"One cannot transform capitalist terrain into proletarian terrain." Octobre, Nº 4, April 1938.

Most of this issue of La Banquise is devoted to a summary of the modern revolutionary movement. Summing up the past, including the recent past, and taking soundings of the contemporary period in order to recognise some of its basic tendencies, is essential in order to know who and where we are. You will only find an assessment here, not the complete global summing up which will only be possible after the world revolution. Each revolutionary grouping can only take stock by starting from its own position, formation and particular experience. This text is not a group introspection, nor is it an assertion of general principles and movements which we pretend to describe as a whole, instead it seeks to be both universal in its basis, through the aspirations and struggles of which it is the product, and also particular, because its authors participated in the world communist movement in specific places and circumstances. It would be wrong, not to say untrue, to believe and to instil belief in an absolute summing up : like every revolutionary group we have a relative position and activity within the totality of a social movement, that is expressed and influenced, but not created, by collective efforts such as ours.

It is obvious, for example, that a revolutionary who has come from anarchism would have conceived this assessment differently. He might arrive at similar conclusions, however his trajectory would be different. But just like us he would not have made Marx and the communist left into a dead end.

On the other hand, we haven’t written about everything that we consider important. The essential consideration was to deal with the things which have formed us, but this does not mean that the contribution of other critiques which are only mentioned or passed over in silence has been negligible. For the same reason, to deal with our relations with la Guerre Sociale and the Faurisson affair in a merely allusive way, would have been unacceptable and absurd.

Fundamentally, the connecting thread of this text is the relation between capitalism and the human activity from which, without ever entirely exhausting it, it draws its dynamism. The proletarian movement is neither based on feelings, nor on the hope that one day capitalism will become truly unbearable. Revolt "with a human title", universal and non-categorial, is certainly born from a limit of Capital, one which is expressed amongst other things in economic crises, but which cannot be reduced to them. Capital doesn’t find its limit in absolute misery, or in the loss of the sense of life, but in the difficulties it has in absorbing the energy of living labour, of the proletarian. While these difficulties appear above all within the organisation of work, they are also felt in the proletarian’s whole life, especially as Capital has colonized the conditions of the reproduction of life.

It is in those periods when new forms of the integration of labour by Capital are installed — in the middle of the 19 century, around 1914–18, and at the present time — that the critique of the basis of capitalism, rather than of its inevitable but secondary consequences, becomes possible. More exactly, in such periods, critique can rise from effects (poverty, unemployment, repression, etc.) to their cause: dispossession by the market and wage labour.

Where can a society go which is based on work and yet which makes it impossible? To take shelter from the social consequences of the crisis (unruly unemployed), it creates something which is an anomaly, if not an absurdity, in terms of its own logic: it gives a wage ("social" and not "productive") without any equivalent work, a kind of insurance, a little like the way in which it (badly) pays the disabled and the elderly. Capital undermines its own coherence when non-work pays, albeit less than work does, but in the same manner. Similarly, the collective character of labour removes any sense of remuneration for personal effort. The individual wage is no longer anything except an instrument for dividing workers, whereas formerly individual wage negotiations responded to real differences in the work they provided. In all of this, as in automation, wage labour remains whereas work quite simply becomes, not superfluous, but inessential in a large part of society and of production. We are at the stage, already described by Marx, where all individual workers participate in the production of value.

The struggles of unskilled workers, disputes in the space outside work, the refusal of work, (in which the left and leftism only see reactions, the consequences of exploitation), all contain something which confronts those things which future revolutionaries will dissolve, because these movements come up against (without being able to overthrow it) that which capitalises human activity.

The reduction of everything to the minimum time necessary to accomplish it, the accumulation of small blocks of crystallised time, this is the domination of value. We devote the shortest time to the production of things, and in the same way, to each act of life. We thus produce objects incorporating the least possible time. The life of proletarians is subjected to this search for productivity, to the point that they partially internalise it. The secret and the madness of valorisation consists in always trying to obtain more from less, a maximum from a minimum. Something that is impossible, but which seems accessible by means of technology incorporating an accumulation of past labour, and turned into value by as small a living labour as possible.

On the way what becomes of the person who provides this living labour? In his life he knows the limit-experience of exhaustion which, in a different context, Capital forces the earth to undergo. In the factory as in the field, the obsession with productivity runs up against the same limitation: the conditions which it must meet, in order to constantly reduce the socially necessary labour time for the production of goods, turn against it. When we say that in twenty years, output per hectare has doubled or tripled, we forget that this increase presupposes raw materials and energy. In the United States the relation between the energy harvested in the form of grain and the energy given to its production was quantified. Setting aside prices, "the valorisation of the energy invested in 1970 was no more than 3/4 of what it had been in 1945". (L’Année économique et sociale 1978, Le Monde, 1979, p. 158.)

