsiders’ into workplaces, two important issues arise: a) putting value production at stake will not necessarily take the form of the strike (which does not mean that strikes will not happen, but that the crucial significance of productive labour is not posed anymore as the centrality of the figure of the productive worker); b) the practices of blockading anticipate the practical questioning of self-organisation in the conflictual encounter between workers and ‘outsiders’, to the extent that this invasion will tend to question the privileged relation of certain workers with the specific means of production they work with.

The capitalist crisis is a flight forward, an acceleration of all the dynamics of the restructuring. It is a radical affirmation of the illegitimacy of the wage demand amidst the unraveling of guarantees for survival, the proletarianisation of middle and petit-bourgeois strata and the accentuation of the production of surplus populations. The attack against the price of labour power is crystallized as austerity measures (similar to the structural adjustment programmes of the 80s) that are now implemented What seems to be absent from the invasion of the riot into the movement, as it appears in the current conjuncture in the first zone of capitalist accumulation, is the struggle in the workplace. In the movement over pensions in France, where a large number of workers participated, there was no major wave of strikes. The movement’s connection with the workplace was mainly expressed in the form of the blockade (blockades of refineries). Similar was the case in the US, when the occupy movement saw the step forward in blocking ports in the West coast, while during a week of workplace occupations in the public sector in Greece last autumn, occupiers were very careful not to be strikers (nobody was really prepared to lose their wages). The posing of the contradiction between classes in this cycle of struggles at the level of their mutual reproduction is in the present moment unable to cross the barrier of production, namely enter the field which is at the core of this mutual reproduction, as, in the face of the precarisation (lumpenisation) of the wage relation, being a proletarian today is not identified with being a worker and even those who are actually workers do not identify in any positive way with the condition of being a worker. This has in a way been expressed in scattered factory occupations over redundancies and compensations in Europe during the last few years, which as such are a flight from the workplace, from the worker’s condition (itself a moment of the production of class belonging as an external constraint). In the absence of struggles or actions that will put the production of value at stake and their relating to them, those who find themselves reproduced in the modality of inclusive exclusion will be unable to question the dependence of their survival on activities of exchange, as became evident in the August unrest. However, in the practices of blockading, in the invasion of ‘outsiders’ into workplaces, two important issues arise: a) putting value production at stake will not necessarily take the form of the strike (which does not mean that strikes will not happen, but that the crucial significance of productive labour is not posed anymore as the centrality of the figure of the productive worker); b) the practices of blockading anticipate the practical questioning of self-organisation in the conflictual encounter between workers and ‘outsiders’, to the extent that this invasion will tend to question the privileged relation of certain workers with the specific means of production they work with.

The capitalist crisis is a flight forward, an acceleration of all the dynamics of the restructuring. It is a radical affirmation of the illegitimacy of the wage demand amidst the unraveling of guarantees for survival, the proletarianisation of middle and petit-bourgeois strata and the accentuation of the production of surplus populations. The attack against the price of labour power is crystallized as austerity measures (similar to the structural adjustment programmes of the 80s) that are now implemented everywhere in the first zone of capitalisteverywhere in the first zone of capitalist accumulation (the supervisors of this process are Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s). As this process develops amidst a severe sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the implementation of austerity in the South is of utmost priority not only for the PIIGS (austerity is the mechanism of the restructuring which mystifies itself in the coercive language of access to international financial markets), but for the core states as well, in order to prevent the acute devaluation of their own financial assets, which would rapidly send them deeper into recession, making contradictions in the internal front even more explosive (somebody called that uneven de-development at a discussion in London). Amidst the whirlwind of intensified intra-capitalist competition, the multiplication of proletarian struggles and riots, the police is everywhere affirmed as a central moment in the reproduction of the contradiction between classes, as exemplified in the banning of protests in the US and Spain, with new laws voted following the ‘occupy’ movement and the appearance of riots in Barcelona, in the recent emergency law in Canada, brought into action when riots invaded the student movement, or in the army taking to the streets in Italy and the new detention camps for illegal migrants in Greece. In Britain, the August unrest was followed by around 5,000 arrests and legal modification that led to hugely increased sentences for riot participants. Apart from the publication of various studies on the events and the shortcomings of the state’s response which explored ways of preventing similar unrests in the future, a number of committees and bodies announced that widespread riots are quite likely to erupt again and have been working hard to supply the state’s arsenal with more effective ways of dealing with similar unrests.[34] The form of the ghetto, of intensified spatial segregation secured by innovated surveillance methods, police special forces or even the army, is anticipated as the dominant modality of reproduction for rapidly increasing proletarian populations, a trend that has been more advanced in the US. The recently voted for housing benefit cap and the massive ‘regeneration’ of the traditionally poor districts in East London on the occasion of the Olympics, which cause a renewed social cleansing, point to this direction in Britain. In these trends as well as in the cases of technocrats being directly appointed as heads of the state to temporarily relieve serious political crises, as has recently been the case in Greece and Italy, a tendency towards totalitarianism is evident, which, not being though in any case an incorporation of the working class into the state across national lines, is not a repetition of the historical totalitarianisms of fascism and Nazism (historical repetitions are without meaning anyway).

Of course, all of the above dynamics that increase precarisation (the lumpenisation of the wage relation) cannot in any case resolve the contradictions of restructured capitalism because they are these very contradictions the ones that led to the current crisis, and are themselves already in crisis as solutions. The ghetto is already a ghetto-in-crisis and the August unrest was this crisis in action. The internal distance that appears within class struggles today aggravates all social contradictions and creates a self-reinforcing process of growing conflicts – that includes more and more categories – and the intensification of state repression. As we’ve said, the dynamics of the struggle in the era of riots cannot produce any stable results. The limit of these struggles, now, is that they are class struggles. The overcoming of this limit is a practical attack against capital, which is identical with the attack on the very existence of the class of proletarians.

From demand struggles to revolution there can only be a rupture, a qualitative leap. But this rupture is not a miracle, not a change that happens in an instant, neither is it merely the realisation by proletarians that nothing else is any longer possible except the revolution, as everything else has failed. This rupture is produced positively as struggles unfold[35]. It is prefigured in the multiplication of rifts within struggles. The generalisation of the struggle can only be the generalisation of practices that question proletarians’ existence as proletarians. The capitalist crisis as a crisis of the reciprocal implication between classes will be the backdrop of this generalisation, and precisely because of the latter the crisis will become paroxysmal[36]. The generalisation of the struggle, as a coming together of conflicts within struggles, will immediately bring multiple aspects of surplus value production / capitalist reproduction to a halt, thus putting at stake proletarian reproduction itself, necessitating simultaneously the intensification and expansion of what will then be an open insurrection, or probably multiple insurrectionary fronts. Obviously, the coming together of proletarian practices will not be peaceful. On the contrary, we should expect a violent process in many instances. If the generalisation of rifts produces a new kind of ‘unity’ of practices, this will not be the old class unity, but multiple practices objectively establishing different camps within the fighting proletariat that will however be unable to crystallise (lest the revolution be defeated) into particular political forms; they will be volatile by definition, precisely because for the ‘communisation camp’ there won’t be an end. The production of rifts is the production of class belonging as an external constraint within the class struggle. The dynamic of class struggle today can never be victorious, because it will keep finding class struggle itself as its limit, up to the point when the multiplication of rifts will become the overcoming of class belonging (and therefore of class self-organisation), as a revolution within the revolution, as communising measures, that will either de-capitalise (communise) life further and further or be crushed.

Rocamadur/Blaumachen

August 2012

1. Like a summer with a thousand Julys… and other seasons…, Wolfie Smith, Speed, Tucker and June, 1982.
2. And he continues: ‘I don’t know how this is to come about, and it has been frustrating not to have seen more explicit political expression. It certainly shows that immiseration on its own doesn’t generate consciousness’ (Marlowe, IP blog, August 2011). Nothing personal against Marlowe, he just summarizes well what has been said or implied by many ultra-leftist or anarchist accounts of the riots. For an academic version of the same approach, see for instance the text ‘Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets’ by David Harvey.
3. See Woland, ‘The transitional phase of the crisis: The era of riots’, Blaumachen no. 5, June 2011.
4. See Screamin’ Alice, ‘On the periodisation of the capitalist class relation’, Sic no. 1, November 2011.
5. This process of individualisation of the working class was accompanied by the ideological attack against the identity of being a worker, producing it as an unwanted behavioural identity, while glorifying wealth and private property. The working class ceased to be something to be proud of and became something to be despised.
6. The state prevented councils from building social housing to replace the stock that was being sold off. Rising demand for housing pushed prices up. Housing became increasingly unaffordable for huge swathes of the population and many were condemned to languish for years on council housing waiting lists. Those who remained council tenants tended to be poorer and in the worst quality housing. Over the years, local governments stopped maintaining to a good standard the council properties that remained, so that they would fall into ruin and then be ‘condemned’ and demolished. Private contractors would then get contracts to build new houses that would contain a high ratio of privately rented flats. This is still ongoing, and has been part of a ‘regeneration’ policy that aimed to replace the existing council states with new public/private-owned estates.
7. The whole process of dismantling social housing carries its own contradictions: on the one hand capital / the state would rather those council estates did not exist but be replaced by privately owned housing, on the other hand they have been necessary for the social reproduction and policing of (surplus) proletarian populations.
8. Take for example Hackney: entire streets have been transformed in a matter of 1–2 years. Hackney is the second poorest council in the country, with over 11,000 residents living on benefits. At the same time, a small one-bedroom flat costs something like £300,000 to buy or £1,000 to rent, as middle-class families move into the area, and expensive cafes and overpriced organic takeaways spring up like mushrooms among one-pound shops. Cheap Caribbean grocery stores have been replaced by boutiques; barbers (an important meeting place for afro-Caribbean communities) by expensive trendy bars; kebab shops and caffs by fancy restaurants and modern furniture stores; butchers by delicatessens and estate agents. City squares have turned into ‘plazas’, designed in a way that disallows hanging out and street drinking. For the evicted small shop owners this has meant abrupt, devastating proletarianisation. For their punters and local working class social networks this meant less space, being unable to afford their neighbourhood, and being looked down upon by middle-class newcomers.
9. Stop-and-search under the Criminal Justice & Public Order Act of 1994 was introduced for football hooligans and allows the police to search anyone in ‘designated’ areas without grounds for suspicion. Stop-and-search incidents increased from 7,970 in 1998 to 149,955 in 2009, while between 2005 and 2009 the number of searches of blacks rose over 650%, unrelated to football. It is also worth adding here the outraging figures that, since 1998, 333 deaths have occurred in police custody (Independent Police Complaints Commission), and since 1990, 1,433 people have died either in police custody or following other contact with the police (950 deaths took place in custody, 317 following a police pursuit, 112 were the result of a road traffic incident involving a police vehicle and 54 were police shootings), a quarter of them in London (The Guardian, data by Inquest).
10. By the end of 2011, the number of prisoners in the UK reached 87,000. Every year, around 100,000 people are convicted to community work. Practical consequences of being convicted in the UK: The employer has the right to ask for access to one’s criminal record, and turn down applicants with prior convictions. Convicted students can lose access to the health services and can even be expelled from their school. At the same time, those coming from outside the EU have serious difficulty in renewing their visas, while everyone faces obstacles in accessing credit. It is obvious that the criminalisation of poverty adds one more active factor to its self-reproduction, while at the same time it seeks to create a ‘sanitary zone’ around it.
11. For more on these riots, ghettoisation and the penalisation of poverty, see Wacquant, ‘The Return of the Repressed: Riots, “Race” and Dualization in Three Advanced Societies’, 1993/2007.
12. In 1998 students were required to pay up to £1,000 a year for tuition and fees were means-tested. Later, means-testing was abolished and everyone was obliged to pay fees by means of loans from the state. In 2004 the government increased the level of tuition fees that universities were allowed to charge, to £3,000 a year. By 2010, maximum fees had increased to £3,290. Tuition fees were tripled to up to £10,000 a year with the higher education reform in 2010, which sparked the student movement.
13. An open letter to those who condemn looting, Parts I & II, socialism and/or barbarism, August 2011.
14. At the level of the spectacle, a very British sort of austerity nostalgia has been rediscovered and reappropriated, as the flip side of an all-powerful social surveillance and policing apparatus. ‘Keep calm and carry on’, which has spread in the wake of the demise of the Blair-era boom on posters or other artifacts whose aesthetics refer back to the turbulent Blitz era, exemplifies the call for a stoic acceptance of the hard times ahead. See Owen Hatherley, ‘Lash out and cover up’, Radical Philosophy no. 157, 2009.
15. Rates of unemployment are even worse in poor areas; for example, in Tower Hamlets young adult unemployment was 27.7%, while in Tottenham there was one job opening for every 54 jobseekers. In addition, one has to keep in mind that only those claiming jobseekers allowance are counted as unemployed, not those on other kinds of benefits (e.g. income support or disability allowances) or those surviving from activities in the informal sector.
16. 80% of the 650,000 high school students who used to receive the maintenance grant come from homes where household income is less than £20,800. The EMA enabled youngsters from poorer background to continue to further education and nearly a third of them to go on to higher education.
17. For a previous elaboration of this idea see ‘The glass floor’ on the 2008 riots in Greece by Theo Cosme.
18. ‘Forget university, I can’t even afford college anymore. Where’s my future?’ (from banners that appeared during the student movement).
19. Violent outbursts by lumpen-proletarians have been a constant theme throughout the history of capitalism.
20. See ‘The rise of the (non-)subject’ by Blaumachen and friends, February 2012.
21. Of course, many historical riots did not involve directly making demands. The 80s riots in the UK or the Watts uprising earlier in the USA, for example, lacked any specific immediate demands, but the rioters’ actions were embedded in a movement, which historically aimed at the equitable integration of blacks (as blacks) in civil society. Today, there is not such an affirmative movement.
22. ‘However, a riot destroys what little we have in terms of our community assets, it also places the rioters, as well as bystanders at great risk. […] Burning, destruction, and putting the lives of members of our community at risk is not the way to express your legitimate anger at being left behind in the boom years and expected to pay with your future when the economy crashed. You are capable of more imaginative and more effective ways of demanding economic and social justice’ (Leaflet by Hackney Unite). ‘Our communities need a united response to both the riots and the causes of despair and frustration that can result in riots’ (A North London Unity Demonstration).
23. It is a mistake to claim that there were ‘implicit demands’, in the sense that demands may not have been articulated, but in later interviews with young rioters, many said that it happened as a result of the cuts, unemployment, policing, etc. If young hoodies talked about what they considered as some of the causes of their actions, this only proves that they are not feral idiots, as presented by the media. This is not making ‘implicit demands’.
24. Due to the diffuse character of the unrest, it is impossible to estimate how many people were involved in total. Unfortunately, the only available source of information in terms of total numbers is the various state-commissioned articles, studies and reports. According to the Sunday Times of 21st August ‘police are seeking 30,000 rioters’ and according to the Guardian ‘up to 15,000 people took to the streets in August’. In most epicentres of the unrest, a few hundred people would actively participate, although there were a lot of people hanging around watching the events, in many cases passively supporting what was happening, or at least hindering the efforts of the police to gain control. In a few cases, the number of rioters was bigger, such as in Tottenham, Hackney, Salford, Birmingham and Manchester (crowds of more than 1,000 people appeared in these cases).
25. ‘Let’s not mince words. The great Catford loot was funny as fuck. Shopping at Argos will never seem the same again. Hundreds of local people were out on the street, with the mood varying from elation, barely disguised amusement and occasional tut-tutting as people of all ages struggled home with wide screen tellys. For ages there wasn’t a copper in sight. The discerning looters in JD Sports were trying things on before deciding which pair of trainers to take home. The smell of skunk hung heavy in the air. All it needed was a sound system and the carnival atmosphere would have been complete. The looting of Blockbusters was not so successful. The playstation boxes turned out to be empty as were the DVD cases that ended up littering the pavement. Discarded electrical goods were also amongst the debris, their value abruptly wiped out in the free for all. The act of looting was just as important as the loot’. Johnny Void, ‘Rioting for Fun and Profit’, August 2011.
26. Socialism and/or barbarism, Open letter
27. Clearly, the state and the media used the involvement of gang members (in the strict sense) in the unrest to facilitate their ideological attack against the riots, presenting the latter as organised crime. After initially claiming that as many as 28% of those arrested in London were gang members, the police later revised the figure to 19%, a figure that dropped to 13% countrywide.
28. Kids coming from families of Greek workers, petit-bourgeois or middle strata and second generation, integrated, mainly Balkan, immigrants. It’s worth not forgetting that the teenager shot dead by the police – which was the trigger of the riots – came from a middle class white Greek family residing in a wealthy suburb of Athens.
29. See ‘The “indignados” movement in Greece’, Sic no. 1, November 2011.
30. It is important that in New York the ghetto remained in the ghetto; they did not find themselves in the square. Only a few paupers in the most literal sense, namely homeless or beggars, found themselves in the occupation, more in a charity-like interaction (provision of food and shelter), and even this very fact caused tensions within the camps, as filth, alcohol and non-participation in the commons (what was called opportunism) were hostile to the political character of the movement. The disgust of the middle strata for their proximity with the lowest ones was even more central a dynamic in Santa Cruz. In Oakland, on the other hand, the geographical proximity of the camp with the ghettos and the radical class struggle tradition of the city brought quite a lot dispossessed in the square, with a double effect: the cops were on the opposite side of the barricade by definition; the participation of the more marginalised strata from the ghettos was defused by black civil society organisations which have a significant influence on black or brown populations, committed in a transfer of radicalism from one generation to the next (for more on the Oakland commune and the occupy movement see ‘Under the riot gear’, to be published in Sic no. 2).
31. Blaumachen and friends, ‘The rise of the (non-)subject’
32. See the Introduction to “The transitional phase of the crisis: the era of riots” by Woland, September 2011.
33. In that sense the attempt for a reconciliation of opposing interests between rioters and small shop-owners by the Turkish and Kurdish communities of North London against police repression in the aftermath of the events is a political attempt to resolve a contradiction which cannot have a political resolution: ‘Let’s not forget that the Turkish and Kurdish youth are also a part of the youth in this country and therefore Turkish and Kurdish youth and their future are also at stake as a result of such cuts. […] We are witnessing the development of an instinctive tendency to protect their small shops and at times attacking the youth. Surely the traders have the right to protect their shops. But such events should not be […] used to strengthen the prejudices that the oppressed and migrant communities have against each other’. These interclass fraternity call sought to substitute a ‘community of the poor’ for what only the direct attack at the means of production and subsistence can achieve: the confrontational posing at stake of the coming together of different parts of the proletariat and poor small proprietors. At any rate, a 39-year-old mother among the rioters stated: ‘We won’t shed any tears for the shops; they never contributed to the community, now they only care about their middle-class hipster customers’.
34. Police should consider using live ammunition to halt attacks on buildings when the lives of those inside might be at risk. The use of ‘protected’ vehicles advancing against rioters, rubber bullets, water cannons and military backup were also suggested. On the occasion of the Olympics, the technological repressive arsenal of the state is being reinforced as well, with new face recognition cameras and other gadgets, while the condition of the army patrolling in the streets is being normalized.
35. See Théorie communiste, Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution, it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome, 2005.
36. The link between everyday struggles and the revolution ceases to be a theoretical abstraction and becomes direct in the crisis of the capitalist relation of production.

Text published on sic.communisation.net

We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen [community] be each time substituted for State; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French Commune. (F. Engels, letter to A. Bebel concerning the ‘Gotha program’, London, March 18–28, 1875)¹

Both ‘war machine and care machine’, the Oakland Commune extended itself over the course of five weeks and one square. Generating both surprise and admiration, it peaked with the strike of 2 November 2011. This was only the second time since 1946 that there had existed the possibility of a general strike in the US. The previous one had also taken place in Oakland.

From its inception, the Oakland Commune had to come to terms with the reproduction of the proletariat in a way that overcame the preceding struggles and the other Occupy movements. Confrontation with labour was both its peak and its swansong.

The following text is an attempt to show the contours of the camp’s five weeks, as well as the days of action which followed. These are contours which underlie the limits of this struggle. Limits are always intrinsic to a movement and they are its own dynamic. One should not see them as limitations. We do not therefore intend to bring an external moral judgment to bear on the situation, but to understand the dynamics of the struggle. If we interest ourselves specifically with the Oakland Commune, it is only to the extent that, according to its specificity, it was the unfolding of a front of attack sharper than that of the other Occupy movements. At the same time, we will focus on it as a singular event which allows us to understand the general nature of Occupy and also, more broadly, the movement of plaza occupations. Understanding the limits of this struggle means, therefore, understanding the dynamics of a moment of the general crisis of accumulation. This crisis, in all of its moments, carries within itself a horizon. Within this is contained the abolition of the present state of capitalist relations: the ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’, alongside its counter-revolution. Communism as the horizon of the current cycle of struggles is for us communisation, abolition of all the classes by the proletariat and communism as an immediate process. This horizon is for us neither a state of affairs which is to be established nor an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. The ‘existing conditions’, those of crisis and of the disciplinarisation of the proletariat, will find their abolition in the generalisation of the attacks against the limits peculiar to each movement, a generalisation that must necessarily manifest itself as a rupture with these same conditions.

The City

Chronology of the Movement

Reproduction, Camp and Piggies

Labour, General Strike and Grain

Withdrawal from Production? The Haunted House and its Glorious Tenants

Classes Alliance, Identity and Percentages

From One Cycle to the Next, From One Counter-Revolution to the Next

Self-Transformation, Event and Activity

Farewell to the Commune

As a mode of inquiry into the conditions of present-day and historical struggles, much recent output from the so-called ‘communisation current’ might be described as a kind of limit analysis. This mode is something more than the usual exercise in unhappy consciousness we have come to expect from the ultraleft. Rather, we are told, limits are the very condition of possibility for struggles. They are generative, the source of struggles’ dynamism as well as their transience and inevitable failure. The horizon of communisation, in this sense, appears through these impasses, just as the virtual depths of a painting appear as the thickening of paint on a canvas surface. Each historical moment, in this sense, has a form of transcendence specific to the limits it presents for proletarian struggles—communisation, then, is that form of overcoming which opens from the particulars of today’s struggles. In attending to the two-fold character of the limit—both barrier and horizon—such analysis shares something with dialectical thought in general, and its willingness to think two incompatible thoughts at once.

But there are limits, alas, even to the study of limits, which can all too quickly pass over into fatalism and theodicy—as if the tragic text of history were already written, and our task only to discover the fatal flaw present from the outset. When done well, however, this method is about the search for the new in history: a new given by struggles themselves and merely registered by theory, a new immanent to the ever-changing terms under which proletarians meet capital and its powers. To register these new developments, however, requires close attention to all of the forces at play in a particular moment. Otherwise, limit analysis is just a machine for affirming assumptions.

‘Under the Riot Gear’ exemplifies both the good and the bad of such a method. There is no little amount of insight into what happened in Oakland during 2011 and 2012, and it is certainly one of the most rigorous and engaged accounts we’ve read. There are numerous moments worth commending. The distinction arrived at in the concluding pages, between processes of generalisation and processes of unification is incisive and, even better, portable. But there is quite often a mechanical application of certain conceptual frameworks (a mechanisation with the ironic effect of naturalising its own assumptions, as we shall see later on). While we often agree with many of these frameworks, in whole or in part, we can’t help but feel that the way in which they are applied leaves something to be desired.

‘Under the Riot Gear’ follows the analytical schematic elaborated by Theorie Communiste in essays such as ‘The Present Moment’ and ‘The Glass Floor’, in which it is suggested that, for proletarians at present, ‘the very fact of acting as a class appears as an external constraint, a limit to be overcome’. This means that every time proletarians affirm themselves as a class—as labour power—they likewise must affirm and sustain capital. Under present crisis conditions, workers often struggle merely to keep their jobs; in other words, they struggle to maintain the capital–labour relationship as such. Minimal modifications and defensive struggles are the order of the day. As a result of the restructuring of labour, workers are compelled to make endless sacrifices, effectively adopting the standpoint of capital in order to preserve and extend their access to the wage. If previous generations might have imagined working-class struggle as a process of ‘self-valorisation’ in which workers gradually won for themselves an autonomy from capital, now the affirmation of class identity seems one and the same with an affirmation of the imperatives of capital and its right to manage. Action as a class becomes self-undermining.

This shift in the structure of the capital-labour relation has shattered the material coherence of the factory, of industrial production, in the formerly industrial core—via automation, off-shoring, disaggregation of productive processes, and the remaining litany of post-Fordism. Exiled from the factory floor, proletarian antagonism finds itself in the streets, departing the space of production for the space of reproduction or circulation. The December 2008 uprising in Greece is a paradigmatic example of this displacement, in the reading given it by Theorie Communiste: the most explosive encounters occurred between precarious, marginalised proletarians and the state, while the formal, unionised working-class involved itself rather late and ambivalently. Once antagonism has been displaced in this manner, proletarians face off against the apparatuses which reproduce their class identity: the police, the schools, the trade union offices and various governmental agencies. The promise of such struggle is that, in attempting to negate the forms of class belonging which now appear ‘as external constraint’, it might pass into open insurrection that puts both labour and capital into question and affirms neither. The concomitant limit, conversely, is that such antagonism remains at a remove from the heart of production and is unable to bring the economy as such to a halt.

