Factory and Society

At the end of the III section of Capital, after finishing the section on absolute surplus value, Marx returns to distinguish the two faces of capitalist production and, as a result, the two points of view from which the capitalist production of commodities can be considered: labour process and process of valorization. In the first, the worker does not treat the means of production as capital, the worker consumes the means of production as material of his productive activity; in the second, “it is not the worker who uses the means of production, but the means of production which use the worker”, and hence it is capital that consumes labour-power. It is true that already in the labour process capital develops as command over labour, of labour power and, therefore, the worker; it is only in the valorization process that there develops a coercive relation, which forces the working class to surplus-labour and, from there, the production of surplus value. Capital is able to capture, it in its own way, the unity of the labour process with the process of valorization; and captures it in an ever greater manner the more that capitalist production develops and the more that the capitalist form of production grasps all the other spheres of society, invading the whole network of social relations. Capital puts labour- and is forced to put it- as the creator of value, but then sees value- and is forced to see it- as the valorization of itself. Capital sees the labour process solely as a process of valorization, it sees labour-power solely as capital; it alters the relation between living labour and dead labour, between the creative force of value and value; it can do so to the degree in which it is able to recuperate the whole process of social labour within the process of valorization of capital, in the degree that it can integrate labour-power within capital.
In the bourgeois mystification of capitalist relations, these last two processes go together and in a parallel manner, they both appear objectively and necessary. The correct way to see them is to see them distinct in their unity, to the point of opposing them as contradictory processes which exclude each other alternatively; material action of the dissolution of capital implanted in the decisive point of its system.
The method through which previous/dead labour is transformed everyday into capital is clear. This is the motive why bourgeois economists eulogize the merits of dead/previous labour. In fact, it is this, under the form of the means of labour, which collaborates once again in the living labour process; hence why the importance of labour is attributed to the figure of capital which it assumes. The capitalist form of labour coincides in this case with the means of production in which labour has objectified itself with to the point that the practical agents of capitalist production and its ideologues “are incapable of thinking the means of production different from , separate from, the social antagonistic mask which today they take on.” As a result, dead labour, like any natural force, provides a free service to capital: and when it is invested and put into motion by living labour, it accumulates and reproduces itself as capital. It is more difficult to reach an understanding of the method through which living labour is completely caught and engulfed within this process, as a necessary part of its development. “It is a natural quality of living labour to conserve the old value in the same time it is producing the new value.” Labour “conserves and perpetuates, always under new forms, a capital value that is always growing.”; even more, the more that efficiency grows, the volume, the value of its means of production, the more there advances accumulation which inevitably accompanies the development of its productive force. “This natural force of labour presents itself as the auto-conservation of capital in which it is incorporated, precisely in the same way that the social labour forces of production present themselves as quality of capital and as the constant appropriation of surplus-value by the capitalist appears as the constant self-valorization of capital. All the forces of labour are projected as the forces of capital….”
The capitalist mode of production presents to itself surplus-value and the value of labour-power as “aliquot parts of the production of value”: it is this which hides the specific character of the capitalist relation, “or in other words, the exchange of variable capital for living labour-power and the corresponding exclusion of the worker form the product.” While all the developed forms of the process of capitalist production are forms of cooperation, the development of capitalist production itself re-proposes and generalizes the “false appearance of a relation of association in which the worker and the capitalist share the product according to the different proportions of the factors of its formation.” It is upon this base that, at the superficial level of bourgeois society, the retribution of the worker appears as the price of labour: necessary price or natural price, which expresses in monetary terms the value of labour. Marx correctly emphasizes that the value of labour is an imaginary expression, irrational definition, phenomenal form of the substantial relation which is the value of labour power. But what is the necessity of this appearance? Is it a subjective choice to hide the substance of the real relation, or is it not instead the real manner of making function the mechanism of the relation? Exemplary, in this respect, is the manner in which value and price of labour-power present themselves in the transfigured form of the salary. The real movement of the salary appears to demonstrate that it is not the value of labour-power that is being paid, but instead the value of its function, the value of labour itself. For capitalist production it is indispensable that labour-power presents itself as labour pure and simple and that the value of labour is paid under the form of the salary. Let’s think of the second particularity of the form of the equivalent; when concrete labour is turned into the phenomenal form of its opposite, of human abstract labour. It is not concrete labour that, in the relation of value, possesses the general quality of being abstract human labour. On the contrary, being human labour in the abstract is its proper nature, being concrete labour is only the phenomenal form of determinant form of the realization of that nature. This complete inversion is inevitable given that the labour represented in the product of labour is only creative of value to the degree in which it is abstract human labour, the using up dispensing of human labour power. Isn’t it true that “value transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyph?” The value of labour power expresses in the salary, simultaneously, the capitalist form of the exploitation of labour and its bourgeois mystification; it gives us the nature of the capitalist relation of production in an inverted manner.