Like the fall in industrial profitability, decreasing agricultural outputs are not insurmountable. But the solution depends on the social balance of power. While the earth only opposes its inertia to valorisation, proletarians are the active means for it and its critical threshold. The crisis of valorisation, which is simultaneously both cause and effect of action-reaction by proletarians, opens the possibility of a break with a society based on the systematic search for productivity.

Capitalism also finds itself in an open situation, which it dreams of filling by means of technology. Machine automation combines tools and programming. But the software remains separate from the hardware, the "programme" is distinct from the purely mechanical and (re)programmable part. The robot is typical of a world where to make and to learn, to do and to direct, are kept as distinct realities. The robot is a worker incorporating his boss. In spite of Taylor, man could not be made into a machine, so the aim is to make machines into living beings. Specialists in robotics constantly lapse into anthropomorphism: being simultaneously "arm", "eye", etc, the robot joins together body and head, muscles and intelligence. It is the ideal slave by which one measures "the degree of servitude". A research project, one of whose creations was a machine for quadriplegics, was christened Spartacus. In this vision the robot is to become the prosthesis of a Capital that would be both disembodied, and freed from the harmful surplus of human activity, reducing the living being to an unavoidable but controlled pollution.

Our attempt at a summing up ends with the prospect (only a possibility) of an upheaval as significant as the industrialisation of the first half of the 19th century, or the appearance of a new system of production at the beginning of the 20th. However it would be misleading to wait until proletarians simply revolted against the forward march of a system which crushes them. Big social movements don’t have a motor, and cannot be deemed equivalent, for example, to economic crisis or the disastrous effects of technological progress. They are set in motion by the contradictions of a universe revealing its faults and aberrations.

There is no guarantee that proletarians will profit from these contradictions to play their own hand in a crisis which perhaps will prove to be the transition to another form of production and of capitalist society. Our action is founded on the double conviction of the depth of present day contradictions, and of the lack of support, expressed ideologically, of workers for Capital, unlike the support the communist left had noted before the second world war or in 1944–5. Class action, that is to say those practises which link proletarians, advances matters inside heads through the durable cleavages it creates between proletarians and everything that sustains capitalism. But this proletarian experience is only revolutionary if it commits itself to ways of breaking with capitalist solutions.

It is not enough just to see that under the domination of Capital, which is capable of penetrating everything and of making durable workers organisation into one of its relays, the introduction of permanent mass structures by workers becomes an obstacle to the revolution. It is also necessary to wonder why. Today the mere defence of the proletarian condition is a dead end, an unrealisable path or a parasyndicalism. It is not a matter of dissolving the defence of workers living conditions into a tide of "new social movements", nor of making it the mainstay or face of these neo-reformisms. The difficulty today, in theory and especially in practise, comes from the fact that one can no longer demand anything, that is to say, anything that positively exists in this world, whether it be to defend it, to extend it or even less to transform it in a progressive, proletarian-friendly direction. This is why a revolutionary movement, and thus also groupings heralding communism, have such difficulty in emerging.

The revolution will not be the sum of different movements, each fighting in the name of its own specificity, even while they give pride of place to a movement that would like to be of the workers. It won’t juxtapose district committees, women’s groups, environmentalist circles... even if these are overseen by factory councils. Each constituent part will not first of all deal with its own condition, instead it will combine into a whole that will not just change the school, the factory or the manwoman relation, but will change those things, money and wage relations, which lie at the root of everything, and thus will overthrow the sectors through which Capital has either created or maintained specialisation.

People are not wrong to affirm the global expansion of the class of wage workers (Simon Rubak, Classes laborieuses et révolution, Spartacus, 1979). But this enlargement is accompanied by a polarisation into two extremes both of which reveal themselves as traps. Workers in the developed countries (and recently in Poland: cf. our article in issue 1. of La Banquise) still see themselves too much in terms of a working class identity that is both archaic and capitalist. The hardest fought and longest strike in France since 1945 was that at the Parisien Libéré (1975–77), which simultaneously managed to be capitalist in its objective of maintaining such a newspaper, trade unionist in its almost total control by the CGT which turned it into a shop-window for its capacity for action, and yet which was radical in its methods (taking power over the newspaper, printing pirate editions, "rodeos" against scabs, etc.)

At the other extreme, in the third world, proletarianisation is often momentary, it does not unite around a common condition. The frequent absence of working class identity goes hand in hand with a lack of proletarian consciousness and practise. Where the workers of the developed countries endeavour to escape proletarianisation by confining themselves within their employment, if not their trade where they have a qualification, those of the third world try to escape proletarian status by making it a temporary phase of their existence.

It is never repression or the "pulverisation of the proletariat" which overcomes revolutionaries, but their inability to understand what happens and to situate themselves in relation to it. One of the principal causes of the current weakness of small radical groups, which at best pushes them towards a flight into activism, is our common difficulty in understanding the forms of present day proletarian experience, something we have less grasp of, than of the capitalist context which endeavours to incorporate it.