While sometimes insightful about the differences separating Oakland from Athens and Thessaloniki, ‘Under the Riot Gear’ applies this analysis to Oakland somewhat heavy-handedly. We read, for instance, that the unique contribution of Oakland and the other plaza occupations is that, there, the proletariat took in hand the question of its own reproduction. Unlike Greece, ‘the space of struggle was no longer only contained in the face to face encounter against the police, but in the face to face encounter with the reproduction of the proletariat.’ Nonetheless, for the authors, this direct engagement with reproduction brought its own challenges, naturalising an ‘autonomisation’ of the sphere of reproduction consequent on the growth of superfluous, unwaged proletarians. This makes it more difficult to examine the ways in which the materials for the mutual-aid based structures of the camps came from the surrounding capitalist economy (and were sometimes paid for with money earned from the sale of labour power).

This is where the piece displays its own taste for hyperbole, and we read, for instance, that as a result of this autonomisation, ‘[the Oakland Commune] never questioned the idea of production’, a point contradicted shortly; the following pages largely concerns Occupy Oakland’s two blockades of the Oakland Port, and its intervention into the struggle of port workers. This discussion also stands in contradiction with the likewise hyperbolic claims that ‘Outside of the square, nothing could be attacked.’ As is well-documented, all sorts of things beyond the square were attacked in the many nights of rioting, disturbances that spooked the Oakland Business Association enough for it to speak to the press about declining sales and businesses which had chosen not to relocate to Oakland given its lack of security. However, we find ourselves in agreement with the spirit if not the letter of our correspondents’ wording, if by this spirit we are meant to understand that the Oakland Commune was unable to pass into a phase of sustained attack against the economic forms upon which it depended. It’s true that the Commune’s central feature was a fundamentally passive and defensive one: the camp, a space in which the reproduction of the proletariat was directly engaged through structures of mutual aid and free giving. Though this space was defended, the moments of open violence were responses to attacks on the camp, or alternately, responses to attempts to thwart its reestablishment. To overcome this limit would have meant the passage into open insurrection and the transcendence of the ‘camp-form’.

That said, we are compelled to linger over the categories of strike and production which ground the critique—not to defend the virtue of the encampment, but precisely to shake these matters loose from a static conception and bring them to life in the present situation. Without this there will be no understanding of the Oakland Commune, nor the terrain in which the practices of communisation may unfold.

What Is a Strike?

Where Is Production?

What Is Production?

Class Belonging?

The Morality of Production

“The way things are today, only when people are frightened will they take to the streets; and they will come out abruptly, all at once… Then, the KKE1 will be enlisted to stop them.”

This impressively precise prediction was made by an old Trotskyist in a chat over a coffee in 2007. In this text, we look into the overt emergence of the KKE as police2 , this important event of 20^th October, its meaning for the development of the class struggle in Greece and how this relates to the development of the crisis.

We begin by attempting a critical reading of the core position that criticises the KKE for “betraying the working class”. Those holding this opinion are also dejected that “we are bickering among ourselves”. Their stance gives the impression that it overlooks the KKE’s role in the class struggle in Greece. This is not an oversight, however; it is not an omission caused by a lapse of attention. What this viewpoint fails to see is determined by the essence of what it does see, by the structure of its vision and by the very core of its content. Its vision is revolution as the triumph of the working class, as the transformation of capitalist society into a society of workers, that is, the revolution as the KKE also purports to see it (with itself in place of the bosses, of course). That is why this critique accuses the KKE of “betrayal” in the fight towards a common goal. It contends that the KKE betrays the common goal of the “free” workers’ society, because, through its practice and discourse, it upholds the political form of a workers’ state, as opposed to the self-management of production, and, on these grounds, this view objects to the KKE’s use of the slogan, “without you, not a single cog turns – worker, you can run things without the bosses”.

It may seem paradoxical at first, but it is this slogan that contains the essence of the events of 20^th October. The content of this slogan expresses the KKE’s side (not only the KKE’s though, and this is very important) in the conflict that is historically produced in the current period between the practices of class struggle. A careful reading of this slogan reveals that the word worker is the key to the content of the revolution according to the KKE (and not only). This revolution does not abolish the worker as such, it does not abolish the proletariat, it does not abolish the “cogs”, that is the production of value. On the contrary, it calls on workers to fight (or to align as sheep behind the shepherds, in the KKE’s case) so as to carry on being workers, to carry on “turning the cogs”. The utopian phrase “without the bosses” means “by your own initiative”, namely with bosses who will also be workers, supposedly their own bosses, or with the “workers’ party” as the boss. Behind the opportunistic adoption of an “anarchists’ slogan” by the KKE, there is the essential point that labour continues to be a separate human activity after the revolution, and everything that entails.

The KKE’s defence of the parliament and the police, in this critical moment for capital and the state, from the attacks of a section of the proletariat is entirely compatible with this slogan, even more so because such attacks against the state and property can only become possible with the support of a very large chunk of the proletariat, as it became obvious on 19^th October. The defence of labour cannot take place in a historical vacuum – an ahistorical form of work (as is implied by slogans like “we want work, not unemployment”) does not exist – it is necessarily the defence of the specific form labour has taken in the historical present. Subsequently, the revolution, according to the KKE, will be the restructuring of labour on the basis of its historically determined condition (something already done by the Bolsheviks when they gained power in Russia, taking part in the proletarian revolution of 1917, as well as by the CNT trade unionists when they took control of the factories after the proletarian uprising in Spain in 1936). If we consider these conclusions alongside the KKE’s strategy to claim an ever more important role in working class reproduction, that is, to gain strength as a reproduction mechanism of the capital relation in parallel with the State, or as a “cog” of the State apparatus in some cases, then, in the context of the growing importance of policing for working class reproduction, it is evident why the KKE must play the role of the police.

So what of those who attacked the KKE? How is it explainable, in terms of the reasoning described above, that a section of those who attacked the red front of the police, which was blocking the way to the khaki front of the police, share a great deal with the KKE’s view of the revolution? Is there a point in blaming them for fighting against the KKE over the possession of Amalias Av. and effectively over the political leadership of the movement? There are grounds for this in part, although there is an error in the content of the question itself (the political leadership of the movement). The meaning of the 20^th October events is hidden below the surface of the political dispute. The question of why this conflict is produced, what its true content is and why this is now the central issue of class struggle3 in many countries around the world, can only be answered if one goes beyond the apparent polarity between the left and the anarchists (a polarity of prior revolutions, as “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”). To go beyond this polarity one has to focus for a moment on the content of the “anarchist” camp, or the black bloc or whatever one wants to call it (although the difficulty in establishing a name hints something already). It is widely known that the subsection of “those involved in clashes” organically belonging to “militant anarchist” groupings is now very small and is becoming less and less significant as the crisis deepens. It is also known that, by now, even workers clash with the police – often without their actions being condemned by their unions (see POE-OTA) – as well as the unemployed and even the petit bourgeois (taxi owners) who are proletarianised abruptly. Those who have, one way or another, caused the recent period’s riots are NOT organized anarchists in their vast majority, while organised anarchists’ influence upon them is minimal and constantly declining. They are a mixed crowd of young (and as the crisis deepens, not only young) proletarians who are precarious or unemployed, or they can be school or university students. Their practices – typically riots without specific demands, occurring both separately and within demand struggles – express the current impasse of demands, the lack of future produced by this crisis, which is a crisis of the existence of the wage and therefore of proletarian reproduction. Those who clash with the police are NOT “revolutionaries” who do so because they have “class consciousness”; they are agents of the practices brought on by the exclusion of proletarians from labour, by the violent pushing downwards of the middle strata, by the frenetic course of the crisis of restructured capitalism and the attempt to address it with another round of capital’s attack, which challenges the very existence of the wage. These practices also lead to a dead end, seen from the viewpoint that seeks a strategy towards the victory of the working class and the realisation of a workers’ society. It is this impasse that prefigures these practices’ overcoming through the class struggle, an overcoming that will not result from their dominance over other practices but will be produced in the course of their conflictual co-existence with revindicative practices. This overcoming will only be possible at the stage when this conflict does not only reproduce the dynamic of riots without specified demands but also involves taking particular measures. This conflict is produced objectively – any individual choices are overdetermined by the sweeping onslaught of the crisis. This was not then a conflict between anarchists and the KKE in front of parliament – this is only what it is apparent. Such an understanding only serves the special interests of politically organised anarchists, those of the KKE and their fellow travelers. There will certainly be efforts to extract political value from this by both sides of the conflict and in the short term they might (both) appear to be successful. There will be quarrelling over who is most concerned about working class unity, with accusations against each other in almost the same terms. However, the development of the crisis accelerates, and the event of 20^th October will soon look like an innocent game involving rocks, a couple of petrol- bombs and hundreds of poles with hanging red cloths.

The conflict that, in the terms of political fetishism, appeared as a clash between anarchists and the KKE in front of parliament, has been produced as an internal conflict of proletarian practices within the entire cycle of struggles that began after the restructuring of the 80s (90s for Greece); it constitutes the essence of this cycle of struggles, generated and developed by contradictions that are now condensed in the current crisis. This conflict has been produced historically as the outcome of capital’s accumulation, of the class struggle, and it is not a result of “strategies”, ‘betrayals”, “class consciousness” and other ideologemes. The two camps rapidly created through the condensation of historical time are fluid; what seems to prefigure the revolution through the overcoming of its limits today, will appear divided tomorrow; its internal contradictions, that may not seem so important today, will explode. The deepening of the crisis will lead to practices beyond those of the current “phase of riots”. The rebels of tomorrow (and that may not be so far away) will be forced to take measures for continuing the struggle that will simultaneously be survival measures, communist measures that will affect the crux of surplus value production and will build new social relations. The contradictions of militarism and sexism, which necessarily come with the riots, will explode in the camp that will challenge the very existence of value. Internal conflicts are coming, new divisions are unavoidable.

We are living in the vortex; there is nothing that can rescue us anymore. Every attempt to understand the structure of current social relations, every attempt to break free from the political conception of the revolution, which, being a political one, belongs to the old world of previous revolutions, will certainly contribute to the critique of this world, which in any case trembles, is under threat, as an ensemble of social relations, of being abolished by the coming revolution.

Agents of chaos

• 1Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδας, the Communist Party of Greece.
• 2It is not only their act to block protesters’ access to Amalias Av. that constitutes the KKE’s practice as a police practice. There is evidence that the KKE also guarded the Plexiglas police barrier on V. Sophias St., as well as the Parliament, specially and separately, i.e. without there being a crowd of “civilian” KKE protesters behind the line of guards.
• 3This issue is so central in Greece that it sidelines a demonstrator’s killing by police. The police used so much teargas that it managed to murder one of those who defended the working class by guarding the parliament. In many countries, mainly those in the first zone of capitalist accumulation (the most recent examples occuring in Italy and the USA), this conflict appears in the form of the polarity between riots and “peaceful” occupations / demonstrations.

30-40 years ago, the state could afford to BUILD 1 million flats in 10 years, now it’s too poor to even RENOVATE them.

This exclamation is highly representative of the activism that has flourished in the suburbs of Stockholm these past years. In this case, it comes from Megafonen (‘The Megaphone’), a grass-roots activist group founded by young people in the Stockholm suburb Husby in 2008, around the principles of democracy, welfare, community, work and education. The state, says Megafonen here, no longer lives up to its proper function, which would be to ensure the material well-being of people through housing policies. The ambivalence of this perspective is already clear in the nostalgic reference to the heyday of Swedish social-democratic welfare, represented by the state housing policy which led to the construction of ‘1 million flats’ between 1965 and 1974. On the one hand, it recognises cuts, privatisations, closures, etc. as symptoms of an already existing capitalist restructuring. On the other hand, its actions emerge as the affirmation of what is left of the infrastructure and political institutions that formed the Swedish workers’ identity, e.g. public housing.

This ambivalence can be made coherent: by fighting the advancement of the restructuring, one is at the same time defending that which it has not yet reshaped. But then, one leaves aside an essential product of the destruction of workers’ identity: the end of the political existence of the proletariat in Sweden which, in the most pauperised areas, has been acompanied by the development of inarticulate riots between 2008 and today. If we take the practices of these riots into account, the ambivalence of Megafonen’s type of activism – the fact that it operates within that which incarnates the end of workers’ identity, and at the same time tries to organise upon the remnants of that identity –, appears as a contradiction between the conditions in which it exists and its perspectives. In a time in which the proletariat, in the obligation to sell its labour power which defines it, is structurally excluded from the table of collective bargaining, this activism still does, through its denunciations of ‘the state’ and its various institutions, affirm the possibility of a dialogue and a future within this society. In a word, it defends a welfare state which no longer exists.

It would be tempting to analyse this contradiction along a revolt-reform axis, in which the riots would incarnate the destructive language of ruptures, whereas the activists would incarnate the constructive language of politics. The riots would be a mere symptom of the destruction of workers’ identity, whereas the activists would be trying to find a remedy to it. But if one takes a closer look at the events in the long run, this political-theoretical construct does not fit. Of course, the riots are not harmoniously united with this activism. The practices of burning cars and setting fire to the head-quarters of various institutions, or fighting the police and the fire brigade, are qualitatively different from practices such as demanding specific political transformations and explicitly stating what institutions’ function should be. But with regard both to the subjects that carry out these practices, and to the practices themselves, the relation between riots and activism is not that of two clearly distinct camps. What is at stake is to reveal this contemporary relation between rioting and activism in Sweden, to see what this says about the current period more broadly.

Six years after the riots in Malmö, five years after the riots in Göteborg, and more than a year after the week of riots in Stockholm and other Swedish cities, the scarcity of writings about these events prevents us from even picturing what happened during the riots. Therefore, what is needed first and foremost is a description of the emergence of both riots and activism in the suburbs of these cities between 2008 and last year. The focus on the practices which compose the riots on the one hand, and the activism on the other, must be followed by an exposé both of their historical production and of that which structures the so-called suburbs today. This will lead us to look at the inner relation between the riots and the activism in these suburbs, and to formulate a question which exceeds the Swedish context: that of social and political integration.

1. Occupations, Campaigns… And Riots

The ‘Stockholm riots’ of 19-27 May 2013 do not just appear in a social and political vacuum. They were preceded by other Swedish riots, most notably the 2008 riots in Malmö, which started with an occupation of a public space, the 2010-2011 riots in Göteborg, which culminated in the formation of a movement for the refurbishment of the suburbs, and last but not least, the 2013 ‘Stockholm riots’ are in themselves inseparable from a longer Stockholm-specific history of defending public utility. When we take a close look at the practices which compose these events, the fragile relation between riots and activism comes to the front. As we will see, riots in the suburbs coexist with civic protest movements with explicit demands, although they also develop their own specific tactics. In the Swedish context, suburban riots emerged in defence of public space or against rent increases, and as such, they can be seen as a kind of illegitimate negotiation.

Along these lines, both in terms of subjects, practices and political outcomes, the ‘Stockholm riots’ of 2013 are a product of a longer contemporary history of riots. We could say that this history began in the part of Malmö called Rosengård in December 2008. ^[2] The riots in Rosengård were preceded by the occupation of a locale in the centre of Herrgården, one of the neighbourhoods which compose Rosengård. The occupation was organised by local youth with immigrant background and some white housing activists from other parts of the city. For 16 years, this locale had been used as a mosque by the Muslim Cultural Association, but also – a fact often left out in most reports of the events – by twenty other associations for cultural and educational activities like youth recreation, supplementary tuition and so on. With the planned restorations of the neighbourhood, Ilmar Repalu, a local social-democrat, as well as representatives of Contentus, the real estate company that owns the place, thought that a mosque would no longer ‘fit in’. To understand such an attitude, one must bear in mind that Rosengård, much like Husby in Stockholm or Backa in Göteborg, is an area which, following the transformations of the labour market and the growing unemployment starting in the 1970s, gathers almost exclusively first or second generation immigrants, of which a great number are Muslims. Once neighbourhoods with public housing for the working class, these ‘suburbs’ have now become some of the rare places which still offer rents and housing accessible to newly arrived people with refugee or family reunification background, but also to the unemployed, long-term sick-listed, former convicts, early retired/sick pensioners, etc. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s, such suburbs were commonly perceived as hideouts for gangs or drug addicts, their symbol is now another figure of Otherness: the Middle Easterner or the African, often associated with Islam. Hence, from the point of view of public authorities, the line between social refurbishment and cultural edification might be a very fine one.

However, the police only intervened in the locale with full powers – muddy boots, dogs, shields, batons and pepper spray – on 12 December, after three weeks of occupation. According to all the parties involved, the night after the eviction was probably the calmest of the week. More and more people gathered to defend the occupation, so the police had to drag them out of the place again. An hour or so later, calm was restored, but the occupation continued, displaced to the lawn in front of the place. People stayed around the police perimeter for several days and nights, pursuing the activities that were usually held in the premises. Mats were laid out for prayers, young people were hanging around, tea and bread was served, a couple of older men set up tents to sleep in, and an old parabolic antenna was used as fireplace.

Riots only broke out on Monday 18 December. Youth from the neighbourhood who had taken part in the occupation and their friends, most of them male and under 18, started gathering in small groups, circling around the area of Herrgården. To begin with, containers and some dustbins were set on fire, and the windows of another real estate company, Newsec, were broken. The day after continued in the same way while the police started to intervene more actively. One of the guys they had arrested was liberated by force, an officer was beaten to the ground, stones were thrown at the fire brigade. Finally, some of the young adults from the neighbourhood gathered and attacked the cops that were standing in front of the locale. They threw rocks at them and ran away. Still, both children, younger and older people stood in front of the locale. Having kept it under uninterrupted watch for two days and nights, the police then decided to close access to it by placing large containers by truck. This only caused general irritation to escalate. During the Wednesday, arson, the throwing of fireworks, stones and glass bottles at the police, as well as attacks on the offices of the local real estate companies spread all over the area of Herrgården. The police station in the centre of Rosengård was attacked. People set fire to dustbins placed out along Ramels väg, a central road in Rosengård, in order to stop the traffic. When the fire brigade arrived, it was chased away with fireworks and stones. It was also on Wednesday that a dozen autonomous activists, some with links to the Antifa scene, arrived in this part of Rosengård, but gathered only very briefly before they were all encircled and caught by the police (19 people were arrested that were not from the neighbourhood). The next day, Thursday, the police station in the centre of Rosengård was completely wrecked, while the local offices of the real estate companies Contentus and Newsec were destroyed and looted (some computers and other valuables were stolen). Powerful home made bombs started to circulate within certain groups. The whole of Rosengård was burning. People rebuilt barricades as soon as the police destroyed them, but only few of them directly confronted the police when they arrived.

The police, which was literally chased out during the Wednesday and Thursday, regained control over the area on Friday, aided by reinforcements from two of Sweden’s biggest cities, Göteborg and Stockholm. Several hundred riot police officers were now constantly present in Herrgården. Although the long period of intense arson, attacks on the police and building of barricades which we may call the ‘Rosengård riots’ was over, the practices that compose this event persevered. As a matter of fact, on 16, 17 and 18 March 2009, several dustbins, over-full due to the bad garbage maintenance of the local real estate companies, as well as a recycling room on Ramels väg were burned and stones were then thrown at the fire brigade as it arrived. ^[3] Stones were again thrown at cops on 2 July 2009, and containers set on fire on Ramels väg. Rosengård also faced minor riots in April 2010. The general climate was so tense that hundreds of people gather within less than a day when someone was reported to have been mistreated by the cops.

During the two following months of 2009, arsons multiplied in and around Göteborg, a couple of hours away from Malmö. Also, stones were thrown at the police and windows of various institutions wrecked. On 10 August, cops arrested a person suspected for illegal ownership of weapons and during this event ten clients in a shop in Backa were drawn out onto the street to be searched. ^[4] On 4 April 2011, the police chased two guys who had stolen a couple of pairs of jeans in a clothes shop in Göteborg and ended up hitting their car into them, hurting one of them badly. Riots broke out the day after, and lasted for two nights: in Backa, cars were burned and more stones thrown at the police. ^[5] In the meantime, Pantrarna (‘The Panthers’), a grass-root activist group which, very much like Megafonen in Stockholm, aims at defending the infrastructure and reinforcing the sense of community, had formed in Biskopsgården, a Göteborg suburb.

In Stockholm too, 2008 was a pivotal year. The new tactic of starting fires in order to attract the cops and the fire brigade, so that stones can be thrown at them, was to be introduced in its suburbs, indicating a change towards a more aggressive stance against the police. As the riots in Rosengård were going on in December 2008, cars were burned and confrontations with the police also occurred in Tensta in Northwest Stockholm. At the beginning of 2009, riots spread to the nearby areas of Husby and Akalla: cops reported having heard rioters shout that they were attacking them ‘in sympathy with our brothers in Rosengård’. In June 2009, the fire brigade was attacked in Husby and Tensta. Between August and October the same year, a lot of arson occurred in the neighbourhoods of Gottsunda and Stenhagen in the city of Uppsala, North of Stockholm. This started when a police patrol at which stones had been thrown called for reinforcement. In October 2009, after a one-hour bust in a youth recreation centre, which occurred because a green laser had been pointed at the police, a lot of cars burned in Fittja, another Northern suburb of Stockholm. In September 2010, due to the arrest of one of their friends, young people from the neighbourhood vandalised the metro station of Husby and attacked the local police office. ^[6]

During 2010 and 2011, the activist groups, which had been developing since the 2000s in Northwest Stockholm, experienced some victories. It is important to underline that the people in organisations like Megafonen originate from and live in the suburbs in which they are active, like Husby, Rinkeby and Hässelby. They are men and women who are older than those who start riots, they are more likely to take part in higher education, although they do share the racialised proletarian conditions of the rioters. One of Megafonen’s issues was the ‘Boosting Järva’ project (Järvalyftet) which began in 2007. The City of Stockholm is planning structural urban reforms which at the time in Husby, among other things, was to abolish the ‘traffic separation’ between roads and living spaces, demolish the existing pedestrian bridges, and create a new highway through Rinkeby and Tensta. Megafonen opposed this and during the 2012 occupation of a soon-to-be-closed recreation place in Husby called Husby Träff, the organisation put forward two sets of demands. First, the creation of a local board in each neighbourhood focusing on ‘jobs’ and ‘education’ which would give ‘real power’ to the inhabitants through the local associations of Husby. Second, the withdrawal of Husby strukturplan, the specific part of ‘Boosting Järva’ which concerned Husby. These actions did not hinder the planned closures of several schools (the Bredby school and the Bussenhus school), the local post office, the local health centre and the tax office of Tensta. But the demand of a withdrawal of Husby strukturplan was ultimately satisfied with the argument that given the resistance, there was no point in pursuing it. Megafonen also managed to stop the demolition of several houses, the privatisation of a bathhouse and ultimately the closure of Husby Träff. ^[7]

Riots broke out again in the neighbourhood of Risingeplan in Tensta, another Northwestern suburb of Stockholm, at the beginning of April 2013. Two recycling rooms and two cars were set on fire and the same night a demand was sprayed all over the neighbourhood: ‘LOWER THE RENT’ (SÄNK HYRAN). When the police and the fire brigade arrived they were surprisingly let in, probably because the rioters wanted the demand to be seen. ^[8] Six years earlier in this same neighbourhood, the monthly rent of a five room flat was 7 900 Swedish kronor; at that point it was at least 11 700 Swedish kronor, and during March and April 2013, the inhabitants were informed that a retroactive rent raise for the year was to take place. ^[9] The struggle against these transformations previously took other forms than riots. Some young people from the neighbourhood created the campaign The future of Risingeplan (Risingeplans framtid), with the explicit goal to speak to the media in order to spotlight the problems of their surroundings. The campaign not only highlighted high rents, but also the ill-treatment of inhabitants by service and maintenance representatives of the company. ^[10] Nevertheless, both the riots and the campaign focused on the local real estate company Tornet, which manages rental flats in Stockholm and in Skåne. At this point, it was hated by almost everyone in the neighbourhood because of the degraded flats (although there had been a renovation three years earlier) and the bad state of the public spaces, including wall sockets and electric cables hanging loose, stuck cellar doors, non-isolated windows, spots in wet areas, paint falling off cabinet doors, problems with the toilet flushes, etc. More riots took place in the middle of April: in the same neighbourhood, a recycling room was set on fire and a car trashed. On surrounding walls and in the recycling room, there was also more graffiti with demands, now looking more and more like threats: ‘Lower the rent or take consequences’, ‘Lower the rent with 50%’, ‘Remember 50%’ and ‘Hans you’re gonna die’ (Hans Erik Hjalmar being the director of management of the 500 flats). ^[11]

Worth mentioning as a possible heightening of tensions running up to the Stockholm riots was the police killing, in Husby, of a locally known 69-year old man. According to the man’s neighbours, he had been acting in a threatening way towards authorities, and when the police called for reinforcement the man locked himself in his flat. The police then forced the door and threw in a stun grenade, and as the man ran out he was shot dead – witnesses say he was shot 14 or 15 times by several heavily armed cops. Following his death, the police made a public announcement stating that he had been driven to the hospital in an ambulance, but according to young people from the neighbourhood who had witnessed the incident, the man’s body was left on the spot until late, and then simply driven away in a hearse. A demonstration against police violence was organised by Megafonen in Husby on 15 May. As in Rosengård in 2008, riots did not erupt immediately. For a week, tensions grew day by day. The riots only broke out six days later. ^[12] On the evening of 19 May, a group of young people enticed the police, the local firemen and the ambulance into Husby by setting several dozens of cars, a couple of trucks and a garage on fire. The police, whose function at this point was to protect the firemen, were targeted with stones and incendiary bombs at their arrival. Calm was restored quite soon. The next day in Husby was a very much like the first one, but the number of rioters grew to over 50. Police was called due to burning cars and on their arrival, accompanied by the fire brigade, stones were thrown at their cars. Four cops were wounded, and the windows of local schools and shops were broken. Earlier the same day, less than 24 hours after the outbreak of the riots, the organisation Megafonen held a press conference on the riots, highlighting the realities of segregation and police brutality.