Labour, is turned, on this basis, into the necessary mediation for labour-power to transform itself into salary: the condition for living labour presenting itself solely as variable capital, labour-power solely as part of capital. Value, in which is represented the price of a day’s labour, should appear then as the value or price of the labour day in general. In the salary there disappears precisely every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus-value. All of labour emerges as paid labour; it is this which distinguishes wage labour from other historical forms of labour. The more that capitalist production develops and the system of its forces of production, the more the paid and non paid parts of labour are confused in an inseparable manner. The diverse forms of the payment of the wage are no more than different manners of expressing, at different levels, the constant nature of this process. We understand then “the decisive importance that the metamorphosis of value and price of labour-power under the form of the wage, or in other words, in the value and price of labour itself. Under this phenomenal form which turns the real relation invisible and destroys precisely its opposite, there is founded all the juridical ideas of the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all the illusions of liberty…etc.” We can follow the history of the variety of forms of the wage through the whole development of capitalist production: the unity each time more complex which is established in its heart between labour process and valorization process, between labour and labour-power, between variable and constant part of capital, and hence, between labour-power and capital.
The salary is nothing more than wage labour considered from another point of view. The determinate character which labour has as an agent of production appears in the salary as the determination of distribution. The salary presupposes wage labour, as profit presupposes capital. “These determinate forms of distribution presuppose determinate social characteristics of the conditions of production and determinate social relations between agents of production.” The salary is provided, gives us as already superseded “the crude gross separation between production and distribution.” The determinate manner in which we take part in production determines the particular forms of distribution. The “relations and modes of distribution appear as a result solely as the inverse of the agents of production.”
Establishing what is the relation that exists between distribution and production is “evidently a question that falls within production itself.” Exchange is the mediating moment, on the one hand, between production and distribution, and on the other, between production and consumption: in the first case exchange is an act direct included in production; in the second case it is completely determined by it, if it is correct that exchange for consumption presupposes the division of labour, that private exchange presupposes private production, that a determinate intensity and expansion of exchange presupposes a determinate expansion and organization of production. It is on this basis that in general it was attempted to express an immediate identity between production and consumption: to the degree that one has a consumptive production and a productive consumption. Or we find a reciprocal dependence between them: production as means for consumption and consumption as the end of production. One can be presented as the realization of the other and vice versa: consumption consumes the product, production produces consumption. But Marx himself had already mocked those literate socialists and the prosaic economists that played with this Hegelian identity of opposites. We only need to add to the list those vulgar sociologists, also prosaic and literate, but not socialists and economists. “The most important thing to emphasize is that production and consumption….appear in whatever case as moments of a process in which production is the effective point of departure and because of that the moment which includes and overcomes the others and…the act in which the whole process renews itself.” Production, distribution, exchange and consumption are not identical; they represent moments of a totality, differences within a unity.” This unity is composed of an “organic aggregate” and it is clear that, in the interior of this organic aggregate the diverse moments established between them a reciprocal action. Production as well, in its unilateral form, is determined by the other moments. But “production supersedes not only itself, in the antithetic determination of production, as well as the other moments.” It is from production that the process begins anew. “A production determines as a result a consumption, a distribution, an exchange of determinate relations, beyond the determinate relations between these diverse moments.” The necessity to appeal to these elementary concepts of Marx demonstrates in itself the objective existence of many too many “Marxists” inclined to repeat “the insipidness of the economists that treat production as an eternal truth, relegating the terrain of distribution to history.”
If we consider capital directly in the process of production, we cannot cease to continually distinguish the two fundamental moments: the production of absolute surplus value, where the relation of production appears in its most simple form and can be immediately captured, whether by the worker or the capitalist: the production of relative surplus value, specifically capitalist production, where we have at the same time the development of the social productive forces and their transfer directly from labour to capital. It is solely at this point- when all the social productive forces of labour emerge as autonomous internal forces of capital- that we can explain in all its wealth the whole process of circulation. At this level, the realization of surplus value not only hides the specific conditions of its production as it appears as its effective creation. This appearance too is also functional to the system.
Alongside labour time, there enters into action circulation time. The production of surplus-value receives new determinations in the process of circulation: “capital runs the cycle of its transformations; supersedes, its organic internal life entering into external relations of life, relations in which it opposes, not capital and labour, but capital and capital, on the one hand, and individuals as buyers and sellers, on the other.” At this point, all the parts of capital emerge equally as fountains of exceeding value and, because of this, all at the origins of profit. The extortion of surplus labour loses its specific character: its specific relation with surplus value is obscured: it is for this reason that the metamorphosis of the value of labour-power in the form of the salary serves. The transformation of surplus value and profit is effectively determined as much by the process of production as the process of circulation. But the mode of this transformation is nothing more than the ultimate development of the inversion of relations which we had verified in the interior of the process of production: when all the subjective productive forces of labour are presented as the objective productive forces of capital. “On the one hand, value, dead labour, which dominates living labour, is personified in the capitalist; on the other , instead, the worker appears as labour-power purely objective, as commodity.” “The effective process of production, as unity of process of direct production and process of circulation, engenders new forms, in which we continually loose ever more the internal connecting thread, the relations of production are autonomized in relation to the other and the constitute parts of value consolidated in autonomous forms separate from one another.”