This self-understanding of a social movement necessarily remains partial. We will only look at one fragment of this movement, considered from a particular angle. We will speak above all about France. Not because it might have been the centre of a dynamic, but because we are obliged to speak about what we know best, and communism has only been strong enough to reach international dimensions for brief moments, quickly followed by a contraction of perspectives back to the national context.

"Once included into the production process of capital, however, the means of labour passes through a series of metamorphoses until it ends up as the machine, or rather as an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery; automatic merely means the most complete, most adequate form of machinery, and alone transforms machinery into a system). That system is set in motion by an automaton, self-moved motive power; this automaton consists of a large number of mechanical and intellectual organs, with the workers themselves cast in the role of merely conscious members of it." (p. 82)

"(...) the necessary tendency of capital to increase the productive power of labour and to bring about the greatest possible negation of necessary labour." (p. 83)

"In the same measure as labour time — the simple quantity of labour — is posited by capital as the sole determinant of value, immediate labour and its quantity disappear as the determining principle of production, of the creation of use values. It is reduced both quantitatively, in that its proportion declines, and qualitatively, in that it, though still indispensable, becomes a subaltern moment in comparison to general scientific work, the technological application of the natural sciences, on the one hand, and also in comparison to the general productive power originating from the organisation of society in overall production (...) Thus capital works to dissolve itself as the form which dominates production." (p. 85–6)

"But in the degree in which large-scale industry develops, the creation of real wealth becomes less dependent upon labour time and the quantity of labour employed than upon the power of the agents set in motion during labour time. And their power — their POWERFUL EFFECTIVENESS — in turn bears no relation to the immediate labour time which their production costs (...)" (p. 90)

"Once this transformation has taken place, it is neither the immediate labour performed by man himself, nor the time for which he works, but the appropriation of his own general productive power, his comprehension of Nature and domination of it by virtue of his being a social entity — in a word, the development of the social individual — that appears as the cornerstone of production and wealth. The theft of alien labour time, which is the basis of present wealth, appears to be a miserable foundation compared to this newly developed one, the foundation created by largescale industry itself. As soon as labour in its immediate form has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and therefore exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of a few has ceased to be the condition for the development of the general powers of the human mind. As a result, production based upon exchange value collapses, and the immediate material production process itself is stripped of its form of indigence and antagonism." (p. 91)

"By striving to reduce labour time to a minimum, while, on the other hand, positing labour time as the sole measure and source of wealth, capital itself is a contradiction-in-process. It therefore diminishes labour time in the form of necessary labour time in order to increase it in the form of superfluous labour time; it thus posits superfluous labour time to an increasing degree as a condition — question de vie et de mort [A matter of life and death] — for necessary labour time. On the one hand, therefore, it calls into life all the powers of science and Nature, and of social combinations and social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth (relatively) independent of the labour time employed for that purpose. On the other
hand, it wishes the enormous social forces thus created to be measured by labour time and to confine them within the limits necessary to maintain as value the value already created. The productive forces and social relations — two different aspects of the development of the social individual — appear to capital merely as the means, and are merely the means, for it to carry on production on its restricted basis. IN FACT, however, they are the material conditions for exploding that basis." (p. 91–92)

"Labour time as the measure of wealth posits wealth itself as based upon poverty, and DISPOSABLE TIME only as existing in and through the opposition to surplus labour time; or the whole time of an individual is posited as labour time, and he is consequently degraded to a mere labourer, subsumed under labour. Hence the most developed machinery now compels the labourer to work for a longer time than the savage does, or than the labourer himself did when he was using the simplest, crudest implements. (...)" (p. 94)

"Just as with the development of large-scale industry the basis on which it rests, appropriation of alien labour time, ceases to constitute or to create wealth, so, this development takes place, immediate labour as such ceases to be the basis of production. That happens because, on the one hand, immediate labour is transformed into a predominantly overseeing and regulating activity; and also because, on the other hand, the product ceases to be the product of isolated immediate labour, and it is rather the combination of social activity that appears as the producer." (p. 94–95)

Marx, 1857–58 Manuscripts (Grundrisse), Marx Engels Collected Works vol 29, International Publishers, 1987.

"First, with the development of the real subsumption of labour under capital, or the specifically capitalist mode of production, the real lever of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual worker. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various competing labour-powers which together form the entire production machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of making commodities, or, more accurately in this context, creating the product. Some work better with their hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc., the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge."

Marx, Results of the Immediate Process of Production. in Capital I, Penguin, 1976, pp. 1039–1040

"The product is transformed from the direct product of the individual producer into a social product, the joint product of each collective labourer, i.e. a combination of workers, each of whom stands at a different distance from the actual manipulation of the object of labour. With the progressive accentuation of the co-operative character of the labour process, there necessarily occurs a progressive extension of the concept of progressive extension of the concept of productive labour, and of the concept of the bearer of that labour, the productive worker. In order to work productively, it is no longer necessary for the individual himself to put his hand to the object; it is sufficient for him to be an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate functions."

Marx, Capital I, Penguin, 1976, pp. 643–44.