On the third night, riots were pursued in Husby, but also spread to Jakobsberg, a Northern suburb, where the local police office was attacked, two schools damaged and an art centre set on fire. All in all, 30 cars were burned, and that night, eight people were arrested. On the forth night, fires spread to 90 different places. As usual, when the police came to help the fire brigade, stones were thrown at them from all directions. Another police office was attacked with stones in Kista, close to Husby, and two police offices in the South of Stockholm were damaged. In Skogås in Huddinge, a restaurant was set on fire. The only police questioning of the night was that of a girl in her teens suspected of preparing a fire because of the blasting agents she was carrying under her jacket – she was sent back to her parents. Many other young people were sent back to their parents too, without questioning. This fourth night was the first one during which hundreds of parents, locals and members of the above-mentioned associations hit the streets of Northwest Stockholm to put an end to the violence and the arson. They were often referred to as ‘citizen patrols’ (medborgargarden). The riots then moved to the Southern suburbs of the city, accompanied by the same kind of practices: cars set on fire, cops attacked with stones when they arrive to help the fire brigade. A police car was set on fire and during this night, cars burned and stones were thrown at the police in Malmö.

On the fifth night, dozens of cars, three schools and a police office were set on fire. Fires spread to 70 different places, most notably to Rinkeby (five cars), Tensta (a school), Kista (a kindergarten), Jordbro (a car and a supermarket), Älvsjö (a police office) and Norsborg. Stones were thrown at the cops in Södertälje. There were still hundreds of people voluntarily patrolling the streets to restore calm, and the cops became a bit more active, as 13 questionings occurred during the night, all of them of people between 17 and 26 years of age. On the sixth night, less cars were set on fire in Stockholm (30-40) where police reinforcement from Malmö and Göteborg joined the local troops. The riots now spread to the city of Linköping, 235 km from Stockholm, where a kindergarten, a primary school and some cars were set on fire; to Uppsala, 70 km from Stockholm, where a school and cars were set on fire and some rioters wrecked a pharmacy; to Örebro, 160 km North of Stockholm, where a school and several cars were set on fire, a police office was attacked and a cop wounded. The seventh night was calmer in comparison: a police patrol in Vårberg in the South of Stockholm was attacked; in Jordbro, stones were thrown at the cops when they tried to arrest a young guy. Finally, on the eighth night, less than ten cars were set on fire which, according to the police spokesman, could be considered ‘a return to normal’.

So, in a sense, 2008 was the year that brought the riots of our times to Sweden, with one of the practices which compose them, arson of cars and buildings, becoming an everyday practice in certain suburbs of the big cities. Arson and its necessary counterpart, police intervention, is here a part of normal life. It is only socially considered as an ‘event’, i.e. brought into the sphere of the mediatic and the political, when it is accompanied by direct confrontations with the police, or arson of buildings such as police offices, shops and schools. As we have seen, the riots as ‘events’ and, in some cases, the everyday practice of arson, can not be isolated from the public declarations, the occupations and the demands that punctuate them. The practices of the riots tend to converge with the language of demands.

2. The Swedish Workers’ Movement and its Disintegration

In order to understand this state of things, we must now consider in what way the conditions, the subjects and the practices of the riots were historically produced. What has led to the current situation is the crisis of the Swedish model and the disintegration of the social-democratic workers’ movement. The restructuring of capital which started in the early 1970s has not put an end to the proletariat; it has transformed the modalities of the reproduction of the latter, so that these no longer form an essential, stable component of the reproduction of capital. What’s more, in the case of Sweden, the restructuring unfolds at the same time as the country becomes a centre for immigration. The transformation of the modalities of proletarian reproduction also implies a polarisation of this class, along the lines of one’s qualifications and one’s national origins, and most often the two together.

Central to our analysis will be the notion of integration and that of the state. Our approach thus implies to move away from the wage relation in the strict sense, because we will need to look at how concrete individuals enter and relate to the material community of capital, in ways that are always specific to them. This is why we will begin by exposing the Swedish social-democratic welfare state and its main product, namely the social integration of the proletariat, before we analyse the major effects of the crisis of this society. ^[13] These historical considerations are meant to prepare the theoretical tools for an adequate understanding of the Swedish ‘suburbs’ and the specifically ‘suburban’ riots which, as we hope to show, are not to be taken for granted.

The Swedish social-democratic welfare state rested upon centrally regulated wage determination. Its foundations were laid out in the Saltsjöbaden Accord of 1938, between Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen (hereafter SAF), the Swedish Employers Association, and the Landsorganisationen i Sverige (hereafter LO), the Social-democratic Federation of Swedish Trade Unions. Within a rather lately and rapidly industrialised country, it was the encounter of, on the one hand, the peasantry and the proletariat’s need for protection from the impulses of the market and, on the other, a capital which tended to be more and more concentrated (through investment banks and holding companies, cross-ownership, cross-membership of management and executive boards, etc.). According to the so-called Rehn-Meidner model emerging in the 1960s, LO was to coordinate wage demands and negotiations of all its member unions, thus setting a wage norm for all of them, which was to be high enough for wage increase and equality, but low enough not to endanger full employment. This ‘solidaric wage policy’ (solidarisk lönepolitik) supported both by the unions and the Social Democratic Party actually reinforced the concentration of capital, since corporations with intense accumulation ended up with relatively low wages with regard to what they accumulated, while smaller-scale corporations had relatively high wages with regard to their accumulation. This centrally negotiated mode of social regulation guaranteed the reproduction of a unified workers’ identity. Indeed, the social-democratic policies were fundamentally policies of distribution. Welfare was a social transfer ensured not only through high income, corporate, sales and payroll taxes, in order to finance production in the public service sector, but also through the centralised wage-policy which transferred a part of the potential wage increases of workers in the export-oriented manufacturing sector to wage increases above productivity in the public service sector. ^[14]

The Swedish social-democratic workers’ movement can then be said to be a spur in the development of Swedish capitalist society. The flip-side of the politics of distribution, with its central wage negotiations and high employment was, from the point of view of capital, no less than labour peace, labour mobility, total control over investments as well as over the organisation and rationalisation of the process of production. Of course, organised labour as well as farmers and reformist intellectuals were to counteract the ‘economic’ power of capital with their own ‘political’ power. But this ‘political’ power, though organised and represented as a popular movement or a counter-society, endorsed capital in the quest for its ideal pace: too high profits, it was said, would lead to wage drift, and too low profits would lead to unemployment. ^[15] In this sense, the Swedish social-democratic workers’ movement was a process of social integration. What allowed it to develop as such was the Fordist norms of production consolidated in the post-war era. A great increase in productivity, enabling the decrease of the cost of the commodities essential to the reproduction of the proletariat, could go hand in hand with a heightening of the real wages. In this way, mass production was validated by mass consumption, thus repressing the organic composition of capital. The capitalist development during this period was based upon the expanding scale, the technological innovation and the improvement of products developed from natural resources in the production of ‘staples’ commodities (such as lumber and iron). ^[16] Throughout this era, real wages increased following an equalised pattern, while the rate of profit remained relatively low. Unemployment was kept at 1-2 %. It was this steady and protected development that permitted the well-grounded national workers’ identity to support the Social Democratic Party, allowing it to maintain a parliamentary majority between 1932 and 1982 (with exception of one mandate). With no exaggeration, one could say that during this period, the Swedish social-democratic workers’ movement became one with the regime.

Until the middle of the 1970s, the reproduction of a unified workers’ identity and its extension to the middle strata was also accompanied by the integration of immigrants into the national workforce. The centrally determined wages and the strong political representation of the working class blocked the use of immigration as a modality of wage depreciation. ^[17] This horizon of an inclusive national workers’ identity was that of an increasingly instrumental affiliation. No anti-discrimination legislation was formulated, because the state and its active labour market policies were thought to be sufficient to create a rational social organism in which everyone could be treated equally. ^[18]

Mass consumption, education and specialisation were to make realities such as ethnicity and race irrelevant. ^[19]

The vehicle of this inclusive national workers’ identity was the Swedish state. Since the social surplus that both capital and labour aimed at maximising was in need of an allocator, this specific state developed as the unity of the mutual implication of capital and labour. The form of the inclusive national workers’ identity was that of universal entitlements, i.e. social incomes independent of wage labour. Both historically and in the post-war era, it generated working class unity, and extended the appeal of the coalitional social-democratic workers’ movement to ‘the people’ in general. The Swedish people’s ‘home’ (folkhemmet), the territory of the social-democratic politics of distribution, was nothing but the nation. From this point of view, the Swedish state was the locus of the collective bargaining model. It was only through the state that the distribution of welfare services could be established as a compensation for losses of income. As individual citizens, workers and capitalists were represented in the political parties in the Parliament, but they were also represented as functional interests, organised in LO and SAF, harmonised in the social regulation of the state. ^[20]

This process of social integration, constituting a political power against capital, but always endorsing the latter, is what we may call the social-democratic workers’ movement in the Swedish post-World War II context. The establishment of a mutuality of interests in the labour-capital relation allowed for an organisation of the proletariat upon what it represented within capitalist society (labour, welfare, use-value, etc.). This is what we call ‘workers’ identity’.

Grasped as such, the social-democratic workers’ movement and its specific workers’ identity compose a historical situation. Now, in order to understand their disintegration, we must grasp them in their development – a development which, at one point, hits against its own inner contradictions.

The wave of wildcat strikes that broke out in the spring of 1970 was symptomatic of the breach of the historical agreement that had been established between labour and capital during the first decades of the 20th century. This happened as Sweden entered a crisis of over-accumulation and declining productivity growth, both exacerbated by the oil crisis. During the rest of the 1970s, due to the falling rates of profit and the subsequent global breakdown of the Fordist circuits of valorisation, productivity growth in Sweden’s export-oriented manufacturing sector was no longer intense enough to permit wage increases in the domestic service sector. At the same time, unemployment began to rise. ^[21]

This crisis of the Swedish social-democratic workers’ movement is also the beginning of the restructuring in Sweden, i.e. the transformations of the capital-labour relation starting in the 1970s. In this country, the restructuring can only be understood in the long run. First of all, the restructuring was the end of income policies. In Sweden, production as such was internationalised from the late 1960s and onwards, while relocations started in the 1980s. It then became necessary, from capital’s point of view, to abandon joint central wage formation, especially since the unions had been able to force high wage increases during the 1970s. Hence the Swedish state lost its function as social regulator of the capital-labour relation, because the wage lost its status as an essential component of the reproduction of capital. Devaluation became a better option for capital than incomes policy, and the big industrial firms joined the major Swedish banks in order to develop financial activities within productive capital. ^[22]

Meanwhile, the restructuring established the impossibility of controlling exchange and interest rates. The Rehn-Meidner model presupposed low rates of interest and the development of the world market. As corporations and banks started undertaking evasive currency swaps, national state control of exchange and interest rates were rendered impossible. ^[23]

The eradication of the Swedish state’s regulation within the spheres of production and circulation was consolidated with new social-democratic policies between 1982 and 1991. Sweden’s weak export industry, the lack of foreign investments, the country’s budget deficit and its rising foreign debt favoured a politics of devaluation, as well as conservative fiscal and monetary policies. In the context of the financial crisis of 1991, expressed primarily as a housing bubble, this culminated in drastic austerity measures in Sweden: reductions in benefit levels, tightening of eligibility rules for health and unemployment insurance programmes and, ultimately, the abandonment of the political imperative to defend full employment.

Now, as the steady and protected development of the Swedish social-democratic workers’ movement is long gone, the wage relation can no longer support an inclusive national workers’ identity. Through the crisis of this movement and through the restructuring, workers’ identity has been disintegrated.

However, the process of this disintegration can not be understood with exclusive reference to the capital-labour relation. The disintegration at the level of the capital-labour relation (disintegration ‘from above’) is the crisis of the Swedish welfare state and the end of the Swedish social-democratic workers’ movement’s ability to politically influence the spheres of production and circulation through the state. The disintegration at the level of the capital-labour relation implied the end of national confinement of production, came with a growing financialisation of capital, and was accompanied by the constitution of a trans-national fragmented workforce. But the disintegration of workers’ identity also comes from below, from the internal relations within the proletariat. At this level, we must try to deal with the historical coincidence of the decomposition of the industrial working class and the increased immigrant inflows to Sweden. The most important effect of this historical coincidence is the polarisation it has created within the class itself, between a stable, national core on the one hand and a precarious, immigrant periphery on the other.

After the post-war influx of refugees, the period ranging from the 1950s to the early 1970s saw the arrival of immigrant workers, mostly from Yugoslavia and Finland. These workers made it possible to manage economic peaks and temporary labour shortages, but they never had the status of guest workers. In 1972, a ban was set on further labour immigration, which had been put forward by the unions in order to protect the wages of the national work force. From then on, immigration to Sweden has primarily been composed of refugees and asylum seekers, in addition to those arriving for family reunification. A new type of immigration has developed, originating primarily from the Horn of Africa, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. ^[24]
In the global restructuring, technological innovations and the reallocation of labour caused a decline in the number of industrial jobs, which was compensated for by the development of menial service jobs in new urban agglomerations. These jobs were and still are mainly occupied by immigrants, whilst the expansion of R&D and the ‘information industry’ in the late 1960s/early 1970s set the ground for the formation of new middle strata within the majority populations. These past years, there have been public programmes and subsidies to stimulate what goes under the name of ‘ethnic entrepreneurship’, which have boosted the already heavy presence of immigrants in the highly competitive self-employed sectors of cleaning, catering, restaurants and small retail stores. Whilst a large part of Swedish women were to be employed in the expanding public sector, immigrant women tended to be employed in the industrial sector. ^[25]
Not only did immigrants have the most physically demanding jobs – thus constituting a growing part of early sickness-related retirement –; during the 1980s, the downsizing, relocation, labour-substituting reorganisation and technological upgrading also occurred within the industries where immigrants were concentrated, thus exposing them to unemployment more than anyone. Last but not least, because of Sweden’s well-known inability to put its anti-discrimination legislation into practice, it was far more difficult for anyone with a foreign-sounding name, even with qualifications, to get stable employment. All of this amounted to several decades of class polarisation developing along two axes: an immigrant proletariat / national middle class axis, and an unemployed immigrant / national stable proletariat axis.

These internal class relations are also mediated and reinforced by the state. The social regulation operated by the state was once a vehicle for the reproduction of a unified working class; it now tends to marginalise all those who have not long been part of the stable national core of workers, or even regulates exclusion from the formal economy. In the 1980s and the 1990s, immigrants were facing a highly protected and selective labour market, and the Swedish legislation on job security (according to the last hired-first fired principle) led to a form of indirect discrimination, since it works against immigrants in cases of lay-offs or plant closures. Because of Sweden’s high labour costs and strictly regulated welfare system, small businesses must also be able to carry through large investments in order to get around, which often explains the limited niches available to newly arrived self-employed immigrants, or their necessity to ‘go underground’. ^[26]

At the same time, the various ethnic central organisations (riksförbund) which had been developed by Finns, Yugoslavs, Croats, Turks, Greeks, Kurds and Syrians were incorporated into state practices. Through its public support, the Swedish National Board of Immigration (Statens Invandrarverk) exercised heavy economic control over their activities, e.g. by preventing them from developing into political pressure groups, or from supporting existing parties, a control that implied a profound depoliticisation of immigrants striving to organise as immigrants. ^[27]
Obviously, the political contract, the norms of the citizen’s practices as well as the way by which he/she is represented, is continuously administered as a race-neutral contract. But as a matter of fact, the political contract is determined as white, because the general interest is that of those whose social integration is accomplished. The others are marked with a particular phenotype or genealogy, and can only hope to break into the sphere of political universality by affirming no more no less than this particularity. Indeed, the pluralistic 1970s policies of community rights did enable the formation of permanent institutions like schools or places of worship, but the modalities of the social and political integration of immigrants are becoming increasingly precarious. Certain populations are indeed encouraged to exist politically as representatives of their culture, if not to completely withdraw from the sphere of political universality. Very much like the class polarisation, both grass-root and parliamentary politics thus develop along two axes: an organised immigrant / established citizen axis, and a depoliticised immigrant / representable worker axis.

It then becomes clear that when the reproduction of the proletariat is no longer a stable component of the reproduction of capital, the state does no longer constitute the unity of a mutual capital-labour relation. Nonetheless, the disintegration of workers’ identity is not only the dismantling of the achievements of the workers’ movement. Welfare, too, is restructured, i.e. produced in a new form. When a proletarian movement is no longer confirmed within the reproduction of capital, welfare tends to become a mere cost for the state. The management of welfare then becomes an essential moment of the attack on real wages – ‘real wages’ in the wide sense of the term, i.e. including indirect wages and social transfers. This leads to austerity measures, i.e. partial or total suppression of the entitlements in themselves. In Sweden, this process was initiated in 1991 and radicalised from 2006 onwards with the right-wing coalition’s ‘work strategy’ (arbetslinjen). ^[28]
The new form in which welfare is produced lies in the particular relation between the state and the market which is at the base of the new Swedish welfare sector. Since the period between 1991 and 1994, private companies and venture capital conglomerates have emerged within the Swedish welfare system in order to conduct the welfare operations, whilst these operations remain publicly financed. This is the case in health, care and sometimes in education. Having been founded upon universal social entitlements, welfare is now a sort of public commodity. Then, as with all commodities, there are exclusive variants (for those in the inner city who can afford it) and mass produced ones (for those in the suburbs, if they are lucky enough to still have a hospital or a school where they live).

In this situation, the given integration of the national workers’ identity has been completely destroyed. The general attack on real wages and the subsequent management of welfare produces a situation in which, tendentially, workers identify not so much with the political labour-capital opposition as with the labour-‘outsidership’ dichotomy. Indeed, the partial suppression of welfare entitlements implies an increased selection of their recipients. Welfare is no longer an investment in the social citizenship of workers, it is marked as being ‘for those particularly in need’, for those in ‘outsidership’. ^[29]
What then prevails within the proletariat – and we are here at the level of the social experience of this situation – is a tendency to desperately cling to that which remains. For growing parts of the proletariat and the middle strata in the ‘majority population’, ^[30] the presence of immigrants and refugees is seen as a social problem of ‘outsidership’ in itself, very much in the same way as the new selective form of welfare presupposes that certain individuals are problematic in themselves. Beyond this analogy of the psychological and the structural, we must grasp their common element: the tendency to culturalise social conditions. In 2008, the right-wing liberal People’s Party (Folkpartiet) published a survey in which ‘outsidership’ is said to be a self-reinforcing culture which ends up constituting the identity of certain individuals. ^[31]
So far, these cultural frames of reference have produced one of the most successful political perspectives in the restructured Swedish welfare state, to the extent that the anti-immigration Swedish Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) became the country’s third biggest party in the 2014 parliamentary elections, receiving about 13% of the votes. After the decline of what Théorie communiste have called the workers’ movement’s hegemony ‘rival’ to that of capital, the general tendency is not to identify as a worker defying capital through collective organisations such as those of Leninism or Social-democracy; it is rather to identify as a worker having to struggle to remain a worker through individual distinction from some outside threat. As already indicated by the Swedish Democrats’ Party Program of 2010, what is at stake for them is not labour and capital, it is Swedish culture on the one hand and immigration, the EU, ‘American imperialism’ and ‘economic globalisation’ on the other. Since the growing immigration of refugees of Asian and African origins during the 1980s, this unease with what one is within this society has increasingly been taken out on these immigrants. When confronted with the ‘benefit dependency’ or ‘passivity’ of Mr. or Mrs. Immigrant, the Normal Swedish Worker’s own disintegration is elevated to a value, and the alien character of class belonging is transcended in a cultural community. As for the immigrants themselves, the restructuring of capital and the subsequent class polarisation which divides society into whites and ‘others’, the perceived homeland’s cultural practices is what some of them cling on to in order to create a stronger and more secure sense of identity beyond material precariousness or poverty. ^[32]

To conclude, the restructured Swedish welfare state no longer represents a regulator and allocator of the mutuality of the labour-capital relation; with its selective welfare and privatised planning, it now rather promotes the differentiated reproduction of the classes. Both wage labour and political representation have thus lost the universal and inclusive norms that characterised them in the post-war social-democratic regime. Their inner polarisation according to qualifications and national origins must then be grasped as a constitutive element of the labour-capital relation, as something which shapes social life and the experience one has of it in its entirety. The ideas about the dysfunctional lifestyles of the suburban ‘immigrant guys’ (invandrarkillar) and the deviant values of their Muslim families have become commonplace, to the extent that the Rosengård riots were often perceived as some kind of Islamistic rebellion, and the riots in Stockholm as a question of ‘cultural barriers’ (according to ex-Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt).

3. The Constitution of the ‘Suburbs’

The capitalist restructuring and the disintegration of workers’ identity only allows us to trace the historical production of the present situation. In order to grasp what is at stake in the riots in Sweden, we must now look at the constitution of this situation, that is look at the processes which continuously reproduce it in the so-called ‘suburbs’. In other terms, we will try to answer the question as to how the classes’ differentiated reproduction and profound polarisation – both products of the disintegration of the workers’ movement – persists in present-day society. This persistence is a matter of material anchoring of specific individuals in specific positions. With regard to the reproduction of capital, the processes of this persistence amount to one thing: discipline. However, the critique of class reproduction and polarisation must also understand them analytically, in and for themselves. We will try to show that these processes are a matter of (a) personifying a determined situation in the labour market, (b) of representing a certain element of the ‘population’ guarded by the state, and finally – only as a product of the persistence of the two previous positions, and not as something given – (c), of being located in a specific place.

a) The Market

The driving force behind the discipline is the market. The primary product of the creation of low-wage niches and a precarious informal sector, and of the production of welfare as a commodity, is a specific subject: the one who is crudely exposed to the market, i.e the one for whom labour is reduced to the compulsion to work. In the present period, this specific subject, and the objectivity it presupposes, are continuously reproduced in the ever-more expanding insecure, low-skill service sector. This subject is usually referred to as the ‘excluded’ one or, in more orthodox Marxist terms, as being part of the ‘reserve army’. But the subject at stake here is neither outside a society identified with a labour market (as ‘exclusion’ suggest), nor destined to it (as ‘reserve’ suggests). Through temporary, part-time or hyper-casualised jobs, this subject is actively taking part in the labour market, but this very activity presupposes that it is expelled from it as soon as it enters it. In one word, it is alien to the market, in the sense that it is a subjectivity which faces the value production cycle without ever being incorporated into it. It is stuck in the ongoing breakdown of the third moment of exploitation ^[33] : the transformation of surplus-value into additional capital, which makes it necessary to maintain the face-à-face of labour and capital, the separation between labour power and the means of production, the fundamental subject-object split without which there can be no exploitation.

This subject is composed by the significant groups which are now relegated from both the formal labour market and any unemployment insurance. This was reinforced when income tax reductions (on the employed) were traded-off for social insurance payment cuts (both in unemployment and sickness benefits). In the neighbourhood of Herrgården in Rosengård, only 15% of the inhabitants are engaged in formal labour. ^[34]
In Husby in Stockholm, the level of formal employment is 24% lower than in the greater Stockholm region. ^[35]
But the so-called ‘outsidership’ is not an attribute of this subject; it is only at the peak of a process of de-essentialisation of labour, a process which now concerns the Swedish society as a whole. Among the 20-25 years old of the Swedish population in general, 20% are without formal employment and not involved in education; in areas such as Herrgården and Husby, 40% are in this situation. ^[36]
Being at the peak of this process does not really imply a certain ‘segment’ of labour power, as if the whole question could be reduced to a certain level of income. It is a matter of a certain situation of labour power, namely the one which is never confirmed as waged labour, i.e. socially validated and socialised in a continuous process of production. This situation is constituted by the market’s alien character to a specific subject, and this subject’s alien character to the market.

To understand the constitution of this situation, it is no longer sufficient to speak of a mere class polarisation, in the sense of a relation internal to the proletariat. Indeed, the process through which a specific subject with specific properties is constantly thrown back into this situation must be grasped as a process of racialisation. In Sweden, this situation is that of the ‘immigrants’: persons born in the Middle-East, one of the biggest sources of immigration, are three and a half times more often employed in temporary jobs, while a growing part of young immigrants of first or second generation live on diminishing public assistance and occasional undeclared work. Just as union’s capacities to regulate the labour market through the state is disappearing, the informal sector is becoming more and more important in construction, agriculture, cleaning, catering, and domestic services for the urban middle-class; this informal sector is almost exclusively comprised of immigrants and illegal immigrants. ^[37]
Racialisation, then, is not only a segmentation of the class, as if a racial redefinition of the latter was occuring a posteriori upon a presupposed homogeneous unity. Racialisation is constitutive of the actual class, because it produces the situation of the unwaged – the alien character of the market to a specific subject – by personifying this alien character upon the basis of phenotypical characteristics, national origins and culture.

Those we referred to with the term ‘rioters’ above are such racialised subjects. Since they are only crudely exposed to the labour market, and their chances to be integrated into its stable core are nearly inexistent, the very conditions of their own reproduction appear as something alien to them, and can thus appear as something to burn or to destroy. Schools and shops are two of the primary targets of their practices of arson, because they materialise their experience of ‘social citizenship’: that of constantly being blocked out of it.

b) The Police

Therefore, if we are to understand the constitution of the ‘rioter’, we must leave the level of the impersonal force of the market to focus on this force’s actualisation, the one to which the rioters are constantly confronted at the level of their reproduction. This implies to look at the modality through which this driving force of the market is carried out: the police.