Already in the analysis of the simplest categories of the capitalist mode of production, commodities and money, we can completely understand the process of mystification which transforms social relations into the property of things and the relation of production itself into a thing. In capital, and with the development of its successive determinations, “this inverted and cursed world” develops and imposes itself ever more. At the base of the capitalist mode of production, the existence of the product as a commodity and the commodity as the product of capital implies the “objectification of the social determinations of production and the subjectification of the material fundamentals of production itself.” It is not by mistake that the specific capitalist mode of production implants its roots, first, in relative surplus value and, following, in the metamorphosis of surplus value into profit: particular form of the development of the social productive forces of labour, which appear as the autonomous forces of capital opposed to the worker, precisely because they are, in fact, a form of the domination of capital over the worker. “Production for value and surplus value implies….the always active tendency to reduce the necessary time for production of a commodity, or in other words, its value, under the social medium in each moment. The desire to reduce the cost price to the minimum turns into the strongest pressure for the increase in the social productive force of labour which, appears nonetheless solely as a continuous increase of capital.” All we need to do is focus on the fanaticism of the capitalist in the economizing of the means of production; economizing in the employment of constant capital and at same time in labour.
“Capital tends not only to reduce to the indispensable direct living labour, and to reduce continually, through the exploitation of the social forces of production of labour, necessary labour for the finishing of the product, that is, to economize to the maximum living labour direct employed; it also has to, beyond this, the tendency to employ in the most economical conditions this labour reduced to the limits of the indispensable, that is, to reduce in to the minimum the applied constant capital.” An increase in the rate of profit, beyond giving a more modern exploitation of the productivity of social labour in production of constant capital, derives “from the economizing of employing constant capital itself.” This economizing is possible, only with its base, the highest concentration of the means of production, the only base that could give a location for their mass utilization. As a result, “ it is only possible for the collective aggregate worker and , a lot of the times, it can only be realized in organized works at a large scale, that is, attaining a combination of workers even more greater at the direct process of production. “ Like this, the means of production are consumed in the productive process, with the sole criteria, on the part of the collective worker, and not under a fractioned form on the part of a mass of workers without a reciprocal connection. Then, “the economizing in the conditions of production which characterized large scale production derives essentially from the fact that such conditions operate as factors of social labour, of labour socially coordinated, that is as social factors of labour…It has its origins, then, in the social character of labour, in the same way that surplus value comes from surplus labour of each singular worker considered in an isolated manner.” Nonetheless, the economizing of constant capital, of employment in the conditions of production, as specific instrument to increase the rate of profit, emerges to the capitalist as an aspect completely estranged to the worker, “it emerges in a manner even more clear than the others inherent in labour, as a force inherent to capital” property of the capitalist mode of production and, hence, function of the capitalist. “Such a representation is even less surprising to the degree to which it corresponds the appearance of facts and to the degree in which the capitalist relation hides, effectively , the intimate structure of the phenomenon, for the total indifference, exteriority and strangeness in which it places the worker in relation to the conditions of realization of his labour”, to the point of turning “reciprocally strange and indifferent, on the one hand, the worker, representative of living labour, on the other, the economically employment, that is, rational, of the conditions of labour.”
Like this, through the immediate social nature of labour, there is extended and deepened the domination, ever more exclusive of capital over the conditions of labour and through this domination, with employment ever more rational of all the conditions of production, there develops and specifies the capitalist exploitation of labour-power. The means of production are no longer simply, from this moment, objective property of capital, but subjective function of capital. The worker which finds himself with them in the process of production recognizes them only, as a result, as use values of production, instruments and material of labour. The worker returns to see the whole process of production from the point of view of view of process of simply labour. The unity of the process of labour and the process of valorization remains only in the hands of the capitalist; from now on, the worker can only understand the whole of the process through the mediation of capital; labour-power not only exploited by the capitalist, but integrated within it.