The social existence of the racialised subject is not that of ‘unemployement’ or ‘being surplus’, as if the social norm was that of employment and essentiality. Instead, it is socially produced in relation to a form of labour of which precarity is constitutive. It exists only to be controlled. In this sense, it is not disposed of as a potential use value for capital. It is only controlled; silence and calm being the only acceptable behaviour for this alien subject. In Husby, Rosengård, Backa and the other suburbs where arson is a normal practice, ‘social rest’ is now a question of avoiding direct confrontations between riot police and local youth. Policing, then, is no less than constant counterinsurgency.

This situation is only understandable from the perspective of the disintegration of the workers’ movement and the capitalist restructuring. Policing as counterinsurgency must be seen as a mode of social control specific to the racialised subject described above. In the heyday of the Swedish social-democratic workers-movement, social control was not primarily a matter of policing, because the reproduction of a unified workers’ identity was in itself a constant interiorisation of the function of the worker within capitalist society. First of all, the separation between subject and object, between labour power and means of production, was evened out by the continuity of the process of production within the manufacturing and public service sectors, as well as by the corresponding stable forms of employment, entitlements and, last but not least, union representation. This went hand in hand with the Swedish social-democratic horizon of a development of the productive forces which would at the same time be a deproletarianisation of the workers, in the sense that in the long run, this development was to give them access to the trophies of citizenship: education, culture, democratic participation. More generally, after its emergence in the 1930s, the Swedish social-democratic historical agreement between labour and capital was constantly reproduced through a kind of city planning in which material spaces acted as fundaments of workers’ steadiness. Take the neighbourhood of Möllevången in Malmö, for example. Once in power, the social-democratic regime managed to transform the slums that once composed it into a living symbol of the Swedish social-democratic workers’ movement, by literally embedding it in the institutions of Folkets hus (‘The People’s House’), Folkets Park (‘The People’s Park) and the newspaper Arbetet (‘Labour’). By one’s very presence in this neighbourhood, one could recognise one’s situation as a worker as one’s defining social characteristic, not only individually, but as part of a materialised and firmly established organisation. Then, the reproduction of labour power was at the same time its domination. The material life process of its regeneration coincided with the process of its continuous disposability and obedience.

Today, as growing parts of the proletariat are being expulsed from the process of production, as a consequence of the disconnected circuits of the production of surplus value and the reproduction of labour power, the reproduction of labour power no longer coincides with its discipline. Capital can no longer have direct disposal of alien labour through the process of production, because there is no socially recognised identity at its base ensuring a form of spontaneous social self-control. This implies that the discipline carried out by the police must be considered in its historical specificity. Today, its function is to control those who are alien to the market. This control is not only carried out on immigrants within the country. In a world where any surplus value can be invested or turned into additional capital anywhere, anytime, control is a matter of global management of a fragmented and mobile workforce. It then becomes harder and a harder to distinguish control and immigration control. The REVA project ^[38] aims at combating irregular migration through amplified identity checks and deportation. It began in Malmö in 2008, and broadened its range to Stockholm in 2013 (REVA controls were reported in Rinkeby and Husby at the end of February 2013). REVA, a collaborative project between the Swedish police force, migration services and prison service, is also partly financed by the European refugee fund. National policing is thus a component of a broader, global policing. Through the control of immigrants within Sweden, another control is exerted: that of dominated populations as such, those that are structurally in an inferior position on the maps of capitalist production and circulation. Here, it is important to note that these controls often coincide with ticket inspections. Only the racial profiling distinguishes a REVA control from a regular ticket inspection. The REVA’s interventions within strategic commuting and transfer hubs ^[39] suggest that this is a control of mobility. At the level of the city, it is a control of the material access to mobility, in agglomerations where the price of public transport is a real issue. At the global level, it is also a control of the legal access to mobility, in a situation where growing parts of the world’s population stand outside all formal modes of reproduction, but still remain trapped within capitalist society. In this sense the police’s control practices are constitutive of racialisation too. Not only through ‘racial profiling’, but more fundamentally by implementing the discipline of the market, which constantly retraces the frontier between the ‘outsidership’ of immigrants and the social citizenship of honest consumers. Along these lines, the substance of racialisation is not personal prejudice or some reactionary state ideology. It is the material and symbolic space of the Western city, where the formerly colonised African populations once essential to European capitalism, or the populations having fled from the authoritarian regimes or the war lords of their countries, are now continuously pushed out to the peripheries of social reproduction and identification.

No wonder that in the riots in Sweden, as in France and Denmark, cars are one of the privileged targets of arson. Even if they belong to the – naturally hard-working – neighbour, they remain symbols of the exclusive character of social citizenship. And because self-consciousness is always constituted in the Other’s outlook on the individual, REVA, and the regular identity checks and strip searches by the police in the suburbs, tend to force the subject of the ‘deviant immigrant kid’ to identify with himself precisely as a ‘deviant immigrant kid’. This identification is at the same time its recognition of itself as a subject existing only to be controlled. This is why the police becomes the focal point of all ‘suburban’ riots in Sweden. Through its everyday practices of control, the police is the very actualisation of the alien character of society, existing only as an external force to be imposed on the ‘deviants’. Riots become a form of self-defence against the constant pressure of this external force. The rioters aim the police, the symbol of the European quelling of that without which, historically, Europe as a capitalist fortress would not have been possible: the racial construction of the global circuits of accumulation. Thus, burning cars to attract the police in order to throw stones at them, setting police cars on fire, or destroying police offices are practices that become an end in themselves. As such, they are strictly limited to the ‘suburbs’ spaces of the ‘deviant immigrant kids’.

c) The City

In point of fact, the police control carried out on immigrants actualises the discipline of the market along specific geographic patterns. At the level of the city, this is the relation between the ‘centre’ and the ‘suburb’, where the latter is always that which has to be controlled, kept calm. We have also hinted at how, at the level of the global cycles of accumulation, this relation could be seen as a mise en abyme of the relation between the centres of this cycle and their peripheries. As such, the relation between centre and suburb can not be understood as a given one, as if this relation was born out of the inherent properties of the centre and the periphery in themselves. We must try to grasp the relation between centre and suburb as the material product of discipline.

In Stockholm, suburbs such as those of Hallunda, Fittja and Alby, which compose the area called Huddinge, were initially built for the 70s working class coming from the north of Sweden (Norrland, Jämtland and Härjedalen). Indeed, in the era of the workers’ movement, which tended to integrate the reproduction of the proletariat in the reproduction of capital, housing was an essential component of labour reproduction. The housing policy formulated by the social-democratic Commission on Housing and Redevelopment in 1934, and supported by the Minister of Finance, insisted on the stabilising function of public housing, which was to be assured by municipal housing companies owned by the municipalities and run on a non-profit basis. Through subsidy programmes aimed at improving the quality of buildings, at equality between different forms of tenure, and at a rigorous control of rent levels, ^[40] a common housing stock was made affordable for the general population: Interestingly, no specific estates, like ‘social housing’ in the UK or in France, were built for those ‘especially in need’. These subsidies sprung out of the workers’ funds of the Rehn-Meidner plan: a 20% tax on profits was controlled by the unions for reinvestment, partly in public housing. ^[41]

But with the rising unemployment and the toughening of the labour market which followed the early years of the restructuring, the Northwest and Southwest ‘suburbs’ of Stockholm, and the historically proletarian neighbourhoods of Backa and Rosengård, were the only ones to offer affordable rents to the proletariat. Once the very milieu contributing to the social integration of workers, these areas have now become places which one is forced into, urban dustbins, much like the French banlieues. This process is reinforced by the progressive marketisation of public housing. Since the beginning of the 1990s, municipalities have been selling their estates – mostly to sitting tenants, but also to private landlords – while the municipal housing companies lost all government support. The deregulation of transfer pricing for housing units and the inflation of the costs of urban land are making it unattractive to build for rents. Thus, the Swedish model of housing is evolving towards that of a market-oriented system without support mechanisms. Here, too, certain aspects of persistent state regulations have the effect of regulating exclusion or of excluding through their regulation. A very monitored system for allocating rental housing, as well as strict rules concerning personal sub-letting, are blocking out all those without steady income, savings or home-owning parents from the formal housing market. ^[42] Hence, in neighbourhoods such as those of Herrgården in Rosengård and Risingeplan in Tensta, the ‘Million programmes’, once monuments of workers’ identity, are commodities among others, subject to transactions on the rental housing market. Here, there is no production of space but only its degradation. Housing does not exist as an essential component of labour reproduction, as during the workers’ movement; it exists crudely as a source of rent, of which mold and cockroaches are daily reminders for the inhabitants.

The ‘suburb’, then, is not what it is because of where it is located, but because of who lives there and how. A quick look at the map indicates that ‘suburbs’ like those of Rosengård, Backa, Gottsunda, Husby, Tensta and Rinkeby are actually not that ‘suburban’; from the centre, they can often be reached by the bus or the metro in 15-20 minutes, and sometimes their urban landscape is not that different from that of more well-off areas simply referred to as ‘Stockholm’, ‘Göteborg’ or ‘Malmö’. The distance that separates them is psychological more than anything; not ‘psychological’ as opposed to ‘geographical’, but psychological in the sense of space as it is experienced. In Swedish, the very notion of the suburb’ (förorten) has become an umbrella term for all that is perceived as deviant: first and foremost immigrants but also, as mentioned above, the long-term sicklisted and former convicts, early retired/sick pensioners (for example the 69-year old man who was shot a dozen times), etc. It is a place one is ‘forced out’ into, because the process of gentrification is a coercive one, which materialises the class frontiers between the white citizens of the centre and the racialised subjects of the suburb, thus materially anchoring the process of racialisation. Through Husby, Tensta and Rinkeby, a highway can be drawn, while only a couple of kilometres away, luxury flats such as those of Kista Tower are being built. Seeing as the discipline of the market, actualised in the police and materialised in the suburb, is what constitutes the alien subject – the one for whom it is sufficient to live in a certain area to be the focus of attention in matters of control and discipline –, neighbourhoods like those of Herrgården or Husby are areas that people tend to leave if they get enrolled in stable employment or education.

Despite all this shit, or maybe precisely upon the basis of it, an identity is formed in these suburbs, expressed most notably in rap lyrics, with its reference to ‘the concrete’ (betongen) and ‘the hood’ (orten). It is only with this in mind that we may understand how both the activists of Tensta in Stockholm and those of Herrgården in Rosengård could identify with themselves as ‘renters’ trying to establish a dialogue with the ‘real estate companies’, in some cases ‘the municipality’ or the ‘state’. Indeed, as the activists of ‘The future of Risingeplan’, or those who occupied the cellar space in Herrgården, were continually ignored both by the real estate company and by the commune or the tenants’ associations, riots eventually broke out. And the rioters, too, targeted their practices of arson, sabotage and occasional looting at the very headquarters of these ‘real estate companies’. The shared demands of the activists and the rioters were those focusing on the lowering of rents, or on keeping or regenerating their infrastructures.

The identity formed in such struggles is a syncretic one, based upon these shared conditions of discipline. It is not the homogeneous workers’ identity based upon the male, white, skilled worker. The suburbs of Husby, Tensta, Rinkeby, Herrgården, Backa, etc. do in themselves gather hundreds of languages and backgrounds, which has given birth to the now well-known dialect of ‘Rinkebysvenska’ (Rinkeby Swedish), but it is only when some aspect of the neighbourhood is attacked by elements perceived as alien to the community – cops, real estate companies or local politicians – that collective practices carried out by school kids, students, young unemployed, adult workers and the elderly emerge. However, the fact that this syncretic identity is based upon the shared conditions of discipline presupposes that it only exists through its internal divisions. Polarisation being a constitutive element of today’s class relation – historically produced in the restructuring, and maintained as such by the processes of racialisation, control and segregation –, the internal divisions within the proletariat are as determining as the labour-capital relation. This is not to imply that the central division at stake here is of a sociological nature, opposing a static delimitated group of ‘activists’ and another one of ‘rioters’. We know that the members of Megafonen, Pantrarna, and other organisations that we have mentioned often both originate from and live in the same suburbs as the rioters. What we mean is that there are internal divisions within those who live in the suburbs, and that these internal divisions are expressed in different practices and discourses that come from specific subjects constituted in the struggles.

4. The Language of the Riots

This is where the relation between rioting and activism, and its significance for the present period, comes to the forefront. The simultaneous constitution of the rioting practices on the one hand, and new forms of activism on the other, raises the question of their respective methods and perspectives.

First, we must look at the nature of the relation between rioting and activism. In the present situation, is there a possibility for activism to transpose the riots into its own positive language, i.e. its own tendency of affirming the possibility of a dialogue and a future in our society?

Let us first stress the historical novelty of this question. Riots have not always consisted in practices separated from movements of social integration. In the riots in Möllevången in Malmö of 1926, which broke out in a conflict between strikers and non-strikers, violent practices including those of confronting the police could to a certain extent be legitimised and defended by the institutions of workers’ identity, for example by the newspaper Arbetaren (‘The Worker’). And in the end, these riots became an impetus for dialogue, since a lot of workers from the city accepted to take part in a big, centrally organised peaceful demonstration. The riots thus had the possibility of being socially integrated from the start, because the practices that composed them, unlike those of today which are often a matter of sporadic and ephemeral communities, sprung out of an emerging and increasingly institutionalised workers’ identity. ^[43]

We must also clarify the following: when we raise the question of the possible integration of the riots in our period, it is not to imply that the latter now stand ‘outside’ society, as if they were immune to recuperation or less subject to the ‘illusions’ of this society. What we mean is that the practices of attacking one’s own living conditions, which pose one’s racialised class belonging as something alien, are impossible to integrate as such. As the representative of a political party, of a union or any other established institution, one can not ‘organise’ and ‘coordinate’ the burning of police offices or the sabotage of infrastructures, simply because one incarnates the very society that is attacked through these practices, and that one’s existence as such a representative presupposes that of urban administration, of police control, of the cleavage between social citizens and ‘outsiders’.

This is why the activism which, while denouncing the functioning of the state and its institutions, defends what it perceives as the remnants of the workers’ movement, is poised on a knife-edge: it is trying to represent a part of this society for which this very society is something alien. If activism defends the riots, it abolishes itself as a socially recognised representative, and if it does not defend the riots, it must repress them like the rest of society. Following its press conference after the very first day of the ‘Stockholm riots’, Megafonen was to be treated like a cause, a reinforcement, a leader or a mediator of the riots, but always as its representative. Even the political opposition to the right-wing coalition in power in Sweden only reacted 24 hours later. During the second day of the riots, Megafonen gave its view on them. These quick reactions show in themselves how strongly Megafonen is rooted in Husby and its surroundings; otherwise, the organisation would not have had the confidence required to make statements about these events as they happened and where they happened. Although Megafonen understands the social problems which cause the riots, ‘Megafonen does not start fires’, because it aims at ‘long-term change’, ‘constructive resistance’ and ‘social refurbishment’. ^[44]

In other words, and this has become a widespread cliché in the Swedish left: they understand the anger of the rioters, but think that they should express it differently. Disappointment, it is said, must be made into something progressive. When they formulate such an idea of channelling the unease of what one is within this society, they are much like an echo of certain revolutionaries who appraise the rioter’s ‘potential of violence’ against the police, but not the fact that they target their own living conditions (schools, local shops, buildings, etc.). In both cases, what is implied is that beneath the practices of the riot, there is an underlying force which could be reoriented in another direction. It then is up to the activist, the active subject, to organise this underlying force, a passive object. From the viewpoint of this activism, the self-destructive practices of the riots must make way for a coherent, political movement.

But when one seriously considers the social constitution of the suburbs, it becomes clear that one cannot disagree with the form of the riot without denouncing its content. The subject of the riots is nothing but its practices. The form is not a set of alternative mechanisms (the riot or ‘constructive resistance’) separated from its motor (anger because of one’s living conditions). What the self-proclaimed agents of Organisation are unable to grasp is that it is not a matter of Organisation and Non-Organisation – in other words, themselves and the rioters –, but a matter of two different forms of organisation, and thus two different contents being organised. On the one hand, riots are organised by those for whom society appears as an external force. Yes, ‘organised’: fixing gathering places takes a lot of communication; blocking paths, getting paving stones, forming ammunition groups and trackers takes a lot of coordination; keeping these practices alive despite the reinforced police patrols implies to know all hiding places and shortcuts of an area. The content here is that of creating turbulence; the form is that of an ephemeral coming together. On the other hand, the coherent political movement is organised by those who still see a future within this society, or who are subjectively constructing a visible future, even one which looks concretely impossible from outside perspectives: the reconstruction of the welfare state. In Stockholm, Megafonen set up a fund-raising for those without car insurance whose car had been burned; it also supported the ‘civic patrols’ helping the fire brigade to extinguish fires and helping the police to send young rioters home. The content here is that of civic behaviour; the form is social integration.

By distinguishing these two forms and contents of organisation, we do not wish to condemn activities like those of supplementary tuition, independent lectures, and so on, which make life more bearable for a lot of young people in the suburbs. We intend to reveal their horizon, the perspective on the transformation of society that they presuppose. This horizon is, in Megafonen’s own words, that of ‘a more cohesive Stockholm’. ^[45]
They thus echo the social-democratic perspective of a unified society. The very content and form of these activities make them into vehicles of a renewed social regulation. Tendencially, this is already what they are becoming in their everyday practices. In Göteborg, Pantrarna go as far as projecting to start training courses in professions that are in need of workers. It is thus noticeable that when welfare has become a public commodity, this type of activism tends to replace certain functions which were once taken care of by the state. It tends to do communal work for free, and to present this as social emancipation.

On this view, activism can indeed transpose the riots into its own positive language, but only by substituting the practices of the riots by those of social integration. The nature of the relation between riots and activism is that of an incorporation, an activity of transforming the content of the riot in order to give it a socially recognisable form.

Nevertheless, as our description of the riots in Sweden revealed, activism and riots do not develop along a revolt-reform axis as two clearly separated realities. The riots may express demands, and they do often emerge out of a politicisation operated by activism. We cannot address the question of the possible integration of the riot strictly from the viewpoint of the positive language of activism. Indeed, this positive language is not an intrinsic property of activism; it might also be shared by the riots.

Then, if the positive language, that of affirming a possibility of a dialogue and a future in our society, is not restricted to activism, the question of the relation between rioting and activism leads us to consider the different expressions of this language. How is it expressed in riots? How is it expressed in activism?

In the Swedish context, riots are not intrinsically destructive. Even from a consequentialist point of view, the one which usually concludes that ‘the rioters don’t hurt anyone but themselves!’, ^[46] the riots tend to incarnate a modality of demanding. That the major real estate companies of Herrgården in Rosengård (Newsec and Contenus) finally decided to renovate the moldy flats during the spring after the riots; that no further closures of the local youth recreation centres occurred; that a new sports ground with longer opening hours was built; that, in some cases, rents were lowered 25% – all this can only be seen as a way of satisfying the demands that were explicitly formulated during the occupation, and of the demands that local politicians, municipality workers and heads of real estate companies read into the acts of the rioters. This is also the case in Stockholm where, after the events in Risingeplan of April 2013, the real estate company Tornet withdrew its proposal to construct 167 new buildings. ^[47]
The reason, according to the CEO of the company was that ‘[w]e must establish a coherent dialogue with the inhabitants, and put an end to the threats against our personnel.’ ^[48]

Here, then, it seems that the riot tends to incarnate the positive language of a dialogue and a future by burning and demanding at the same time. It is a form of constructive destructivity. From the Swedish outlook, we must then ask if this could be seen as a new form of social bargaining. Of course, this would not be the centrally organised social bargaining of the Swedish workers’ movement. As we have seen, the universal and inclusive norms that characterised political representation under the post-war social-democratic regime have made way for differentiated and polarised modes of political representation. From the specific outlook of the situation within the Swedish suburbs, this reveals that the strong racialisation of certain proletarians goes hand in hand with that of the political contract. For the rioters, who are not only at the peak of the de-essentialisation of labour, but also exposed to the most intense control and gentrification, social bargaining surely can not consist in that of the citizen striving to be politically representable. This bargaining can only express itself through intensified conflict which inevitably soon dies out, because what the rioters are rejecting in their practices is the very existence of this political representation of which they are normally excluded. During riots, for short periods of time, the rioters provoke political and media debates about their living conditions; they force the improvement of some aspects of their reproduction (housing, infrastructures, etc.); during this short time span, they could even be said to constitute a class – not as objectively defined by the relations of production, but in the fact that they recognise themselves as a political collective, composing itself upon the basis of things previously not understood in these terms: repression, poverty, police hatred, etc. This is at the same time the limit of the riots. The riots become an intrinsically suburban ‘question’, a chronic sickness medicated with occasional improvements and, more importantly, constant policing. In Sweden, the strategies of the latter have not consisted in arresting a lot of people, but have focused on re-establishing calm in collaboration with the pacifying elements of the suburbs. ^[49]
Precisely because riots tend to become part of the normality of certain suburbs, the normal course of capitalist society is not endangered by them, not even at the level of its reproduction. It follows its course not despite the riots, but with them.

Thus, in Sweden, riots penetrate the movement organised around the positive language of social bargaining. But it does so by re-appropriating the language of the demands, by transforming it into a more conflictual and broader struggle. In Rosengård, the riot emerged as the very extension of a demand-oriented occupation, but against the initial civic mode of bargaining, by directly attacking the perceived forces behind the eviction (the real estate companies and the police). In Risingeplan during the months preceding the ‘Stockholm riots’ the riot emerged from within the campaign as another more turbulent modality of demanding: demanding by burning, reclaiming a very drastic lowering of the rent, and not just another survey by the tenants’ association. The positive language of dialogue and a possible future exists in the riot, but in the sense of demanding immediate solutions to concrete problems, not within the perspective of a cohesive society or a Social Democracy 2.0.

However, in Sweden, it is also the other way around. Not only does the riot penetrate the movement; the movement also tends to penetrate the riot, in its striving to become its representative: we have seen how organisations like Megafonen and Pantrarna stand in a relation of incorporation to the riots. By symbolically covering certain costs of the destruction of the rioters or by taking in charge the qualification of the young, they tend to affirm a coalition, here and now, of all the antagonistic elements of civil society. This subject strives to be ‘political’, in the sense that its practices tend to organise the coming together of people which in everyday life only exist through the racialised class relations which the reproduction of capitalist society presupposes. In activism too, the positive language exists in and through demands, but demands which are put forth following the modality of integration.

This is a broader tendency. The riots in Copenhaguen in the winter of 2007, ^[50] for example, culminated in the publication of an open letter in the major newspaper Politikken signed ‘The boys from inner Nørrebro’ (‘Drengene fra Indre Nørrebro’), in which both rioters and a young worker from a recreation centre gathered in order to describe the youth’s everyday experience of police controls and brutality. A particular police officer was actually fired after the events, and meetings between the police, the young worker, some youth who had taken part in the riots as well as parents from the neighbourhood were held in Nørrebro. More recently, this political subject has even reached the European parliaments. In Greece, for example, during the early days of the riots of December 2008, Syriza presented itself as the party that recognised that the rioters – those who occupied universities, sabotaged shops and metro stations, confronted the police – do what they do because their future is blocked. Six years later, it has become clear that the sole political recognition of this absent future implies that the state and a socialist economy is to provide this future to the rioters.

5. Movement and Explosion

The specificity of the riots in Sweden, in comparison with those that took place in Athens in 2008 and in London in 2011 – which both started not as acts to defend welfare, but in response to police killings –, is that they emerge as a defence of the infrastructure of the suburbs. This reveals that the current crisis of restructured capital develops in differentiated temporalities. No important government spendings and no austerity measures were needed in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the crisis of 2008, on account of the combined attack on indirect wages during the financial crisis of 1990-1994, aggressive monetary policy as well as a rather restrictive loans policy. Hence, the restructured Swedish welfare state does, to a larger extent than countries like Greece or England,^[51] contain something to defend, namely social benefits, notably materialised in housing and infrastructure, often upon the basis of the particular relation between the market and the state described above. In Sweden, then, the relation between rioting and activism is not the openly conflictual one which we have seen in France where, during the French anti-CPE movement of 2006, the rioters from the Parisian banlieues literally attacked the students’ demonstrations or general assemblies, by burning cars or seeking confrontation in a way that broke with the demand-oriented practices of the latter.^[52]
In Sweden, the language of demands may be shared by activism and rioting although, in some cases, these demands can be projected reconstructions made by politicians, municipality workers or CEOs of real estate companies. Of course, there are demands and there are demands: the restless demands of the rioters (lower the rent! or solidarity with our brothers!) are not the general ones put forwards by organisations like Megafonen, requesting more welfare and democracy, but they do emerge in the same situation. The decline of the heavily centralised unions that were once the primary mediator of all social bargaining leaves a void that can only be replaced by forms of organisation that we may call immediate, in the sense that they are not integrated in a socially recognised institution. ^[53]
The forms of this immediacy are diverse; they are both the taking over of abandoned state functions, the filling of the void, and the direct action against the perceived sources of one’s social deprivation, the defiance of the void. In Sweden, then, the defence of social benefits becomes a catalyst for riots: burning and demanding can coincide.

But the practices of burning and demanding can not coexist in a harmonious way. By burning the very infrastructure of their reproduction and at the same time demanding an improvement of this reproduction, the rioters are acting against and for their perpetuation within this society. Through their practices, they thus tendentially split apart their constitution as racialised proletarians in relation to capital – the processes that determine their specific situation –, and their reproduction as racialised proletarians within capital – the processes that perpetuate what they are in this society. ^[54]
These acts of splitting apart the constitution of what one is within this society on the one hand, and the reproduction of it on the other, is nothing revolutionary in itself. They only reveal a rift between this constitution and this reproduction; they do not undo the inner relation between the two. There is nothing that says that the mere revelation of this rift could not be integrated to the reproduction of capital. As we have seen, this is already the case in some rare occasions, when the exposure of this rift is represented politically not as the splitting apart of the constitution and the reproduction of the class – calling for a rupture with existing relations of production – but as an inadequacy between this constitution and this reproduction, an inadequacy that calls for social integration: ‘an education and a job’ to the ‘excluded’ who seem uncomfortable in their situation as ‘excluded’. Thus, when actors such as activist groups or parties emerge in order to represent the rioters, they are not ‘recuperating’ the riot. They emerge from the very limit of the riots: their social and geographical isolation to those who are alien to the market – their existence as strictly ‘suburban’ riots.

With regards to the near future, the relation between rioting and activism we have tried to depict allows us to formulate two questions.

The first question concerns the tendency of activism to strive towards the constitution of a coherent, political movement which is to integrate the rioters. In Sweden, this is the case with Megafonen and Pantrarna. By trying to produce a coherent, political movement, these organisations emerge in response to the practices of the riot. But in this response, this alien character of racialised class belonging is represented as a deviation from a political norm, a political norm which is often that of the welfare state of the workers’ movement. These organisations treat exploitation and racial domination as something which is to be transformed through the redistribution of existing wealth. For them, the economy is not constituted by class polarisation and racialisation; it is fundamentally neutral. This leads them to represent the riots as the living proof of the necessity to integrate denigrated identities, which are only blocked by the discrimination operated by those in power. A similar tendency has been seen in Ferguson these past months, especially among the older generation of militants, those affirming the necessity for black people to act like good citizens in order to be treated as good citizens. For them, citizenship is not constituted as the structural exclusion of blackness from whiteness; it is fundamentally open to everyone. As we pointed out above, these actors emerge from the very limit of the riots; they present the ‘outsidership’ of the rioters as a passive state deprived of action. It is important to note that this tendency contains a highly repressive moment: by affirming that identities must be integrated, or that we all should act like good citizens, they affirm the necessity to pacify the movement in order to produce a coalesced political subject. In Sweden, this is constantly taking the form of a differenciation between the rioters – ‘criminal gangsters’, ‘throwers of stones’, or why not ‘professional activists’ (sic) ^[55] coming from other parts of the city – and the locals – ‘hard working people’, ‘shop owners’, ‘citizens’, etc. This classification is at the same time an exclusion of the practices of the rioters. Indeed, the coalesced political subject does not admit internal struggles like the ones that appear both in the Swedish ‘suburbs’ and in Ferguson: struggles between the self-employed proletariat – owners of small retail stores, restaurants, etc. – and the younger proletarians. Then, it should come as no surprise that it stands on the side of the ‘civic patrols’ in Stockholm, the post-riot clean-up in London or, more recently, the Oath Keepers in Ferguson. Can this activism successfully level out the practices of the riot into a new force of social bargaining, which can be calmed as soon as its demands are satisfied? The latest developments in Greece (Syriza) and Spain (Podemos) might already be indicating such a tendency. ^[56]

If so, upon what basis does this social integration occur, i.e. what is its internal relation to capital and to the state?

The second question concerns the tendency of the riots to take the form of social explosions. The inarticulateness of the riots – their diffuse and ephemeral character, their refusal of any civic dialogue, their restless demands when there are any – must be treated in and for itself, and not merely as the sign of an incapacity to speak properly. Indeed, within the existing state, the riots can not be articulated as riots, simply because there is no space for deliberation, especially in a period when the one and only necessity of capital is to get on with the restructuring. But also because the process of this restructuring presupposes the structural exclusion of the proletariat from the table of collective bargaining. The riots are fundamentally non-relational: their relation to the capitalist totality, although systematic, is not directly mediated by any socially recognised institution. In this, the riots blatantly reveal that the production of racialised class belonging as something alien is no less than its production as something alien. Of course, they manage to transform accumulated anger into a collective event. This is blatantly expressed by the fact during the riots, people from other ‘suburbs’ quickly converged in Husby in Stockholm, and that people from other parts of the US joined the riots in Ferguson. What’s more, as seen in France in 2005, or in Sweden last year, riots are becoming longer and more spread out phenomena. This in itself can be celebrated. But communisation, the intertwined processes of abolishing capitalist social relations and of producing ourselves in new material communities, can not consist in riots, not even generalised ones. How could this intrinsic limit of the riot, its existence as a riot, i.e. as a social explosion, as the expression of accumulated unease against but always within capitalist society, be overcome? As suggested by the relation between rioting and activism, what needs to be overcome is not the destructiveness, for the establishment of constructiveness; nor is it constructiveness, to set destructiveness free. In areas like those of the Swedish suburbs, this would first of all imply to overcome the isolation of the strictly suburban riot. This would be about more than burning the cars of the rich in the city centre. It would begin as the putting at stake of the geography of capitalist accumulation: the relation between the capitalist core (Europe or the city centre) and its periphery (immigration or the suburbs). This could only be produced as internal struggles within the proletariat, because if there is one thing that these riots reveal about the revolution of our period, it is that we can not expect struggles to hit capital directly at its foundation, to only affect capitalists: there are no pure struggles.

Zaschia Bouzarri

November 2014

[email protected]

The relation of exploitation contains, in an immanent way, a direct relation of domination, of subjection, and of social and police control. But when one takes the relation of domination, of subjection, as the totality of the relation of exploitation, the part for the whole, then one loses sight of the relation of exploitation and of the classes. The moment of coercion taken as starting point and posited as the totality of the relation between the individual and society inevitably lapses into the point of view of the isolated individual and the critique of everyday life.

— Théorie Communiste, The Glass Floor1

A Revolution in Daily Life

Across the domains of government in the canton of Cizire, people are working, mostly on a voluntary basis, to make ambitious transformations to society. Doctors want to build a modern free healthcare system but also, they told us, to collect and disseminate suppressed local knowledge about healing and to change the conditions of life in general. They aim, they said, to build a way of life free of the separations – between people and between people and nature – that drive physical and mental illness. Academics want to orient education to ongoing social problems. They plan, they said, to abandon exams and destroy divides between teachers and students and between established disciplines. The new discipline of ‘gynology’ (the science of women) constructs an alternative account of mythology, psychology, science and history. Always and everywhere, we were told, women are the main economic actors and those with responsibility for ‘ethics and aesthetics’, ‘freedom and beauty’, ‘content and form’. The revolution aims to overcome the limits placed on these activities when the State is taken as a model for power.

It was repeated to us again and again that the coexistence and coordination of changing cross-cutting pre-existing identities is to replace ‘one flag, one language and one nation’. The new administration is composed of quotas of representatives from Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian communities, nominated according to their own practices. Although the militias and security forces are ethnically mixed, Assyrian groups have their own battalions. Everyday life has changed most for women, who were previously restricted to a life indoors. Although the streets are still mainly the province of men, women have set up their own education structures and their own local councils. All mixed political bodies must be 40% women and all co-representatives must include one woman. Women are thus both autonomously organised within the revolution and its archetypal subjects. The billboards in Qamislo show the YPJ’s women fighters more than YPG’s male ones. ‘We will defend you’, one reads.

Members of the YPJ spoke to us about the non-hierarchical organisation that exists within the militias. There are elected commanders, they said, but they participate in all the activities of communal life in the same way as everyone else. But it’s not all love and post-structuralism. Discipline is also an important part of the ethics and aesthetics of daily life. The women we saw being educated as security forces (Asayish) were taught sitting in rows. It was a bit of a shock on the first day of our tour, to be greeted by a line of trainees in uniform, standing with perfect rigidity in a line doing that call and response thing armies do, precisely and very loud. YPG training videos, set to music, play on every TV. Even in the University, where young people live collectively, cooking and cleaning-up happened in a super efficient way: tasks are performed efficiently, divided up between everyone, so that equality and horizontality and automatic discipline overlapped perfectly.

Another ethic and aesthetic ambiguity surrounds the significance of the PKK’s Ocalan, or ‘Apo’ (the name for him people more commonly write on walls and carve into their guns). His picture hangs on the wall in almost every room. The ‘libertarian turn’ of the PKK, with which Rojava’s PYD are affiliated – its renunciation of hierarchical structure among other things – was initiated by him. It is interesting to note, that it was also after a period spent in this region, before his arrest in 1999, although he is always attributed with coming up with the ideas. The other images that adorn walls, dashboards and plants are those of martyrs – their faces against a coloured background that denotes their organisation. Is it significant that Ocalan is the only person still alive to be given this honour and a leader with whom no one can communicate directly and with no de facto power?

Weakening the State

The point of the revolution, many people told us, is not to replace one government with another, it is to end the rule of the state. The question, the co-president of the Kurdish National Congress put it, is ‘how to rule not with power but against power’. State power is being dispersed in a number of ways. The education of people as Asayish is taking place on a large scale, with the aspiration that everyone will receive it. It is part of an attempt to diffuse the means of coercion to everybody. People’s self-defense, were were told, is ‘so important that it can’t be delegated’. Through education (not only in the use of weapons but also in mediation, ethics, the history of Kurdistan, imperialism, the psychological war waged by popular culture and the importance of education and self-critique), the fighter in charge of one training centre told us, the aim is to finally abolish Asayish all together.

The new administration (with a parliament and 22 ministries), appointed for now by various political parties and organisations but to be eventually be elected, has taken responsibility for some state functions. When in spring 2012, ISIS reached Rojava, anticipating the carnage of a confrontation between Isis and Assad and seeing the opportunity in the situation, the Kurdish forces surrounded the Syrian state forces in Derik and negotiated their departure (without their weapons). After consultation with other political and social forces in the area, the same happened across Rojava. However, the Assad regime has not been completely ejected. In Qamislo, the largest city in Cizire, it still controls a small area which contains the airport. The old state also continues to operate in parallel with new structures. Syrian hospitals to the south still accept some of the very sick and the regime still pays some civil servant salaries including those of some teachers.

Meanwhile, the new administration is balanced by multiple autonomous elements. Separate from it, communes (weekly open neighborhood councils, with their own local defense units and sub-councils dedicated also to youth, women, politics, economy, public services, education and health) and city and canton-level councils consisting of delegates elected by them, deal with immediate practical problems that can be resolved immediately. Both the administration and the communes were set up by TEVDEM, a coalition of organisations including the PYD, co-ops, academies, women’s and youth organisations and sympathetic political parties. These organisations all have their own decision-making structures and sometimes there own education programmes in their ‘cultural centers’ ‘houses’ and ‘academies’. The result of all this, is both that all political forces have complex, cross-cutting reliances on each other and that there are plenty of meetings to go around.

And Communism?

Little existent agricultural or industrial production takes place in Rojava, despite its flat and fertile soil. The ‘bread basket’ of Syria, most of its land has been owned by the State and used for mono-cropping wheat and extracting oil. Its Kurdish population often immigrated to souther cities to form a class fraction working for lower wages. The new administration took the land and distributes portions of it to self-organised co-ops who are working to expand the farming of animals and to increase and diversify what is grown. It continues to extract some oil and to refine it into low quality diesel to sell in the canton and to distribute to co-ops and other institutions. What co-ops produce is sold either to the administration or in the bazar under administration price controls. The administration provides each household with a bread ration. Smuggling is huge.

Those overseeing these changes describe them simply as practical solutions to the problem of how to reproduce the population in the context of war and embargo. This is very different from how the immediate practical transformations to the domestic sphere were described. The women’s militia, members of the YPJ told us, ‘opened a space for liberation’: ‘You take part in life in a new way and, when you are with others, you realise that you are a power.’ And, they said, ‘when people saw us fighting alongside the men they also accepted us fighting against male-centric mentalities’. There was no talk about the positive empowerment came with the necessity of disrupting relations of exploitation and exchange. Perhaps this was because the people we were bought to talk to were mainly middle class, although this fact itself is also significant.

In some ways, opposition to the state is opposition to capital, on the level of its global force. The new administration opposes, as they see it, NATO in two forms: in one as Turkey-supported ISIS in one and in the other US and international capital (a category into which the KRG – where two ruling families now construct refugee camps along one side of their motorways and shopping centers along the other – also falls). They have no illusions about the motivations of those who give them military support: ‘Everyone, including the US now, portrays it as it we are on their side!’ TEVDEM laugh. But there is no opposition to value in its everyday form continuing to exist. Those that debunk the claims of over-enthusiastic western activists about the revolutionary nature of what is happening in Rojava are right to describe it instead as the building of a shield against today’s war and most brutal oppression, using, as well as an army, a new kind of ideology replacing that of national liberation2 .

The situation also has something in common with the sad trajectory of struggles around the world in the past few years. The state, now an agent of global capital, is seen as the guilty party by movements composed of middle as well as proletarian classes. Meanwhile, the nation is seen as the force to oppose it. Struggles rally under the ideology of citizenship (and the race and gender hierarchies this presupposes). The transformation taking place in Rojava rests to some extent on a radical Kurdish identity and on substantial middle classes contingent who, despite radical rhetoric, always have some interest in the continuity of capital and the state.

Yet, at the same time, it also shares something with the high points of the struggles of the crisis: its riots. In some ways the strategies employed in Rojava were born from analysis of the failure of riots: in 2004, only months after the PYD formed, an uprising of Kurds demanding political freedom from the Syrian state met not only with immediate torture, murder and imprisonment but with a long period of brutal oppression. We decided, they remembered, we would not make the same mistakes again.

What is taking place is not communisation. But it is a real movement against state plunder and coercion – fighting both militarily on its boarders and inwardly through the diffusion of power within them. The limits of the struggles in Rojava in this sense are those of struggles everywhere where the relation between labour power and capital has become a matter of repression and struggles that take that repression as a starting point. It is another struggle taking place far from the strongholds of capital’s reproduction and not directed at over turning relations of exploitation. What will be interesting in Rojava, for now largely cut off from the force of global capital, is what struggles will emerge over relations of exploitation… over the distribution of land, over assignment to different kinds of work, over prices and wages, over imports and exports. What transformation of property and production relations will women demand as they return from the militias?

Becky

• 1Theorie Communiste (2009) The Glass Floor
• 2Il Lato Cattivo (2014) The Kurdish Question

Introduction

At the outset of 2015, anyone hoping for a recovery of labor markets is told to lower their expectations.[1] Specious apologetics on the resilient turnaround of unemployment rates and job creation stumble against continuously revised growth forecasts reflecting the inertia of both high-GDP and emerging market economies. On a global level, the period since the crisis of 2007-08 has witnessed, at best, tepid economic activity despite unprecedented monetary stimulus and liquidity injection. Business investment remains predominantly stagnant, most recently with energy producers dramatically cutting back total capital investment.[2] Even China is stuttering and decreasing its appetite for raw materials[3], while the professed German success story cannot be read without the unfolding process of precarious centralization of capital in a rapidly declining Eurozone, rather than as an indicator for lasting growth.[4] At the same time, the world economy continues its recourse in unrestrained leveraging[5], further exacerbating credit-to-GDP ratios, with, according to a recent report by the International Centre for Monetary and Banking Studies, total public and private debt reaching 272% of developed-world GDP in 2013.[6] The recent alarm of deflation means a rise in the real value of existing state, corporate, and household debt. Corresponding to the fiscal approach of higher budget deficits is, since 2010, the outright purchasing of government, corporate and real estate bonds by central banks and paid for with newly printed money – i.e. ‘quantitative easing’. The European Central Bank has, most recently, followed the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan in the latter policy despite the fact that it has yet to demonstrate itself as an effective response to decelerating economies. Instead, the money created enters into the banking system, shoring up balance sheets on finance capital and fomenting bubbles within assets held.

These conditions outline the phenomenal contours of the present crisis of capital accumulation, which is at the same time a crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labor relation. Since the economic restructuring of the 1970s, deregulation has expanded the flexibility of labor markets and fundamentally reoriented the conditions of the class relation. While unemployment remained relatively abated during the postwar period – alongside the assurances of the welfare state – developments in capital accumulation since then have witnessed an unprecedented ascendance, in terms of duration and concentration, of both unemployment and underemployment.[7] Since the early 1970s and through the dismantling of the Keynesian wage-productivity deal of the postwar period, the capitalist mode of production has been stumbling to combat the anguish of diminishing returns. Its recourse of economic restructuring consisted in the expansion of finance capital and increasing the rate of exploitation in an attempt to stabilize and defer its own inherent propensity to undermine the process of self-valorization. The 21^st century thereby opened with a reign of labor-power devaluation that has only intensified its duress, which, alongside fiscal and sovereign debt crises expressed in austerity, continues to wield unrelenting immiseration.

Materially, the crisis of 2007-08 has only worsened the conditions of labor with, for example, the labor participation rate in the US now at a 36-year low[8], eclipsing any earnestly lauded low-wage job creation and its feeble average hourly earnings. For that segment of the proletariat not losing their jobs or dropping out of the labor force altogether – for which unemployment statistics have very little to say – the types of employment still available are largely temporary, part-time, seasonal, freelance, and in general, precariously informal without contractual guarantee of compensation. Thus, as the present moment finds an overcapacity of surplus capital unable to find lasting investment, the effective demand for labor-power follows suit and diminishes. Through the critique of political economy, this phenomenon finds systematic expression in what Marx refers to as the ‘general law of capital accumulation’. Here, the proportional expansion of total capital, itself resulting from the productivity of labor and therewith in the production of surplus value, yields a mass of workers relatively redundant to the needs of the valorization process. This tendency arises simply from the nature of capital.[9] As capital develops labor as an appendage of its own productive capacity, it decreases the portion of necessary labor required for a given amount of surplus labor. Therefore, the relative quantity of necessary labor needed by capital continuously declines. This occurs through the organic composition of capital in which competition between competing capitals induces the generalization of labor-saving technologies such as automation, thereby increasing constant capital at the expense of variable capital, resulting in a relative decline in the demand for labor.[10] The production of this relative surplus population is the devaluation of the total labor-power that takes on the form of a dislodgement of workers from the production process and in the difficulty of absorbing them through customary or legally regulated channels. If the labor-power of the proletariat cannot be realized, i.e. if it is not necessary for the realization of capital, then this labor capacity appears as external to the conditions of the reproduction of its existence. It turns into a crisis of the reproduction of the proletariat who is surrounded, on all sides, by needs without the means to adequately satisfy them.[11]

Friends have pointed out that surplus population is a necessary product of capital accumulation and therefore a structural category deriving from the ratio of necessary and surplus labor. It is a tendency that is always already there and inherently constitutive of the capital-labor relation independent from its historical configurations. So why might one justify its emphasis within the present conjuncture? After all, the notion of a surplus population ‘is already contained in the concept of the free labourer, that he is a pauper: virtual pauper.’ (Grundrisse) The task therefore remains to demonstrate why the relative surplus population is paradigmatic of the class relation in the present moment and what are the implications for contemporary class struggle.

The difficulty of a category

After the restructuring of 1970s, the foregoing spectacular representation of expanding prosperity and full employment, which would ostensibly lead to greater and more stable social integration into the spheres of production and consumption, reversed. Since this retraction, the undiminished centrality of production is confronted with a structurally distanced and weakened position of those employed. During the postwar period of the Situationists’ critique, the spectacular appearance of the proletariat had shifted from its role as workers to that of consumers. Today, the spectacular image of proletarian conditions instead appear as an ‘exclusion’, referring to parts of the population unlikely to ever be exploited under conditions that would make them respectable consumers. When describing the general law of capitalist accumulation, Marx observes stagnant, floating, latent and pauperistic tendencies within his elucidation of the relative surplus population. Thus, even beginning with Marx, the phenomenon of surplus populations elicits a heterogeneity of contemporary working conditions in more or less dynamic oscillation between the poles of employment and unemployment. From the erratic nature of seasonal, part-time, informal and freelance work[12], to the treacherous ruse of entrepreneurialism under ‘sharing economy’[13] and unpaid internship regimes; from the labor migrations of the countryside to the slum-dwellers of the urban metropolises; from the indentured parody of student debt and political Islam[14], to the universal uncertainty facing younger generations – as a whole, the proletariat today is colored by an unprecedented objective imperative of significant labor-power devaluation that puts its conditions of reproduction into total ambiguity. As such, dividing an absolute line between employment and unemployment for grasping the dynamic of surplus population appears grossly inadequate for comprehending its logic as emanating from the historical development of capital accumulation. Instead, in order to resist the temptation to simply focus on the immediacy of the given – and with it the enchantment surrounding the moniker ‘concrete’ – we attempt to elucidate the essence of the concept of relative surplus population as a category of social mediation unfolding the self-reproducing totality of capital.

Adorno observes that ‘[s]ociety becomes directly perceptible where it hurts.’ In fact, there is no shortage of sensationalized and emotionally arousing imagery presenting its audience with the conditions of structural unemployment. Temptations abound to hold fast to the immediacy of moralistic categories of discrimination, exclusion and expulsion that can, at best, promote the equitable distribution of exploitation. Celebrated political agents such as the ‘multitude’, ‘precariat’ and ‘excluded’ – all seeking, at heart, to triumph over inequality under the horizontalist banner of full employment – obscure the truth of the class relation while praising a narrow practicism in the service of that which is simply the case.[15] Symptomatic of these surface-level observations is the withdrawal from communism to egalitarianism and communitarianism, from critique to moral concern. Identitarian divides along a hierarchy of privilege or oppression carry little conceptual weight beyond the tokenized glorification of those at the margins and in the reification of deprivation. While the essence of a category cannot but be apprehended through its forms of appearance, critical reflection is impelled to move beyond those immediacies without leading into empty abstractions.[16]

Marx’s conception of the relative surplus population refers to a structural phenomenon of a contradictory totality and is not your run-of-the-mill sociological category. As such, the empirically given conditions of the capitalist mode of production are only moments that methodologically disclose objective law-like tendencies for which capital posits its own conditions of existence. As has been said before, ‘[t]he concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.’ (Grundrisse) The categories of the critique of political economy cannot be reduced to an overtly empiricist perspective for which quantitative facticity reigns. Against the positivism of presuming the existence of social facts in themselves, the immediacy of the conditions of surplus populations must reveal deeper mediations. These deeper mediations can be found in the concept of class insofar as class does not refer to a collection of individuals sharing common attributes such as income, consciousness, cultural habits, etc., but is instead an inherently antagonistic relation between capital and labor that structures the lives of individuals.[17] Strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as class ‘membership’. Such an understanding cannot help but wield the perspective of totality without which class collapses against a spatial schematic of discrete social ‘spheres’, ‘levels’ or ‘instances’. There is no mono-causal determination, but different moments of a totality of the class relation of capital-labor of which the phenomena of the relative surplus population derives.

In analyzing surplus population, it becomes clear that an ordered aggregation of social tragedy elevated through quantitative facticity is not a substitute for immanent criticism. The concept of relative surplus population is not an empirical category and yet incorporates the concrete within itself. As both concrete and abstract, the relative surplus population is at once both a directly observable and universal component of the accumulation process.[18] The surplus proletariat is a qualitative category of the productivity of labor in the capitalist mode of production that has quantitative dimensions because the productivity of labor is determined by the ratio of constant and variable capital. Without this understanding, one risks regressing into the assumption that the employed and unemployed constitute two different segments of the population, rather than a dynamic of the capital-labor relation. This dynamic is characterized by the insecurity in realizing labor-power against capital’s prerogative to increase surplus labor, and not as a sociological taxonomy for which individuals are organized. It has been observed that Mike Davis’ useful characterization of the phenomenon as a ‘continuum’, rather than as a sharp boundary between the employed and unemployed, is a more suitable description.[19] By defining the surplus proletariat as a continuum, one is capable of grasping the phenomenon as a general dynamic that exists of the capital-labor relation, one which signifies individuals frantically moving along the spectrum of unemployment, underemployment and employment at an unprecedented rate of precarious transitioning. For this, the surplus proletariat expresses the truth of class mobility. The point is to break down a rigid separation between employed and unemployed as if these were static social positions within the economy. The problem of the surplus proletariat is not reducible to the seemingly simple question of who works and who does not, but a dynamic that runs through and constitutes each of these positions. Expulsion from the formal labor markets derives from a contradiction embedded within the wage relation itself. Those suffering from chronic unemployment are part of production as much as they are its product. Unemployment must therefore be grasped as a category of exploitation and not external to it. Additionally, diffuse underemployment translates into both a disciplining mechanism by capital for those that are employed in seemingly stable positions and as a means for lowering the value of labor-power and increasing the rate of exploitation. Contractual workers have to ‘discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population’ (Marx). In this way, there is nothing superfluous about the surplus proletariat. The surplus proletariat is actually a dynamic within the proletariat qua concept. Because of this, it can further be said that, like the objective antagonism of the class relation itself, the structure of surplus proletariat permeates the lives of every individual in differentiated ways and yet, is not reducible to identity. The totality of the surplus proletariat, as it derives from the capital-labor relation and in the imperative to devalue the total value of labor-power, is present within all individuals.[20]

The surplus proletariat at present

The novelty of the production of the surplus proletariat within the present moment can be respectively approached from the tripartite perspectives of labor, capital and state, each of which reveal nuances about the present gap between the supply and demand for labor. Present accessibility to contracting labor markets is wrought with the conditions of a flexibilized workforce and casualized employment contracts to an extent that effectively renders most employed already half unemployed. The activity of the surplus proletariat presupposes its exclusion from the market as a precondition for its entrance. The renewed trumpet of entrepreneurialism, for which anybody can become a teacher, taxi driver or motel manager, is only the language of a labor force intensifying its internal competition. Self-employment, while once appearing as a sign of success, now signals the procession of atomization marching steadfast into utter peril. Further, since the 1990s, those living near or below the poverty line as a result of mediocre labor markets have become increasingly reliant on low-interest rate consumer credit in order to augment the languishing strength of wages.