The development of capitalism brings within it the development of capitalist exploitation. The latter, brings within it the development of the class struggle; the legislation on the factories to the rupture of the State. The struggle for the regulation of the working day sees the capitalist and the worker, one in front of the other, still as buyer and seller. The capitalist defends his right to buy surplus labour, the worker the right to sell less of it. “Right versus right….between equal rights, force decides.” On the one hand, the power of the collective capitalist, on the other, of the collective worker. It is through the mediation of legislation, with the intervention of the law, through the use of right, that is to say, it is on the political terrain that, for the first time, the contract of buying and selling between singular capitalist and isolated worker is transformed into a relation of force/power between the class of capitalists and the working class. It appears that this is the ideal terrain in which to develop the general struggle of the class: this was how it was, in fact, historically, its birth. In order to evaluate the possible generalization of this moment, we have to understand the specific traces which characterize it, that is, the determinant manner in which it functioned within a certain type of the development of capitalism. It is not by coincidence that Marx introduces the chapter on the struggle for the working day when he is discussing the passage from absolute surplus value to relative surplus value, from capital that captures the process of labour as it finds it to capital that puts, upside down, this very same process of labour, until it molds it to its image and similarities. The struggle for the regular working day historically places itself in the middle of this process. Given the natural impulse of capital in the sense of prolonging the working day, it is correct that the workers got together through a living force, as a class, a law of the State, a social barrier, which impeded them from accepting slavery, “through the means of a voluntary contract with capital.” The struggle of the working class constrained the capitalist into changing the form of its domination. Which means that the pressure of labour-power is capable of constraining capital in modifying its very own internal composition and that it intervenes inside of capital as essential component of capitalist development, that is it pushes forward, from within, capitalist production, until it makes it trespass completely all its external relations of social life. That which appears in the most advanced state of development as a spontaneous function of the worker, disintegrated relatively to the conditions of labour and integrated relative to capital, emerges in the most backward state with the legal necessity of a social barrier which impedes the destruction of labour-power, founding, or providing the basis at the same time for a specifically capitalist form of exploitation. Political mediation assumes in each one of these moments a specific place. It is not written that the bourgeois political terrain lives eternally in the sky of capitalist society.
The transformations in the material mode of production and the corresponding mutations in the social relations between producers “creates firstly monstrous excesses, provoking after, as antithesis to the excesses, social control which determines by law the regular working day and makes it uniform.” All “those minuscule dispositions, which regulate with such military uniformity to the sound of bells, periods, limits and pauses of work were not in fact products of parliamentary subtleties; they developed little by little according to the situation as natural laws of the modern mode of production.” The English parliament was able to understand through experience that, “a coercive law can perfectly eliminate, with its orders, all the so called natural obstacles of production which opposed to the limitation and regulation of the working day.” The law over the factories introduced in one branch of industry, fixed/put a limit to the factory boss so that it could remove all technical obstacles. “The law on the factories like this, forces the maturation of the material elements for the transformation of the system of manufacture into a factory system; contemporarily, it accelerates, through the necessity of a greater dispensing of capital, the ruin of small artisans and the concentration of capital.” In this sense, “the legislation on the factories, first conscious and planned reaction of society in the spontaneous figure assumed by its process of social production, is a necessary product of large scale production, large scale industry.” With the violent intervention of the State, the collective capitalist first attempts to convince and then reaching the point of constraining the individual capital to conform to the general necessities of capitalist social production. The exploitation of labour power can occur even if there is an economizing of labour; as the continuous increase on the part of constant capital goes hand in hand with the growing economization in the employment of constant capital itself. It is only on this basis that it is possible, at a certain point, a process of generalization of capitalist production and its development at a higher level. The clashing of the classes on the political terrain, the political mediation of the class struggle, was in this case, simultaneously, the result of a certain level of development and the condition for that development in conquering its own autonomous mechanism, a mechanism from which that point forward went very far, to the point of recuperating political mediation itself, the political terrain of the class struggle itself. “If the generalization of the legislation on the factories was inevitable, as means of physical and intellectual defence of the working class, on the other hand, it generalizes and accelerates the transformation of dispersed labour process, realized at a minimal scale, into combined processes on a large social scale, and with this, the concentration of capital and the exclusive domination of the factory regime. It destroys all the antiquated forms and transitory forms of capital, substituting them with its direct domination, without a mask. In this way, it also turns general the direct struggle against this domination.”
Before anything else, it is necessary to consider this as the point of arrival of a long historical process that parts from the production of absolute relative surplus value and reaches, by necessity, to the production of relative surplus value; from the forced prolonging of the working day to the increase, which appears spontaneously, of the productive force of labour ; to the pure and simple extending of the process of production in its entirety to its internal transformation, which leads it to continually revolutionize the process of labour, in an ever more organic function and dependence of the valorization process. The relation, which before could be easily established, between the sphere of production and the other social spheres is now transformed into a relation that is much more complex between the internal transformations of the sphere of production and the internal transformations of the other spheres. It is transformed, beyond this, into a relation that is much more mediated, organic and mystified, more evident and hidden at the same time, between capitalist production and bourgeois society. The more that the determinant relation of capitalist production grasps the social relation in general, the more it appears to disappear within the latter as a marginal aspect. The more that capitalist production penetrates in profundity and invades, in extension, the totality of social relations, the more society appears as a totality relative to production and production as a particularity relative to society. When the particular generalizes itself, is universalized, it appears represented as general, as universal. In the social relation of capitalist production, the generalization of production expresses itself as the hypostatization of society. When specifically capitalist production has already weaved the whole web of social relations, it itself emerges as a generic social relation. The phenomenal forms reproduce themselves with immediate spontaneity, as current forms of thought: “the substantial relation should be discovered by science.” If we limit ourselves to a purely ideological approach of this reality, we do nothing more than reproduce this reality as it presents itself, inverted in its appearance. If we want to understand the intimate material link of the real relations a theoretical effort is needed of scientific penetration which, before anything else, strips the object—bourgeois society—of all its mystified phenomenal forms, that have been ideologized, in order to isolate and attain its hidden substance which is and continues to be the relation of capitalist production.
In that formidable work that is The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin in speaking about large scale mechanized industry, establishes firstly that the scientific concept of the factory does not correspond to the common sense understanding of it. “In our official statistics, and in general in our literature, by factory it is understood to be an industrial establishment greater or smaller which employs a greater or smaller number of salaried workers. Following Marx, by large scale machine industry (factory) is understood solely as a certain level, precisely the most advanced level, of capitalism in industry.” Lenin sends us to the 4^th section in book 1 of Capital and especially to the passage from manufacture to large scale industry, where the scientific concept of the factory serves precisely to signal the “forms and phases through which the development of capitalism in industry passes in a given country.” At a certain state of its development, if capital wants to lower the value of labour-power it is inevitably forced to increase the productive force of labour; it is forced to transform as much necessary labour into surplus-labour and, like this, to put upside down all the technical and social conditions of the labour process, of revolutionizing from within the mode of production. “In capitalist production, the economy of labour via the development of the productive force of labour does not have as its objective the shortening of the working day.” It does have as its objective the shortening of the labour time necessary for the production of labour-power and, because of that, for the production of a determinant quantity of commodities. Like this, the increase in the productive force of labour should, before anything else capture the branches of industry whose products determine the value of labour-power. “but the value of a commodity is only determined by the quantity of labour which gives it its ultimate form, but also, and in the same manner, by the mass of labour contained in the means of production…Hence, the increase in productive force and the corresponding cheapening of commodities in the industries which provide the material elements of constant capital, also lower the value of labour-power.” If we understand this process, not from the singular capitalist point of view, but from the point of view of capitalist society in its totality, we will see that general rate of surplus-value increases to the same degree in which the value of labour-power decreases. “The labour of exceptional productive force operates as potential labour,” or in other words, it creates in the same periods of time superior values to those created by median social labour. For this reason, the capitalist that applies the perfected mode of production, appropriates, through the means of surplus-labour, of a greater part of the working day relative to that appropriated by other capitalists in the same industry. “He does, singularly, what capital does at a higher level in the production of relative surplus value.” The coercive law of competition operates, then, in the manner of introducing and generalizing the new mode of production; but competition itself, the external movements of capital, are nothing more than another mode through which the “immanent laws of capitalist production” are presented, of which a” scientific analysis of competition is only possible when we have understood the intimate nature of capital, in the same way that the apparent movements of the celestial bodies is only intelligible for those that know their real movement.” In fact, it is at this point that the general rate of surplus-value, for it to be positively untouched by this process, has the necessity of re-dimensioning/ reshaping continually the value of labour-power, of revolutionizing the conditions of the process of labour, of generalizing and accelerating the mode of capitalist social production: point of departure which will, after, make of capitalism a formidable historical system of development of the social productive forces.
Capitalist development is organically linked to the production of relative surplus value. And relative surplus value is organically linked to all the internal vicissitudes of the process of capitalist production, that distinct and ever more complex unity between process of labour and process of valorization, between the transformations in the conditions of labour and the exploitation of labour-power, between the technical and social process together, on the one hand, and capitalist despotism, on the other. The more that capitalist development advances, that is, the more the production of relative surplus value penetrates and extends, the more that the circle-circuit production-distribution-exchange-consumption is necessarily closed. That is, the relation between capitalist production and bourgeois society, between factory and society, between society and State achieves, to an ever greater degree a more organic relation. At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation is transformed into a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society is turned into an articulation of production, that is, the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society. It is upon this basis that the machinery of the political State tends to ever more identify with the figure of the collective capitalist; it is turned ever more into the property of the capitalist mode of production and, as a result, function of the capitalist. The process of the unitary composition of capitalist society, imposed by the specific development of its production, no longer tolerates that there exist a political terrain, even if this is formally independent of the web of social relations. In a certain sense, it is true that the political functions of the State begin today to be recuperated by society, with the slight difference that this is the society of classes of the capitalist mode of production. Consider this a sectarian reaction against those who see in the modern political State the neutral terrain of the struggle between capital and labour. Heed some prophetic words from Marx that have not been superseded in the political thought of Marxism: “It is not enough that the conditions of labour present themselves as capital on one side and as men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power on the other. It is also not enough to constrain these men to sell themselves voluntarily. To the degree that capitalist development progresses, there develops a working class that, by education, tradition and habit recognizes as obvious natural laws the demands of that mode of production. The organization of the process of production overcomes all resistances…; the silent coercion of the economic relations places the seal of the capitalist over the worker. It is true that extra economic power, immediately, continues to be used, but only exceptionally. In the normal course of things the worker can remain confident that in the natural laws of production, that is, on his dependence in relation to capital, which is born from the very conditions of production and that these guarantee and perpetuate.”