For all of this, it can be said that the restructuring has qualitatively shifted the proletariat from virtual pauper unto what has been described as its concrete lumpenization.[21] If, during the mid-19^th century, the surplus proletariat consisted in the potential pauperization of the free-laborer, the restructuring of the 1970s-80s has established the concrete realization of the virtual pauper as a permanent condition of the proletariat in its relation to capital. As such, the surplus proletariat refers to the current position of labor-power in its difficulty in confirming and realizing its sociality through – and because of – the wage relation. Further, the antagonistic relations of the surplus proletariat tend to express themselves along gender, racial and generational lines.[22]

These developments within labor markets signal a crisis of the reproduction of the labor force. Indeed, for Marx, writing in the Grundrisse, it is the means of employment that characterizes the surplus proletariat: ‘this should be conceived of more generally, and relates to the social mediation as such through which the individual gains access to the means of his reproduction and creates them.’ Attempts to simply define the surplus proletariat as a specific location within the production process falls short of grasping its dynamic in accordance with a form of social mediation and in relation to the sphere of reproduction. If, in the present moment, capital no longer guarantees the regularity and sufficiency of the wage relation in the reproduction of labor-power, the proletariat enters a crisis at the level of its own reproduction. The surplus proletariat is thereby the expression of capital’s attack on the reproduction of labor-power, a position of stark contrast to postwar social democracy for which stronger wages and larger state welfare expenditure characterized the conditions of exploitation. During this time, capital refused its deal between itself and labor, which had aimed at an integration of labor into the process of accumulation. It can also be said that this rupture in the reproduction of the class relations was a reaction of capital on the cycle of class struggles of the 1960s-70s in which the proletariat put pressure on the preceding wage-productivity deal by succeeding in acquiring massive wage increases and thus raising the costs of the reproduction of labor force.[23] In contrast to this situation, the present expression of the surplus proletariat is the permanent devalorization of labor-power inextricably connected to the depreciation of capital currently accelerating within the crisis. The proletariat of the global slums and ghettos is only the condensed form of this overall crisis of reproduction. This process, in what the late Robert Kurz has referred to as a ‘spiral of devalorization’[24], outlines the contours of an era of lagging growth alongside the proliferation of the surplus proletariat and its crisis of reproduction.[25] The safest prediction is incremental deterioration lasting decades.

As a dynamic of the capital-labor relation, the relative surplus proletariat emanates from the present crisis. Simply invoking the ‘industrial reserve army’ – for which the term reserve and its association with a potential trajectory of implementation no longer captures the conditions of the surplus proletariat – does not reveal much about the present conjuncture – that is, that the growth of the surplus proletariat cannot be understood as an exclusive crisis of labor but indicative of the present limitations of capital accumulation.[26] This crisis accelerates capital to make labor more productive thereby lowering the portion of necessary labor, which means – in Marxian terms – to increase the organic composition of capital. The other side of the coin is that this development is also undermining capital’s own precondition for valorization: human labor force.

Furthermore, any industrialization that has taken place over the last decades – largely stimulated by the liberalization of finance capital – is hardly labor-intensive and employs a proportionately smaller number of proletarians compared to earlier periods and industries of the 20^th century. For instance, when considering the economic growth of the BRICS markets (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), of course it can be observed that in these areas capital accumulation has, as of late, proceeded at quicker rates than those economies that developed at an earlier period. Indeed, these countries, most notably China and India, have seen accelerating growth rates accompanied by considerable geographical shifts in global manufacturing output and employment. However, within these markets and since the 1980s, there is only a slight increase in industrial employment as a portion of the total employment[27], with nonagricultural employment predominantly moving towards service sectors, most notably in Brazil. As a percentage of, for example, China and India’s total workforce, the proportion of manufacturing employment barely approaches 15%. Additionally, in China since the 1990s, there has been a gradual decrease in the number of proletarians active within the production process relative to the total population.[28] Here, despite the fact that there has been expanding industrial operations within China during this period, this has not resulted an automatic increase in the size of its workforce, but rather in its decline. As China thereby loses manufacturing jobs in its older industries, relocating to areas of even greater labor-power devaluation in Southeast Asia (e.g. Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh), the newly emerging industries “have absorbed tendentially less labour relative to the growth of output.”[29] Here, Marx’s description of the latent surplus population bears a noteworthy resemblance to the urbanized and migrating labor force of the Chinese surplus proletariat[30] whose forced expeditions across both countryside and continents – itself the result of the capitalization of agriculture – are plagued by uncertainty.[31]

The global stagnation of the number of industrial workers as a percentage of the total workforce correlates with an expanding low-wage service sectors characterized by the labor flexibility of the surplus proletariat. As such, while the capitalization of emerging markets might reduce the absolute number of poor in these countries, this process predominantly entails the proliferation of low-wage work. Telecommunications and computerization in India might yield higher rates of GDP, but increasing underemployment remains the rule. Further, in the past, the state expenditures of the BRICS countries concealed the reality of an industrialization that is not absorbing a workforce at a rate congruent with the rate of accumulation. These safety nets, which often took the form of subsidies for staple commodities, are now largely dissolving through privatization and austerity.

The main problem for capital in the contemporary crisis could be expressed in the following tautology: Capital is forced to make labor more productive and needs more capital to do so. However, against the historical background of an already very high organic composition, the minimum amount of capital needed to invest in order to receive a certain return of profit is too high. As such, to get more capital needed for investment, capital has to make labor more productive. Because of this tautology or aporia, capital increasingly flees the sphere of production and finds refuge investing in financial markets where it seems easier to acquire profits out of monetary, state treasury, or housing market speculation, etc. This tendency can also be described as an escape from the strict regimentations of the law of value – an escape that can never be, in the end, successful.

The present crisis takes on the appearance of a general devalorization that, besides entailing reconfigured terms of exploitation, elicits fiscal deadlocks resulting from exorbitant deficit spending. The state is at once both the precondition, and result of, conditions of capital accumulation. The present crisis of capital expresses itself as a crisis of the state, which in turn, appears as monetary stimulus, liquidity injection, austerity and, in the end, repression. Police are concentrated in areas emptied of capital. Within this context, state administration of the surplus proletariat corresponds to a globalized geographical zoning of labor forces expected to take on mounting importance in accordance with, for example, massive immigration and refugee flows, as well as an urban and suburban social division of labor.

Through the Second World War, the alleviation of crisis was implemented in the form of a massive destruction and devaluation of capital. Thereafter, the state was primarily geared at stabilizing the crisis by ever-increasing deficit spending, which in turn, secured the Keynesian wage-productivity deal between capital and labor.[32] While this deal would eventually come to a close in the crisis of 1970s, the period of 2007-08 affirmed the frivolity of such an approach in achieving real economic growth. Currently, the function of the state, regardless of its social democratic posturing[33], is continued austerity through which the state lowers its share of the cost for the reproduction of labor force – a policy that inevitably results in more criminalization and repression.[34] The state as a mediating moment of total labor-power devaluation can be most potently witnessed at present within Southern European countries for which creditors compel governments to, for example, reduce the amount of public holidays, overtime rates and severance packages, dissolve collective bargaining agreements, and generally rollback public expenditure on welfare programs, i.e. the indirect wage. Here, the state loses its integrating force as the possibility of political mediation tendentially disappears. It is therefore no coincidence that social struggles in recent years increasingly consist in a direct confrontation with the state.[35] In the past, the state was the stabilization of crisis. However, the Keynesian solution is no longer an option because of state insolvency after having subsidized the private sphere alongside heavy borrowing throughout the postwar period. In the past, the reproduction of the surplus proletariat could be mediated by the revenue of preexisting surplus value distributed through state expenditures and social benefits. In such a scenario, more plausible prior to the economic restructuring of the 1970s, the indirect wage of the surplus proletariat was filtered through the taxation of private enterprises. Now however, the state itself is in crisis and can no longer guarantee the reproduction of labor-power. This inability is an expression of the global devaluation of labor-power, leading to the unrivalled eruption of a generation of surplus proletarians with a bleak future.

The struggle of the surplus proletariat

Against the flippancy of mixed signals, we might now forewarn readers to withhold two concerns that may arise – potential dead-ends which, in essence, express two sides of the same coin: the idealization of labor either in its past glory or in its present volatility. Firstly, the foregoing discussion of the phenomena of surplus proletariat within the present moment is not to be understood as a lamentation on the marginalization of what is often imagined as a classical productive worker with a heavy hand at the bargaining table that may have characterized previous periods. If anything, the present conjuncture and the dynamic of the surplus proletariat signal a poverty of the workerist perspective. The point is not to attempt a restoration of prior conditions of exploitation, but to confront the historical limits of the reproduction of the class relation today. The production of communism is not the glorification of labor but its abolition. The internal opposite of this directionless mourning is the elevation of the conditions of the surplus proletariat into a unique revolutionary subject capable of feats for which others lucky enough to maintain preceding conditions of exploitation are structurally prohibited. The proliferation of riots within the present moment as an addendum to the development of the surplus proletariat does not necessitate a romantic projection that distinguishes an identitarian agent closer to communism than those more fortunate.[36] Even those most satiated can be recalled at their worst.

The dynamic of the surplus proletariat is a dynamic of the fragmentation of the proletariat – that is, a process that reconfigures the total labor force in accordance with the changing conditions of capital and its devaluation of labor-power, effectuating internal transformations to the proletariat as a whole and to its differentiated relations to the production process.[37] As a result, contemporary class struggle is frequently comprised by participants originating from varied backgrounds and experiences, often in conflict with one another. This inter-classism can perhaps most notably be seen in the conflicts surrounding what is on occasion referred to as ‘middle-strata’ and in its angst at sinking into less favorable conditions of exploitation. Its crisis, which includes its appeal to fairer economic distribution, is itself a moment of the totality of the surplus proletariat, i.e. in and through the internal fragmentation of the proletariat. The present problem of the surplus proletariat thereby evokes the question of inter-classism as a dynamic within the contemporary struggles of the proletariat whose fragmentary nature often appears as its own limit.

This problem has often been described as a problem of composition, i.e. as the complexity of unifying proletarian fractions in the course of struggle. Indeed, the content of revolution no longer appears as the triumph of overflowing proletarian class power as it might have during the first half of the 20^th century.[38] Struggles whose site of conflict is less the realm of production, but increasingly the sphere of reproduction, expresses this development. The Arab Spring, Indignados, Occupy, Taksim, Maidan and the heterogeneous riots abroad, for example, have not seen the affirmation of the workers’ identity in conflict with capital, but rather the unavailability of constituting a unifying identity in the dynamics of these movements. The recent racial upheaval against the police in the US, most notably in Ferguson and Baltimore, shares little in common with the employment ambitions of yesteryear. This is further corroborated by the expansion of the surplus proletariat alongside the increase in surplus capital unable to find lasting investment. The workers’ movement no longer provides consistency to class struggle. As such, fragmentation emerges as a new class consistency. Contemporary struggles express themselves less as a unity than as an aggregate of segmented interests sharing various affinities through material reproduction (evictions, food prices, transportation costs), abstract demands (‘corruption’, ‘inequality’, ‘injustice’), or through self-sacrificing identifications with false fragments impersonating the social whole (with either national or religious sects). As a result, what was in the past the centrality of the wage-demand characterizing the struggles of the previous period has become tangential. The surplus proletariat, as a dynamic of class struggle in the present moment, cannot harbor the dreams of a Keynesian class compromise. The class affirmation of the proletariat is perpetually on the defense.

When considering the concept of the surplus proletariat within the context of class struggle, the preceding discussion should have made clear that it is not simply an empirical question of who these groups are in their composition. Contemporary sociological identities are themselves forms of appearance, moments of the totality of the reproduction of the capital-labor relation and therewith in the devaluation of the labor-power commodity presently unfolding through the surplus proletariat. The more important question for communist theory is what the personifications of the category of the surplus proletariat do against who they are – i.e. as an immanently negative force of their own proletarian condition as a class against itself in its crisis of reproduction. The discussion remains open as to how the concrete development of the surplus proletariat, which is at the same time the developing crisis of capital, intensifies the division and fragmentation of the proletariat, and along which lines does it do so within contemporary struggle (e.g. antagonisms between geographical locations, between a skilled and unskilled labor force, through the stigmatizations of age, race and gender, etc.). The concept of the surplus proletariat thereby elicits the more important question of how, within the present moment, the expropriated and exploited class – in spite of its intensifying divisions – can act in and against itself as a class of capital. In this way, the surplus proletariat is simply only the most contemporary appearance of the proletariat itself – one whose essence remains that of being unified in its separation from the means of its own reproduction.

Surplus Club

Frankfurt am Main, Spring 2015

[email protected]

[1] Most notably, ‘[t]he International Monetary Fund has cut its growth forecasts for the global economy on the back of a slowdown in China, looming recession in Russia and continuing weakness in the eurozone.’ <http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/20/imf-cuts-global-economic-growth-forecast>. Additionally, the International Labor Organization ‘forecasts a grim employment picture for the global economy as a whole over coming years.’ <http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/01/21/world-economy-needs-280-million-jobs-in-next-five-years-ilo-says/>. Expectations for Latin America fare no better as the IMF ‘said it expects economic contraction in Venezuela and Argentina and growth of just 0.3 percent in Brazil in 2015, and it also lowered its forecast for Latin American growth in 2016 to 2.3 percent, down from 2.8 percent.’ <http://laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=2370538&CategoryId=12394>. Brazil’s economy in particular nears implosion as ‘economists for the fourth week in a row raised their inflation forecast for this year and lowered their estimate for economic growth.’ <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-26/brazil-economists-raise-2015-cpi-cut-gdp-for-fourth-week-in-row>. Nor is northern Europe immune to slowdown as ‘Sweden’s government cut its economic growth forecasts and predicted it will fail to reach a budget surplus over the next four years.’ <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-20/sweden-cuts-gdp-forecast-as-deficit-seen-stretching-past-2018>.

[2] ‘Chevron Tightens Belt as $40 Billion Makeover Sweeps Oil Sector’. <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-30/chevron-profits-fall-to-lowest-since-2009-as-oil-prices-collapse>.

[3] ‘We Traveled Across China and Returned Terrified for the Economy’. <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-09/we-travelled-across-china-and-returned-terrified-for-the-economy>.

[4] The allegedly ‘stable’ economic boom in Germany is based on the restructuring of the labor market of the last decade that resulted in a significant decrease in the cost for the reproduction of the social labor force. <http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/05/rich-germany-has-a-poverty-problem-inequality-europe>. Additionally, an economy predominantly based on exports to other countries, the purported resilience of the German economy can end very rapidly with the next downturn in the global economy because of its export dependency and low wages. <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/eurocrisispress/2015/03/12/germany-the-giant-with-the-feet-of-clay/>.

[5] ‘Debt mountains spark fears of another crisis’. <http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2554931c-ac85-11e4-9d32-00144feab7de.html#axzz3QuNTKwet>.

[6] ‘Deleveraging, What Deleveraging? The 16th Geneva Report on the World Economy’. <http://www.voxeu.org/article/geneva-report-global-deleveraging>. Southern European countries in particular have seen their debt-to-GDP ratios climb 15% in the last 3 years. ‘Germany faces impossible choice as Greek austerity revolt spreads.’ <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11407256/Germany-faces-impossible-choice-as-Greek-austerity-revolt-spreads.html>. Most notably as of late is China’s debt, which, now at 282% of GDP, has quadrupled since 2007 and is, alongside latent overcapacity, predominantly attributable to an overheated real-estate market. ‘Debt and (not much) deleveraging’. <http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/debt_and_not_much_deleveraging> and ‘How addiction to debt came even to China’. <http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/585ae328-bc0d-11e4-b6ec-00144feab7de.html#axzz3SjqvVqAV>.

[7] ‘Most of the world’s workers have insecure jobs, ILO report reveals’. <http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/may/19/most-of-the-worlds-workers-have-insecure-jobs-ilo-report-reveals>.

[8] ‘The December Jobs Report in 10 Charts’. http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/01/09/the-december-jobs-report-in-10-charts>.

[9] As Marx writes, ‘Die Vermehrung der Produktivkraft der Arbeit und die größte Negation der notwendigen Arbeit ist die notwendige Tendenz des Kapitals.’ (Grundrisse)

[10] Here it is worth emphasizing the relativity of this decline – that is, even if capital quantitatively increases the number of people employed, the general law of capital accumulation posits that it will do so proportionately slower than the overall rate of accumulation. This means that ‘the working population always increases more rapidity than the valorization requirements of capital’, and that ‘in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.’ (Das Kapital Band I)

[11] As Marx writes: ‘Das Arbeitsvermögen kann nur seine notwendige Arbeit verrichten, wenn seine Surplusarbeit Wert für das Kapital hat, verwertbar für es ist. Ist diese Verwertbarkeit daher durch eine oder die andre Schranke gehemmt, so erscheint das Arbeitsvermögen selbst 1. außer den Bedingungen der Reproduktion seiner Existenz; es existiert ohne seine Existenzbedingungen und ist daher a mere encumbrance; Bedürfnisse ohne die Mittel, sie zu befriedigen; 2. die notwendige Arbeit erscheint als überflüssig, weil die überflüssige nicht notwendig ist. Notwendig ist sie nur, soweit sie Bedingung für die Verwertung des Kapitals.’ It should further be emphasized that this forceful compulsion of need satiation is a result of this crisis of the exchange relation: ‘daß es also die means of employment und nicht of subsistence sind, die ihn in die Kategorie der Surpluspopulation stellen oder nicht. Dies ist aber allgemeiner zu fassen und bezieht sich überhaupt auf die soziale Vermittlung, durch welche das Individuum sich auf die Mittel zu seiner Reproduktion bezieht und sie schafft; also auf die Produktionsbedingungen und sein Verhältnis zu ihnen.’ (Grundrisse)

[12] ‘One in Three U.S. Workers Is a Freelancer’ <http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2014/09/04/one-in-three-u-s-workers-is-a-freelancer/>.

[13] ‘Against Sharing’. <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/against-sharing>.

[14] ‘ISIS Paying Off Student Debt to Lure American Recruits’. <http://dailycurrant.com/2015/01/20/isis-paying-off-student-debt-to-lure-american-recruits>.

[15] As Adorno writes: ‘Nominalism is perhaps most deeply allied with ideology in that it takes concretion as a given that is incontestably available; it thus deceives itself and humanity by implying that the course of the world interferes with the peaceful determinacy of the existing, a determinacy that is simply usurped by the concept of the given and smitten with abstractness.’ (Aesthetic Theory)

[16] As Zamora writes, ‘the categories of “the unemployed,” “the poor”, or the “precarious”, are swiftly disconnected from being understood in terms of the exploitation at the heart of capitalist economic relations, and find themselves and their situation apprehended in terms of relative (monetary, social, or psychological) deprivation, filed under the general rubrics of ‘exclusion,’ “discrimination”, or forms of “domination”.’ Zamora, Daniel. ‘When Exclusion Replaces Exploitation.’ <http://nonsite.org/feature/when-exclusion-replaces-exploitation>.

[17] C.f. Gunn, Richard. ‘Notes on Class’. <http://www.richard-gunn.com/pdf/4_notes_on_class.pdf>.

[18] It is for this reason – i.e. the simultaneity of the abstract and concrete – that, hereafter, the category of ‘surplus population’ will be referred to as ‘surplus proletariat’. As Marx notes in the introduction to the Grundrisse, the category of ‘population’ – which presumes society to be a quantitative collection of atomistic individuals – is itself a ‘chaotic’ abstraction from the class relation. ‘Population’ is therefore a convoluted subjectification of a concept which the present text is attempting to emphasize not as an identity but as a dynamic social relation. As for Marx’s own use of the term ‘surplus population’, it should be recalled that his invocation of the category has largely to do with the debate against Malthus and as an argument against overpopulation as a biological necessity. As such, Marx establishes the category to bring attention back to the historical and social determinations of the phenomenon of overpopulation. In a way, it might be said that Marx’s categorial employment of ‘surplus population’ is a sort of détournement of Malthus, i.e. a polemical appropriation of Malthusian categories of classical political economy by inverting their upside down standing. It is for this reason that Marx refers to relative surplus population, rather than absolute surplus population. It remains an open question how seriously one should contend with the ideological force of Malthusian overpopulation theories in the present moment. This is a legitimate inquiry insofar as there implicitly remains Malthusian presuppositions about demographics within sociological discourse that effectively mystifies the historical specificity of labor productivity in the production of surplus populations. A more topical example would be the populism surrounding ecological catastrophe and its adherence to issues of consumption and demographic patterns, rather than to the real subsumption of nature by the form-determinations of value.

[19] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, 2006.

[20] In accordance with the extent to which the capital-labor relation, expressing itself through the surplus proletariat, pervades both relations between individuals as well as through individuals, the following articles describe, in one way or another, the bleak horizons of struggling with the affliction of being recognized only partially by capital: ‘Young people ‘feel they have nothing to live for’’ <http://www.bbc.com/news/education-25559089>. ‘Spanish Suicides Rise To Eight-Year High’. <http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-03/spanish-suicides-rise-eight-year-high>. ‘Is Work Killing You? In China, Workers Die at Their Desks’. http://investmentwatchblog.com/is-work-killing-you-in-china-workers-die-at-their-desks/. ‘The Greek Mental-Health Crisis: As Economy Implodes, Depression and Suicide Rates Soar’. <http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2079813,00.html>. ‘Suicide rates increased with global economic crisis’. <http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/266181.php>. ‘US suicide rate rose sharply among middle-aged’. <http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-suicide-rate-rose-sharply-among-middle-aged>. ‘Banker Suicides Return’. <http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-24/banker-suicides-return-dsks-hedge-fund-partner-jumps-23rd-floor-apartment>.

[21] As Rocamadur from Blaumachen writes, ‘[t]he dangerous classes of the 21st century are not the traditionally defined lumpen-proletariat which, as a permanent fringe of the reserve army of labour, used to live in its own world, and therefore represented from the start an ‘outside’ from the central capitalist relation. The new ‘lumpen-proletariat’ (the new dangerous classes) is encroached by the normality of the wage relation, precisely because the ‘normal’ proletariat is lumpenised. The crisis, on the one hand, causes an abrupt pauperisation of many workers (as is the case in the whole western world), under the burden of increased unemployment/casual employment and debt (loans which they are now unable to repay, which is aggravated by the fact that those who have mortgages cannot always claim benefits to cover their housing costs) or restriction of access to credit. Even more, though, it produces the increased lumpenisation of the proletariat itself—a lumpenisation that does not appear as external in relation to wage labour but as its defining element.’ ‘The Feral Underclass Hits the Streets’. Sic no. 2 (2014).

[22] The suggestion that the dynamic of the surplus proletariat expresses itself through relations of gender, race and generation remains an open question to be pursued in further discussions. Nevertheless, some preliminary remarks might be offered to propel the theorization of the surplus proletariat along said lines: (1) Regarding gender, it might be posited that the surplus proletariat, in its essential entirety, is feminine insofar as ‘the general tendency towards ‘feminisation’ is not the gendering of the sex-blind market, but rather the movement by capital towards the utilization of cheap short-term flexibilised labour-power under post-Fordist, globalized conditions of accumulation, increasingly deskilled and ‘just-in-time’. ‘The Logic of Gender.’ Endnotes no. 3 (2013). Here, it can be said that the production of the surplus proletariat is the feminization of the proletariat itself. Such a line of thought must also examine the re-privatization of reproduction and the actualization of traditional family roles implied by current developments since the crisis. (2) Similarly, processes of racialization can be understood from the antagonistic relations of the surplus proletariat. Through the condition of the surplus proletariat, labor-power is taunted by the limits of its own exchangeability and is left with an unrealized use-value for capital, a hollow materiality meagerly grasping for the social validity of the exchange relation and instead finding recourse in the naturalization of phenotypic differences. Further, it might be said that immigrants and migrant labor are constitutive of informal labor markets themselves and therefore structurally necessary personifications of total labor-power devaluation. As such, a racialized labor force does not refer to a particular segmentation of the proletariat, but is the resulting social instantiation of the dynamic of the surplus proletariat expressed through ethnic, national and phenotypic attributes. C.f. R.L. ‘Inextinguishable Fire: Ferguson and Beyond’ and ‘Burning and/or Demanding. On the Riots in Sweden’. Sic no. 3 (forthcoming). (3) In accordance with the ways in which the essence of the surplus proletariat appears through generational disparity, see R.L. ‘Inextinguishable Fire: Ferguson and Beyond’. Sic no. 3 (forthcoming) and ‘‘Old People are Not Revolutionaries!’ Labor Struggles Between Precarity and Istiqrar in a Factory Occupation in Egypt’. <http://www.focaalblog.com/2014/11/14/dina-makram-ebeid-labor-struggles-and-the-politics-of-value-and-stability-in-a-factory-occupation-in-egypt/>. Marx’s description of the floating surplus population specifically pivots along the ageing process of the labor force. In his time, once workers’ reached a certain age, they were no longer vital enough to carry out the demands of the production process. Today, the situation has changed considerably insofar as capital is now capable of accommodating the elderly within a vast service sector for low-pay and part-time jobs without social benefits or pensions, most notably within the fast-food industries. C.f. ‘Low-Wage Workers Are Older Than You Think’. <http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-older-88-percent-workers-benefit>. ‘In Tough Economy, Fast Food Workers Grow Old’. <http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/tough-economy-fast-food-workers-grow-old-v17719586>.