One of the instruments which function within this process is precisely the mystified relation which is established, at a determinant level of development, between capitalist production and bourgeois society, between the relation of production and the social relation—consequence of the mutations that intervened in the heart of the social relation of production and premise for this relation to be once again conquered as a natural law. It is only apparently paradoxical that, the factory being a particularity, even though essential, of society, it can maintain its specific traits in face of the whole reality. When the factory seizes the whole of society—all of social production is turned into industrial production—the specific traits of the factory are lost within the generic traits of society. When the whole of society is reduced to the factory, the factory—as such—appears to disappear. It is on this material basis that is repeated and concludes, at a real higher level, the maximum ideological development of bourgeois metamorphoses. The highest level of the development of capitalist production signals the most profound mystification of all the bourgeois social relations. The real growing process of proletarianization presents itself as formal process of tertiarization. The reduction of all forms of labour to industrial labour, of all types of labour to the commodity labour-power, presents itself as the extinction of labour-power itself as commodity and, as a result, as the depreciation of its value as a product. The payment of whatever price of labour in terms of salary presents itself as the absolute negation of capitalist profit, as the absolute elimination of the surplus-labour of the worker. Capital, which disorganizes and reorganizes the process of labour according to its growing necessities of the process of valorization, presents itself as already as a spontaneous objective potential of society which self-organizes and as such develops itself. The return of state political functions in the structure of civil society presents itself as the contradiction between State and Society; the functionality ever more straight/narrow of politics and economy, as possible autonomy of the political terrain relative to economic relations. Resuming, the concentration of capital is, at the same time, the exclusive domination of the factory regime, both historic results of modern capitalism, are inverted, the first, in the dissolution of capital, as determinant social relation, the second, in the exclusion of the factory from the specific relation of production. That is why capital appears as the objective wealth of society in general and the factory as the particular mode of the production of “social” capital. This is what emerges to the crude bourgeois eyes of the vulgar sociologist. When the scientist himself is reduced to a salaried worker, wage labour is beyond the limits of scientific knowledge, or more correctly, it is transformed into the terrain of the exclusive application of that false bourgeois science of technology. It is useless to add that all of this is still to occur and we will only occupy ourselves when it does occur. “Whoever wants to represent whatever living phenomenon in its development should, inevitable and necessary confront the dilemma: advance the facts or stay behind.”
This is a principle of method to be used permanently going forward. Even when it forces us to choose that savage/ferocious unilaterality which strikes so much fear in the moderate soul of so many “professional revolutionaries.” Even more when this is present, not, of course, as a subjective illusion, arbitrary act of the mind, but as a real process of objective development, which is not about following it but anticipating it. No one tries to forget by force the existence of the world exterior to production. Putting the accent on one of the parts signifies recognizing and demanding the essentiality of this part relative to the others. Even more when this particular aspect, by its very nature, generalizes itself. The scientific unilaterality of the workers point of view is not to be confused with a mystical reduction ad unum. It is, instead, looking at distribution, exchange and consumption from the point of view of production. And, from within production, looking at the process of labour from the point of view of the process of valorization and the process of valorization from the point of view of the labour process. In other words, to understand the organic unity of the process of production, which founds, provides the basis for, the unity of the process of production, distribution, exchange and consumption. The global dynamic of this process can be understood whether with the partiality of the collective capitalist, or the socially combined worker; only that the first presents it with all the functional despotism of its conservative appearances and the second reveals it with all its liberatory force of its revolutionary development.
The social relation of capitalist production sees society as a means and production as an end: capitalism is production for production. The same sociality of production is nothing more than the medium for private appropriation. In this sense, at the base of capitalism, the social relation is never separated from the relation of production; the relation of production is identified ever more with the social relation of the factory; the social relation of the factory acquires each time a greater and direct political content. It is capitalist development itself which tends to subordinate the whole political relation to the social relation, the whole social relation to the relation of production, the whole relation of production to the relation of the factory, because only this permits it to start after, from within the factory, the inverse path: the struggle of the capitalist to destroy and reconstruct in its image the antagonistic figure of the collective worker. Capital attacks labour on its very own terrain; it is only from within labour that capital can disintegrate the collective worker to integrate, following, the isolated worker. We no longer have simply the means of production on the one hand, and the worker on the other, but all the conditions of labour, on the one hand and the worker, which labours, on the other; labour and labour-power opposed one to the other and both united within capital. Attained this point, the ideal of the most modern capitalism is to recuperate the primitive relation of simple buying and selling contracted between the individual capitalist and the isolated worker: having, hence, one of them in their hand the social power of monopoly and the other the individual subordination through the paying of the position of labour. The silent constraint of the economic relations puts by itself the seal of capitalist domination over the worker. The current legislation over the factories consists in the rationalization of capitalist production. The constitution within the factory sanctions “the exclusive domination of the factory regime” over the whole of society.
Its true: this will in turn render “equally general the direct struggle against this domination.” In fact, attained this point, not only is it possible as it is historically necessary to plant the general struggle against the social system within the social relation of production, to put into crises bourgeois society in the heart of capitalist production. For the working class, it is essential to once again travel, with all its class consciousness, the path dictated by capitalist development, viewing the State from the point of view of society, society from the point of view of the factory and the factory from the point of view of the worker. With the goal of continually recomposing the material figure of the collective worker against capital which seeks to dismantle it; more, with the objective to begin to dismember the intimate nature of capital in the potentially antagonistic parts which organically compose it. To the capitalist that attempts to oppose labour and labour-power from within/inside the collective worker, we respond counterposing labour-power and capital in the interior of capital itself. At this point, capital attempts to dismember the collective worker and the worker tries to dismember capital; this is no longer right contra right, decided by force, but, instead, directly, force against force. This is the ultimate state of the class struggle at the highest level of capitalist development.
The error of the old maximalism consisted in conceiving this opposition, from the exterior; it saw the working class completely outside of capital and, like this, as its general antagonist. From here the incapacity of any scientific knowledge and the sterility of all practical struggle. It is worth more today to say that, from the point of view of the worker, we should look, not directly at the condition of the workers, but directly to the situation of capital. The worker should also recognize to capital, in its analysis, a privileged post, precisely the privilege which capital objectively possess within the system. Not only: the working class should materially discover itself as a part of capital if it wants to oppose the whole of capital to itself. It should recognize itself as a particular of capital if it wants to present itself as its general antagonist. The collective worker is opposed not only to the machine, as constant capital, but to labour-power itself, as variable capital. It has to reach the point of having as its enemy the whole of capital therefore itself as a part of capital. Labour should see labour-power as its enemy, as a commodity. It is on this base that the capitalist necessity of objectifying in capital all the subjective potency of labour can be transformed, on the workers part, into the maximum recognition/understanding of capitalist exploitation. The attempt at the integration of the working class within the system is what may provoke the decisive rupture of the system, bringing the class struggle to its highest level. There exists a moment in development in which capitalism finds itself in this state of necessity; if that moment passes, capital has won for a long period; if the organized working class can break it for the first time on this terrain, then the model of workers revolution under modern capitalism is born.
We saw the commodity labour-power as the properly active side of capital, as the natural source of the whole capitalist dynamic. Protagonist, not only of the expanded reproduction of the process of valorization, but of the continual revolutionary transformations of the process of labour. The technological transformations themselves are dictated and imposed by the modifications effected in the value of labour-power. Cooperation, manufacture and large scale industry are nothing more than “particular methods of the production of relative surplus value”, different forms of the economy of labour that, on its parts, provoke growing mutations in the organic composition of capital. Capital depends more on labour-power each time; it should then, as a result, possess it in a more complete manner each time, as it possess the natural forces of production; it should reduce the working class itself to a natural force of society. The more that capitalist development advances, the more that the collective capitalist has the necessity of seeing all labour within capital: the more necessity it has in controlling all of the movements, interior and exterior, of labour-power; the more it is forced to programme, in the long term, the relation capital-labour, as the index of the stability of the social system. When capital conquered all the exterior territories to capitalist production properly termed, it begins its process of internal colonization; on the other hand, when the circuit of bourgeois society is definitively closed—production, distribution, exchange and consumption—we can say that there begins the true and proper process of capitalist development. At this point, the process of objective capitalization of subjective forces of labour is and should be accompanied by the process of the material dissolution of the collective worker and, therefore, of the worker himself, as such; reducing the worker to the property of the mode of production and, as a following, function of the capitalist. It is clear that, on this basis, the integration of the working class within the system is transformed into a vital necessity of capitalism: the workers refusal of this integration impedes the system from functioning, making possible one only other alternative: the dynamic stabilization of the system or the workers revolution.