[23] The rising cost of state welfare expenditure, and its use by proletarians which aimed at decoupling income from wages, was another manifestation of proletarian defiance at the time.

[24] Robert Kurz. ‘Double Devalorization’. <https://libcom.org/library/double-devalorization-robert-kurz>.

[25] On the connection between the depreciating currencies and the migration patterns of the surplus proletariat from the former Eastern Bloc, see ‘Russian Rouble Crisis Poses Threat to Nine Countries Relying on Remittances’. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/18/russia-rouble-threat-nine-countries-remittances>.

[26] A most striking example concerns those instances in which employers propagate policies of connecting wage rates to profit under the laughable rubric of combatting inequality. C.f. ‘Fiat Chrysler CEO Takes Aim at Two-Tier Wages for UAW Workers’. <http://www.wsj.com/articles/fiat-chrysler-ceo-takes-aim-at-two-tier-wages-for-uaw-workers-1421080693>. ‘Fiat Chrysler Sets Bonus Scheme for Italian Workers’. <http://www.thelocal.it/20150417/fiat-chrysler-sets-bonus-scheme-for-italian-workers>.

[27] For a discussion of this issue in relation to the historical obsolescence of the party-form of workers’ organization, see Benanav, Aaron and Clover, Joshua. ‘Can Dialectics Break BRICS?’. South Atlantic Quarterly (2014).

[28] World Bank. ‘Labor force participation rate, total (% of total population ages 15+) (modeled ILO estimate)’.

[29] ‘Misery and Debt’. Endnotes no. 2: Misery and the Value Form (2010).

[30] For a good summary on the origins of the contemporary latent surplus proletariat in China, see ‘Land Grabs in Contemporary China’. <http://libcom.org/blog/china-land-grabs>.

[31] It is also important to remember that the global division of labor, or segmentation of capital accumulation, is naturally also transforming the internal capital-labor dynamics of individual countries. For a long time, China played the role of a country with a low organic composition with great labor-intensive industries. While this is now changing, the industrialization of China in the last decades also expresses the production of surplus proletariat in the rest of the world. Popular narratives about the global economy in the 2000s consistently lamented the capital flight of core country manufacturing jobs eastward, towards areas of greater labor devaluation. The result produced a devaluation of labor-power within manufacturing industries in Western Europe and the US. As such, the proletarianization of the Chinese population – which is at the same time a production of its own the surplus proletariat – is the expression of production of surplus populations in other parts of the globe.

[32] This historical moment produced – in exchange for the immense growth in productivity and the cheapening of commodities deriving from the massive devalorization of capital through the war – increased purchasing power and greater integration of the proletariat into the spheres of consumption. While this was reflected as a relative decrease in the value of labor-power to the total social value produced, it nonetheless occasioned an absolute increase in the real value of wages. This tendency was additionally accompanied by direct subsidies to the productive sphere as well as an increase in the indirect wage of the proletariat, which thereby obtained the luxuries of a slight increase in the price of its labor above the minimum necessary for the reproduction of that labor, as well as various supplements such as loans, credit, and welfare and retirement benefits.

[33] For a useful reflection on the prospects of Syriza in Greece, see Cognord. ‘Is it Possible to Win the War After Losing All the Battles?’. <http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/02/field-notes/is-it-possible-to-win-the-war-after-losing-all-the-battles>.

[34] As a most recent example in Spain, see ‘Spanish government prepares new National Security Law’. <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/02/11/spai-f11.html>.

[35] The permanent feeling of being potentially disregarded by the exploitation process expresses the plight of proletarians who understand themselves as middle class. This is expressed as a political problem and is often construed under the rubric of a global citizenry. Such was a central dynamic of the movement of square occupations in 2011, themselves stimulated by issues of urbanization, state infrastructure and repression. On one hand, the state loses its integrating force, and on the other hand, a need for a new form of political mediation is formulated in the social movements. More generally, it can be said that the wave of struggles from 2008-2012 were distinctly characterized by an encounter with the state as their primary antagonist.

[36] It is for this reason, amongst others, that Marx’s occasional apprehension towards the reactionary character of what he referred to as the lumpen proletariat should be reexamined.

[37] Of course it can be said that there is a normative understanding of the proletariat as always already fragmented by its very nature. This refers to general condition of separated from the means of production and reproduction, as well as the various mediations of value which render the proletariat’s activity an alienated force ‘over and against it’. However, as fundamental as these conditions might be as prerequisites to the exchange relation, these separations tell us nothing about the historical development of the proletariat’s fragmentation within capitalism at the present moment.

[38] This does not of course mean that struggles within the sphere of production are no longer important, but only that they attain a new meaning within a changed historical and social context of class composition. They cannot therefore be understood as a return of the old workers movement. The more important question concerning such struggles is whether or not they entail a moment of negation of the existence of the class relation in all of its mediations.

Cognord, “Changing of the Guards”1

It appeared that the endless saga of the negotiations between the Syriza government and the European lenders had come to an end. After five months of ferocious zigzags, suspense, and fear, a certain deal had been reached. A sense of relief was radiating from the world press, the technocrats, and government bureaucrats. Whether the deal would be a success or not, however, seemed to depend on whom you ask. For those who wanted to ensure that austerity would continue, the deal was certainly to their liking. Curiously, for those who claimed to be on a mission to end austerity, the deal was also favorable. For those who will be immediately affected by the proposed measures, it seemed that not much had changed. The devil is in the details, some say, and many would have preferred those details to get lost amidst the obscure technicalities. Unfortunately for them, however, even Lorca knew that “ […] under the multiplications, the divisions, and the additions […] there is a river of blood.” The relief and satisfaction that the deal brought about could only have been short-lived. In fact, it could only have provided some gratification to the extent that it remained on paper. For as soon as its measures would have been implemented, the party would have been over.

Gentlemen, we don’t need your organization

In the February 2015 issue of the Brooklyn Rail, I described Syriza’s infamous Thessaloniki Program(its veritable pre-election box of promises) as a minimal Keynesian program, with no real chance of reversing the catastrophic consequences of five years of violent devaluation. Back then, to say this was nothing short of blasphemy. An enthusiastic left was roaming around the globe speaking of a radical left, proclaiming an end to austerity, blowing a wind of change. Criticisms of Syriza and its economic program were cast aside as indications of an unrealistic and arrogant ultra-leftist dogmatism.

Today, the very people who supported Syriza in widely read articles and interviews are forced to admit a certain “moderate Keynesianism”2 in the initial program as well as a real distance between that program and today’s agreement. The happy chorus has stopped singing about the “end of austerity/Troika/etc.,” and has made a hard landing onto the desert of the real.3

It seems it took five months to openly admit what was already clear from the February 20th agreement. And while for those who put their trust in Syriza it is somewhat understandable that hope dies last, for those close to the decision-making process of the Greek government, such naiveté is, to say the least, suspicious. For if something has become crystal clear in the last few months, it is that Syriza was not negotiating with European officials; it was actually negotiating the ways through which the continuation of austerity will be accepted by its own members and by those who will be forced to endure its consequences.

Decline and fall of the spectacle of negotiations

From the February 20th agreement in the Eurogroup onwards, it had become clear that Syriza was in no position to implement its Thessaloniki Program. After it became clear that they had no leverage to impose a discussion on debt reduction and an admission of Greece into the Qualitative Easing program of the ECB (European Central Bank),4 Syriza’s last chance was to rely on a show of good will from the Troika (which was kind enough to accept a ridiculous name change into “Brussels Group”), in exchange for social and political stability in Greece’s troubled territory. A clearly misunderstood version of the “extend and pretend” policy that the Eurozone has been following since the beginning of the crisis was seen by Syriza as a possible win-win for everyone: both the Troika and Syriza would pretend that austerity is minimized, while its essential character would remain unchanged.

However, a combination of the orchestrated irritation caused by Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and his inconsistencies, and the more substantial fact that any lenience towards Greece might spiral down towards Eurozone countries with more significant GDPs, meant that this sort of divergence from austerity was out of the question.

The only remaining way to salvage the spectacle of “negotiations” was to engage in a PR campaign which would offer different narratives to different audiences. In this process, what was a series of humiliating compromises in the Eurozone meetings was constantly transformed into a “harsh negotiation” for the Greek audience. Varoufakis became a cause célèbre, whose ability to annoy German Finance Minister Schäuble became a source of national pride in Greece. A mixture of hope beyond proof, disbelief, and the non-existence of political opposition made the task even easier for Syriza’s think-tanks. To top it up, one only needed to throw in a series of incomprehensible figures and decimal points. The self-evident truth of the abandonment of any prospect of minimizing austerity consequences was mystified through a steady production of numbers and statistics which left even experienced “experts” baffled.

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?

In the last few weeks, the “drama” of the negotiations reached its zenith. Back and forth in Brussels, during meetings upon meetings, technical details and strong words were exchanged. It seemed like both sides did their best to uphold a continuously climactic situation, offering cliffhanger after cliffhanger to the addicted spectators. Will a deal be reached? Will we see a Grexit? Is austerity going to continue, or will the “radical left” government of Syriza restore democracy in Europe? How will the markets, these guardians of truth, react?

As soon as one took a closer look at the negotiations, the disagreements and the actual source of this endless conflict, a cloud of boredom descended. Will the fiscal surplus be 0.6%, 0.8%, or 1%? Will Value Added Tax (VAT) be raised by 2% or 3%, and which exact commodities will these increases affect? Will parametric measures equal 2% or 2.5% of GDP? And what about administrative measures? Will there be an ESM-ECB debt swap?

The ease with which both Syriza and the Troika threw around these numbers was nothing but an indication of their contempt for their actual meaning. For what was there to see behind these numbers but imaginative variations which denoted tax increases, direct and indirect wage and pension cuts, and privatizations? How could one possibly miss the accord between the “radical left” and “neoliberal Europe” in their discussions about the need to modernize, to make the economy competitive, to perform a series of structural reforms that, as we were informed by Mr. Varoufakis, are essential for Greece to “stand once again on its own feet”? Can someone really remain confused after the announcement that paying the (hated and formerly to be abolished by Syriza) property tax of ENFIA was “the patriotic duty of Greek citizens”?

The narrative chosen for the internal audience of Greece in order to transform apples into oranges was not only based on the “creative ambiguity” of the Finance Minister. On the side, the PR hacks of Syriza started cultivating the idea that the lenders were treating them so unfairly that not a single unilateral law can be passed by Greek parliament without the approval of the Brussels Group. And thus, in a simple twist, collective bargaining, the increase of the minimum wage, and other measures aimed at tackling the “humanitarian crisis” were put on ice and delegated to a distant future.

To a certain extent, this intransigence of the Troika was, of course, evident. But it was also clear that Syriza selectively used this fact as a useful alibi. For a lot of people failed to understand how, while any measure that was supposed to relieve impoverished proletarians was blocked by the Troika’s intransigence, this never stopped Syriza from making long-term economic deals with Greece’s most important capitalists.

How can Syriza’s members and fervent supporters explain, for example, the recent handing out of lucrative public works like waste management to Bobolas’s company Ellaktor?5 Or maybe offer some reasonable justification why Bobolas’s contract to financially exploit the highway tolls was extended to forty-five years? Are we really meant to swallow the idea that the reason behind the new agreement between the Attica local municipality and Siemens (a company under investigation by Syriza’s government for money laundering and corruption) was simply that the deal was “already at an advanced level” and could not be stopped? Last but not least, we would be really interested to hear someone explain (in radical-left fashion, please) the statement by deputy Finance Minister Nantia Valavani that any increase in the taxation of wealthy ship-owners runs against the Greek Constitution.

What was initially only felt as a glitch in the screen of the “first-ever-left-government” soon became a inevitable conclusion. Syriza’s government had decided that its allegiance rested not with those who believed that austerity would stop, but with those (inside Greece and in Europe) who were afraid that a left-wing government might prove unable to implement the “necessary” restructuring that austerity is meant to deliver.

A brief look at the language chosen by Greek officials in the course of the “negotiation” reveals as much. Moving away from the abolition of the Troika, the reduction of debt, the series of immediate measures to deal with the “humanitarian crisis,” the Newspeak of Varoufakis was indicative of their self-understanding and selling point:

A common fallacy pervades coverage by the world’s media of the negotiations between the Greek government and its creditors. The fallacy, exemplified in a recent commentary by Philip Stephens of the Financial Times, is that “Athens is unable or unwilling—or both—to implement an economic reform program.” Once this fallacy is presented as fact, it is only natural that coverage highlights how our government is, in Stephens’s words, “squandering the trust and goodwill of its Eurozone partners.

But the reality of the talks is very different. Our government is keen to implement an agenda that includes all of the economic reforms emphasized by European economic think tanks. Moreover, we are uniquely able to maintain the Greek public’s support for a sound economic program.

Consider what that means: an independent tax agency; reasonable primary fiscal surpluses forever; a sensible and ambitious privatization program, combined with a development agency that harnesses public assets to create investment flows; genuine pension reform that ensures the social-security system’s long-term sustainability; liberalization of markets for goods and services, etc.

So, if our government is willing to embrace the reforms that our partners expect, why have the negotiations not produced an agreement?6

Inside Greece, however, the narrative was strangely different. Syriza was proclaiming that it would never cross its “red lines” and would not agree to a program that ignores its mandate, while it started circulating the notion that the aim of the Troika was to bring down the government. This spectacle of a government strongly committed to fulfilling its pre-electoral promises (repeated extensively by the foreign press) was in stark contradiction with the fact that that government had entirely abandoned them, but it did serve a purpose: Syriza’s support increased, while it skilfully pre-empted any ridicule of the “negotiation” process. Interestingly, the Brussels Group and interested parties played along with this narrative. Article after article and statement after statement highlighted the unwillingness of the Syriza government to fulfill its obligations to the lenders, its fragile commitment to the “necessary” reforms, its denial of restructuring.7 When these explanations appeared to lose their effectiveness, the go-to-villain was ready at hand: Syriza’s internal opposition.

There is really no other way to explain the latest stage of “negotiations” than as a veritable piece of theatre, meant to convince both sides (and the public glued to the screens) that there is such a thing as a “negotiation”—even though its exact characteristics are somewhat slippery. The roles were interchangeable: sometimes it was Syriza who raised the flag of no-compromise; in another case, the “negotiations” were torpedoed by the IMF, which curiously echoed Syriza’s (long-abandoned) demand for a debt restructuring as a prerequisite for any deal. And when in May Syriza came up with a forty-seven page proposal officially declaring their will to continue with austerity, the negotiations collapsed after Eurogroup counter-proposals demanded further cuts at a level not ever demanded in the last five years of non-negotiated austerity.8 Notions like irrationality and absurdity were hard to keep contained.

Post mortem ante facto

For the past weeks, spectators found themselves trapped in a “groundhog day” experiment: every Eurogroup meeting was announced as “the meeting to end all meetings,” every inability to reach a conclusion was seen as a straight path to Grexit, every time the “markets” reacted negatively to the continued instability … and every single time, the conclusion was a pre-recorded message which proclaimed that “progress has been made, but a lot of work is still needed.”

In this race to the finish, and despite the nonsensical comments, it became clear that what was at stake was merely the ability of Syriza to pass further austerity measures as either a victory or an inevitability. Or both. When it started to surface that Syriza’s own proposal would not be easily accepted by all its members (and, perhaps more importantly, by those who would pay for it), stronger means were employed. The ECB joined the dance, threatening a cut of ELA funds, a move that would force the Greek government to impose capital controls (and essentially pave the way for Grexit), while a variety of European officials started proclaiming that a possible Grexit would not have the devastating results that people think.9

Whether this was a conscious decision or not is slightly beyond the point. But the result of this spectacle of absurd intransigence on behalf of the Troika produced a very specific outcome: Syriza found itself in a position to present the basis of its forty-seven-page proposal as the “only realistic ground for any negotiation,” while violently rejecting the (absurd) counter-proposals. This portrayal of Syriza as actually defending “red lines” (both internally and externally), while accepting further austerity, seems to have broken the spell. For the first time, all interested parties seem to agree that a deal has been reached and can be signed by all.

At the moment (this was written on June 28th), all eyes are now on the question whether Syriza will manage to pass this proposal in parliament. Some of Syriza’s own ministers and MPs, have publicly declared that the latest deal is in fact worse than the one the previous government rejected, and proclaim that they will refrain from voting it in. It is debatable whether Syriza will actually manage to convince its “rebels” that the deal is a victory and an inevitable outcome of the “negotiations,” let alone make them adopt an approach that says that this deal “buys Syriza time to focus on the defeat of neoliberal policies.” But here is the catch: this does not change much.

If Tsipras believes that the agreement will not pass in parliament, it is very likely that he will call for elections. At the moment, reasonable polls put Syriza well ahead of any other party, and obviously in a position to gain an overwhelming majority. As a result, elections at the moment would only help Syriza consolidate its position and, more importantly, form a government with the explicit and democratically verified mandate to[…] sign the previous agreement. And this time without any internal opposition.

The only problem with this whole saga lies elsewhere. The agreement signed (either now or after a new election) will impose crippling taxation; it will reduce pensions; it will proceed with privatizations; in short, it will aggravate the very reasons why Greece has been in turmoil (in one way or another) for the last five years. Looking beyond the insignificance of political games and spectacular “negotiations,” the agreement that Syriza wishes to implement might make its European counterparts happy, but does nothing to stop or even minimise the actual crisis and its social consequences. What the last five months have shown is only that the “extend and pretend” policy works well inside the Eurozone. But its troubled times are far, very far from being over.

Update (July 2 [2015])

Just when a deal seemed finally to have been reached between Syriza’s government and the Troika, all hell broke loose. Negotiations broke down, Greece defiantly rejected the Troika’s latest proposal and on June 27th Tsipras announced that a referendum is to be held on July 5th, which many have (mis)interpreted as a referendum on whether Greece will remain in the Eurozone or not. To top it all, banks were closed (until the referendum) and capital controls were put in place forbidding money transfers abroad and limiting daily withdrawals to €60 per day.

As I explained in the article, a deal of this sort would have been very difficult to pass. And this is exactly what Merkel herself hinted to on June 25th, just before everyone was about to sign, when she proclaimed that the real problem is whether it will be signed off on by the Greek parliament (i.e. whether Tsipras can guarantee the compliance of his own party). At the moment, it became quite clear that this was not very likely.

In what can only be explained as the troika giving a (risky yet) helping hand to Tsipras, the signing of this deal was sabotaged by the last-minute addition of a number of inexplicable measures that Syriza had already rejected (while incorporating a series of harsh austerity measures in its own forty-seven-point proposal). Suddenly, Syriza landed back in the seat of a defiant, left-wing government and the Troika appeared once again as an intransigent, neoliberal evil lender.

On the morning of June 27th people woke up to meet a Syriza reminiscent of its pre-election bravado: defiant, drawing red lines that will-not-be-crossed, denouncing European anti-democratic procedures. Only difference, for those who cared to notice, was that this time round, Syriza’s “red lines” included an explicit continuation of austerity with pension cuts, new taxes, and privatizations. Varoufakis had used Syriza’s continued public support as an important selling point. But it looked like this was not entirely ensured.

The announcement of the referendum seems to have the purpose of ensuring this “public support.” And though everyone appeared to be taken by surprise by this development, a closer look at what is at stake reveals quite a lot. The question of the referendum is whether Greek citizens approve of or reject the proposal of the Institutions (Troika) made on June 25th. Not Syriza’s counter-proposal, not a previous Troika proposal (there have been many), nothing of the last five months. Now this means very specific things.

A “yes” vote is quite clear-cut. It essentially means that the majority of the Greek population is willing to allow the Troika to continue shaping its economic policies, with the government reduced to its previous role of simply and hastily ratifying the already-made decisions. A “no” vote, on the other hand (which is what Syriza is propagating), is not as clear. It includes those who wish a Grexit; those who want to continue negotiations; those who would accept an “honorable compromise” with slightly less austerity, and a whole number of others that fall somewhere in between these categories.

Now if a “yes” answer prevails, Syriza will resign (they have already announced that much), since while they will respect the democratic decision of the referendum, they are unwilling to be the ones to implement its consequences. Thus, and most probably, a temporary coalition government will be formed (most likely with the participation of New Democracy, PASOK, and Potami) who will then be charged with implementing the harsh austerity that the Troika’s latest deal included. In the meantime, Syriza can enjoy a position of a very sizeable official opposition, eat popcorn, and wait for the temporary government to announce elections a few months down the road (with Syriza’s victory a most probable outcome). If a “no” answer prevails, Syriza is more or less given a free hand to interpret the result as it sees fit. It can push for a Grexit and a return to the drachma (though they have explicitly said this is not what they want), it can restart negotiations (either from their own forty-seven-point program or from scratch), it can make use of “creative ambiguity” to reach some other deal.

In short, the situation seems to be a win-win scenario for Syriza, something that has not escaped the attention of the main opposition parties which, after trying (and failing) to get the referendum cancelled, are now engaged in a vicious (and mostly hyperbolic) propaganda war which results in stark polarization of Greek society and the adding of votes to the “no” side.

One might chose to believe that European counterparts were genuinely surprised by these developments or not. In any case, their reaction has so far been rather conciliatory: the non-payment of the IMF was officially not treated as a sovereign default, capital controls were not interpreted as a direct path to Grexit, and they seem awfully pre-occupied to ensure everyone that they will do their best for Greece to remain in the Eurozone. The only exception seems to be Germany, whose go-to narrative in relation to the Greek crisis seems to have backfired on them. The constant propaganda that lazy Greeks are being fed German hard-earned money, without committing to any of the reforms and their obligations, has led many in Germany to wish for Greece to be kicked out of the Eurozone. Useful as this fairy-tale might have been in the past, it now appears to have the opposite effect. And Merkel might soon have to come clean and explain that, in fact, Germany will lose its money and start paying for this crisis only if Greece exits the Eurozone.

Cognord

13 July 2015

TH, Remarks on “Changing of the Guards”

1. The insufficiency of the notion of a purely spectacular negotiation.

If we are to follow the machiavelian understanding of a staged negotiation, we are unable to understand what our comrade describes:

And when in May Syriza came up with a forty-seven page proposal officially declaring their will to continue with austerity, the negotiations collapsed after Eurogroup counter-proposals demanded further cuts at a level not ever demanded in the last five years of non-negotiated austerity.10

If the continuation of austerity in Greece was the aim, then why was this proposal rejected? Syriza had already capitulated, and this was just a proposal, the 47-pages document could have become a 55-pages one without problem. European capital, and German capital in particular, would have never been able to even dream of such a chance to apply austerity in a ravaged country with a maximum of popular tolerance.

2. The specificity of the current Greek situation.

Understanding Syriza as just another Left to do the dirty job as usual is underestimating both the global crisis and the destruction of the Greek economy and society. Of course, a Jedi has to do what a Jedi has to do, and we are in a position to know a thing or two about any would-be manager of a piece of world capitalism with some traces of a human face. But radical critique has to understand what is new, different, specific, and how all this fits in the local and global inter-class and intra-class configuration. It cannot risk to be understood as leftist denunciation as usual.

3. What motivates the different capitalist forces in their attitude towards Greece?

In such times, globalization does not warrant that every disagreement and every confrontation is fake. There’s some real history going on, not everything is a staging. Radical critique cannot accept to rest on conspiracy theories, although some “conspiracies” do exist. History is not the deployment of a given script.

a.

The explanation by a German greed to reap as much as possible and as quickly as possible from a battered Greek economy is rather out of the question. Everybody, including the IMF and any even remotely respectable economist, knew from the very start that the Greek debt was unsustainable and was never going to be repaid in full. As for real assets, German or other capitalists could easily get what they wanted if they put a somehow decent price.

b.

The explanation by the need to impose German discipline on the rest of the Eurozone is much more plausible, but one should also see what it means. The lesson was already harsh, and the spreads on Italian, Spanish, etc., bonds were bound to rise in case of a Grexit. Did Germany intend to be more generous in such a case? Sheer sizes make this very relative. There can be no doubt that Germany intended to firmly impose its domination in Europe. However, there is also strong evidence that it has also methodically pushed for a Grexit. These last days it was revealed that Schäuble had already proposed a consensual Grexit to the then Greek Minister of Finance Venizelos back in 2011, and even after the ‘agreekment’ he is continuing to do so. A final agreement is not that certain.

c.

A possible explanation could be that Syriza had to be utterly crushed, so that any thought of deviating from the one and only German TINA (or German-European, but let’s say German to make things easier) would be banished for ever. This is true, but the scenario of a ‘very brief passage in time’ for an anti-austerity Left had already been thwarted, as Syriza retained an immense popularity, much stronger than their election score. Why not sit back and watch Syriza dwindle through the application of the very austerity it had been elected to fight? An answer to this question has pointed to the imminent Spanish elections, but the acceptance of austerity by Syriza would have been a sufficient sign to any Spanish anti-austerity manager of capitalism.

d.