Marx says that “of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive force is the revolutionary class itself.” The process of capitalist production is already in itself revolutionary: it maintains in continuous movement and operates an incessant transformation of all the productive forces, including the conscious and living productive force which is the working class. The development of the productive forces is the “historical mission” of capitalism. It is true that it founds at the same time its maximum contradiction: that is why the incessant development of the productive forces cannot cease to provoke the incessant development of the greatest productive force, the working class as revolutionary class. It is this that should compel (impulse) the collective worker to value, consciously, the objectively revolutionary content of capitalist development: to the point of forcing it to anticipate development, if it does not want to remain behind. Because of this, as a result of this, the workers revolution should not be realized after, when capitalism has already destroyed itself in catastrophic general crises, nor can it come before, when capitalism has not even reached its specific cycle of development. It can and should be realized contemporaneously to that development; it should present itself as internal component of that development and at the same time, as its internal contradiction, in the same way as labour-power, that only from within/the interior of capital can put into crises the whole of capitalist society. Only the revolutionary development of the working class can turn efficient and evident, at the same time, the fundamental contradiction between the productive forces and the social relations of production: without that development, the contradiction is nothing more, effectively, than a potential fact, but not real, a pure and simple possibility, as with the possibility of crises at the level of C—M—C. The level of the productive forces is not measured by the level of technological progress but by the degree of revolutionary consciousness (awareness) of the working class. More correctly, the first is the capitalist measure, which conceives the worker solely as a human appendage of its machines; the second is the measure of the organized workers movement, which organizes, precisely on this basis, the process of rupture of the social relation that cages the revolutionary experience of the working class. In this sense, the contradiction between the productive forces and the social relations of production is nothing more than the exterior expression of another contradiction that lives completely from within/in the interior of the social relation of production: the contradiction between the socialization of the process of production and the private appropriation of the product, between individual capitalist which attempts to decompose that socialization and the collective worker which recomposes it front of it, between the bosses attempt at economic integration and the political response of the workers antagonism. It is not by coincidence that we speak of these things. This process is currently in development in Italy, for everyone to see. On this terrain will be decided for a long period of time the alternative between capitalism and socialism. The political party of Italian capitalism appears to have understood this; the parties of the workers movement have not.
It is not a question of eliminating by force all the other contradictions, which subsist and are, therefore, more evident for all, appearing, as a result, more essential to the comprehension of the whole. Instead, it is about acquiring and knowing this elementary principle that, at a determinant level of capitalist development, all the contradictions between the various parts of capital should be expressed in the fundamental contradiction between working class and the whole of capitalism; only at this time is the socialist revolutionary process opened. To express all the contradictions of capitalism through the working class means to say immediately, for itself, that these contradictions are unsolvable within capitalism itself, sending us therefore beyond the system which engenders them. This is because the working class within capitalism is the only unsolvable contradiction of capitalism, or more correctly, it turns into such from the moment in which it self-organizes as a revolutionary class. No to the organization of the oppressed class, to the defense of the interests of the labourers; nor to the form of class organization for government, manager of capitalists interests, but instead, yes, to the organization as antagonistic class: self-political government of the working class in the capitalist economic system. If the formula of the “dualism of powers” has any sense, it should be this one. That consciousness should be brought to the worker from the exterior and that such a task belongs to the party no longer constitutes the problem for today. The solution already exists and is directly dictated by the development of capitalism, by capitalist production which has touched the limits of bourgeois society, by the factory which imposed henceforth its exclusive domination on the whole of society. Political consciousness should be brought by the party, but from within, the interior of the process of production. There is no one that thinks today that we can launch a revolutionary process without political organization of the working class, without a workers party. Many still think, however, that the party can direct the revolution remaining closed/cut off from the factory, that political action only begins where the relation of production ends and that the general struggle against the system is that which develops in the vertices of the bourgeois State, of which has itself turned, in the meantime, into the particular expression of the social necessities of capitalist production. Take note: this is not about renouncing the Leninist rupture of the machinery of State, as inevitably happens with all those who walk about through the democratic path. It is about anchoring the rupture of the State in society, the dissolution of society in the process of production, the destruction of the relation of production within the social relation of the factory. The bourgeois State machinery today has to be destroyed in the capitalist factory.
Whether we start from Capital, or from the actual level of capitalist development, the analysis reaches the same conclusions. We cannot still say, at this time, that these conclusions are proved: it is necessary to return, from the beginning, run along another path; to experiment once again the significance of the Marxist theory of capitalist development, which turns ever more into the historical knot of all the problems, to liberate it from all the ideological incrustations which put to sleep a part of the workers movement in the opportunist wait of the catastrophic fall, contributing to integrate the other part in the autonomous mechanism of an undefined stabilization of the system. This is what will be done following this discourse.
It is sufficient to remember the preliminary necessity of recuperating the most correct path, whether for theoretical analysis, or practical struggle. Factory-society-State—this is the point in which today, coincide scientific theory and subversive praxis, the analysis of capitalism and the workers revolution. This is enough to verify the correctness of this path. The “scientific conception” of the factory is that which today opens the path to the most complete comprehension/understanding of the present and, simultaneously, to its complete destruction. Precisely because of this the factory is situated at the point of departure of the new construction, of which it must start from if it wants to construct and grow the workers State completely within the new relation of production of socialist society.
Translated by Guio Jacinto