The German push for a Grexit contained of course an element of propaganda. The bailout of, especially, German and French banks exposed to Greek debt through the public debt of Greece in 2010, presented the advantage of being able to blame everything on lazy Greeks, not on financial speculation. The same could be conveniently said about rising spreads in Southern Europe or about the recapitalization of Northern European (especially German and Swiss) banks through the draining of Southern European deposits. It is however to be noted that propaganda is never the decisive element. What Germany was pushing for was a compact Eurozone under its sway (I am told that recently there has been much talk in Germany about such a ‘compact’ Eurozone). Which means, among others, a stronger euro than in the case of a loose Eurozone. Some years ago German employers were pushing cries of alarm when the euro was rising compared to the dollar. This year their association declared themselves in favour of a Grexit. The core question is no more a weak euro to boost German exports. A strong and stable euro seems to be more desirable. This makes it cheaper to buy real assets in ailing countries (now Greece, tomorrow Italy, Spain, and so on). But it also means a strengthening of the position of the euro as an international reserve currency. Who controls this, can attract financial placements from all over the world, pay minimal to negative rates of interest on their bonds and, if need be, create money at will to dominate the world and impose a large part of global capital’s devalorization on others. Not bad, except that there is an incumbent.

e.

How can one possibly explain repeated, and continuing, interventions by the US administration in favour of some German leniency for a Greece run by Syriza’s government? This came as a surprise to everybody in Greece, and the Greek Vice-Premier Dragasakis admitted yesterday that there would probably have been no agreement without US pressure. This also seems to fit well with an ever bolder attitude by France and Italy during the crucial last week of negotiations (not to mention the spectacular U-turn by Sarkozy in just one week – from Grexit, yes, absolutely, to Grexit, no way). An explanation for the American attitude, popularized by the media, is geopolitics. True, but the US could have insisted on Greece’s continuing membership in the EU and NATO and not bother much about the Eurozone. Another explanation, is American nervousness about the bursting of the [global] financial bubble. Also true, but not enough in itself. On the one hand, the Greek problem was known to everybody and discounted in the markets by the day. This is not usually the way bubbles burst. On the other hand, the financial size of the Greek problem was quite big, but not much compared to a similar situation in, say, Italy, not to mention the colossal size of the world market for derivatives. I think that one has to take account of what I mentioned about international reserve currencies. It is improbable that the US would refrain from fighting the emergence of a compact Europe under German control.

4. How are class relations reconfigured at the level of politics and ideology?

What is the mass behind Syriza in Greece, at least up to the agreement? Sociological insight will not do, whereas [Zaschia Bouzarri]’s remarks about the concrete forms of the decomposition of workers’ identity are more than relevant. Greece is of course not representative of the situation in other countries, but, being an extreme case of a ravaged ex-advanced country, it is useful in showing the shape of things to come. Partisan discourse has been eroded to an unprecedented extent. You can talk to almost anybody, including traditional right-wing voters, about almost anything. You can hardly tell a public servant from a (waged, semi-waged, unwaged, would-be waged or unemployed) worker or a pensioner or a shopkeeper, all united by a sense of a common situation, a common precarity, a common ruin. Voices are low, faces are serious, there is much discussion, confusion, schizophrenia, despair, and much, much anger. The surprising result of the referendum had little to do with hope or conviction; it was essentially anger against fear, and anger largely dominated. “The bastards are ruining our lives, we are not going to say thank you”.

I am seriously tempted to term this a meta-people. Little to do with what we used to call ‘people’, petty existences going after a petty survival, little to do with citizenism, with the affirmation of rights; it’s all about survival, about a community of distress, about an anger against the corrupted, the plunderers of public wealth, the tax-evading plutocrats, and what else. It is impossible to foresee anything, not least because of the actual globalization into the mega-capitalist crushing-pot. However, I cannot stop thinking of this meta-people as a possible foreshadowing of the proletariat to come: not in itself, not for itself, but against ‘them’.

TH

16 July 2015

A Preliminary Response to TH’s Remarks

The article “Changing of the Guards” was written for Brooklyn Rail, after the request of Paul Mattick, and was the third part of a series on articles on Syriza. It does not stand on its own, but is a continuation – and thus quite often an expansion or addition – of points made in previous articles. So, some of the incompleteness that TH. identifies is addressed in previous articles. But, more importantly and beyond that, these are newspaper articles and not theoretical texts. I never claimed that any of them are complete, or that they aim at providing a consistent analysis of the current state of the capitalist crisis – in Greece or elsewhere. In the best of cases, my aim was to provide an expose of what is contradictory, non-sensical, illusory and false in Syriza’s proclamations and policies, in a more or less journalistic way.

Having said that.

The overall argument (in all these articles) is not that the “confrontation” between Syriza’s government and the Troika is “fake”. Rather, I asserted that the “conflict” between Syriza and the Troika was and remains at a spectacular level, which mystifies and politicises their differences in such a way as to present them as substantial. I stand by the assertion that opposing versions of capitalist restructuring are not essentially contradictory, or at least, they represent a contradiction at a level which is spectacular. From the point of view of proletarian subversion, the content of the disagreements, conflicts and breaking points of the “negotiations” is insignificant. As I wrote,

The ease with which both Syriza and the troika threw around these numbers was nothing but an indication of their contempt for their actual meaning. For what was there to see behind these numbers but imaginative variations which denoted tax increases, direct and indirect wage and pension cuts, and privatizations?

For me, this was the content of the “negotiations”. The percentage of VAT, the exact fiscal surplus, the specific amount to be gained from privatisations. In other words, austerity as the common ground, its extent and scope being the point of divergence. Did Syriza and the Troika disagree at this level? It seems so. Does it matter? Only if someone decides to prioritise certain forms of austerity over others.

For this reason, my claim was that the only real content of the “negotiations” between Syriza and the Troika (since February 20th), and since the option of Grexit was rejected by Syriza, was the way in which further austerity would be accepted in Greece without causing a social explosion. This became the essential selling point of Syriza, mirrored in Varoufakis’ quoted passage that Syriza is “uniquely able to maintain the public’s support for a sound economic program”. It does not take much to understand what a “sound economic program” was for Syriza.

The forms through which I expressed this, and the language used, could possibly be misunderstood as the expose of a “given script”, and as such, a “conspiracy theory”. This might well be the case (my English writing skills are limited), but sometimes this interpretation is simply a matter of perspective. Claiming that Syriza is in chorus with an aim of capitalist restructuring could be interpreted as implying a “conspiracy”. Or, it could be seen as a way of rejecting the notion that different understandings of capitalist restructuring are in fact actual contradictions.

TH. claims that “radical critique has to understand what is new, different, specific, and how all this fits in the local and global inter-class and intra-class configuration. It cannot risk to be understood as leftist denunciation as usual.” From the very first text on the Brooklyn Rail, I attempted to stir clear of the typical leftist denunciations of Syriza and tried instead to take Syriza’s proclamations at face value and then explain their inconsistencies. Maybe this was not successful, but this was the aim. In contrast to other radical left texts that I read (which more or less rejected Syriza merely for being part of the State, for being social-democratic etc), I avoided ideological denunciations. I accept that I did not write texts which explained “what is new, different, specific and how all this fits in the local and global inter-class and intra-class configuration”; I admit that this certainly sounds like a worthy undertaking, but – as was once said – “I don’t feel I am up to the task”. Nor do I see my role in this moment to do such a thing. But I don’t think that any analysis which does not live up to these standards is reduced to leftist denunciation.

In reference to the concrete example that TH mentions in relation to Nantia Valavani’s statement it is, I think, again misunderstood. The question (“I would be interested to hear someone explain …”) is clearly addressed to supporters of Syriza, who kept proclaiming that – at least – Syriza is interested in a certain amount of “social justice”. Taxing the ship owners in Greece was part of Syriza’s pre-election campaign. The abandonment of this “promise” with the excuse that it runs against the Constitution is mere nonsense. But what is the key point here? Do I care if ship owners are taxed or not? Not in the slightest. Do I find this abandonment of a pre-election promise scandalous? That is also nonsense. If anything it is a simple indication that Syriza’s strategy was to promise everything to everyone, a strategy that was abandoned as soon as they became government and got busy establishing and normalising relations with representatives of capitalist accumulation in Greece. There was no hint in my article that Valavani is “on the payroll of ship owners”. That, I grant you, would be a “leftist denunciation”. And though I would not deny such a possibility, I would deny any interest in it. I also fail to see in what way my article gives the impression that the Greek mess is a “nice little crisis as usual”.

TH. points at a supposed contradiction between claiming that the “negotiations” between Syriza and Troika were “staged” (see second paragraph of my response for that) and the fact that Syriza’s 47 page proposal was rejected. But what he is ignoring in this case is what I provide as the undercurrent of these negotiations: the difficulty of making austerity acceptable in Greek Parliament (and by extension, to the Greek public). When the 47 page proposal was made, and it looked that a deal could be reached on its basis, Merkel’s response to the widespread enthusiasm on all sides was indicative: “First, this deal has to be passed by Greek Parliament”. This was the problem of the 47 page proposal. To maintain a spectacle of “harsh negotiations” (which was Syriza’s only selling point internally), the intransigence of the Troika had to be constantly re-asserted. And it was.

This was in effect the aim of the referendum too. It has become pretty obvious that Tsipras was actually expecting (and hoping) that the “Yes” vote would win in the referendum, as this would clear them from being responsible for imposing austerity. The stage was set: the mass media in Greece were clear in their proclamations that a “No” vote would mean that Satan would take charge, and there was not a single European official who did not add that a “No” vote would directly mean Grexit. But the result surprised everyone (Tsipras and the Troika) and their actions after were clearly to pretend like it never happened. This – and the signing of the eventual deal – has brought Syriza into a very fragile position, but given that neither Syriza nor Europeans see any credible opposition at the moment, this fragile position (with a possible coalition in the horizon if Syriza’s “rebels” gain momentum) is translated as a stable scenario. And this could well be the case.

The overall question on what exactly is the aim behind the treatment of the Greek economy by Eurozone officials is probably the key question, but at the same time the most difficult to answer. The most possible scenario that I can come up with is that a process of harsh devaluation will reduce labour costs to such a degree that the Greek economy might become competitive vis a vis other Balkan economies and not other Euro countries. This does not explain everything that has happened, but I have to admit that I find other explanations (such as “Germany’s need to discipline” or the notion of an attempt to “humiliate Syriza”) as vague and very problematic. To say the least, they “psychologise” the actions of centres of capital accumulation.

I agree that Germany’s quasi-open call for Grexit is partly propaganda and partly realistic. But I would explain this divergence between the two as an expression of the internal contradictions of Germany’s self-understanding. I have failed to find any credible account on how a Grexit (and its consequences) can be contained, and in this respect, I find the statement of the head of the Bundesbank (that a Grexit will have tremendous economic consequences for the German economy) more credible than the war cries of Schauble.

My concluding remark in the article is pointing at the same process. The underlying argument is that parts of the German political and economic class have fallen for the propaganda that they have created in relation to Greeks (“German taxpayers have been paying too much for those lazy Greeks”), to the extent that they end up believing it. The reality however (and I am convinced that key players are well aware of that) is that German taxpayers have not paid a single cent so far and they would only be forced to pay something in the event of a Grexit. The logic is quite simple: Germany’s gives loans (not gifts) to Greece that are repaid with considerable interest rates. Furthermore, the continuing crisis and instability means that German (and other) bond yields and borrowing costs are extremely low, something that allows them to save billions of euros (“One study, by German insurance giant Allianz, has calculated that Berlin saved 10.2 billion euros in 2010-2012 because of lower borrowing costs, as yields on its 10-year bonds fell from 3.39 percent to 1.18 percent now.”). On the other hand, it is also pretty clear that a Grexit would mean an immediate non-payment of Greece’s obligations, something that would mean the immediate loss of billions of euros, an amount far beyond the ridiculous 14.4 billion euros that Germany has already put aside in provisions linked to the euro zone debt crisis.

In relation to the US involvement, I fail to see where TH. bases his claim that the US has been lenient towards the Greek government. First of all, signing the deal yesterday (with the help of the Americans, as Dragasakis said) indicates no leniency whatsoever, as the deal signed is far worse than anything signed so far in Greece. Secondly, the position of the IMF (as a key representative of US interests in the eurozone) might appear as rather puzzling, but only at first sight. IMF involvement in the Troika has a clear deadline (March 2016). The continuation of its involvement might well be in the IMF’s interests, but in order to ensure that, they need to impose some debt haircut, not because they align themselves with Syriza, but simply because IMF rules forbid intervention and bailout agreements in countries that have unsustainable debts. The recent DSA of the IMF makes it clear that Greek debt is uviable and that if it is not cut, it will remain unsustainable and would thus preclude IMF continued participation in the program. And it is only through continued participation that the IMF (or else, the US) can ensure their involvement in Eurozone politics.

Last point concerning the mass that supports Syriza. While I would not deny the “decomposition of the workers’ identity”, I would refrain from reaching concrete conclusions of its implications at the moment, let alone come up with a narrative that sees a unification “by a sense of a common situation, a common precarity, a common ruin”. At the moment, the only thing we can say with some certainty is that a very large percentage of the Greek population (I would claim around 60%, in accordance to the referendum results) has simply had enough of austerity and can no longer tolerate it. This does not tell us what they would like instead, but it does point –negatively – at what they cannot live with anymore. For me, the overall situation in Greece indicates that what we should expect in the immediate future is an attempt by political parties (new or old) to take advantage of this huge, un-represented, gap. But it is clear that this (attempt at) representation will take the form of an open support for Grexit and a return to the drachma. The illusion that people’s lives can improve in any way within the eurozone has received its final blows with Syriza’s agreement. So the next “cycle of struggles” in Greece will most definitely take the form of a struggle between those will try to represent the “drachma party” and the rest. What proletarians will do in this context, however, remains to be seen.

Cognord

17 July 2015

Some Thoughts on Cognord’s Text and TH’s Response

[…] How can a ‘people’ avoid being national and citizenist? I have not been in Greece in recent years to be able to clearly know what you mean.11 When I go back I notice a lot of destitution, physical and mental poor health and of course anger, which is, however, very often mis-directed (racism, frantic attempts to recover from ‘national humiliation’)… What has changed in ‘people’s’ discourse since the squares? That’s a very interesting question and I would like to know more.

Some more thoughts:

Having read Cognord’s texts, as well as his response to TH, I think his reassertion of his approach (to expose Syriza’s inconsistencies or manipulations) clarifies what I have a problem with. While his texts point out inconsistencies that should alarm any ‘believer’, I feel like this approach reduces things to the level of personalities and decision-making. Tsipras said this, Varoufakis said X and did Y, they gave in and they did not live up to their programme, and then they wanted to implement reforms anyway. But why did they do that? Would everything have been different if Syriza were real defenders of the interests of workers? There are certain limits once a self-proclaimed radical finds oneself as head of state, and these are the limits of capitalist reproduction. This is not because people’s personalities become corrupt by power, but because the state plays this very specific role. Example: the state has to manage the pension system, when there are no funds because they were spent on haircuts and debts, and because unemployment is 30%, so they decide to raise the pension age. Perhaps some expected Syriza to turn Greece into Cuba or to print money without currency reserves. The left wing of Syriza would indeed want Greece to become something like Cuba. But would that make life easier for proletarians or would it be even more disastrous? I am pretty sure I am not saying something new here that Cognord would not have thought about already, so then, what is then the point of this criticism? What are its implications and what conclusions does it draw? I feel as if Cognord is more angered by Syriza politicians than he is angered by the fact that it is now clearer than ever that the suffering for workers, unemployed, poorer pensioners in Greece has no hope of abating even slightly, regardless of what any Greek politician will do, and also, which is worse, regardless of how much they struggle. Yes, we knew that demands were asystemic, but I think things are even worse. Even the most defensive and modest of demands are asystemic, which means a relentless and very rapid worsening of life, the scale of which is unprecedented. We imagined communisation as destructive, but now it seems that even the slightest struggle has a ‘scorched earth’ scenario hanging over its head.

There is also one inaccuracy, by the way, in the introductory paragraph of Cognord’s recent text with the reference to the ‘minimal Keynesian’ programme: Lapavitsas, a Syriza MP, called the Syriza programme ‘mild Keynesianism’ ever since before the elections (check out his BBC interview). It is pretty clear that Syriza is an inconsistent party anyhow, but I don’t think it helps the analysis to depict all of them as self-interested cynics who colluded with EZ politicians to impose more austerity on purpose. This is not because I am convinced they are good people, but because a personalising analysis would suggest that, if they were more honest, then better things would come. But this is blatantly not the case. If they were more honest, they would either not have gained power at all, or they would simply resign because their programme is impossible, and Samaras would be back in power. These were the options. You can call me ‘reformist’, but I would not want a return of the ND govt, until perhaps Syriza manages to become absolutely identical to it, i.e., a government of outspoken racists. And I think that the passing of the laws to grant citizenship to 2nd generation immigrants, and of civil partnership for gay couples, however measly and limited, have practical and symbolic importance for these groups in a context where racism and homophobia, including the scale of abuse, have been on the rise. Yes, all the options are really dark, but some are downright hellish. That is why I see no point in either cheering for and excusing Syriza or vilifying them.

The real question is, in my view, what are the options now for class struggle in Greece? Because it is now clear that no matter what struggles do they will be crushed by a combination of heavy policing and currency blackmail, which was already the case, but now it has all become far more blatant. It’s easy to vote ‘no’, but total economic collapse is frightening in reality, and not only for those in power. The response to the absence of money is mass looting, of course, but can this really go further, especially if it only takes place in one country? We have seen again and again how quickly and violently social order is restored after such outbreaks. The other response to lack of money is alternative currencies and solidarity economies. We know the limits of these also. The most depressing thing for me though is the lack of significant mobilisations anywhere else in Europe except Spain (and these under the Podemos banner, which might mean they are about to be weakened).

Ady Amatia

17 July 2015

Second Response by Cognord

In my response to TH, I tried to make it clear that I wrote the 3 articles for Brooklyn Rail with a specific aim in mind: to counteract the enthusiasm of the Left about Syriza, to address an audience (as I understood it) in the US and the level of debates around Syriza over there, and to spell out the inconsistencies of presenting Syriza as the “radical left” party that will “end austerity” in Greece and, why not, the eurozone. In this (clearly limited) scope, I dealt with Syriza’s own proclamations, its economic strategy and proposed policies and tried to explain what was problematic about it.

In the first article, I dealt with issues such as:

the relationship between Syriza and the movement against austerity; the main reasons behind Syriza’s election results in the context of the dissappearance of this movement and of continued austerity; the material reasons why debt restructuring and the inclusion of the Greek economy in the quantitative easing program of the ECB (which formed an important part of Syriza’s solutions to the crisis) were mere illusions; the lack of any leverage on behalf of the Greek government to impose their semi-Keynesian program;

Following up, the second article, I addressed issues such as:

the historical inability of Keynesian economic policies to be presented as a viable project to save the eurozone; the way in which Syriza tried (and failed) to take advantage of political contradictions within the Eurozone; the intransigence of eurozone officials towards Syriza’s minimal program; the essence of the February 20th signed agreement as a clear indication of Syriza’s acceptance of the continuation of austerity; the fact that a lack of an active proletarian movement means that all discussions are reduced to different forms of capitalist restructuring; Syriza’s continued ability to achieve consensus from the majority of the Greek population, as well as its success in creating national unity far beyond what the previous governments’ had achieved; some of the implications of what the emergence of national politics and patriotism means for the future of the eurozone;

I am guessing that most people have read the 3d article, so I see no reason for summing up its points.

I fail to understand how the 3 articles consist of a “leftist denunciation” of Syriza (as TH argued), or in what way they constitute an approach that “…reduces things to the level of personalities and decision-making” (as Ady Amatia claims). I am more than willing to accept that, in itself, the 3d part of the article (“Changing of the Guards”) might appear as deserving the above-mentioned criticisms. And if I had not mentioned that the 3 articles should be read together, or if there was no mention of the previous articles in the last one, this criticism might make more sense. Given that I did explicitly say those things, I am afraid that the criticisms do not make a lot of sense.

In my response to TH I clarified that I never claimed that the articles were complete. And I also clarified that my articles were very far from an analysis that explains “what is new, different, specific and how all this fits in the local and global inter-class and intra-class configuration”, an approach that I would greatly welcome when and if someone (maybe SIC comrades?) would decide to produce one. But ignoring the easily accessible previous 2 articles and their content in order to provide a caricature of the latest one is more difficult to swallow.

For example, I honestly fail to understand how one could read the 3 articles as complaining about the fact that Syriza proved that they are not “real defenders of the interests of workers”, as Ady Amatia argues. And I have to admit that the explanatory sentence that follows (“There are certain limits once a self-proclaimed radical finds oneself as head of state, and these are the limits of capitalist reproduction. This is not because people’s personalities become corrupt by power, but because the state plays this very specific role”) sounds exactly like a “leftist denunciation” that I am being accused of endorsing. For if one takes the implications of this sentence to their logical conclusion, it seems that it would have been enough to say that Syriza is concerned with capitalist restructuring and as such nothing more needs to be said about it.

When attempting to write about a given situation, there is always the danger to either focus too much on the political expressions of underlying material contradictions or to ignore political developments altogether because, for example, “decisions are already made at the level of production”. I find both tendencies problematic, and though I tried to refrain from giving too much importance to the political level of high-level summits, I thought that it would also be problematic to ignore how the management of the crisis in this specific case was also expressed in those meetings. Especially since there was no worthy proletarian movement putting (direct or indirect) pressure on these discussions. But to conclude that I am more “angered” by Syriza politicians than by the suffering of proletarians and their inability to (or the irrelevance of their) struggle is, to put it politely, quite absurd.

If someone asked me, I would say that I strongly believe that those who decide to engage with the management of capitalism and the State, and thus with the maintenance and continuation of its relations, are scum. And that they are, at varying levels, responsible for the imposition of exploitation and for the emmiseration of our lives. The historical ability of the Left to achieve greater consensus in this context makes them slightly more despicable. Does that render them “self-interested cynics”? That I do not know. What I do know is that I did not use such a characterisation (or my above-mentioned belief) as an analytical tool in the 3 articles. At best, what is clear in my 3 articles is that whoever takes the job of managing capitalist relations and the State is by definition forced to engage with their reproduction. As I recall, Ady Amatia makes the same point.

For many people in Greece, the implementation of the new agreement (and the following one in September) already constitute a “total economic collapse”. It is absolutely clear, for example, that the changes concerning farmers will immediately devastate massive sections of this sector; it is also painfully clear that when banks re-open, a massive haircut on deposits will be applied (given that almost 90% of bank deposits in Greece are below €4,000, the supposed European law of protection on deposits below €100,000 is non-sensical). Furthermore, the new agreement opens up the way for the forced expropriation of houses, something that was desperately avoided in the last 5 years in direct relation to the devastating social consequences it will produce. These are only a small part of the measures that we will see in the immediate future, and it is in this very real, and very frightening context that the passing of the laws concerning 2nd generation immigrants and civil partnership lose their symbolic and practical value. And, in my mind, they render the comparison between Syriza and New Democracy meaningless.

Cognord, 25 July 2015

• 1Editor’s note: initially published in The Brooklyn Rail, Field Notes, July 13 2015, [last visited July 2015].
• 2C. Lapavitsas, “The Looming Austerity Package,” Jacobin, June 12, 2015.
• 3It is peculiar to note that those on the left of Syriza (like Lapavitsas), only recently re-discovered their opposition to the euro and the EU. In their new role as Syriza’s MPs and internal opposition, they urge (whom exactly, is not very clear) a fresh examination of alternatives. As far as we have seen, this anti-EU alternative is precisely what they have been propagating for the last five years. So, in reality, they have a five-year-long background in this quest for the holy grail, giving them a decent head-start and the opportunity to finally present their [Libcom note - this footnote cuts short here]
• 4 Any debt reduction, or any ability of the Greek state to issue bonds and finance itself, would single-handedly eliminate the Troika’s leverage for imposing austerity.
• 5Bobolas, one of the best-known capitalists of Greece, was recently “arrested” by Syriza’s government on tax evasion charges of approximately €.4 million. He immediately paid less than half of that (€1.8million) and was released with all charges dropped.
• 6Y. Varoufakis, “Austerity is the only deal-breaker,” Project Syndicate, May 25, 2015.
• 7Within Germany, Greece’s primary opponent during the negotiations, many members of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) party of Angela Merkel openly called Syriza a “communist” government.
• 8 One of those newly added demands was an abolition of the Pensioners’ Social Solidarity Benefit (EKAS) benefit, which amounts to a minuscule financial assistance (between €100-€150) for those who receive pensions of less than €300 a month.
• 9 It has become a common absurdity to claim that a Grexit would have minimal consequences. As Frances Coppola correctly put it recently, “If Greece were to leave, others would be likely to follow, either because of speculative attacks as in 1992, or because of popular unrest and political change. This would threaten the very existence of the Euro. The oft-expressed view that the rest of the Eurozone is “firewalled” from contagion was never credible and is now evidently false: bond yields are already spiking in other Eurozone periphery countries. The ECB cannot be seen to force out one country while protecting the rest from contagion. That would destroy its credibility as an independent body immune from political influence.” (F. Coppola, “The Greek Negotiations: Many Angry Words And No Way Forward,” Forbes, June 19, 2015).
• 10Editor’s note: the excerpt is from “Changing of the Guards”.
• 11Editor’s note: this is a reference to TH’s last remarks on the social climate in Greece.